#silvanus/notes

05 - 06.25.2024 - Remembrance

Last Session

• Saved Nessa, Timefall fell

Katal

Relevant Characters: картошка | Silvanus | Nessa The Mage Silvanus

• Hot air balloon, Andrea navigates back to the computational dept.
• Nessa sleeps, mental sleep debt
• After about half an hour, my houseplants request a weeks worth of blood
  • Their voice is deeper
• I ask andrea about blood
• Andrea is thoroughly scared
• Plants: "We need to be fed, for if we are not fed, bad things will happen"
• Me: "Wow just like a toddler"
• The plants change color, their vein things become bloodshot, their leaves become blood red, they hiss
• Me: "Damn I've given y'all so much blood tsk tsk"
• They dive at me but I dodge it
• Unable to convince Andrea to go down and find and shank a bear for blood
• I give the houseplants some blood to tide them over until we arrive at Katal
• We return to city at midnight
• It is no longer on lockdown :O
• As we float over, we see something strange over the palace, see some banner being hoisted up, it's purple, it's got gold lettering on it
  • Everyone is fucking nearsighted
  • The banner reads: "long live the king"
  • Asks Andrea if it's the king's bday
  • Andrea: "You forgot? The king died"
  • Kartoshka: "What are you talking about?"
  • Andrea: "The king was, uhm, he died, because, he was killed, idk why he is alive"
• In front of the castle there's a small group of people, 10, being systematically dismantled, executed, they seem to be wearing some sort of religious garb, they seem to have been protestors
• Andrea doesn't know anything about the religion
• Nessa wakes up, "no one touched my bar right" (the alcohol bar, not a metal rod)
• She gets into the compt. dept. and clicks some buttons and a bar spins out
• She mixes some stuff and stuff explodes
• "Who tf put phoenix ashes in my cloves jar"
• I can get a potion from Nessa every mission
  • The Hair of Ghosts: 6s invisibility (unlimited uses, recharge time)
  • Velvet Prince: Soul-swapping (2 uses)
  • Lily in a Well: Intangibility (unlimited uses, recharge time)
  • Acropolis: Teleport upwards 10 feet at will (unlimited uses, recharge time)
  • Silver Wind: Heal 50 HP. Lose 10 HP every turn until the end of combat.
  • Thanatos’s Tears: Fall to 0 HP. All enemies in the vicinity permanently forget that you exist. Can be taken as a reaction. (1 use)
• Andrea is navigating to her office, where she has constructed a holographic map of the surrounding area
• Andrea: This is what our purpose as a dept. allegedly is, we're supposed to just make holographic maps, but then all the weird happened, we sell these to our military bois
• I go to Nessa to ask for blood
• Nessa: rearranges bottle and procures a bottle of blood with a little smiley face
• The houseplants inhale a shot glass of blood
• I ask Nessa for a vial of blood, she gives it to me
• Nessa makes a drink, I drink it, Nessa goes "phew"
• Back to map room, there is one dot that is pulsing red, there are 2 gray dots (that are Timberfall/Timefall and Briesville)
  • It is pulsing in the middle of the ocean
  • Point out Xoisa Island, it's not too far away, not close but not far, without Xoisa flying distance
  • It's in the ocean area beside Katal
• Andrea: "Previously we had a lot more dots, we had dozens of people, they're all gone"
• Andrea: "Can't do reconnaissance, can't find any documentation, "
• Bartered Andrea for a pay raise, got 2499GP, straight from the safe, the entire bag
• Andrea: Gotta figure out what's going on with the king
  • Can't ask for a meeting, we can do what we do because nobody important knows what we do
  • Me: what if it's necromancy?
  • Necromancy's power comes in waves historically, when Thanatos and Hades were weak, it would be easier to do necromancy, in the past thousand years, that has not been the case, necromancy, especially among mortals, has been pretty close to nonexistent, ppl get away with extending their lives or reviving a small critter which is pretty state of the art, high tech
  • Andrea: 2 options, prioritize military base or king
• Andrea calls everyone back to figure out the king
  • Priority 1: stay under the radar, if the authorities catch wind of us, especially snooping into the king's affairs, then we are all dead
  • Priority 2: wtf is the king doing
• People are apprehensive of being outside post-lockdown
• The newspapers are completely blank from the day after the king's death
  • The front page is completely blank
  • Page 3: local magic football team, etc.
  • Editorial page, also completely blank
  • Other people see it is also blank
• Hear people saying, "this past week is a complete blur, I can't remember shit"
  • I rember what I ate for dinner, but I feel like nothing has happened
  • People have a weird sense of nothing happening during lockdown
  • Hear the word "lockdown" but it's spoken with a questioning tone, with a question mark
• I walk near the city watch building, don't see Commander Borff, there aren't any guards standing directly outside the city watch building
• I run to Wynather's Magical Emporium (I rolled a nat 1 on insight for guards in the city)
• I ask her about the "conditions apply, ask an employee for more information" that's not affiliated with any item
  • Alta: Misprint, we don't have an employee, but we have an associate and (lists other employee synonyms)
  • Out of character: It's the thing for the haunted doll, the item thing is empty, she had forgotten about it after nameless used it
  • Try to get Alta to be 3 characters at once (staff member, associate, experienced crew member)
    • "hellohowdyhowareyoudoing"
    • Alta throws the hats on the ground "I can't do this please ask me one at a time"
  • Illusion of young gold dragon clipping into the store
  • Alta hastily puts the cards back into the deck
• Ask about the bag of beans
  • To demonstrate bag of beans
  • Lead to a back room, has a small blast door, pulls out a massive key, which opens, leads me into a furnace with no fire (yet?)
  • Alta locks me in, there's a small window with 12 layers of tempered glass
  • I plant a seed, 1 minute later, a bajillion mushrooms sprout, see Alta intently staring into the window looking excited
  • I pick all the mushrooms
  • I feed it to the houseplants, who only eat it after drizzling it with blood ()
  • I see the leaves get more green
  • Alta cautiously opens the door
  • Alta, that's pretty peaceful usually it explodes or something
• I examine guards for a while, nothing happens
• I go to the library, the library is closed, it's boarded up
  • I ethereal step through the wall
  • Every 2 seconds, a book is forcefully ejected from the bookshelf and falls to the ground, this is just happening all across the library, some of the books on the ground are flying around, pages flying everywhere
  • Pick up book from the ground, it starts wriggling like it's trying to escape, force it open, and most of the pages are fine, every so often a page is foggy or dreamlike(?), it's like trying to read text in a dream
• Different sections of the library are affected to different degrees, section of library that isn't affected at all (no chaos no nothing), there's sections with chaos, there's one section where all the shelves are like on the ground, absolute carnage, the sign is demolished
• I go to the reception desk, look at the map, the carnage section is on the royal family
  • The fiction section is unaffected at all
  • One book on the floor for the section Fossils and Prehistoric Life (mostly unaffected)
  • Political Science and History of Ke'ath are pretty messed up
  • The reception desk was abandoned in a hurry, see there is somebody at the back entrance of the library in full plate armor wielding a sword cautiously (thinking the sword won't help)
  • 2 minutes of them just being unsure, they walk forward a bit, and hold their sword forward and then backs up in fear, eventually they walk forward 10 feet, get bashed in the head with a book and they run out the back entrance
• I climb up a bookshelf to a high up window, see another suit of plate armor entering from the back entrance (it's a different person) but it's the same process
• I break the window, three books fly out like "Weeee I'm free" I crawl thru, mend the window (a book immediately slams into it) and look at the back entrance
• I see a group of city guard equivalent of riot gear, SWAT team of the city guard, there's 10 of them there, the first guy is slumped down on the ground being comforted by another guy
• There is one person with them who is an academic, she looks like a magic user but not a wizard, but academic magician person
• They try to send in 5 people "hold the line, we're gonna stand like this, we're gonna move like a turtle thing" they put all their hands in a circle, 45 seconds pass and they exit the building
• The academic lady (in academic nerd gear, a robe) is speaking to a someone with full plate armor but without their helmet
• I go up and tell Borff that Andrea sent me
• Borff: We were told to figure out what's going on, and stop it, so far we've done neither
• The academic pushes the commander to the side, I'm the curator of this establishment, it's developing a mind of its own, idk why, it started roughly 6 days ago (7 days ago was when the king was killed and the lockdown started)
• We ran a routine procedure, we have a centralized system, it manages the information content of the library, new information comes in and we have to reboot it, (I suspect it is that reboot is when you put it on a boot and kick it) "No it's a technical term when we planned shut it down and restart it by applying a large amount of force"
• We rebooted it, and then all hell broke loose, normally just a couple books rewrites it
• The reboot thing is on the second floor
• Decommissioned books on the second floor
• The librarian is an elf, she looks about human equivalent 65 years old
• The librarian calls the swat team buffoons, the initial guy starts sobbing harder
• Me: what about ladder
• The SWAT team go "Ladder!! Oh Yeaaahhhh"
• They have an armored carriage, they pull out a extended ladder, looks like obsidian
• Borff puts it up to a window to the 2nd floor
• The SWAT team: "woooo commander borff"
• See a hallway with some books at the beginning a bit chaotic, then a fortified door
• I ask Borff for like swat shields, charge through the window, I turn left to stop the books and the librarian runs in behind me towards the door, I take a couple hits
• I mend the window then back to back with librarian get to the door
• 87 hp
• Inside, I see a main terminal, a collection of ~10 boxes which I recognize as computations dept. manufactures
• Each has a number from 1-10 and some lights have varying colors
• The ceiling is very flat, and pulsing various colors, there leads brass pipes which feeds into the pipes, each box has a pipe that exits it that goes into the ground, at the very bottom there's a really rickety old box, saw it in computations dept. in some dusty ass container, one of the first things they ever manufactured, right next to it there's a giant boot
• She asks me to look at the boxes and really focus on it
• She puts on the boot, hears a loud thump, the room starts pulsing a lot of lights, especially the ceiling, information flowing from the ceiling into the boxes and then zooming out thru the pipes
• Loud rumbling on first floor, hear distinct chaotic noise of books slamming into places subsiding
• I ask the librarian what's in the ceiling, she says, in layman terms, any time the state of the world changes such that our books become out of date, some major event happens, that information is stored in, what we call the cloud, eventually when we reboot (she is still wearing the boot, she puts the booted foot behind her to hide it and becomes more visible) all of the important updates get pushed to the boot we navigate thru the boxes, ceiling is mostly gray, but small bits of red and green
• She asks me to look at the boxes and takes off the boot quietly
• We head downstairs, there are books on the ground, it's a complete mess, but nothing is flying around
• Head to section on royal family, open it and read it, The Life and Times of the King (current), as you flip thru it, you feel that the last section is hot to the touch, some pages are warm, the last section is entitled "Anniversary Ceremony"
  • I skim it, it is about the past week where it's basically just nonsense, 40 pages of what should be one page about a ceremony commemorating the king, super wordy and flowery
• I ask about borrowing the book
• She says she can get me a library card
• I say that we should open the backdoor and chuck a book through it
• She pulls up a sleeve, and takes a wand out of the holder, signals to me to open the door
• She lets darkness out of the back door and it says "BEGONE"
• People scream, run, when darkness fades see tire marks on the ground, everyone is gone
• Head to the reception area, halfway there, hear a fwomp as 5 or so doors fly in thru the back door, fwomp on a shelf, begin glowing and pulsing, and then settle down
• As I wait for library card, more related to king, the more the book is fucked up and warm, for the most part it's just flowery prose about the ceremony
• There is one book which I find because it is singed on the back, that book is on the history of capital punishment, I can tell it's written by some sort of activist against capital punishment, the last 40 pages is a list of people executed in Ke'ath
  • A lot of names have descriptions
  • The last page is burnt to a crisp
  • The previous page is the previous execution in some random area of Ke'ath week and a half ago
  • I bring it to the librarian, "oh shit that's very weird, we've never had that happen"
  • It's probably some bug, she calls it a flaming moth
• She says there are backups, she grabs a completely blank book, she slots it into the reboot system, grabs a slipper and slaps the box, the book flashes brightly, she removes the book, gives it to me, the last page just doesn't exist
• Return within 1 month
• I head back, swing by city watch building, hear a ruckus from inside, I open the door, see a bunch of guard members with pints of beer and a pizza and party hats going "commander borff you're the best"
• Commander borff is at the front, ppl are bringing flowers to him, "yeaah you saved the city you fixed the library"
• I report back to Andrea, show her the books, etc.
• Andrea: "this isn't like anything I've seen before, idk what we could be dealing with"
  • Pretty clear that whatever info was supposed to be here was about the king's death, and now it doesn't exist
• I show her the newspaper
• Tell Andrea about the missing item on alta wynather's item list
  • Andrea says she had a witch's hat with a little pumpkin on the side