Session Eleven: Lost and Found
Jumbled
From the logs of M'k'Splswap
We realized that we had lost Aephyr to the portal to Yehket, surely to be consumed by zombies. Six of us had gone to dinner at Sleepy Pete's Snail Eyes and Nail Pies, and five had returned: truly an impressive survival rate.
Returning to the whale, we were surprised and relieved to see Igneous out of his lab, and then immediately horrified to recognize that he had somehow managed to become even uglier. His head was wider, and the space in his newly-stretched grin was filled with extra fangs. His long ears were even longer, and where they'd extended horizontally, they now bent at a right angle skyward.
"I appreciate your purchase of that bat. Alta brought it to me."
We stared.
"Everything is fine."
Thus completely reassured, we settled in for the night.
From the logs of Igneous
The Rave
While Igneous was busy figuring out Human genetic enhancement technology, and testing it out by granting himself a bat's power of echolocation, the party acquired a bard, named Samuel.
Bards are something of a mystery: many prime worlds independently claim they have access to all sorts of special magical powers, but empirically they don't – just ordinary enchantment and illusion spells. Samuel thought he had the answer: the art of world-bending music tended to get lost somewhere along the path to civilization, but with the right teacher he could learn it. The right teacher was the lead guitarist of the Eternal Rave.
After a long an wandering discussion (apparently a cabal of dragons suppresses the helicopter rental industry in Sigil), we devised a plan. We spot-welded Samuel into a steel harness, and attached him to both a lamppost on the ground and the roof of a nearby building. The cables we attached him with allowed him about ten meters of movement, but hopefully would prevent him from following the Rave when it passed by.
Would he be able to learn enough as the Rave passed? Learning is hard to predict, but he hoped the Rave would linger by him if he impressed them enough with his musical skill.
Well, he impressed them all right. He impressed them so much that they cut the steel cables holding him in place. It seems with the right musical knowledge, an axe guitar functions as a battleaxe, and slices through tempered steel like warm butter. How is this possible? It can't be a straightforward sonic effect. Perhaps the dionysian psionics of the rave focus raw Chaos energy, and the cable reverted to a higher entropy state when struck? Subsequent examination of the cables did not show oxidation, but that might just be a sign of geometric precision.
In any case, we reverted to plan B. Igneous, stationed a safe distance away, attempted to tranquilize Samuel with his needle gun. Sigil's concave nature makes long sightlines easy, but the shot was still too difficult. The dart missed, and struck the Rave's singer.
The Rave treated this as an attack, and fell upon our party in a sphere of subjective gravity – similar, but not magically identical to, a demi-urge's AT field. The leader of the attack, a topologically confusing vampire, proved to be devastatingly violent, so the party portalled out. Fortunately, the Rave was too busy partying to hold a grudge, and forgot about us as soon as we were no threat.
A Cleaner Rescue
After we took a bit of time to patch our wounds, we devised a Plan C for rescuing Samuel, who was now playing bass guitar with the Rave while riding on the shoulders of a pair of Tieflings.
As preparation, we rented a room in Sigil and M'k placed a portal on the ceiling. We offered to help him resist the Rave by either drugging or deafening him, but he ultimately declined both.
M'k teleported to high above the Rave, opened a portal under the Tieflings, let the fall through, and closed it.
Igneous webbed the arriving ravers.
M'k teleported back before hitting the ground. His teleport did not match velocities with the destination, but his skill at acrobatics, combined with landing on a pair of webbed tieflings, prevented serious injury. And his ability to gather quintessence, was quickly healed.
Igneous and Doktor rendered the ravers unconscious, with a mixture of tranquilizers and blood chokes. We then dumped the tieflings on the street and didn't ask what became of them.
When Samuel awoke, he was happy to be free, and reported success: he knew the legendary Highway to Hell Guitar Kata.
Oh My God It's Full Of Stars
Our next mission was to investigate Igneous's bag of holding, which had been losing items. Igneous, Octocat and Samuel took it to the lab, while Doktor commanded some crew and M'k went to play parcheesi with some Vectronians or something.
Leaving some bait and a camera in the bag resulted in sabotage to the camera, plus the disappearance of the bait. This suggested a sentient adversary.
Magical examination of the bag revealed a nearly linear structure of foreign magic on the interior surface. Visual examination revealed this to be a zipper.
It was now clear that the items were disappearing because someone was taking them, and this is how that someone was getting in and out. This made the idea of going into the bag far more appealing.
The zipper had no pull tab on the bag side, but the slide was ferrous metal and easily pulled with a neodymium magnet. Beyond was a microgravity space traversed by ropes and lit by an extremely bright jar, which seemed to somehow contain a star. The space had a breathable atmosphere of unclear origin. A sign, not attached to anything, proclaimed “Welcome to Lost and Found”.
We sent a camera drone to explore, but it was soon stolen. We began to suspect (correctly, it turned out) that this was the home base of the Thief of Stars. Around this time we called Captain Meetslab, who came running.
A War of Vomit
Determined to have his revenge on the Thief of Stars, Doktor Meetslab attempted to crawl through the zipper. He was able to stick his head through the hole. His shoulders, even pauldronless, had no chance of fitting through.
From this new vantage point, Doktor was able to see what was mounted on the outside of our own bag, which had been hidden from previous explorations: three crew-operated tripod-mounted fully automatic machine guns, pointed straight at his head at point blank range.
All three unloaded on him. Between his power armor and his sheer innate toughness, he suffered a bloody lip.
Next, the Thief of Stars himself arrived. He closed the zipper until Doktor's neck blocked it. With his arms and weapons on the wrong side of the bag and no leverage for a head-butt, Doktor seemed helpless. And the Thief looked him right in the eye to gloat.
The prosthetic eye. The one which was actually a laser cannon.
Doktor has no skill with ranged weapons, but at point-blank range and with Samuel's musical assistance, he melted half of the Thief's face.
Adding insult to injury, he opened his faceplate and vomited a wolf.
The machine-gun crews turned and ran. But the Thief was made of sterner stuff. Taking advangage of open faceplate, he stole Doktor's mustache, and anti-stole a token under the Doktor's tongue.
Soon the Doktor vomited again, this time spewing forth a triple-masted frigate. The boat snapped his jaw, but killed one of the fleeing gunner teams outright.
Doktor pulled back and let the smaller team members try things. Octocat sought to befriend the gunners, but they were too terrified. Igneous webbed the Thief and wolf together, and shot the former with a tranq dart to little effect. The wolf, taking advantage of the Thief's limited mobility, ripped off his right arm.
The Thief then tried to steal the wolf. Apparently he knew the encoding, so he grew two size categories (revealing his own werewolf nature) and ordered it to nest in him.
(It was probably around this time that somebody (most likely Lance Corporal Dewey Scrubbs, The Dragonslayer) radioed M'k and suggested he come back.)
Igneous concluded the bottleneck at the zipper was crippling their fighting, so he went all the way through into Lost and Found, zooming through the open space. He brought Octocat with him, but she pivoted off a gun embankment and stayed on the bag.
The Thief then vomitted the wolf at Ingeous. The wolf was loyal to whomever it had last nested in, but Igneous was able to give it a special override to attack the thief anyway. This required it to reverse direction in microgravity, which it did by pushing off Igneous, sending him rapidly flying the other way.
The Thief also flung an item into our bag, which landed at Doktor's feet, to no immediate effect. This was ominous.
Finally Doktor Meetslab finished the fight with a grenade. The Thief had no way to dodge, so he tried to steal the detonator. Working one handed and tranquilized, he had the grenade open and the detonator between his teeth when it went off. The Thief's body parts went in many directions. Doktor somehow caught the bit that his mustache was attached to, and it gladly resumed its proper place on his upper lip. Igneous took a sample as well, of course.
And then we identified the thing between Doktor's feet as a tree token. M'k opened a portal dropping the token in our rented room, but Doktor fell through it as well. A moment later, the tree emerged. Having his head driven through multiple ceilings didn't hurt our good Doktor, but a sixty foot tree growing from nothing in an instant right between his legs did. He vomited once more, from the pain.
The remaining residents of Lost and Found put up a token resistance, but between Igneous's marksmanship and Octocat's cuddliness, they quickly came around.
On the Nature of Lost and Found
It turns out the bags of holding are quite simple. There is a large bag, left somewhere in the astral, far from any warp-gate. And there is a small bag, that an adventurer carries. The two are linked so that going inside the small bag places you inside the big bag. The small bag is nearly indestructible, but the big bag is not. And damage to it may detach the two.
Bags that were made together may have their big bags quite close to each other, and they can be repositioned or bound with ropes without effecting their function as bags of holding. And so Lost and Found was built.
Ordinarily, any attempt to get to the outside of a big bag will either fail or break the bag, but the Thief found a way to place zippers. Sadly, he didn't tell anyone or write it down anywhere, so unless Igneous can reverse engineer the zippers we have, the technique is lost. Still, this gives us twenty someodd bags, most likely on different spheres, which can be entered reliably without needing warp travel.
One bag had Orobus shoved through him, but that bag was destroyed. Another leads to Gehenna, where Orobus's phylactery is now buried. The rest will require exploration.
Clues from Sleepy Pete
Once these matters were resolved, we paid another visit to Sleepy Pete. He told us that in order to perfect the ultimate sandwich, he thinks he needs three things:
His chef's hat, which was last seen on a sphere of communist vampires with a broken warp gate. He has a map to said sphere from the Abyss. The Abyss, we think, is not a crystal sphere, but a hole in the astral where the warp bleeds through, mostly clogged by the Tau sphere. The astral surrounding it is likely full of demons which slipped around the Tau sphere and then found themselves with limited mobility in the vast astral. Not a good place for an unarmed, unshielded whale-ship.
A fire flower, which is offered as a prize in the Strongest Under Heaven tournament.
The gunpowder of the Demigod of Gunz and Gansta Rap, who has no location, but might be brought forth if we made one for him.
He is also running low on dragon meat, and would appreciate a new source of that.
He does have a book on repairing and building warp gates, which he allowed Igneous to read. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the book's information was encoded as ink on paper, while most of it is known to the demons that are bound to the book. Seeing little alternative, Igneous make telepathic contact with those demons and learned from them.
But he showed no signs of psychological damage afterwards. His deep hatred of devils is nothing new. He's always hated authoritarians who stand in the way of science, and he's always hated beings of pure evil, so hating pure evil authoritarians just makes sense. Also, he's been in and out of academia enough to hate Elsevier from personal experience. So this is all perfectly logical and in no way a sign of psychological damage.
Addendum: Research Project
I forget exactly when, but Igneous and Octocat got to a good library and investigated hawking radiation and darksteel. It seems there's a way to influence hawking radiation by dropping a large runic array into the black hole. To create enough darksteel for Doktor Meetslab, we'll need an array 1.5x the mass of Jupiter. Getting the darksteel into the right shape is an unsolved problem.
Addendum: Things M'k Did
Most importantly, M'k got a totally kick-ass back tattoo of Ragna-Grogamak exploding, and then went to a UVC meeting with Pixie. What a day!