The various hijinks of the RPG Stuck official campaigns and sidesessions are listed here.
Session 1 (A)
A bunch of stuff happened, then Alexander beat the snot out of the black king.Session 2 (B)
A bunch of stuff happened, then Kara beat the snot out of some horrorterrors who were also the black kings. Also, she died for your sins.Session 3
Kai: Enter, look around house, find imps, kill them out of instinct, become horrified with self for murdering, try to find mom, can’t find her because siri told him she got kidnapped by derse agents, goal becomes to get to derse and save mom, go check out land, get beat up by stairs because i suck at rolling acrobatics, find rabbit going into consort village, follow him in, ask where i can talk to someone, sends me to elder’s house, solve puzzle to let myself up, meet elder, learn about land and how it is divided into plains, valley, forest maze, and the dark side where skaia doesn’t shine, leave, try to sleep, have nightmare about purple and gold, wake up terrified, go exploring, find first temple, need to answer riddle to go in, can’t figure it out, go back to ask siri, she refuses to help, go back to elder, solve another puzzle to get upstairs, ask him, he helps me answer, go back to temple, beat up ogres in more self defence, become further horrified with self, go upstairs, find puzzle room with bowls of rocks with fire, blood, and water symbols above them, can’t figure them out, captchalogue them, go further upstairs, find imp listening to music, beat him up even though i could have walked away, more self-hatred, find drawing of land and cliff leading to cloudy cliff area, almost fall down, promise to come back later, new goal becomes find wings, bring rocks and bowls from before home, can’t figure them out, siri refuses to help, gets angel wing code from future terese, falls asleep, wakes up on derse, gets stabbed, freaks out, flies to prospit, finds radbet, plans a prison break for mauiki, radbet gets caught, kai flies away and hides in someone’s dream tower, wakes up, takes bowls back to elder, get him to join the party, ask him about bowls, he offers to make a sacrifice of fire, blood and water into each bowl, bring them back to temple, try suggestion, works, opens door into dungeon-y area with a lever, pull lever, door closes, separating kai from siri and elder, kai continues alone, finds threeway crossroads, one tunnel leads to heavily trapped area with no apparent rewards, one tunnel leads to dead end, one tunnel seems to go on forever, turn around, go home, meet back up with siri and elder, tell them about what just happened, uses wings to fly around land, finds “Level Two” sign, which kai can’t figure out.Strat Takes OverKai uses wings to fly around to other lands, goes to LOJAF, finds iinito’s dead body, corpsesmooches him back to life, thinks he failed because iinito woke up on prospit, gets fed up and gets caught in lightning from mauiki’s land, gets stranded.Zion Takes OverDo some alchemy, talk to dying sprites, gets bullied into babysitting while Mauiki and Terese go through dungeon adventures, kai is told to get ice cream for consorts, finds ice cream, tries to alchemize more, costs insanely high amount of grist, brings ice cream back, tries to get water for sprite, is accused of stealing water from the consorts, finds dersite threatening to enslave the consorts to collect glass tax, kai gets fed up and flies away.Strat Takes Back OverDoes some alchemy, prompted with A Step Down Zombie’s Path, a weapon alchemized by weapon with sprite amulet, costs insane amounts of grist, is told that if he alchemizes it, he will die, refuses to alchemize it, fights with Zombie, who gives him the exact grist necessary to alchemize weapon, Kai denies and the grist is taken away, Kai stands up to Zombie, leaves her alone with Elder, goes exploring, finds tunnel near level two sign, figures out that the tunnel is the other end of the endless tunnel from before, goes back home, strifes a lich, kai almost wins, but gets crit when really low HP, siri jumps in front of attack, becoming tier two prototyped with lich crit, kai beats up remaining imp, receives boxing glove “WITH MY FIST”, the best item in all of RPG Stuck history, uses amulet to summon siri back, who has now turned into Zombie (after some kind of computer term with fake bot accounts or something), discusses kai’s purpose of the game, kai learns quest is to Gouge the Murk, involving destroying/solving a total of seven temples, first of which being puzzle dungeon, second of which being through the third gate, third being at the level two sign, the rest unkown, learns “The Worldkiller” has solved gate 5 for him, kai continues to gate 1 where he arrives in huge forest maze, explores around a bit, finds temple which is a pitch black hole in the ground with a voice that insists he is the sixth and final temple, kai informs him of the seventh temple, gets mad at his sister for making a seventh temple, gets mad at kai for not being afraid of him (who sounds like a little kid trying to be intimidating it’s kind of adorable), stops talking to kai, kai can’t find his way out, begins to genuinely feel scared, tries to walk away from the voice, voice says to stop getting closer, offers to give him the reward if he just leaves, kai accepts, and apologizes for what he did, receives the Black bag modus and solves the second temple, returns home, promises not to sleep as per Zombie’s request, flies back to level two sign to try and figure out temple, words are amplified to hurt ears when said, thoughts give headache, light burns eyes, pushing amplified greatly, kai realizes everything is getting bigger because fractals, plans to enter temple by shoving himself inside the small hole, goes to rest first, doesnt want to be near Zombie, goes back to consort village, is intercepted by rabbit agents searching for elder, starts hearing weird messages in his head from “CBK”, who tells him to get out while he can, kai attempts to leave, gets surrounded by rabbits, currently trying to find his way out of the village.
Session 2
Estval: Estval, a young troll with a deathly hatred of bugs, is very bad at computers. He's so bad, in fact, that he winds up downloading a virus called Sgrub. After a long series of panicked flailing, he obliterates his kernelsprite with lightning, and fumbles his way into the game. This brings him to the Land of Prisons and Reactors, a metallic factory populated by killer robots which he soon declares himself to be his minions. This goes poorly, and ultimately results in them beating his remora lusus, Remorad, to death. Estval, mostly-unperturbed, moves on to his dream self on Prospit and wreaks havoc. He returns to find Remorad still dead, and begins wandering the land. This brings him to one of the eponymous prisons, where he recruits a monkey consort minion to aid him in his goal of extermination. They proceed beyond the metal floors of the factory and to a jungle area populated by other consorts, where it's revealed that his ally has a history of murder.
Estval then spends several months debating the merits of democracy with a monkey.
Mobius: enter, look around, see machines in distance, go towards them, get caught in quicksand, level grind, find the golems, try to take their water, get beat up for trying to take their water, run home, meet sprite, go level grind more, get caught in sandstorm, force to choose between sprite or lusus, choose lusus, sprite gets lost in sandstorm, level grind on my way homeAlex Takes Overfind sprite back over at machines, but he’s broken, refuse to go near the golems again because they tried to kill me, go to sleep, spend an IRL month on derse because mobius arguing with his own echoes, ask alex if i can metagame into realizing it’s a dream, start flying around, find some guards, ask them to go through, they say no and try to beat me up, I wreck them horribly, but archer ex machina happens and im forced to derse jail where i am apparently going to trial before certain execution, wake up, refuse to sleep again, play with alchemy, hear something outside, find giant sand barge, go check it out, full of covered consorts that feed me and give me water, tell me about “the way” which im supposed to learn from the three consort tribes, refuse to tell me anything about “the way”, i leave, go back home, play around with alchemy some more, make wing pack, spent an hour playing around with wings and practicing flying, currently flying through first gate, which I have been told leads back to the machines
Maddox: Maddox basically was on an island starting position on entry, and was attacked by imps. Barely saved dad before they through him off cliff, proceeded to fight ogre using Axekind bent around using Axe Body Spray as eplosives. Went through first gate, fought a ton of crap, ran like crazy from an Acheron. Went into second gate, hung with ember, got tranqed, sold unnamed favor to dog consort to get back home, where imps attacked and ember died while Maddox was in the bathroom upstairs. Went through embers second gate to carmens land, where she was suffering from massive drug overdose for other reasons. Went to prospit, got banned from castle following sneaking in and talking to prince of derse.
Session 8
Anastasia: Ana's journey begins at Theone High, with friends Kaz and Callum. She soon meets Aurora and Kirk and the five of them experience all sorts of wacky high school antics.These antics end when people start to die. Ana's entry and those of her friends into Sburb are hastened, after which she serves and kills the primary offender.
After entering the game*, Ana soon levitates through her first gate and fights her way through a hive of underlings and rescues trapped consorts from all over the medium, along with a sentient imp and a clutch of basilisk eggs. After this she goes through the second gate and joins Kaz on her land, then starts wandering the medium killing monsters with her friends (including a new one in Thalix). This ultimately leads to her and Thalix exploring his land, LOGAA, and being recruited to take place in a Pirates vs. Ninjas rivalry between two casinos.
During their subsequent quest to Take a Third Option as Team Astronaut, Ana winds up falling asleep and getting her first real look at Derse. Here, she meets a jaded Dersite named DG, the Blue Oni to her Red. He talks her down from attempting to directly usurp the Black Queen, and they go on an information-gathering adventure in a suggestively shaped building. This ultimately leads to her learning about the universe frog that their entire game depends on creating, being told a legend about a Dersite war hero named Bad Will, and then finding a weaponry designing laboratory that is about to be shut down for not focusing on lethal enough measures.
Kaz: Enter, level grind, build up to gate 1, go to candle place, find a consort village, claim ownership of the cult, have the consorts ignore me, ana lifts up high to look around, find’s aña’s exile pod, go over there to pick up PK, drop him off at home to go party and group level grind, come back to find that lefen is missing, forget that PK exists and go dungeon crawling, get nothing done in the dungeon because too weak to knock, leave dungeon, go home, get sent on jack’s assassination mission, get save data back with ana, fly to prospit, ask for the ring, fly to derse, ask the queen for her ring which is like, sitting on her throne or something(?), take it back to prospit, get the white queen’s ring, bring it to jack for quest EXP, serk teleports it out of my inventory and into his hand, jack starts murdering derse, i wake up and remember that PK exists again, then go out to try and find lefen
Session 3
Lysander: Gathering players for a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign turns a bit different when one of them turns out to have books that tell them the future. Guided by this DMPC, Lysander enters The Most Dangerous Video Game. What follows is a bunch of mucking around with a handful of Author Avatars and then, eventually, getting captured by a figment of his imagination. Upon being thrust into a Gladiator Games and Playing Possum to escape, Lysander returns to the peace and tranquility of his home, a plane. He spends a bit of time on Prospit, then wakes up and goes into a dungeon.
Marcus: entered, yelling at euclid, made a memo, gone outside, currently fighting an SCP
Session 7
Literally Fallen Londonhttp://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/signup
All things were well.
Session 4
Drilfi Pythia:
maid of hope's land is all about sleeping, and two mysterious diseases that affect consorts who sleep, one putting them in a permanent sleep that they can never be awoken from, the other temporarily turning them into monsters that attack anything nearby, with no recollection of it when they wake up
see, the maid actually has two lands, with one being a sort of filter put over the original to make it different, turning it from a peaceful white land dotted with daycare centres, to an evil red land, replacing the daycares with horror-movie style hospitals, in which the filter!consorts insist that anyone being afflicted by the dreams must be brought to 'the high council' for treatment
the maid has not yet seen or heard anything more about the high council
the big kicker here, for the first time ever, the maid's land has someone experiencing both sleep diseases at the same time, the maid's young lowblood companion, the last living member of the church he surrounded himself with pre-game
on the unfiltered land, which for the sake of specifying, will be referred to as LOPAL, the Land of Pain and Lullabies, the companion was permanently asleep a la the first disease (which for the sake of specifying, is called having a Nightmare), but unlike any of the consorts having Nightmares, his permanent sleep was not peaceful, it was greatly uncomfortable, much like the second disease (which for the sake of specifying, is called having a Daydream)
thus, it was revealed the lowblood was having both a Nightmare and a Daydream at the same time, a first for anyone on LOPAL
previously in the session, the maid cured the land of Nightmares by ascending to the top of a spire, using a fancy little portal to send himself, and anyone passing through it, from LOPAL to the filtered land (which for the sake pf specifying, is called LONAD, the Land of Nightmares and Daydreams)
now, the real fun part about this, is when the maid put his sleeping companion through the portal without going through it himself, and he woke up from his Nightmare/Daydream combob, only now, he sees LONAD, while the maid sees LOPAL
at this point, whatever the maid sees on LOPAL, the companion sees on LONAD, with whatever filters are applied to it, which i had crazy fun making puzzles with
solid walls on LOPAL that are open doorways on LONAD, an innocent looking pillow fort on LOPAL turning into a giant death castle of fire and blades on LONAD
by stepping through the portal himself, the maid saw that, while having a Nightmare on LOPAL, the consorts are perfectly fine on LONAD, not even hostile as basically every other consort is by default
so the maid finishes the dungeon, and gets to the top of the spire while currently in LONAD, because the puzzles involved switching between the two lands for puzzle solving
and at the top, there's four music boxes sending pleasant music throughout LOPAL, but horrible screeching throughout LONAD, and also a single consort having a Nightmare, so he's currently awake when the maid meets him
and he begs him not to turn off the music, because the denizen, abraxas, made them to give the consorts peace in their sleep, even if it's eternal
and that's why the peaceful disease is called a Nightmare, because the 'disease' was created to cure the horrible nightmares the consorts would always have
at this point, the maid disagreed, and thought it would be better to have temporary painful dreams, than permanent peaceful ones, and so he turned off the music boxes
thus, every Nightmare on LOPAL ended, and everyone experiencing them woke up
except for the companion
because without a Nightmare to keep him pacified, he's currently only suffering from a Daydream, meaning that he's unconscious, and actively doing anything he can to harm the maid
this doesnt actually do any physical damage to the maid, because, y'know, it's a small child with significantly less psionic power than him
but, just the feeling of having a child that you've been raising for sweeps turn to fight you does way more psychological damage than anything anyone else could physically do to him
so now, currently, the maid is on a sidequest to unlock the second dungeon, The Dream Factory, and hopefully cure the land of Daydreams as well as Nightmares, and get his child back
because the dream factory is locked, not with a physical lock, but with dreams
the maid needs to go around the incipisphere with a small angel statue with four arms, and bring it to each of his three co-players, to collect the four strongest dreams in the universe.
the first was the maid's, his dream was for family, to go back home to before his family died in the reckoning, before children were cursed to fall into permanent sleep, or turn into savage monsters, where he could live happily with his family
the second was the page's, her dream was to be a hero, to be the kind of person who could be brave enough to make sacrifices for the good of other people, rather than herself
the third and fourth are the two players that are being looked after by my co-DM, and the maid's still on his way to them, so no spoipers on their dreams yet
Lena Ashlan:the page of blood is on the Land of Gangs and Glory, a land consisting of one giant, completely ruined slums of a city
completely ruined slums, hundreds of unlabelled buildings shoved together as close and physically possible, all of them with shattered windows, raided insides, and bullet holes covering every inch of street and wall
the only breaks in the hundreds of buildings, is the center of town (where the page's house currently resides), and six wide streets extending outwards from the center, each one with a single solid colour painted at the end of the street where it meets in the circular center of town
the six colours being, in order of:
right-top, right-middle, right-bottom, left-bottom, left-middle, left-top:
red, burgundy, yellow, black, eggshell, indigo
the page followed the indigo street first, based on the theory that each colour represented an aspect, and the current guess for her aspect was void, and met with her first gang of consorts, a group of six rats, each wearing a full on mobster-style suit in full indigo matching their colour
they call their gang the Night Faders, and tell the page that they're planning an attack on their rivals, the Fame Makers, the yellow gang
the page, having been told by her sprite that her quest is to Earn the Respect, figures that the logical way to do that is to follow them in their gang warfare, and assist them
and so, she helps the Night Faders in full on gang warfare, the Fame Makers being a perfectly mirrored gang of six rats, although with suits that match their gang colour of yellow (and with a particularly sassy leader, which the player absolutely insists is going to be her future wife)
with the help of the page, the Night Faders win, and force the Fame Makers to flee into the cramped side-streets of the rest of LOGAG, not killed, but defeated, and forced to give up their territory
after which, the page is told that she has very clearly Earned the Respect of the Night Faders, but very clearly lost the respect of the Fame Makers
it's then that she learned that she'd have to find other ways to Earn the Respect of each gang, because by just assisting them in fighting each other, she can't earn all of their respect without losing the respect of the other gangs
and, that's actually all that she's learned about her land thus far, most of her time in particular has been spent on prospit, learning about all of the stuff happening over there, including dersites painting themselves white to look like prospitians (an effect of the painting easel prototyping) in order to infiltrate their army ranks, and setting up torturous prisons that have full-on chemical showers 'to see if they can get the paint off', and just have the 'unintended side effect of melting their flesh and killing them'
and also a white queen that makes no public statements about the double agents, because she hasn't left the palace since the session started, leading many to believe she'd been replaced by a double agent queen from Derse
however, the page and the maid, both being prospit dreamers, infiltrated the castle themselves, and discovered that the queen, perpetually drunk and/or hungover out of her mind (caused by the whiskey and wine dual pre-entry prototyping), has closed off all access to the palace, because she's throwing the incipisphere's sickest rave inside, and she didnt want to be bothered with 'helping the people' or 'dealing with the double agents'
then led to a whole chain of events where Head Guard, a prospitian archagent leading the army and heavily armed from the pre-entry shotgun prototyping, killed the queen himself, because he was sick of her not caring at all about her kingdom
following this chain of events, the page fulfilled her dream of becoming a hero, and dove to captchalogue the queen's body to stop Head Guard from accessing the ring and using it to become the next jack noir, being killed by Head Guard in the process, losing her dream body, while the maid captchalogued her body, and fled Prospit, flying back to his land
Alex
His story starts with a pizza delivery and averted repossession attempt due to his parents' financial woes..
He prototypes a copy of DOOM (2016), creating a sprite obsessed with martial strength and tearing things.
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He's then plunged into the Land of Bones and Mirrors, where he finds his way over to Saklas, the apparent Denizen of his Land. Saklas then kills his sprite, and abducts Alex, where he finds himself contained in a glass cage, where he has his bones exposed so that they can have runes carved into them. Then he's dubbed Saklas' descendant, Samael, just as Saklas was to his father, the Creator, before being given an escort in Berith, one of Saklas' experiments, before being sent off.
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He also notes that Cassie's parents were in Saklas' lair as well, as were the hungover bodies of dozens of partygoers.
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After emerging back onto the Land, furious over losing his humanity, he improvises with a ladder onto his First Gate, a palace complex built into the earth. Facing imps of all sorts, slaying a Meatbag, and runic-augmented imps, he runs away from a noise deeper within the palace before completing his gate.
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Outside, he engages in some alchemy before heading outside to kill things and let off steam. A few creative uses of cryokinesis later, he comes upon the site of a battle between several sprites and Saklas, the Grand Chancellor there to catch him up on the events of the session, though Alex cares little for that then.
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He's told to go in the direction of the nearest town, where he encounters Irina, the leader of the Calamity Cabal. She directs him into the nearby forest to kill more underlings, before being pulled out as the land surges to life with thousands of streltsy, mobilizing to march to the land's capitol to defend it against an invasion by the Circle of Thorns.
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Unfortunately, when he gets there, it's too late. The royal family has already been corrupted by the Circle, and the Cabal is trapped in a losing fight. Despite repeated warnings, Alex takes on Zan of the Circle. Suture joins in, as does Berith at the last second, though he refuses to run. It isn't enough in the end, and Alex burns to death on the roofs of the royal palace.
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What's left of his corpse is interred in a Deep One Andromedon Suit, then hijacked by Suture, adding Rage to another aspect under the Circle's control.
Cassie
Her story begins with a pizza delivery to a billionaire estate and giant pigeons..
She prototypes an angel statue, then enters The Land of Satellites and Cells.
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Guiding her through the game besides her sprite is her Patron, her sorcerous teacher and a father surrogate where her own father is worthless. He offers her solutions with sorcery and traditional, Hermetic alchemy that serve as unconventional methods that leave her opponents stunned.
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She picks up the tail end of a decades-long slow decline for her canine consorts, pushed back to only one of the seven fortress hubs of the land, with only one captain left to direct their forces. She starts off by volunteering for a feint, infiltrating a lesser underling-held base with only a handful of soldiers to distract the underlings while the rest of them reclaimed some recently lost bases. Despite several near-death experiences that set the tone for the session, she comes out of it victorious.
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She deals in the more cerebral and hands-off parts of the game, steeping herself in the intrigue of the worlds, her and her parents. Her father makes contact with the various factions of the Incipisphere, while her mother takes to her scientific roots and begins experimenting with underlings, not telling Cassie about how they visited Saklas, nor how the terms of their agreement with Saklas the last time they met was to deliver a host of humans.
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Her parents knew about the Game. They bought out St. Helena off the western African coast, and helped fund Skaianet Laboratories alongside Audrey's and Alex's parents. They replaced their servants with military-trained ones to defend themselves. They know things that not only Cassie does not, but neither do the movers and shakers of the Incipisphere, including the Circle of Thorns, Sabaoth, and the Prosperity Commune.
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Then her contact with her Patron is cut off as part of the Circle's invasion, as a void generator onboard the Pride of Alpheratz and its onboard void generator blot out communications. Emotionally distraught and disturbed by prior news that her Patron's Master turned on him, and with Audrey's mother, taken over Terra as an eldritch lord, she's driven to make a deal with Zan of the Circle of Thorns.
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When she comes out of her anxiety, she's plunged back into it upon realizing she's allied herself with the number one enemy of the session, and considers a variety of options, including inducing a Face–Heel Turn in Zan, betraying the Circle, and several more. She puts it away for the time being, attending a meeting elsewhere on her land that sees the Commune appoint her as a lieutenant general in charge of an expeditionary force to her land, with aid from her Denizen Hecate, who cast a mass illusion when it seemed she might not get the appointment.
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One cryptic conversation later that doesn't quite go anywhere, she heads off to her First Gate, a laboratory and factory facility deep within the Land, where she discovers what her Denizen's been up to. There's white carapacians here that, unknown to Cassie, was abducted from the Commune colony on Lilith's land, working on building carapacian giant robots, and creating Supplicants, carapacians with their head and torso scooped out and replaced with candle wax.
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In place of a boss fight, she creatively uses alchemy to disable the reactor and send the entire facility crashing down into the magical waters below, running back through the entire facility, now on fire.
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She doesn't make it, crashing into the water and burning up as the return node crashes into her as it all sinks to the depths below.
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Resurfacing on the roof of her manor tower, she returns back to her hub fortress to direct the takeover of a second hub. Should she be able to take and hold four of seven, she will be victorious. A short display of strategic acumen later, she comes out with a second hub fortress.
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After this, she takes a ship to the Land of Wings and Expanses to fortify Azazel's prison, currently being chipped away at by the Circle of Thorns. When she gets there, she meets Apollo Vesper and a magister from the Kingdom of Prospit, who Apollo immediately kills with his automated bike, rightly suspicious that it was a Faceless One in disguise.
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They venture deeper into the prison, chasing down a magically trained salamander through the prison and across the land's plains, to a train. The salamander holds several hostages, which Cassie and Apollo don't care about too much. Still, she intimidates him into jumping off the train, and they follow him off. A short fight later, they interrogate him, finding it to be an isolated incident and not part of a greater Circle plot.
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Then she heads to the Kingdom of Derse within the Veil, gone the technologically advanced route to Prospit's magical mastery. She meets the Black King within the core of the Warstar, apparently become a digital being not contained to a single body. Then she meets Kayren just as a drone of ancient Aristan design approaches. The boss fight is easily won, but she is precluded from hunting down the drone when Kayren threatens to turn on them out of bloodlust.
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She returns to her manor with both of them in tow, and sets about getting her affairs in order. She resolves her training with her Patron, and gives Kayren therapy to help temper the madness that she developed during her imprisonment. She makes a deal with Hecate to transfer control of the Land of Satellites and Cells to her while keeping up appearances. She recruits Zan to her side. She has computer viruses created and stored in case the Black King becomes a threat.
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A timeskip later, she's in a meeting with the Commune's leaders when they get word that the moon is attacked by angels, led by Metatron. She heads over there, gets her forces to encircle the angelic host, and ventures deep into the Ministry of Innovation.
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Inside, she discovers that the Transformed Idealist is actually Amalie Carith, the Bard of Hope, and the one responsible for the entirety of Pizzastuck when she incited Dyeus Pater into launching his rebellion, and the Creator's retaliation shattered the Great Land and scattered all the players.
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They take Metatron into custody, then Amalie as well. Apollo is forced to run off with the latter to prevent discovery by the other ministers. Later, as Cassie goes over the after-action reports with the council, an unconscious Apollo and Amalie are presented as Circle saboteurs. The Reactionary immediately orders Amalie's execution, recognizing her for what she's done. Cassie sends Hecate and Zan to free her and deceive the Commune, and come away successful.
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The next morning, she leads an assault on the Circle's main headquarters, Zan having fed her their location and their weaknesses. The Commune bombards the quarry in which it was located, and Cassie leads a special ops team down there. She and Tamara have a battle of tactics, and Cassie comes out victorious, taking out all her soldiers before surrounding and gunning her down.
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Then R'vas communicates with Cassie, and knocks her out after she refuses his offer to join him.
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After waking up, she realizes Saklas on the mirror world has pulled her Patron and his Master into the Incipisphere along with the entirety of the island of St. Helena, and immediately sets off with Hecate to rescue them. Upon arriving, she quickly reunites with her Patron, who has been Brought Down to Normal, before descending into the depths of Skaianet Laboratories.
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She eventually faces down the Master in combat as the latter attempts to possess the massive corpse of the being Sandalphon. She distracts him while Hecate and her Patron set about burning down Sandalphon's heart, then launches his physical avatar several hundred feet into the cavern wall before disintegrating his vessel-less essence with eldritch magic.
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She sees about renovating the Prosperity Commune while the Ultimate Alchemy is set up. Its government is reformed with her in the unassuming seat of power, before annexing the four kingdoms, cementing the Commune's supremacy in the Incipisphere. She finally learns the truth about her Patron and the Master, what little there was. She brings Apollo Back from the Dead.
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As the millennia go on after winning the Game, she sees all her companions die. She hears of Audrey's and Claire's deaths while setting up the Ultimate Alchemy. Her canine sub-commander dies after a year. Her parents eventually die, as do all her chosen ministers. Her sprite fades away. Kayren and Apollo as well. Eventually, even her Patron dies, felled by an unknown enemy.
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She concludes after long, lonely millennia that it wasn't worth it, in the end.
Geante
Her story begins with a pizza delivery and shipping shenanigans with her matesprit..
She prototypes pumpkin seeds that critically fail to manifest her sprite until the second day, before arriving on the Land of Gardens and Graves.
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She gets to work ensuring her farm can continue to expand and thrive, though an unfavorable encounter with the Prosperity Commune and their colony on the land leaves her with a distaste for them that evolves into a genocidal hatred for all carapacians.
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Waking up on the dream moon of Derse, now controlled by Revolutionary Derse. She makes her way to a prison despite repeated warnings, and tears her way into the facility, influenced by Astaphanos, who wanted her to free her. She's stopped, yelled at, and shot by the Grand Chancellor before she can free her and prematurely end the session.
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She then has an episode with an alchemy gone wrong, and goes Trickster Mode, or so she is led to believe. In reality, Hecate and the Nameless One conspired to abduct the entirety of the colony and their technical knowledge to Hecate's land. Not that any of this is ever revealed to her.
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In the wake of the trickster incident and some trolls running off elsewhere when they were all also affected by Hecate's illusions, Geante heads off to Revolutionary Derse's colony on the land. However, some stubbornness later, she ends up charging the colony from several hundred feet away, leading to the deaths of her waking self and all her companions.
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Waking up on the dream moon again, she finds the Grand Chancellor and the Nameless One playing ping pong with her padded cage, both of them unwilling to deal with her. She ends up crashing back onto her land after having her dreamself's flight removed, where her matesprit and pumpkinsprite bring her back to the farm, but not before making several stops and recruiting several hundred snake consorts who want to reestablish civilization on the world.
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She stumbles onto works of the Creator, and fails to realize she shouldn't be alchemizing with that several times before awakening the Creator and having his screams kill anywhere from 30%~55% of the Incipisphere. This then leads to her being put down again, putting her into a direct conversation with the Creator, who explains his side of the story. For some reason, she buys it without question and decides to work on setting him free.
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Reawakening and reconnecting with her matesprit, she ends up going into her First Gate with Beiseu, meet an elderly snake who remembers Sabaoth's rebellion and how Uriel devastated the land and killed every twelve out of thirteen snakes before being put down by the combined efforts of the Revolution, Sabaoth, and several Denizens. She then fights an underling from the Land of Satellites and Cells, captured when her Denizen Lilith invaded Hecate's land, as part of Lilith's plan to make her strong and use her to kill Hecate and Sabaoth.
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She emerges victorious, then heads to her Second Gate, onto the Land of Lights and Chateaus, where the Enigmatic Reactionary shrugs off a potentially fatal captchalogue mishap and agrees to establish an embassy, though she fails to actually push through and finalize her end of the deal.
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She returns to see the Circle of Thorns invading her land with over a hundred various giant robots. She decides to go back to alchemy instead, and the invaders overrun her farm with artillery, infiltrated Faceless Ones, a digging machine that disappeared earlier, and sheer mechanical strength.
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She fails to heed her matesprit's requests to run, and ends up fighting Jorgande of the Circle, refusing to retreat. She dies, and her story ends. Her corpse is taken by Jorgande and possessed by him, adding Space to another aspect the Circle controls.
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Her matesprit and what few trolls survived the onslaught are now on the Land of Omens and Angels in the refugee city, trying to survive.
Beiseu
His story begins with an unquestioned pizza delivery and drone sweep of his apartment. At least, it was supposed to be until yetidad smacked both drones down..
He prototypes a pizza and creates pizzasprite, who has a stereotypical Jersey-NYC accent, before arriving in the The Land of Lights and Chateaus.
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Upon arrival, he finds himself accosted by his Denizen Hastur, who tells him to follow the conductor of a local orchestra back to a bar where anti-monarchist revolutionaries are congregating. Beiseu plays in the concert expertly, then follows the horsehead consort to the bar, where he, yetidad, and pizzasprite have a fight against eleven imps. He then asks the bartender for a reward for some reason, and is told to get out.
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He builds up to his First Gate, on the side of a mountain on an island. He makes his way down the island, to a coastal base where he sees dozens of human doctors, nurses, and patients being escorted elsewhere onto the island. He opts to steal the gray ship in which the doctors came, and follows the ship back to its last destination, a base in the Veil where he dithers for a bit before going to the Land of Gardens and Graves.
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There, he sticks with Geante for a bit as she goes through her First Gate, fighting a watery underling that was implied to be connected to Hecate and some sort of involvement she had on Geante's land, though all this flies over his head. He fights the miniboss, and emerges victorious.
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Afterwards, he takes off in his ship towards the Scarce State, where he's caught in a false Circle invasion alarm that sees him caught up in a regime change. He and yetidad end up on the wrong side of a Revolutionary contingent's guns, and is gunned down.
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His body is put in cold storage until Lemegeton's forces arrive on the Veil cities to set up an ambush for the sylph of life, whereupon his corpse is disinterred and sent back to the Land of Cataracts and Caverns to be raised into another of his servants.
Denlak
His story begins with a tavern, where the Pizza Stalker Man makes him take a pizza..
And then a culling happens. Business as usual on Alternia under Her Imperial Coalescence, one targeted against artists to make them join the regime or die. Due to some bad decisions, Denlak is cornered by a culling squad, and is only saved by the PSM's intervention, whereupon he enters the Game, into the Land of Omens and Angels.
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He prototypes a picture of his dead lusus, bringing him back to life and providing some much-needed emotional support.
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He encounters his consorts, a race of horse-riding turtles, who speak of the Aharit Ha-Yamim and its coming. He gains a horse of his own, and travels with them to the mountains, where the tribe elder Matthias tells him he could find what he needs.
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He and Samson ride off towards the land following a battle where the tribe takes on a plethora of underlings, Samson barely avoiding death at the hands of several basilisks. They reach the mountain by sunset, where they come onto a massive courtyard with the statues of the four; the Creator, Astaphanos, Sabaoth, and Dyeus Pater, alongside that of the Archons. Beyond the courtyard is a house that used to belong to Dyeus Pater, whom the consorts venerate as the Sky-Father. After exploring, Denlak discovers a return node in the bedroom that returns him to the tavern.
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Afterwards, he goes through his First Gate, where he eventually meets Sealtiel, the Archon of his Land, who would've been his Denizen were it not for Sabaoth's rebellion. They exchange questions and tells Denlak of his overall role in the game. He comes out of his first gate dungeon into a series of caverns, where he discovers a return node. Going back through after resting, he encounters another tribe of turtles, led by Sarah. The two tribes integrate fairly well, all things considered.
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Denlak has other misadventures during his time. He's privy to the machinations of the Prosperity Commune on Prospit, its ruling government after it kicked out the Kingdom of Prospit to the Veil during Sabaoth's rebellion. Of note is resources held by the Ministry of Compliance that give him a lore dump on the Archons and Denizens. Except for Hastur, who detects Denlak reading his entry and makes his information delete itself.
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At various points, he discovers the war-weary history of the Commune and the fact that the Transformed Idealist has Imperial Drones within her workshops.
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Denlak has more adventures in the caverns below his land. He explores a pyramid tomb, gets lit on fire by a flame trap, then flees before exploring much. He sees a convoy of underlings attack an angelic fortress built into a cavern wall.
His Second Gate goes without much fanfare. Comes out onto a farm on the Land of Gardens and Graves with hundreds of trolls. Denlak walks back through his gate.
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Heading back to the fortress, now emptied of angels by the underlings, he eventually finds a contingent of abducted consort children, originally taken by the angels for unknown reasons. Then he encounters a Giclops that doesn't quite attack him, alongside a gaggle of underlings who don't attack the turtles on sight. This continues until they continue through the fortress, down another cavern level, until he encounters a broken archangel. Cue one fight between one angel and hundreds of consorts.
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One relatively easy fight later, Denlak comes out into another level and another return node.
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Sometime during this, the Circle of Thorns makes itself known. Lyle's sprite visits, tells Koaladadsprite about the Circle and about Saklas' nanite virus, and heads off, eventually to fight and die against Saklas. He gets a call from the Grand Chancellor asking him to intervene on the Land of Wings and Expanses, where the Circle makes itself known with a grand invasion.
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Sabaoth, Zahhak, Hecate, and Hastur face off against Belyra, Jorgande, and Suture, with countless thousands of salamanders and Revolutionary carapacians against more salamanders and Deep Ones.
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Denlak receives a ride from one of the Revolution's fleets, and makes landfall to retrieve the dying Knight of Heart before the Circle can get to him. Ultimately, however, he fails. The Knight already made his deal with the Horrorterrors, and Belyra and Beylik Shobaz claim Lyle's corpse, deceased from nanite infection. He returns to his land, defeated. To make things worse, he's the last one to see Lyle's sprite, his father just as Denlak resurrected his lusus, before he goes off to the Land of Bones and Mirrors to make Saklas pay.
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Some more exploration and another tribe led by Jonah integrated into the growing host later, Denlak gets a message from Claire. The sylph's waking self and her companion have both been captured by the Circle. He, Claire, and her denizen, Serket, head off into the Veil to infiltrate the Circle's base of operations and retrieve them.
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The mission is stymied when the group is interrupted by Holozern, and Claire is baited into chasing him down in vain. They only manage to retrieve the companion, Vexila Osmani, a fuchsiablood former emperor of trollkind from a distant age, who was being continually bled for his blood, which contains powerful magical properties. He and Claire use said properties to empower her, letting her telekinetically lay dozens of enemies and giant robots flat to the ground as they make their escape out onto the asteroid surface, chased by a horde of Deep Ones and Belyra, now in Lyle's corpse and in possession of his Heart aspect.
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They manage to escape, only to run into two more failures. Hastur, who was coming to their rescue with a fleet, doesn't make it out, and is captured by the Circle, leaving his land and the grist markets in disarray. And then Suture follows them to Port Tyrrhenia, where he holds the entire port hostage with his potential casualties, talking Serket down to willingly leave with him back to the Circle. And shortly after, Beylik makes himself known to the companion, and a chase ensues, ending in the void player revealing himself and involving another session in the grand scheme of things.
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After this, he ends up taking ships to Port Cadiz, then to his land, a prime spot for refugees fleeing Lyle's land after it fell to the Circle. He ensures a Faceless One infiltration is stymied, ending in a complete purge of the Revolutionary colony's headquarters to kill all the carrion and eggs.
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His Third Gate sees activity from the Kingdom of Derse as a horsehead captain, Captain Bonaventure, flees from the dungeon, citing angels and insufficient pay. Going further in, Denlak encounters the leader of the culling squad from pre-entry, a rainbow drinker and struggling to pull himself up from a deep spike, continually reviving only to die again, as the bottom of the pit fills with jade blood. Denlak rescues the rainbow drinker, who then doesn't kill him and instead proves to be somewhat helpful.
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Continuing on through what he assumes to be his third gate dungeon, he encounters brainwashed turtles, made to serve the angels and their needs. Fighting his way through that, he comes onto a cage suspended in the middle of a two thousand foot deep chasm. Climbing down the thousand feet, and having the rainbow drinker fall off, die on impact, and revive at the bottom, he breaks the cage open to free Kayren Vayuta, the Seer of Breath.
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After rescuing her, he realizes the path he went wasn't the intended third gate path, but a side path. Following the actual path, he eventually comes to a small tower that serves as an office for Metatron, his Denizen. He meets him there, seeing a tired man who realizes he cannot sit by and wait for events to go as the Creator intended. He shows Denlak to a return node and an offer that he'll be open for questions at a future point.
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His Fourth Gate sees him involved in a Circle infiltration of the Land of Lights and Chateaus as the civil war rages on. Initially, he panics and stands there as the Commune detachment leader is killed by Holozern, then gets himself together and has a rematch that ends with him victorious over the Circle main member and signaling the end of the Circle's perceived domination.
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After that, he witnesses the aftermath of the Minister of the Interior, one Unfazed Everyman, putting a bullet through his mouth, unable to deal with the guilt of having orchestrated the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians to galvanize the Commune into full mobilization.
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Then the Grand Chancellor, Sabaoth, comes to him with an opportunity. The costs of waging war against the Circle has made the Revolution hate his policies, and he expects to lose his position. He intends to take the refugees from multiple worlds and Veil asteroids devastated by the Circle's invasions and settle them on the Land of Gardens and Graves, where he can reestablish a power base. Denlak agrees, and gets the tribes to come with him.
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He arrives on the world to be approached by Lilith the next morning, who tells him of how Hecate sabotaged her player and turned her into a carapacian-hating psychopath, working with Vexila while he was the worst grimdark threat the session faced. He and Lilith end up going to the Kingdom of Prospit out in the Veil, where he ends up tangled in several plots between the Circle and Hecate. Some advice from the spymaster and a chance meeting with the Calamity Cabal, freshly wounded from their failure on the Land of Bones and Mirrors, later, he, Lilith, and Jonah, who ended up joining the Cabal earlier on, end up heading to the Golden March, one of Prospit's territories.
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At the Golden March, Denlak discovers more trolls and carapacians, alongside the margrave of the territory, having sided with the Circle. He defeats them, collects whatever information he can, and escapes, though not before abandoning Jonah and Lilith losing one leg below the knee. Upon his return to the palace, he finds it attacked by underlings from out of nowhere, before facing the magister and a duke, who intend to incapacitate the White Queen and rule as regents. Denlak comes out of hit mostly unhurt, though in typical fashion, his allies pay the price. This time, the marshal of the kingdom, who is locked into a coma by a power of Mind origins.
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After the chaos in the kingdom settles down, the White Queen decides that the Kingdom of Prospit cannot afford to sit by and let the Incipisphere continue to burn. Denlak reads over the documents he acquired from the Golden March, revealing that the Pride of Alpheratz has unloaded most of its veteran crew, survivors from the Old Guard's entry over two hundred years ago, within the Golden March and Kingdom of Prospit, awaiting the Circle's command. Lilith argues that Beylik is of more priority; he's gone to the Land of Bones and Mirrors to speak with Saklas, and Saklas is the one who originally brought Skaianet Laboratories to the Medium a few years before, setting up for the events of the story to occur.
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Denlak and Lilith head over to the mirror world, where they find Berith. Berith leads them into Saklas' lair, his laboratory from which he's made his underlings and all sorts of inventions like the vitaphagic nanovirus. The latter has also overrun the laboratory, turning everything a mossy blue-gray and turning everyone into fungal monsters controlled by a hive mind. It's also revealed to be derived from the same blood of which the Archons are made.
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Some dungeon crawling later, they encounter the core of the fungal network, a nascent Archon. One difficult fight involving multiple parasitic injections, Uriel's intervention, and a second form, it turns out to be All for Nothing as Saklas appears on a monitor, Beylik's unconscious form in the background. Saklas displays his dimensional abilities and banishes Denlak and Lilith back to Alternia.
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He has the unfortunate luck to land right in the heart of the Alternian legal system, and is quickly interrogated. Luckily, the Alternian Imperial State mastered medicine long ago, and patches him back up, sans an eye, a few fingers, and one of his earlobes.
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He escapes the palace-office somewhat easily, decides its hosting city of Asitane isn't safe enough with the legal and religious authorities deciding to have an Allowed Internal War over personal and doctrinal issues, and runs into the woods north of the city. They encounter a limeblood's psionic projection, who both dials back Denlak's danger sense and guides them out of danger.
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A quick patchup by an irreverent jadeblood later, Denlak and Lilith get caught up in the limeblood's plans, a series of assassinations against the ranked elite of the imperial state to draw out Her Imperial Coalescence, then kill her and dismantle the hemospectrum. Denlak's convinced to stay by word of a relic the empress possesses, a device that can supposedly send him back to the Incipisphere, implied to be of Vexila's making, raising questions as to what he was planning to do with it, given the grimdark influences around his backstory.
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The implications continue when the limeblood finds a scepter implied to be of First Guardian origins, using it to control the minds of people en masse. Along the way, she encounters clowns, lawyers, rainbow drinkers, products of nightmarish superscience, and cats. The cats are adorable.
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The implications come to a head when Denlak finds a recording within the depths of the Seastone Palace one day before the assassination attempt on the Empress, a testimony Vexila made over a hundred years into his isolation within the Furthest Ring.
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R'vas, the Leviathan, the master of the Circle of Thorns and one of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors, was the one who gave the scepter to trollkind in the first place, that they would develop civilization and one day play Sburb. Then the Old Guard failed, with two different explanations. Either Dyeus Pater failed his rebellion and his punishment also scattered the players throughout space and time, or the Creator realized the players were sent by the horrorterror, and stopped them.
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And two centuries later in the Game, R'vas is still within the Furthest Ring, his plans to usurp the new universe still on track. Assuming Vexila's insane ramblings can be trusted in any way.
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He ends up ignoring the entire assassination, deeming it not his fight, and gets the empress to show him the Tannhauser Gate onboard the imperial flagship. He gets it to work and ferry him over, but not before the ship is invaded, and a rainbow drinker and supernaturally-augmented cavalreaper come through the gate, as does the empress.
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On the other side, Denlak arrives on Skaia, under the Creator's Chains, to a faded checkerboard of craters and derelict war machines. The Creator notices this, and inflicts his wrath a second time, purging Alternia just as he purged the Incipisphere. This destroys the gate, and strands the three other trolls in the Medium. Lilith offers Denlak the Choice that she would've offered her player. But Denlak inherited their Choices as the Heir, and now he has one to make. He can use the Tumor to slay Yaldabaoth, the Creator, but at the cost of God Tiering.
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He takes the Choice, and uses the Tumor. The Creator offers one last malediction, then is destroyed, freeing Skaia, but also opening the Incipisphere to R'vas' predations. This also severs his connection to his dreamself but opens him up to acquiring powers from other players' aspects.
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He then gets picked up by a ship from the Kingdom of Prospit, then heads to the garden world to check on Lilith's land. From space, he sees a massive blue stain on the continent, indicative of a nanite virus infection, slowly giving rise to a new archon. The gunslingers and nomads of the colony ride off to put an end to it now that Denlak's returned.
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It doesn't go well. After a trap involving an underground city, the archon Typhon emerges, a dragon whose jaws alone are three stories tall. Denlak ends up climbing on, then inside, the dragon as it flies off the land and to Port Tyrrhenia. He targets the dragon's organs to disable it, and even then the fungal properties of the dragon ensure that it leaves behind plenty of minions before falling into the Horizon below.
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Denlak then aids the Calamity Cabal in finding the White King, journeying to the surface of Skaia. They find him in a ruined super siege titan, where Denlak talks him down into returning to the kingdom.
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Then he ends up receiving word of the oncoming Leviathan's Tide, and receives his endgame items shortly after.
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The Tide's assault is overwhelming; within hours, the majority of the Veil, the Golden March, three of the four port cities, and the Derse moon is lost, with estimates foreseeing a grimdark victory by dinnertime. As Denlak stands in the war room within the palace while the kingdom discusses strategy, the empress returns and asks for his aid. R'vas also brought trolls he procured from millennia ago, warped by the temporal instability of the Furthest Ring. She intends to prove that right of blood trumps grimdark patrons, and asks Denlak to help her interrogate one of the troll contingent's leaders in the Golden March.
A successful interrogation extracts two secrets, though Denlak only hears the first one; the leaders of the Circles of Talons, Teeth, and Thistles each have a medallion that allows teleportation to R'vas' ship. Denlak rushes off to aid the White King blunt the Talons' assault into Kingdom territory, and helps the White King slay its leader.
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Unfortunately, Denlak realizes that the medallion can only take one person. Before he can stop him, the White King takes the medallion and teleports by himself to take down R'vas.
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Upon returning from the battle, the empress reveals the other fact she meant to tell him; R'vas prefers trolls because he shaped them from the beginning. He understands them better than the deep ones. Then she reveals her plan. She was going to take a locator beacon from the crashed Pride of Alpheratz on the desert world to give to Denlak. He would teleport aboard, then activate the beacon and pinpoint R'vas' location, then broadcast it to the entire Incipisphere such that everyone would beeline for him.
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She reminds him that there are still two more medallions, right before Daniel calls, asking Denlak to come help on the garden world; the Circle of Thistles has invaded.
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He heads over there, and witnesses the angels from his own land attacking the horrorterrors. Then realizes they're attacking the horde that rode out with him to fight them off, and wonders if the two could be led to exhaust each other. But Denlak realizes he might lose the medallion if he flees, and prepares to go in.
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Samson won't let him. So Daniel won't let him. Then Sarah. Then Matthias. Then Levi. He's one of them now. Where he goes, so do they. They charge in bravely, and fight off both sides long enough for Denlak and Samson to kill their leader and reclaim the medallion.
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He takes the locator beacon from the empress and teleports onto R'vas' flagship, orbiting Derse as Astaphanos, Samyaza, and apparently the White King are fighting off endless hordes of deep ones. Then he finds that Apollo, Amalie, and some of Cassie's consorts are onboard, fighting through trolls to get up to R'vas.
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At the bridge of the ship, they finally meet R'vas in person, and learn one last revelation. All trolls look as they do because they were shaped in his image. They don't have long to linger on this, however, before R'vas attempts to turn Apollo and Amalie on each other.
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Failing, he chops through all the consorts in seconds, then slaughters Apollo and Amalie in quick succession.
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Denlak slays him in the end, but only barely. He collapses, and is recovered by Samson and Lilith, after the empress restored the Pride of Alpheratz and rammed into the flagship. The Tide had assumed it was one of theirs.
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He gets up the next morning and winds down. He speaks to Metatron and convinces him to stand down. He gets his cats back. He attends the White Queen's wedding.
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After winning the Game, he spends his life Walking the Earth. He keeps in touch with the friends he'd made throughout the session. Samson names a son after him. Lilith joins him on his adventures, and brings their cats with her. He begins dating a librarian.
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He dies of old age, surrounded by those he loves.
Audrey
Her story begins with a pizza store in the middle of nowhere and a merry chase throughout a deserted city..
Unlike others, however, her story sees her break one of the game discs and teleport herself to the ruins of Skaianet Laboratories in the wake of a grand battle between underlings and an unknown force, revealed to be the Pizza Stalker Man and Lyle's father, a pair of US special forces soldiers sent to investigate the island of St. Helena.
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Among the founders of the laboratory are her parents, as well as Cassie's parents, Alex's parents, and an unknown man later revealed to be Claire's father. Her parents were always into the less savory pursuits of power.
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She eventually enters after prototyping a picture of her mother, entering the Land of Fjords and Lightning.
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She has fun indulging in her thieving tendencies, sneaking around and stealing what she deems valuable. She agrees to take a coded message from a mine overseer in the local village to the Revolutionary colony a day's travel away. Later on, when she cracks the message, she'll find that the mine overseer is one of many spies for the Revolution, paving the way for the Revolution to stage a syndicalist uprising on the land and overthrow its queen.
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She meets Serket on the road, though she doesn't know it at the time.
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She has similarly thieving tendencies at the colony, robbing a bank. Which also happened to be simultaneously robbed by thieves from the Revolution, sent by one of its prominent union leaders as part of the union leaders' jockeying for power within the government. Not that she knows it when she kills them as easily as one steps on an ant.
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She returns to her house, and enters her First Gate, a cavern passageway being invaded by avian consorts led by her denizen Freya, who intends to execute Jegudiel and use his lifeless head in a ritual. Audrey follows in her wake, and catches up to see her decapitate him, then fly off, leaving the rest of his body to contort and wriggle with tricksterish blood and move in unnatural ways as things move under the skin.
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A desperate escape ensues as she rides off on her wolves, and needs her future self to intervene at multiple points, but she eventually gets away to a return node and returns to her home, imbued with minor time theft abilities.
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She has a variety of misadventures at this time. She accidentally ends up in the Circle's main base by walking through a broom closet, except Tamara doesn't bother to chase her, knowing she can't catch the time player. She throws a chair at Alex for trying to date Cassie. She just brings her dreamself to her land at one point so she can access flight on the go.
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She accesses her Second Gate, but it's of little interest to her. Just grass and bleak skies.
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She goes through her Third Gate, straight into Freya's treasure vault in her palace in Miklagard. She has a hell of a time stealing everything before happening upon Freya conducting a ritual with Jegudiel's head, creating a crown of power meant to give Freya the same time powers as Audrey. Audrey interrupts it, touching the crown. It creates a vortex through which Audrey and the crown are pulled. The crown falls out somewhere in the vortex, to an unknown time and place, while Audrey continues flying back through the past.
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She falls out onto the Land of Gog and Magog two hundred years in the past, and is caught by Kayren Vayuta, the Seer of Breath. Catching up to her soon after is Apollo Vesper, the Witch of Light, Beylik Shobaz, the Rogue of Void, Amalie Carith, the Bard of Hope, and Vexila Osmani, two hundred years younger and not yet grimdark.
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She joins them on their third gate equivalent quest, slaying the dragon sorcerer Aden. She then grows strong enough to manipulate time, and returns to her own time.
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She returns to her land, boasting new alchemy and time powers. She returns to Freya to apologize, by way of kissing her and simultaneously having a future self take a picture at that moment.
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After processing that, Freya gets down to it and explains why she's so angry. First off, she never asked to be born of Dyeus Pater. She was just made and Sabaoth told her to command an entire world. Secondly, she took on a curse to work with Jegudiel's head, and now she doesn't even have the crown to offset her slow descent into fey-like insanity. And thirdly, she hates that as a Denizen, she's expected to challenge and nurture a weak little player into someone that'll grow to be even stronger than her.
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Audrey, unfazed as usual, takes all this in stride. She then hears of how the Land of Lights and Chateaus is in disarray after Hastur's disappearance after a failed attack on a Circle base, and his two children with Serket need to take over. Audrey travels to the Commune's archives for information, but finds Hastur's info already deleted from when Denlak accidentally triggered it. She then has a brief confrontation with Sarif, Hastur's son, who agrees to lead her to Fatima, his sister.
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She finds Fatima in what was meant to be the Seventh Gate of the Land of Lights and Chateaus, in Hastur's palace lair, eating chocolates delivered to her by third party Veil proxy Imperial Drones. She convinces her to join up with Freya.
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At a banquet preceding Freya's mobilization of the land, Fatima drinks a ridiculous amount, then the four of them find out what happened to the rest of Jegudiel's body went, into the form of Oberon, the Lord of the Wild Hunt. Then the meeting turns out to be an illusion and they go about their business.
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The next day, Freya launches an invasion with several tens of thousands of avian warriors and aid from various monarchist-aligned factions within the Veil, and secures the support of the Kingdom of Derse as well, who would like to see the Prosperity Commune, currently aiding the revolutionary horseheads on the Land of Lights and Chateaus, taken down a notch.
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Audrey then makes landfall down in Mayenne, to the west of the capitol, to disable an aerial defensive system using the land's signature electrical technology. More accurately, the Kingdom of Derse has agreed to do it, and she's there to ensure they actually do. The two leading the assault are actually the rainbow drinker from Denlak's pre-entry shenanigans and Captain Bonaventure that Denlak and Claire met on Port Tyrrhenia. Bonaventure screws it up and accidentally destroys the facility instead of leaving it intact for later use, but the mission is declared successful enough.
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Freya then joins Audrey planetside, where they find themselves the target of an ineffectual ambush from the Circle of Thorns, though in the end Freya's scarred by a handful of carrion revenants that burst down from the treeline where some of the corpses were.
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They march further east, until the reach the capitol, other cities on the land capitulating along the way.
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The battle for Saint-Maur goes as smoothly as one could've hoped. They lose thousands of their own, but slay several for each one they lose, what remains of their forces are integrated under Freya's growing coalition, including one horsehead general who aided Denlak earlier in slaying Holozern. And a Siege Titan is recovered intact as Audrey sneaks inside and holds the crew at daggerpoint, defying the efforts of a spec ops agent to delay her.
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Freya then has a short meeting with the Commune, and demands a truce while humiliating the Vindicated Orphan and appropriating their captured ships. They then set off to the Land of Cataracts and Caverns to bring the land under Fatima's rule. Audrey helps blackmail the land's regent into cooperation.
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She retrieves a horrorterror alive for Serket's planned superweapon, before leaving to confront her mother on the mirror world. The confrontation is brief, and she lets her suffer and die from her own magical backlash.
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She doesn't make it to the end. She races back to her Land with her denizen to confront The Wild Hunt and Oberon, and Freya falls to her curse, becoming one of the Fae. She then turns on Audrey, defeats her, and revives her as one of the Fae as well.
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She now sits at Queen Titania's court, as her lover and the court executioner.
Claire
Her story begins with an exasperating pizza delivery, a storm of apocalyptic proportions, and a race to make it to the hospital to be with her comatose mother, who has been that way for several years..
She prototypes a diamond, creating diamondsprite that doesn't have all that much importance in the plot, before arriving on the Land of Cataracts and Caverns.
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She heads out after some alchemization shenanigans despite a lack of grist, and ends up making friends with the local imps, who in hindsight disappear rather quickly. Her Denizen never quite cared about them, it seems. She ends up dying to some nanite-infected crodocile consort patients in a temple-hospital, whereupon the Nameless One makes a grimdark pact with her.
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Descending further into the temple to the catacombs, she learns of the Alchemical Stones, a dozen gemstones scattered throughout the land that can create the Philosopher's Stone when combined.
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Then she builds up to her First Gate, into a secluded locale in a crater, where Serket, her Denizen, has a laboratory. She explores the laboratory, finds the first inklings of what's happened to her father, Mr. Sigma, and then chances upon Serket, who reveals herself and ends her long seclusion to give Claire her land quest.
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However, the Creator happens to awaken then, and nearly half the session's inhabitants die. Startled by this development, she calls up everyone she can on Skype, getting as many denizens as possible on the line. She gets Lilith, Zahhak, and Hastur, as well as Sabaoth. Meanwhile, the Nameless One is caught by the Circle of Thorns, and subject to things he declines to describe in depth.
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The Noble Circle of Horrorterrors, wary of the Creator breaking free of his prison, has sent the Circle of Thorns to contain the situation and ensure that he remains imprisoned. Later on, it is revealed that the main, and possibly only, mover and shaker among behind this is R'vas, the Leviathan. Sabaoth and the Denizens agree that they must do everything in their power to resist the Circle, and drive them off for the safety of the entire Incipisphere.
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Still fairly weak, Claire is told by Serket to find the rest of the Alchemical Stones to revive Barachiel and Samyaza, two Archons who disappeared during Sabaoth's rebellion against the Creator. Sabaoth, perturbed by how Serket went behind his back all these years, still sends Claire the assistance of the Revolutionary Derse military in her search.
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She's then joined by a significantly weakened and broken Nameless One, who eventually reveals himself to be Vexila Osmani, a fuchsiablood that'd drifted through the Furthest Ring for centuries before attempting to become a horrorterror, before the Circle cut him down. As weak as he is, he still proves to be the fighter to Claire's thief.
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She travels through multiple cities in her search, excavating multiple tombs and catacombs. Under Tamiathis, she intercepts a necromancer ritual and puts down the former regents of the land. The further south she travels, the more of the necromancer threat she faces, like darkness-generating insectoids, alchemized strife specibus-immune crocodile zombies, and city-covering shadow generators. She and Vexila take it in stride, and triumph with the aid of several hundred Revolutionary soldiers and local crocodile warrior-priests.
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Their luck turns when, after spotting some ships in the sky of unknown origin, they're caught in a trap following a rout by specibus-immune zombies by Tamara of the Circle of Thorns. The two are captured and delivered to a Circle base within the Veil.
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Claire and Vexila are both flayed and beaten until Vexila agrees to cooperate, unable to see Claire suffer any longer. Then unknown to him, she's taken by Liele, the Circle member Belyra possessing the corpse of Lyle, the Knight of Heart. She slowly begins descending into madness, before failing to kill herself, before she blacks out.
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After having her breakdown, she finds Vexila's trident at their kidnapping site, and wields it as she continues her hunt for the Alchemical Stones. Here, she enters an underground city where the Abu Mena are resurrecting Lemegeton despite not having all the stones. The ritual is partially successful, and Lemegeton still ascends to the surface.
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Realizing she needs Vexila's strength and to rescue her waking self before she needs to wake, she recruits Serket and Denlak, and finds the Circle base. A prison break ensues, where she meets and fights Holozern, but fails to kill him. She finds Vexila being bled for his magical blood, and frees him. Earlier, she'd used the ritual to telekinetically break a starship in half, and replicates the feat here, stunning dozens of Circle guards and escaping.
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She escapes to Port Tyrrhenia, where Suture of the Circle confronts them. He forces them to give up Serket lest he light up the entire port and incinerate several thousand civilians.
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Bereft of her land quest, she takes a detour as she goes on vacation to pre-entry Earth with Audrey and Cassie, where she meets her father, who leaves the restaurant at which they planned to eat. He nearly kills Audrey and Vexila, and almost kills Claire before the Pizza Stalker Man/Paradox Space Messenger crushes him against a building.
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She then meets Jack, who claims to have known her mother. And so Claire is plunged into the parapsychic world, with its politics, modern-day conflicts, and cast of snowflakes.
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Meanwhile, after an unspecified amount of time, Claire's back in the Incipisphere, and goes to save her comatose mother, who's on the Land of Lights and Chateaus while a civil war rages. She eventually finds and rescues her, alongside Lyle's mother, taking both of them to the Land of Omens and Angels, now a haven for refugees.
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She then establishes a Psychic Link with her mother, who has also made contact with and brought in Barachiel and Samyaza, changed after two decades of being locked in their minds. Barachiel, the former denizen of Claire's land, tells her how to alchemize the Alchemical Stones and create the Philosopher's Stone.
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A short alchemy montage later, she manages to revive her mother from the coma, and they have a reunion.
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She then heads off to the Scarce State to follow up on a request from a coroner to identify the body of one dead Beiseu Suramu, who died in a misunderstanding with the police.
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The request turns out to be a trap set up by Lemegeton, and Claire finds herself saved from a fight by the historian, who turns out to be the Heretic the Abu Mena were hunting. They escape the Scarce State and return to her Land, where her attempts at alchemy are disrupted by the Avatar of Recurring Night, the reanimated corpse of the Avatar of Zeal. She's chased into the upper atmosphere, where she, her mother, and the heretic are abducted by the Pride of Alpheratz.
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Claire rushes ahead of her mother and the heretic, hell bent on facing down Liele and Tamara again. Alone. She ends up being hunted by a crocodile wraith, but evades him until stopped by a force field of undead origins, barring her entry to Liele and Tamara. Then she encounters Suture, now entombed in the Rage player in the Andromedon warsuit, proceeding to stop and talk at him while he tried to set her on fire. Weakened, she's finally done in by the wraith.
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She wakes up on Sekhet-Aaru, a ghost that's lost her classpect, and has a need for souls to replenish her own, slowly fading away. She encounters Samyaza, who gives a small exposition on the land of the dead before losing both hands helping her chop off her own arm. Claire alchemizes herself a new body and possesses it, returning to the land of the living.
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Unfortunately, she finds that if she goes too long without eating souls, she blacks out and does it without any control over herself. Her multiple attempts to find a prison that'll hold her see her ostracized as a maniac, then she has another episode on Revolutionary Derse. This also reveals another facet of her new nature as a Lich, where she spreads Sekhet-Aaru's dominion, and gives the undead a way onto the moon.
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She finds a ship and leaves the moon, heading towards the ruins of Saratov on the mirror world, looking for a Spark to stabilize her lich form and stop the hunger spasms. She ends up in a memory of the siege of Saratov, where she accompanies a small squad of iguanas as they're worn down by the endless siege. She eventually meets Sandalphon during the squad's attempt to break the encirclement, or rather, a memory of him, implied to have been put there and the Shard created by Astaphanos in a previous era. He hands over the Shard, and Claire leaves the memory, more practiced in her undead powers.
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She then travels to the Revolutionary colony on the angel world, where she meets Sabaoth again. He updates her, saying that her bringing the undead to the dream moon weakened them to the point where Sabaoth called in the Black King, who then overran the moon and reclaimed it for the kingdom, bringing an end to the syndicate experiment of the Revolution. He then tells her Liele, Jorgande, and Serket were seen in the western Satevis sector, making forays into the Ardent Sky.
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An ill-fated attempt to meet with Zahhak later, she ends up at the Dersite moon again, where she receives the Black King's aid in going to the Satevis sector to take down half the Circle. The Reticent Admiral makes another appearance as he ferries Claire to Nadre, where they were last seen.
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The battle is a Curb-Stomp Battle, all things considered. Claire hypnotizes a monstrous carrion queen into turning on the horrorterrors, and Jorgande is slain in less than six seconds by Claire, Sabaoth, and Belyra. Belyra then steals Jorgande's host body's Space aspect, and runs off with it to the Ardent Sky, with Claire in hot pursuit, just as Saklas' void begins to shroud the Medium's communications.
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She and Sabaoth confront Belyra, and a short battle follows. The horrorterror spawns aspect-spliced abominations while she herself freaks out about Claire no longer having a classpect while melting down from her own Space infusion. She then attempts to suicide bomb both of them. Claire finds it underwhelming, but Sabaoth found it critically effective, crippling him.
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A failed perception check later, Claire and Sabaoth leave the Ardent Sky's halls when a group of grey-skinned carapacians from the Summer Republic ambush and kill Sabaoth. Claire has a breakdown.
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Recovering, she chooses to head back to her land, to slay Lemegeton. She finds that Barachiel is suspended in time, and cannot be affected by the Alchemist's Stone. Or rather, it just causes his body to crumble, which has been woven all throughout the old city in which Lemegeton was imprisoned that he uses as his lair.
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Deeper down, she finds Samyaza's body, and uses another stone on it. The Archon is brought back to life, and the following fight with the god of undeath is made trivial as he beats his face to a pulp with the body Lemegeton meant to use himself.
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The Black King then directs Claire to go to the angel world to receive her 11th-Hour Superpower before the Tide comes, but not before witnessing Samyaza free Astaphanos due to Claire's efforts, then the latter liquidate the entirety of the dream moon of Derse.
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The Leviathan's Tide comes, and sees Serket contact Claire and ask for help in building a weapon to destroy the Tide. After some shenanigans which are best left Noodle Incidents, she heads to the plains world to kill Zahhak so he can revive without the grimdarkness driving his current body insane. She has Dersite voidsuits blast him to bits in an instant.
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She then retrieves the Choice he meant to give his player, then hands it over to Serket, who creates a spear. She then instructs her to take the spear to Tamiathis where its charging up will be hidden among the city's many runes, and wait.
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Naturally, this doesn't go as planned. The ship is crashed by her Disappeared Dad, and the two have a bitter reunion. Then she activates the spear early, and attracts a horde of horrorterrors to herself, the voidsuits, and her father. They fight off a literal swarm of them, Claire pushing on because she refuses to be outlasted by her deadbeat father.
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He activates the spear when it's fully charged, and seemingly cleanses the Incipisphere of the entirety of the Leviathan's Tide.
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She wakes up and begins getting her affairs in order. She sees to reestablishing Derse, under the name of the Kingdom of Favonius. She checks in on her mom one last time. Finds out that Zan was playing both sides the entire time, and is the one that slew Sabaoth. She realizes that she doesn't want to live out her immortality, fearing what she might become.
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She rigs a bomb to nullify her resurrection when she confronts Zan, and takes out both of them.
Lyle
His story begins with a pizza delivery, a storm shelter, and meteors carrying vitaphagic nanites..
He prototypes a picture of his dad, creating dadsprite and having a tearful reunion, before arriving on The Land of Wings and Expanses.
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Unfortunately, infected by the nanites, his time is short. He meets up with and travels with a trade caravan, repels an attack by mounted underlings, and is awake on Derse to see the Nameless One manifest and put Revolutionary Derse on high alert as several battleships are crushed. He also takes away an unconscious Geante, put down by the Grand Chancellor to prevent her from releasing Astaphanos, back to her recuperacoon, before going to bed.
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Waking back up, his condition worsens and dadsprite, revealed to be a weaker version of a First Guardian and the closest thing Terra has to one, teleports him and Smith back to his house, before going around the Incipisphere to find a cure for him and his mother, who are both dying.
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Belyra of the Circle of Thorns makes a pact with him. If he gives himself up to them, they will cure his mother and leave her alone. He succumbs to the nanites before he can finish the ritual, and Belyra takes his corpse to later possess.
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One consolation is that while his mother succumbed to the nanites as well, then reanimated under the nanites' influence and killed Smith, Belyra held up her end of the deal and cured her. She finds her way to a refugee ship, and leaves the land, eventually ending up with Claire's comatose mother on the Land of Lights and Chateaus.
Lara
Lara Novikov is a ghost who lives in an old mansion atop a ley line. Her father Vincent is a distant father figure who taught her magic. He left years ago, and Lara has carried on since, studying magic and music in equal measure..
Her distant father suddenly returns to the mansion after a prolonged absence of years. He expresses alarm that other ghosts can get into the mansion, as this runs counter to his intended purpose for the edifice. Then he hands her a disc that she dutifully downloads, questioning what sort of magic this might be. Unfortunately for her, it's worse than magic. It's gaming.
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She helps a certain Brisco Hawken with her entry process as her father brings out a black runestone to assist them in their own entry. He explains that the entry requires all six people, but the sixth, a certain Kelsav, is unavailable, and he must improvise. Said improvisation sees his bones glow through his skin, space warping around him. Lara acquires a crown as her entry item; she wears it, and the ley line is torn away as is Earth, entering the Incipisphere.
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Lara arrives in a Land of forests and eternal night, mansion conveniently near the last known city of its resident moth consorts. They waste no time establishing Diana as the great enemy of the land, while two figures make themselves distinguished. Samech, one of the flamens keeping watch over the fires that ward off Diana's influence over the city of Last Light, and Gimel, his grandson.
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Gimel explains that Diana ate the sun, and the land is shrouded by eternal night, save for Last Light where the Flame pushes away her influence. The two decide to head to the lodge to see why Samech hasn't returned with some tomes, only to find underlings attacking the library, with Samech crushed under a bookshelf. But he remains alive, and she manages to get him to safety as he tells her that she has a greater destiny lying ahead of her.
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Lara heads out to the local ritual circle where new flamens are inducted, only to find a Time shard in the middle of it. She touches the shard, unaware of its nature, and is presented with a vision of two unknown figures at conflict, a troll who claims to be empress and a bone-adorned, self-proclaimed ascendant. Then the former is dogpiled by thousands of skeletons.
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Feeling the loss of the ley line, she meets a certain August Kelsav, the session's Time player and someone with secrets to hide. She tells her a bit more about the game, but that when the Primarch awakens, she will come for Lara first, while revealing that there was a previous session, of which she and her father were players.
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After checking in on Samech, in a full body cast, she builds up to and enters her first gate, at the base of a mountain playing host to the remains of a Prospitian expedition. A cavern into the mountain leads into the remains of a long-lost academy. After some dungeon-delving, she encounters a thinking corpse at the far of a reflecting pool, someone that identifies themselves as Seth Orban, Thief of Mind.
Echoes
They discuss their circumstances, as Seth reveals he also knows August Kelsav, and does not think of her fondly in the least. They compare their knowledge of the Incipisphere, to find that whenever Seth hails from, it has been decades at the least. Lara cautiously lets him out into the pool, where he soaks in its healing waters next to his denizen Eris, with whom he has made a pact of unknown description.
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He tells her to follow suit, and she does so. This awakens her to her aspect of Mind, or Foresight. Seth then reveals that this session has been reset in the past, erasing everything to start over. Not exactly the same conditions, as the carapacians have moved on from war looming in the future to decades after it ended in favor of Derse. His pact with his denizen allowed them to both escape being erased, by finding a place that Sburb fails to erase and waiting out the centuries.
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Eventually, Lara returns to the manor to have a conversation with her father about her findings. He attributes Seth's existence to a glitch in the game. He muses that while it is probably Kelsav's fault, he has broken the game more than she has. He then explains alchemy to her, and she has her first alchemy session.
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...and finds herself woefully understocked on grist. This sends her out into the forests, in the opposite direction of Last Light. She encounters creatures of mold and wolven features, dealing with them appropriately, and a ghost who tells her that this way lies previous cities.
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She returns with a jackal on her trail, which she dispatches, only to find Seth has somehow crawled from the reflecting pool, out of the cavern, and through her first gate. Whereupon he collapses and laments the high grist costs nowadays.
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After seeing to his immediate survival, she goes to sleep. She wakes up on the golden moon of Prospit, long since a subordinate state to Derse. A ghost she met at the caverns reappears here, having flown to the wrong moon. But not before explaining to her the nature of the Primarch. She heads to a university to research, noting with mild interest that the students there are riling themselves up with communist rhetoric.
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Unfortunately, not only does she find that the Primarch is also the name of the Primarch System by which Derse's email system functions, the Primarch is a master of Time, and Lara only knows one troll who fits the profile. Compounding her misfortune, masked intruders storm the university by the dozens, intent on violence. A display of spectral magic induces a thousands-strong scream from the gathered ghosts, sending them fleeing. In its wake, she makes an acquaintance of the Upstart Legionary. She agrees to help his fledgling cause if he will look deeper into the Primarch for her.
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And with that, she returns to sleep, to wake up on her Land, though Gimel quickly arrives with a message. There are other moths out there.
Bastion
Lara tags along with a scouting party of moths to check out the message. Refugee moths fleeing the continent have taken refuge at the highest levels of a grand, now abandoned city of walls and tiers. They have been fleeing for a decade, and worry over how to stop Diana's hordes from crossing the bridge that connects the city, and by extension the rest of Lara's part of the Land, to the main continent. They have lit a holy fire from the corpses of their fallen, but it will not last forever.
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And in typical good timing, as they discuss their options, something knocks at the door. He seeks her father.
Alicia
Alicia Martinson is a hardboiled detective who resides in Brooklyn. Her mother is a muckraker who reports on the less scrupulous parts of society, while her father was a novelist who disappeared some years ago. This disappearance is most definitely not related to what is to come..
She's on her way home when she encounters a strange man waiting for something. It turns out that something is her, and she finds herself having to lose her tail in a supermarket, though her pursuer leaves behind a strange game with equally odd instructions.
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Running home, she tracks her pursuer as coming from Russia, which just so happens to be where a certain ghostly acquaintance happens to live. But that thread can be picked up later. She proceeds through her entry process, throwing a Batman anthology into her sprite. She receives a compass as her entry item, which she then touches to her mother's wedding ring. She helps a certain Lara Novikov enter the game.
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Alicia arrives on a Land of oceans and island ports, her entire apartment sitting atop a conveniently placed and sized rock. This is when she makes the acquaintance of one August Kelsav. They get off to an awkward beginning, and it slowly deteriorates from there.
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She nearly kills her arms rowing to the nearby island, inhabited by cat consorts with a Mediterranean feel to them. More specifically, she meets a port inspector who is a bit of a mess, possibly an alcoholic, and is a maverick. In other words, the perfect Friend on the Force. His name is Sylvester, but she doesn't learn that till much later.
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He explains to her that the local community theater is holding a play that's rumored to be causing crime sprees in cities where it runs. Being cultured, Alicia wastes no time in making the Lovecraft comparisons.
Brisco later Altria
Brisco Hawken is the thankless leader of a frontier community build to protect Alternian civilization (if such a thing can be said to exist) from ravening hordes of blackbloods. She lives under constant pressure to keep the town of Lawclaw going, under the shadow of her ancestor, the Marshall, who is most certainly long since dead..
Natali
Natali Pathor is a rancher living with her herds out in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization as she prefers. After misadventures with a group of thieves left her as the only survivor of her merry bunch, she lives in solitude with only the bovillions and horses for company. She would most certainly prefer to keep to herself, without any baseless shenanigans..
Aaron
Aaron Sykes is a perfectly ordinary, kind-hearted kid living with his family in suburbia. He lives with his parents and with a little sister, Emma, who will most definitely not play a role in the things to come. Aaron has a gift, it is called normalcy, and he is thus not quite as... extragavant as his co-players..
Silv Goldant later Thief of Heart
Silv is a greed demon who derives his lifeforce from eating the greed of others. Fortunately for him, he happens to live with the single greediest goose in all of existence, and his conjurer, absent-minded wizard Joan Fizzle..
This fortune takes a turn when one morning, his front door's turned to ash by a former player who brings tidings of the end of the world, a video game, and the chance to ascend to godhood. Needless to say, Silv is intrigued and begins to play.
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After chucking a strawberry and a gold coin into the kernelsprite, he uses the entry machines to create a mirror, his reflection taking the form of a spiky-haired man with tired eyes. Before it can say anything, though, the process is completed and Silv is forcibly lifted out of the realm.
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He's intercepted in his travel between Earth and the Medium, though, by a fuchsiablood floating in the middle of the Void. He introduces himself as the Savior, and proposes a deal with Silv— if Silv can get people to listen to the Savior's Soulsong, then the Savior will allow Silv to feed off of the greed that results from that, opening the way for him to become a greater demon.
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For better or for worse, Silv accepts, and is sent on his way.
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He finds himself opening his eyes on the Land of Gardens and Reflections, a subterranean land illuminated by glowing prisms and gardens made of multi-colored glass. He speaks to Emily Seeker, and then to his sprite, where he learns of his pseudo-quest: to find a shard that tears through reality in the core of his land, and deal with it in some fashion.
Finding a Mirror
Making his way to a nearby village in pursuit of a mirror, he meets the praying mantises of his land. They tell him that the core of the land holds one of the Savior's most important allies, and they use the mirror to aid him in his struggle to reach it. He makes his case for having access to the mirror— that being, if he is allowed to use it, the mantises wouldn't have to deal with him any longer— and manages to be frustrating enough for them to accept..
Reaching the mirror's room, he finds that it's been taken by a group called the Knights of Soteria, and is promptly chased through the nearby tunnels by a curse-construct, finding refuge in the entrance to the Knight's hiding place. Unfortunately, he does not know the key phrase needed to open it, and as thus returns to the village outside.
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Deciding that the best place to gather intel is the bar, he makes his way to it. After haunting a particularly drunk mantis, he discovers that the key phrases to get into the Knights' hideout is their mantra, and takes off to the museum to learn what exactly this mantra is.
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After a series of hijinks involving illusions, theft, and greed manipulation, he finds himself in possession of the mantra needed to get into the hideout. But first, it's time to take a nap, because even evil needs to sleep at times.
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Waking up on the purple moon of Derse, he meets up with Exocoe and Joshua Rowan, a player from the original iteration of this Incipisphere. Together, they venture into the catacombs below Derse, pranking a pair of royalist Dersites, coming across a room that only somewhat exists, and the sealed entrance to the Bishop's Tomb.
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He also gets in contact with one of the Savior's allies, the Singing Bishop, who tells him about the Sixfold Ring inside, an artifact that grants carapacians enormous power. Intrigued, he starts to unravel the spell warding the door, going into a trance as he does so.
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Waking back up on his land, he uses the Knights' mantra to get into their hideout, and with a not-insignificant amount of acting and telepathy, he finds his way into the temple where they've been holding the stolen mirror. Inside, he encounters two defenseless mantises protecting it, alongside a projection of Sicial, their commander. Sicial believes that the defenseless mantises will prevent Silv from claiming the mirror; and she is proven wrong, as he kills them both and takes it for himself.
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Looking into it at last, he is treated to a vision of his greatest regret, though it's distorted. He makes out a few words of an oath he spoke while alive, and is branded with the label Oathbreaker as the vision ends. Undeterred, he captchalogues the mirror and elects to put the whole experience out of sight and out of mind.
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He gains a power from the whole ordeal, too. Masquerade, the ability to shift into the form of other people and fool existence itself. Surely this won't cause any chaos in the future.
Manipulation
Meeting with the Bishop again, Silv is advised to go to New Patrae on his land find Malidea, a scholar who knows the secrets of entering mirrors. On the way, he encounters Sicial again, making a deal with her: the Knight will not stand in his way, so long as he leaves the planet and never returns after ascending to godhood.
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Arriving there, however, he discovers that Malidea is missing, and enlists the "help" of local detective Pichele Rickolas to find her. An investigation of the crime scene, interrogation of a mouse, and haunting of one of the perpetrators, he discovers that the Violet Rose Soceity is behind it, an organization founded by a Lady Dusa, an ex-noble from a kingdom that fell to the song.
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Before he has the chance to follow up on this, though, the Bishop contacts him once more with an SOS message— Judith and Exocoe are advancing on him, and he's out of tricks. Ever the opportunist, Silv goes to sleep to aid him.
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And he does it without either of them suspecting a thing.
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Back on his land, he gathers up some dirt on Lady Dusa to use against her later, and then meets up with Takzek, who also has business with Malidea. The two of them attend a Violet Rose ball, where Lady Dusa claims to have found a way to bring people back to life. The two of them accompany her to the mirror, where Silv brings out the traumatic memories of her kingdom's fall, causing her regrets to come surging through the mirror.
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Silv and Takzek defeat the regrets handily, with the help of Rickolas. Seeing another opportunity to seize, Silv claims to be able to commune with Takzek's dead moirail, using that as an excuse to force Takzek to listen to the song, progressing his deal with the Savior.
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Takzek leaves shortly after, and Silv goes to Malidea to learn how to enter the mirror realm. This requires looking into the mirror again; and upon doing so, he is treated to another vision. In this one, he sees his past self speaking to a young patient, the oath revealed to be medical in nature. At the end, he is once more branded an oathbreaker as the mirror fades to fire.
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Utilizing his Heart powers, he circumvents the regrets, entering the mirror realm. For some reason, the song is stronger in here, and needing a break, he returns home.
Escalation
Silv returns home, and immediately gets to two things. The first is hijinks, and the second is carrying out his deal with the Savior. Calling Emily over under the pretense of teaching him how to use a mirror, he shoves her into it when her back is turned, trapping her.
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He's immediately confronted by Miranda Liela, the previous session's Time player, who attempts to bluff him into surrendering the mirror, despite a strange web of bindings and geases preventing her from hurting him unless she's in mortal danger. He figures this out, stopping her from enacting her backup plan of breaking the transportalizer by opening the door to his manor and allowing Mr. Honkers to go free.
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Miranda does not fancy her chances against the goose from hell, and time-warps away. This action will have consequences.
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His next destination is the Land of Spires and Thunder, the only land he can stash the mirror without Miranda being able to get it. In some turn of fate, three of his coplayers happen to be there already: Exocoe, Victoria, and Takzek are already there, and he joins up with them on their journey to Elah, where the Savior's contact is.
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As is tradition, the ride there goes with the occasional incident and constant chaos, between a telepathic re-enactment of the Bee Movie and illusions of dancing Roblox characters. The song plays on the journey, Silv receiving a significant amount of energy from his friends choosing to listen to it. And finally, they arrive at Elah, met with the Warden Brenin, a titanic dragonfly who rules the place.
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Slipping away from the group— or rather, simply leaving to claim to keep an eye on one of the Savior's minions that's been traveling with them— he drops off the mirror with the a tailor loyal to the song. That done, he quickly reconvenes with the rest to fight the giant brute.
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The fight goes well, but during it, Silv refuses to help one of Victoria's consort allies after she fails to comeup with a reason he should. This leads to her leg being crushed, and she's taken out of commission for the rest of the session. This, naturally, leads to his relationships with the group starting to strain.
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((It's worth noting that this was due to an out of character miscommunication, but we decided to stick with it.))
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He separates from the group, and returns to Derse. Here, he finds protestors outside the New Dersite Palace: someone who claims to be the rightful Heir to the Dersite throne protesting against the council that's been running things in the Queen's absence under the premise that she's still alive, just absent.
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Capitalizing on Derse's political instability, he goes to the radio tower and takes over, naming himself the Aureate Emperor and asking politely for the government of Derse to crown him king. Of course, they have the option to not do so. He just happens to know how to take down the dome protecting them from the song.
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Going outside to speak to the crowd, his speech is interrupted by Exocoe, who's shockingly intent on killing the Masqueraded Silv. They have a quick but brutal battle, and Silv manages to put Exocoe into a psionic lock moments before he would have died, making a quick speech before getting the hell out of there with his life.
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He returns to his land after receiving a tip from a cryptic source that his quest bed is in a place called the Kingdom of Dusa, the abandoned kingdom of Lady Dusa. Entering the mirror realm, he begins to follow the crystals to make it there.
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As he gets closer, Heart begins to get increasingly existential, questioning who they are and who they were before they died. As he progresses through the Kingdom of Dusa, his past comes back to haunt him, shards of black regret glass shifting into images of his former life.
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Sylvester Goldman was a young kid, the oldest sibling of five. He became a doctor, and swore the Hippocratic Oath. One day, he was approached by The Great Liar, a Void player intent on sabotaging the session. He tells him that he is from the future. He tells him that in some years, the world will end. He tells him that twelve kids will be chosen to survive. And he tells him that he is not one of those; but he can be, if he kills Elga Zherdev.
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He does it. And the moment he does, he becomes predestined to become a demon, consumed by his own greed.
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In the end, he's too late; the sacrificial slab is gone, taken by the singers. But armed with the newfound knowledge of his past, the mirrors give him another choice: choose who he is, among his myriad identities. Silv chooses to reject every one of them, defining himself as something infinitely more fluid: a reflection.
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Silv Goldant becomes the Thief of Heart, his Heart powers swelling at the cost of his identity. And, as he returns home, he receives nearly the last of the Greed he needs to ascend to a fully self-sufficient demon, just one short.
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He sets off to the Land of Spires and Thunder, his plans on the verge of culmination.
Ascension
Needing one last bit of Greed to ascend, he beelines towards the mirror storing Emily— if she listens to the song, he'll have enough to become a greater demon.
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Luckily for him, she chooses to listen after being freed. Unluckily for him, the deal she made with the Savior entailed killing the Thief. She lets loose her Bard of Space powers for the first time, creating a giant sphere of destruction that begins to decay away at the gargantuan corpse of Brenin, as well as the city around it.
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This is around the time his co-players all arrive, finally seeing for themselves the extent of his villainy. They waste no time in attacking him, and while the Thief puts up a fight and messes with their emotions, he's eventually cursed unconscious.
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He's transportalized out of there by the Great Liar, who sees his investment in danger. Now public enemy number one, the Thief agrees to work with the Liar to rally forces against the Soulsong before leaving the Incipisphere.
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First on his list is Derse, where he meets with a councilman, the Faded Steward. Then the Heir, and then back to the Steward, making a deal to crown the Thief (under the guise of the Emperor) king, so long as he would immediately hand it off to the Heir.
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Exocoe tries to pose a challenge, but they're too late: the Thief's control of Derse is settled by the time they catch on to his plan. With Derse under control and the Savior taunting the Thief with his quest bed, he chooses to return to his land for one last mission.
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The land's erupted into chaos as mantises opposed to the song clash with singers and the song's allies, the Savior finally making his move. The Thief slips past it all, moving into the mirror realm and clashing with the song-ghost of one of the Savior's coplayers before reaching his quest bed.
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And once more, he is too late for the quest bed. The Savior, having made a deal with Exocoe, already destroyed it, leaving an empty shell in a gambit to get the Thief to kill himself on it. He doesn't bite. As singers converge in on him, Sicial appears and helps him escape, still in staunch opposition to the song.
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The Liar has one more request for him before he leaves. He visits three lands, and three of his coplayers, dropping off small nodes at each land as he goes along his farewell tour. On the final of these three visits, Victoria gets him into an orbital backbreaker as he realizes the Liar's been playing them this whole time, killing him.
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His powers from the Sixfold Ring allow him to rematerialize back at the Liar's hideout, and he has a new goal now. The Thief doesn't appreciate being played; he finds the Liar, and engages them in battle. The Liar's a mage of incredibly potent strength, and the Thief is no match for them. Fortunately, they *are* cleverer than one would think, and through Masquerading, poking, and prodding, manage to stall long enough for Heart to prepare a final gambit against them.
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He Masquerades as Bezend Katora, the Savior's missing moirail and leading suspect for the Liar's identity in an attempt to bypass their wards. It fails, but the Thief leaves them one last gift before they're drained unconscious: a ring full of Bard of Space energy that disfigures the Liar's arm and sabotages their hideout.
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Waking up on his last life, the Thief finds himself at the edge of the Incipisphere. It's always been his dream to live in solitude somewhere, away from the clamor of other people; and he finally takes it, leaving the Incipisphere for the silence of the Furthest Ring.
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What feels like months later, his coplayers decide to bring him back, uncovering his drained dreamself and breaking it open to herald his return. They request his help in their final march on the Savior and the Liar, and he agrees.
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There's still hard feelings. An attempt is made by Exocoe and a reluctant Tazkek to hurt him at one point. But he seems to feel genuine remorse for what happened, having had years in the Furthest Ring to reflect on it, and he begins to reconcile with the others.
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He plays an instrumental role in defeating the Savior's ghostly coplayers, and then killing Bezend Katora, who is, in fact, the Liar. And at the end of the day, he finds himself on a long road to improvement.
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One of his bodies he sends with a multiversal bounty hunter, to help him with a scam in exchange for the return of the session's victory condition. The other resides somewhere in the new universe, an isolated farm where he lives with Joan, and from time to time, his coplayers.
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Judith Crawford
Judith is a daughter of a preacher who's taken a recent interest in the occult after reading The Arcanum of the Universe. Of course, her father proves not to be a fan of her less holy pursuits, and pushes back against them whenever he can..
This takes the form of missionaries, who he sends to Judith in an attempt to convince her to abandon her pursuit of the occult. One day, one of these missionaries turns out to be Oliver Grant, a mage and the previous owner of the Arcanum. He magically downloads a set of instructions from the Arcanum, before giving Judith a foreboding monologue and a game to help her survive the end of the world.
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Starting the game, Judith is prompted to perform a ritual of sorts in her church. This ritual, curiously enough, involves a set of strange machines and a seizure orb, which Judith promptly smacks with a Christian Rock CD in a move that she surely won't regret, ever. She goes on to complete the ritual, the world fading away as she's flung through space and time.
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She opens her eyes on the Land of Solitude and Ice, a snowed-over world dominated by a single massive mountain. There's nobody around bar her father and the reincarnated sprite form of a Christian rock singer, a sole path up the Mountain beckoning to her.
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Also, the entry process flung Judith and her coplayers months into the future. She finds this out when she's told that Oliver was one of the first iteration of players in this Medium, and is now dead.
The First Climb
Judith begins making her way up the Mountain, determined to see what this land has in store for her. Unfortunately for her, the first thing she runs into is a dilapidated hotel a short ways up the mountain called Emi's Loft. The door being ajar, she decides to stop by to get some food for the journey ahead.
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The inside is just as ruined as the outside, featuring images of haloed butterflies everywhere. The caterpillar receptionist behind the desk doesn't acknowledge Judith until she rings the bell, and even then refuses to acknowledge the state of the hotel.
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A little exploring later, and Judith discovers the reason. Every time she needs to exert herself to accomplish something here, a maddening aura in the hotel wears away at her a little. This madness takes the form of mildly annoying quirks, such as not being able to use anyone's name in the memo. Getting tired, though, she finds a room and decides to go to sleep.
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She wakes up in a fancily decorated room with a tasteless bright gold color scheme that hurts to look at. A friendly carapacian informs her that she's in the Queen's Palace, and is taken to see the Queen. The Queen turns out to be incredibly rude, but explains the situation nonetheless.
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There's a siren song going around the Medium turning people into ghosts called singers. They call it the Soulsong. The previous set of Heroes abandoned them, and for the past few months they've been holed up in the palace trying their best to ride through the storm. More recently, there's been abductions within the palace, and if Judith wants to make herself useful, the Queen suggests she investigate.
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She meets with the Royal Spymaster, and then moves to the scene of one of the abductions, an entire room that's been torn up by thousands of tiny cuts. Here, she does some investigating: some simple detection rituals from the Arcanum show that this was the work of magic. Specifically, a curse construct of some sort, created by someone specifically to do this. It came from the Land of Gardens and Reflections, another land in the Incipisphere.
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Hopping into a taxi to go meet some of Prospit's resident wizards, she takes a nap on the way, waking back up in Emi's Loft. Deciding that she's seen enough, she leaves the Loft and continues climbing the Mountain. Further up, she meets Abigail Rivera, the ex-player who this land used to belong to.
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She explains to Judith how the Mountain was broken by another ex-player, the Bard of Space Emily Seeker, and no longer protects against the Soulsong. She's been collecting the shards needed to fix it, and one of the last ones she needs is in Emi's Loft.
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The two of them return to the Loft, alongside allied caterpillar Ren, and summarily subdue and retrieve the out-of-control shard causing the madness in the Loft. As she does so, Judith connects with the core of the Mountain, who asks she wants to be. This question throws her off in the moment, but also serves to unlock her latent powers as a Seer of Hope, a first step in her mythological journey.
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Returning the shard to the core of the Mountain, Judith discovers that there's only one shard left: a shard named the Gatekeeper. Before dealing with that, though, events on Prospit demand her attention and she falls asleep.
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She wakes up at the Fivefold Tower, the occult center of Prospit. It's full of wizards, and they're... as eccentric as you'd expect them to be. As eccentric as they are, they *do* help her get a glimpse into the past and one into the future: one of the curse-construct's creation, and one of her, Takzek, and Victoria fighting it.
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As she finishes up, the Soulsong starts anew, and Judith has her first showdown with a singer: a ghostly anti-psion sent to destroy the Fivefold Tower. She triumphs over him, but in the last moments of the duel she falters, listening briefly to the Soulsong.
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She is spoken to by The Savior, a mysterious figure who seems to be singing the song, and he gives her two boons as a reward for listening. The first is the location of an injured angel who would be willing to gift Judith their halo, and the second is a group of consorts on the Land of Oracles and Opulence who would be willing to follow her if approached. His boons given, the Savior leaves Judith's mind.
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Not too long later, she's contacted by the other Prospit dreamers, Takzek and Victoria, in a request to help them out of a sticky situation. They've been kidnapped in the Prospitian palace by The Singing Bishop, and Judith is the only one close enough to help.
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She relentlessly pursues the trail of the Bishop through the ruined palace, into a transportalizer, and meeting up with Exocoe, reverse-engineers a teleportation spell he used to get them off his trail. When they finally corner him, he is uncerimoniously dispatched by what seems to be the Savior himself. Exchanging verbal barbs quickly escalates into a split-second scuffle where Judith and Exocoe manage to get their friends back, but at the cost of a powerful ring Exocoe recently got ahold of. The Savior gets away without a trace.
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As our heroes catch their collective breath, Judith tries one too many times to enter a corrupted room of the crypts and gets knocked out cold.
A Blast to the Past
When Judith wakes up back in Abby's mountain home, she's met with Sydney, an animated marionette doll and fellow player. She's here to follow up on a request she made earlier— with the help of the previous group's Time player, they're to go many years into the past to prevent the murder of Elga Zherdev, who was supposed to be a player in this game.
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Traveling back to 2010, Judith and Sydney go to the hospital in an attempt to stop Dr. Sylvester Goldman from killing Elga. In place of the doctor, though, they find a masked figure who introduces themselves as The Great Liar. The Liar reveals to Judith that Elga's ghost is the one animating Sydney, and then gloats a little for good measure, claiming that they cannot stop the murder without causing a paradox.
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Undaunted, Judith and Sydney leave him in search of Elga, aiming to stop her murder despite the Liar's assurances that it will be futile. They take Elga out of the hospital, and, without much incident, remove the curse that ultimately ends up killing her. And then time breaks and reforms, shunting the two of them back to where they came from.
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Judith is spit out earlier than Sydney is, sans a few memories of the entire past excursion, and takes a quick jaunt over to the Land of Memories and Starlight to help Exocoe fix up the Hope-based protective aura of the land. Of course, given that the land's covered in undead, it checks out that they're intercepted by a undead harpy, who does their best to harry their ascent but falls short— quite literally, as it's blasted out of the sky.
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At this point, Judith's memories have started to come back, and the effects of her temporal journey start to affect the timeline at large. Namely, due to the paradox caused, the new timeline crashed into the alpha, causing all her coplayers to suddenly gain a set of memories from their alternate selves of a timeline where Elga was alive the whole time. This causes as much confusion as it sounds like it would, naturally.
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In the wake of this, Judith decides to continue climbing the Mountain. Having a brief heart-to-heart with Abby, they set out to confront the Gatekeeper and convince them to return to the core of the Mountain. It doesn't work. The Gatekeeper doesn't think of Judith as worthy to climb the Mountain, and summarily rejects her plea.
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Stumped for the moment, she returns to sleep. Back on Prospit, she meets up with the remnants of the Prospitian population: the Spymaster, a handful of other carapacians, and Gail, Abby's dreamself given conscience via Knight of Heart powers. She's appraised of the situation down here: the palace has been compromised, and the remaining Prospitian forces have been defending the catacombs from the hordes of ghostly singers.
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If the singers breach the catacombs, they could find the rift that the Savior is singing the Soulsong through. If they manage to free him from it, any reisistance would be squashed as an afterthought. And one more problem— the curse-construct that Judith's been researching is on the loose, terrorizing pockets of the populace as it pleases.
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Judith spends some time organizing the Prospitian forces, assembling the various groups of the moon to aid in the palace's defense. With the help of the rest of the carapacian leaders, she identifies a chokehold to stop the singers at, and organizes a diversion to give their forces time to make it there ahead of the singers. She enlists Takzek's aid, and the two of them lead the diversion group.
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They lead a charge into the depths of the singer army, deftly retreating as soon as the chokehold is secured. Their clever maneuvering, however, runs into a problem: the curse-construct, which pulls Judith in before she has the chance to do anything about it.
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The inside of the curse-construct is made of regrets. Judith and Takzek watch these regrets play out, snippets of Oliver demeaning Emily leading to Emily opening the rift to the Savior in a bid to unlock her powers. A final scene of the regret breaks down as Judith and Takzek realize that it's been affected by a memory modification spell, and the two of them break the spell to discover that the Great Liar was the one who encouraged Emily to open the rift in the first place.
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The memory damaged, the curse-construct begins to fall apart, Judith and Takzek aiding it as it crumbles. As it does, the Arcanum of the Universe decodes new information within it: a secret room within the Prospitian crypts, which the two of them proceed to explore. Inside, there's a coffin, containing a sleeping Oliver Grant.
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Oliver immediately gets to business, assessing how the world's changed in the months he's been asleep. He starts collecting information on the new team of players and their enemies, with the intent of using his Witch of Light powers to analyze it and come up with a game-plan.
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While he does that, Judith decides to give the Gatekeeper another crack. She approaches them for audience again, expecting a fight— but this time, the Gatekeeper judges her worthy, Judith's ambitions of guiding her friends to safety satisfying some unknowable standard. Returning the Gatekeeper to the core of the Mountain, Judith fights off one last ambush of singers before the Mountain becomes whole once more and expels all singers from its domain.
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Before she can continue climbing the Mountain, a situation arises. Emily's gone missing. Judith, Takzek, Oliver, and former player Josh group up and decide to search Emily's house in hope of finding some clue where she went. They discover that the last place Emily was seen was at Silv's manor, and make their way there to investigate further.
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The song starts again as they move, and Judith listens once more. This time, her consciousness is whisked away to the Void, within the Savior's prison. He wishes to speak with her. The Savior is a fuchsiablood Seer of Heart, and his moirail Bezend imprisioned him within the void after he tried to conquer his session in the name of an ideal empire. He offers Judith a deal to glean a way to expose the Great Liar's lies, but she turns him down.
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As she returns to her body, the four of them catch a lead: an invisible person going through the transportalizer to the Land of Spires and Thunder. They pursue, meeting up with Victoria and Exocoe on their way, and give chase to one of the land's cities. There, they find Emily, having lost control of her reality-destroying powers. And worse: Silv Goldant, having been working with both the Savior and the Liar this whole time.
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In the ensuing battle, the players manage to save the bystanders, but Silv gets away, bailed out by the Liar. As a parting gift, he sends the group into emotional disarray as they fight over what to do about him. Exocoe storms off in frustration, and a disagreement between Judith and Victoria on how to deal with Emily's unstable powers leave the group fractured and uneasy as they go their separate ways.
Rites
Judith returns to her land, but not before having a conversation with Oliver where he assures her that she's correct in her disagreement with the team, and encourages her to stay careful. The next step for her is continuing her land quest, and this time it takes her down the Mountain instead of up it, to the village of Restoppe. This is Ren's hometown, and he hopes to find survivors of the singer onslaught here.
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They find a good portion of the village's population hiding away in the village's temple. Though she faces some resistance, Judith convinces them to return with her to the safety of the Mountain, and for her troubles, she gets three rites to deliver: a tradition of aspiring Mountain-climbers to lay failed climbers to rest.
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Climbing once more, she passes through the Gatekeeper's gate, and finds a shrine to the Denizen Thesan where the rites can be completed. She puts in the rite of the Distressed, and enters a mystical vision. The Distressed's rite is a high-security city, the failed climber protected by a bulky warsuit in the center of it all. Judith sneaks past the security systems, convinces the Distressed to let go of her paranoia, and resolves her first rite.
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As is common by now, the start of the song means that the defense on Prospit is once again perilous. Exocoe, Victoria, and the White Queen are separated from the rest of the group, and the singers have commandeered a Prospitian warship to fire upon the palace. A rescue mission to save the three of them succeeds, but the appearance of the Savior's imperial guard turned singer almost kills them on their way back. The Savior's done holding things back.
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The group takes a second to recoup, coming up with a plan to take down the warship. Victoria and Takzek are going to distract and infiltrate respectively, and place a transportalizer up there so that the Prospitian forces can overrun the ship. Judith and Exocoe wait in the catacombs, ready to defend against any singers who might try to make it past them.
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Sure enough, as the Prospitian forces move through the transportalizer to the warship, the singers make their move. The imperial guard from earlier— named Cilder— and a powerful consort from Victoria's land push forward, and their combined effort almost manages to overcome Exocoe and Judith's defense. Exocoe gets knocked out, and Judith manages to barely recover their unconscious body while repelling the rest of the singers.
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The good news is that in that time, the other group manages to take down the warship, alleviataing some of the pressure on the Prospitians' position. Their position, however, is pushed further back: it's abundantly clear that they can't hold out forever, so it's important that the heroes stop the Soulsong before their defenses fully fail.
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Judith returns to her rites with increased urgency, entering into the rite of the Distressed. The Distressed's rite is an autumn forest, the climber in a desperate chase from angels and stallions. Her frantic path takes her off the edge of a cliff, the rite starting again in a timeloop. After some trial and error, Judith convinces her to slow down and consider her situation, resolving the rite.
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After leaving the rite, she receives an upsetting bit of information: her father has had a sudden change of heart, and is now worshipping the Savior. Obviously, this rings strangely to her— there's something Hope-y afoot. The perpetrator reveals herself via pesters: Emilia, one of the Savior's coplayers and now a singer under his command.
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At this inopportune time, the Savior seeks to speak with Judith again. He offers to leave their session alone if Judith promises not to seal him away. She considers the impact that his conquest would have on other sessions, and chooses to reject his deal, the line now firmly drawn as the end draws near.
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The four remaining players gather at Judith's house to gameplan and just hang out for a bit. Two of the Liar's great lies are shattered: the first is that the rift is in the core of Prospit. It's actually in the Land of Gardens and Reflections, and this knowledge diverts the Savior's forces away from the red herring that was Prospit. The second is that Oliver Grant is the Liar. In fact, Oliver never existed— he's been a front for Bezend Katora, the Savior's ex-moirail, this whole time.
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With the final charge near, the goal becomes to ascend to god-tier, and for Judith this means finishing her ascent up the Mountain. She begins her last rite, which belongs to the Devout. This one's straight-forward: the Devout is mindlessly speaking for the church, and Judith has a heart-to-heart with them that leads to them realizing that the rite they're in isn't real, which resolves it.
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The way cleared, she ascends to the top of the Mountain to meet with Thesan, who asks her to pitch why she deserves ascension. Thesan is displeased with her answer, given that it falls short of perfection, and denies her ascension; the Mountain objects, though, and the desision is deferred to a higher power, spectral steps appearing that lead further up into the clouds.
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The final judge of her worth is herself. They muse on the concepts of self-understanding, impossibility, and the beauty in trying to answer questions that have no answer. At the end of it, she grants herself the ability to ascend to the god tiers as a realized Seer of Hope.
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As a god-tiered Seer, Judith returns to the Savior one more time to confirm what she already knew. She uses her powers to See if his ideal future is possible, and it's not. She tells him this, and for the first time, he seems to seriously consider something that goes against what he already believes. It's not enough to fully deter him, but it's the first chip in the dam.
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Then, the final march on the rift. All the players team up— including Silv, now repentant after his escape to the Furthest Ring— and set out with the goal of killing Bezend and sealing away the Savior until he can be redeemed. Judith gets to kill Emilia, stalls Bezend while they come up with a way to hurt her, and in the end, her prophecy to the Savior contributes to his last-minute change of heart as he is willing to sacrifice his ambitions to ensure that Bezend pays for her crimes.
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They seal the Savior's rift, and stop the Soulsong for good. The players win the game, create a new universe, and Judith enters that universe as a beacon of hope and inspiration for everyone around her. As the new universe is settled, she chooses to spend her time leading everyone into a future that will be brighter than ever.
Sydney actually Elga Zherdev
Sydney is a puppet possessed by a ghost. This ghost, Elga Zherdev, died young of a fever, but somehow lived on as a spirit. Over the years, unbeknownst to everyone, she learned how to impact the world again through her puppet, Sydney..
When a delivery comes for her, the former player doing the delivery leaves it with her parents after finding out that Elga Zherdev has been dead for years. Sneaking down to retrieve it, she finds that the delivery was a game of some sort, and starts to play it.
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As she begins her entry, a trio of magically trained suits show up. They're here for her, and start indiscriminately blasting as they try to hunt Elga down. Along the way, one of their sticks of chalk gets absorbed in the kernelsprite, and Elga manages to put on a cruxite mask, whisked through time and space into the great game.
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She wakes up on the Land of Oracles and Opulence, a quaint medieval land of sprawling wheat fields and ominous manors. According to her sprite, something is very wrong with this land, and it falls on Elga to fix it.
The Great Liar
She makes her way down to a nearby village, where she meets a friendly spider. They tell her about the Indigo Assassin, an urban legend across the land, and more relevantly, the Enlightened, a class of spiders who get the privilege of learning one supernatural Truth and sharing it when the time is right. The Enlightened of this village is throwing their ball now, and Elga decides to check it out.
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After some shenanigans involving Denizen dolls and monkeys in barrels, Elga manages to get ahold of an invite to the ball. She ascends up to the party, just in time to witness the Enlightened get sniped before he can give his truth.
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Time resets to the beginning of the ball, much to Elga and only Elga's confusion. Apparently this has been going on for a few months now, and everyone's resigned to it. She tries to fight off the assassins, but there are too many for her to beat: but over the course of a few loops, she manages to convince the assassins that they're in a time loop and their mission is futile.
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His assailants gone, the Enlightened gives his Truth. He tells the assembled consorts that there is a Great Liar on the loose, and that they're a Void player. He also tells Elga specifically that the Liar was behind her premature death.
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Now knowing her opponent, Elga meets up with Takzek and Josh, a Breath player from the first group of players to inhabit this Medium, and the three of them seek out someone to train their powers. They find it in Jenna Grant, a mage who entered the land with the previous player. Elga and Takzek train their powers, becoming more adept with Light and Void respectively, before going their separate ways.
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When Elga tries to fall asleep, she accidentally tears a hole in the fabric of Time. She's saved by Miranda Liela, the Time player from the previous group. She interrogates Elga, and the two of them deduce that her state of questionable mortality has confused even Time on such a level that her dreamself both does and does not exist. This, of course, is a problem. Miranda offers to take her back to the time of her death to investigate further, efore sending her back to her body.
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Elga recruits Judith for this task, given that she has experience with the types of magical curses the Liar used to kill her, and meets up with her on her land. Miranda takes them back to 2010, on the date of Elga's death, and they get to work trying to stop it.
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Their biggest roadblock makes itself evident immediately as they encounter the Great Liar in the hospital, who laughs at their attempt to stop Elga's death. He claims that trying to stop it will cause a paradox, but he invites them to try.
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They try nonetheless, managing to get Elga out and break the curse on her before she dies. Then, Time shatters. Another timeline forms: one where Elga does not die, lives the childhood she never had, and is whisked into the game as she enters college as an aspiring lawyer. But this timeline cannot exist, and the memories from it are forcibly recombined into the alpha timeline as it collapses.
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Back in the present, Miranda suggests she go visit the Denizen of the Land of Streetlight and Skyscrapers, Respite. Respite is a planetary supercomputer of sorts, and more importantly, partially associated with Void, and he has a plan that may help. He wants to create a Medium-wide surveillance grid in hopes of flushing the Liar out, but he needs the Third Eye of Odin, Elga's Denizen, to do it.
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Unfortunately, Odin hasn't been seen in months. Respite gives her a map to a village that should have a lead, though, and she sets off towards it. She blackmails someone out a horse, and takes off.
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This time when she sleeps, she dreams of the Black Queen. The Queen talks to her, warning again about the Great Liar, before crash landing her ship on the Land of Spires and Thunder. Elga wakes back up in her spectral body, jarred.
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She briefly meets up with Victoria and Exocoe on the Land of Spires and Thunder to investigate, but gets sent back to her land befoe long. Here, she decides to finally make herself known to her family again: they're overjoyed, and share a long overdue family dinner with Elga. The course of it is slightly soured as they realize that the Elga they know now is much different than the one they lost ten years ago, laser-focused on killing the Liar for what they did to her.
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Elga spends the next few days tracking Odin down, eventually finding his lair. She's too late. Odin is dead, and before she has a moment to react, the Liar nullifies her powers and finishes the job.
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Her story ends here, her revenge unfulfilled.
Victoria McHale
Victoria is a part-time wrestler part-time janitor who wants to be the very best, like no one ever was, as the Wrestle Queen of California. She's had some success, too— not as much as she'd necessarily like, but the next big break is always just around the next corner..
This big break, of course, comes in the form of a former player appearing outside of the stadium she fights at, offering her tidings of the end of the world and a game to play to escape it. Naturally, she assumes this is a setup for an "End of the World" themed tourney. But a gig's a gig, and Victoria McHale's never been one to turn an opportunity down, and so she plays.
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The game presents her with a match against a cruxite opponent, a similarly crystalline audience cheering her on as she soundly defeats her opponent, tossing a poster of Macho Man Randy Savage into her kernelsprite somewhere along the way. As she lands the final blow, the world fades away around her as she gets flung through space and time.
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She opens her eyes on The Land of Spires and Thunder, a land made of jagged stone, white-hot flame, and a roiling storm-cloud that lights up with lightning just often enough to make a convincing album cover. A quick exchange with the ghost of Macho Man Randy Savage points her in the direction of a nearby wrought-iron gate, in hopes of finding her consorts and her land quest.
The Chained
Victoria busts her way in through the gate, finding herself in a cave that looks to act as some sort of memorial. There's a smooth blank slate in here, with the inscription "To those we have lost to the Flame." She calls aloud, and gets dropped into a chute in response, sliding down into a subterranean city.
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Here, she meets her consorts, anthropomorphic dragonflies, and one of them takes the time to tell her about the Flame. The Flame is a force on the land that burns through someone's identity if it catches them, rendering them as having never existed. It leaves behind the bodies, which get up and shamble about for an hour each day— they call them the "faceless," on account of them not having faces. And there's a whole bunch of them holed up in the city.
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Victoria, seeing a problem, immediately offers to help. She's given a team— Ani, head of the city guards, and Balo, a member of the guard who fights using a wingsuit. The plan is simple enough, Victoria and Balo acting as a distraction to the faceless while the rest of the guard comes up behind and burns them to a crisp.
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The plan goes smoothly, for the most part— the exception being when a pair of magical chains comes from one of the faceless to swat Victoria and Balo down mid-flight. The two of them manage to improvise, and get away unharmed. Satisfied, she turns in for a good night's sleep.
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Of course, this being SBURB, there's no such thing. She awakens on Prospit, where a squad of Prospitians are fighting off a sea of soul-ghosts, and meets Gail Rivera, a Knight of Heart who belonged to the first session to take place in this Incipisphere. She explains that her group was just about to launch a raid on a prison that belongs to the Forsaken Conductor, a higher-up in this soul-ghost army, and invites Victoria to join in.
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Getting into the prison is almost too easy, and they start freeing inmates when Victoria gets a pester from Takzek, who's talking to the Conductor, telling her that the prison is rigged to crush everyone inside. Victoria manages to get everyone out in time as Takzek stalls, and by the time the prison's crushed, nobody's left inside.
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Takzek and his group of Prospitians come to meet up with her, having claimed a personal notebook from the Conductor while they were in there. The notebook warns of an upcoming attack on the Prospitian palace, as well as notes on The Black Queen's personal ship, which crashed months ago with her inside. Nobody knows where it went down, but it looks like the Conductor was looking for it.
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The two of them concoct a plan to foil the attack on the palace by staging an ambush on their headquarters right as the attack would begin, drawing their soul-ghost singers back. After some preparation for the ambush— which includes a mech-suit for Victoria— all they have to do is wait, so they head off to sleep.
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Back on Lo Sa T, Victoria gets another exposition dump from her consorts— this time, about the Wardens, three special consorts responsible for keeping the Flame sealed, and their boss, the Forge-Warden. Given that the Flame is no longer sealed, the Wardens must have abandoned their duty— and they think that the chained faceless from the initial raid is one of them. They call him Cadwyn the Chained, and task Victoria with capturing him.
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Being Victoria, she marches out into the abandoned sector of the city and calls him out, which leads quickly into a brawl. During their fight, both of them call upon Rage to bolster them, but Victoria comes out on top. The consorts tie Cadwyn up, and send him off to the Runics, a city of magic where they hope to study how the Wardens work.
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Victoria, Ani, and Balo come along too, and after a short journey, are met with a parade and a handful of assorted prophecies of Victoria's heroics. As they arrive, though, the Soulsong begins again— which means that it's time for the ambush, and Victoria heads back to sleep.
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Back on Prospit, the ambush starts, waves of singers pouring into the factory they're using as their headquarters. Victoria starts beating them up with her mechsuit while Takzek goes after the Conductor, and after a quick skirmish, the Conductor is captured and a copious amount of singers have met their end.
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They decide to rush to the palace while the iron's hot, to find whatever it is the singers were after there. A frenzied sprint through abandoned subway tunnels brings them to the courtyard out in front, but the palace's door is locked and they're trapped outside. Worse, a monster made of roiling black glass emerges from the fountain and they only just barely get away as Victoria smashes in the wall and escapes into the palace.
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Inside, they meet the White Queen, who chose not to open the door for them for reasons unknown. Takzek goes with the Queen, while Victoria stays at the front to fend off the glass monster— at least, until Victoria gets a pester from Takzek telling her that the Queen is with the song, led him to an evil Bishop, and that he's been knocked out.
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Victoria comes up with the idea to lead the glass snake to the Bishop, setting the two of them up to duke it out, but that plan ends up being foiled when it's revealed that the Bishop controls the glass snake and the two of them team up against her. The Bishop manages to knock Victoria out, but not before she manages to drop a chandelier on his head.
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Back on her land, Victoria does a quick sidequest, and then knocks herself back out to join the fight— she's a bit too late, though, waking up to see Judith, Exocoe, and a restrained Bishop. She accompanies them back up to Exocoe's tower, and then promptly goes right the fuck back to sleep.
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Back on the land, she's not met with good news. Cadwyn's chains are popping up everywhere— which they shouldn't be able to do, given that he's dead as a doornail. A visit to his body reveals that his chains have vanished, and Victoria deduces that he might be reincarnating.
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She tracks him down, stationed in a city square where he's taken Ani hostage, and Cadwyn demands a rematch. They start fighting, but are interrupted by the memories of another timeline forcibly merging with their own, as a result of her co-players' time-travel. In this alternate timeline, the Flame gets freed and the land is wholly consumed by it— as a Warden, Cadwyn is deeply disturbed by this, and the two of them call a truce while they figure out exactly what just happened.
Tag-Team
The four of them— Victoria, Cadwyn, Ani, and Balo— ascend back up to the surface of the land, which is a wasteland of white-hot Flame plumes and piles of faceless bodies. From there, they return to Victoria's stadium, where one of her coplayers come to join her: Exocoe, here as a result of the same timeline-merging that hit Victoria earlier. They run into Silv and Takzek too, and the group decides to go to the city of Elah, where the Warden Brenin reigns, in hopes of restoring a Ward and seal the Flame.
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On the way, they come across a Dersite buried in a pile of faceless, half-consumed by the Flame. With the power of a really good pep talk, Victoria manages to keep him going long enough so that when the soulsong starts, he can become a singer and avoid his fate.
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Arriving in Elah, the group takes a second to recoup before confronting Brenin, asking for his Ward. He denies their request, having been promised worlds to rule by some mysterious backer if he keeps it inactive. The lot of them make quick work of Brenin in return, Victoria and Cadwyn matching the titan's strength as some of their teammates go to claim the Ward.
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With Exocoe holding a section of the Ward, they discover that the Ward is actually the alternate self of their co-player Elga, morphed into living paradox as the timelines merged. They decide to combine Brenin's Ward and Cadwyn's Ward, making it 2/3rds of the whole, and give it to Victoria to bear. Wearing that much Ward at once takes a sizable physical toll on her, but she bears it well enough.
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Her teammates taking off, she takes it upon herself to take care of business in Elah now that Brenin's gone. Her first order of business is setting up a party, and after some controversy regarding proper doses of 5-hour energy, Cadwyn approaches her and tells her that he's leaving to serve the soulsong full-time, and that he trusts her to take care of the land. Then he leaves.
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Returning to Derse, she beelines for a transportalizer that'll take her back to Prospit, where she meets up with Exocoe and the White Queen, of all people. They fill her in on the state of the soulsong— that there's a small rift in reality under the palace that the Savior, the source of the soulsong, is singing it through. And apparently everyone's known that for a while.
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The Queen takes off, and Exocoe follows, leaving Victoria to lend her assistance to the various Prospitian factions who have taken a last stand in the crypts beneath the palace. She helps them set up some barricades before Exocoe calls her back to Derse to help move some bodies, acts extremely weird for no reason at all, and then leaves. Victoria doesn't question it at all, and instead decides to head back to sleep and back to her land.
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There, she meets up with Exocoe and Elga, the three of them deciding to go investigate a building that the Forge-Warden was known to have frequented in hopes of finding a clue as to how to stop the Flame for good. Here, they find research notes on paradox membrane, a theoretical substance that would have the same Flame-thwarting properties as the Wards. They also find and defeat an ambush set by The Great Liar, a shadowy figure who has an interest in keeping the Forge-Warden— who is also shown to be the Black Queen— trapped within the Flame.
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Returning home, the soulsong starts once more— and for the first time, Victoria listens, the Savior brining her mind into his Void-prison to talk. He simply cannot comprehend Victoria, and their conversation is as short as it is baffling for him. Her mind returns to the land just in time to catch Judith, Takzek, and former players Josh and Oliver all rushing through to Elah in pursuit of an invisible man. Having a hunch as to who it might be, Victoria and Exocoe join them.
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As she had suspected, Silv had been up to no good this whole time, having been working with the Savior, and has set the former Bard of Space into a power-breakdown as his plans reached culmination, her powers threatening to tear apart all of Elah. Victoria tries to catch Silv before he gets away, and almost succeeds— he's teleported out of there by the Great Liar, who is apparently also his ally.
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In the aftermath, Exocoe storms off, and Victoria and Judith get into a small dispute over what to do about Emily. Eventually, everybody peels off except for Victoria and Emily, the Bard of Space, and the two of them start repairing the damage that was caused to the best of their ability. They pay Victoria's Denizen a visit, who points them in the direction of Nerth, the last Warden— but Victoria has to go in alone. Emily walks her to the threshold, and then goes her separate way as well.
The Flame
The ascent up the Precipice that holds him is... weird, consisting of warped memories and cryptic water fountains. Victoria routinely pushes back against what the world throws at her, doubling back and smashing in walls until she manages to make it to the top, pushing past a desolate landscape of sand and busted lockers from her early life. At the top, she finds Nerth, and at his insistence the two of them agree to let Nerth hold the Wards and seal the Flame.
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Right as they finish assembling the Flame, though, they get surprise attacked by a helicopter, and a sniper within. Afraid of nothing, Victoria uses her magnet gauntlets to wrestle the helicopter down to the ground. The surviving assailant tells her that the Liar sent them to kill the Warden.
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She meets back up with Emily, and the three of them return to the stadium, where dragonfly refugees have been hiding from the singers. They decide to recruit some to help with the Prospit defense, before sleeping and returning there themselves. She finds none other than Silv here, and kills him by flying up and performing an orbital backbreaker.
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A quick expedition to the crypts finds the Conductor's notebook from way back when annotated and hidden in a secret room. Before there's much time to examine it, though, Judith calls her up to the front lines of the defense— they need to help extract Exocoe and the White Queen from behind singer lines. They do this by having Victoria reach out to the Savior again, as for some reason, his focus is damaged when looking into her mind. He's getting desperate, and it shows in their conversation.
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They make it back to behind the defensive line safely, though Exocoe has a close call along the way when one of the Savior's former co-players, now turned singer, attacks them. They drop off the White Queen, and then get to solving a bigger issue: a commandeered Prospitian warship bombarding the palace. They decide to toss an invisible Takzek up and onto the ship to plant a transportalizer and stage an invasion, leaving Victoria to run distraction.
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As she flies onto the deck, tanking a missile or two on the way, the ship's forces pull out one of their big guns: Cadwyn, once again turned foe. Not by his own choice, though, as he explains to Victoria through gritted teeth that he considers this a dishonorable fight, but is being directly controlled by the Savior in a fit of anger. Then he's called elsewhere, promising another fight later. On his way out, Victoria warns him of the Savior's descent into madness and encourages him to break free from the Song.
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The whole debacle is ended as the Prospitian warship loses power and what's left of Derse's armada arrives, though it's not much. The survivors reconvene— Takzek, Victoria, and Judith are still up, while Exocoe is battered and unconscious, but not dead. Takzek shares some important information: the Conductor was looking into the Black Queen's disappearance, and found out that the reason she went to hide within the Flame was because she had discerned the truth behind one of the Great Liar's deceptions and was seeking safety. Namely, the true location of the Savior's rift between worlds, the source of the Soulsong's influence.
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The group splits up again, returning to their waking selves. Victoria and Nerth prepare to enter the Flame and confront the Black Queen, while Oliver appears with some advice. He tells Victoria that before the session went to shit, the Black Queen was their greatest enemy. He advises that she kill her as soon as she can, because the Queen's too evil and too clever to be left alive for long. With that, he takes off to take care of some other business, and Victoria and Nerth descend into the Flame itself.
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Even with the protection of the Wards, the full force of the Flame is nothing to scoff at. Victoria gets just a taste of what it would feel like to be erased, and it's all she can do to hang on to who she is. After what feels like ages, they reach the stranded ship of the Black Queen, wedged into the side of the towering Scratch Construct, and climb inside.
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The Queen is... not quite everything Oliver made her out to be. After a bit of a circular conversation, they manage to get what they need out of her: the true location of the Savior's rift is in the center of the crystal land, not Prospit. Unfortunately, they get an unwanted truth from her, too: the only way to shut off the Flame would be for Victoria to sacrifice herself to imprison it with the Wards. And to round out the trio of unpleasant truths, the Queen explains that she's quite frankly not interested in helping one bit.
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With that knowledge in hand, the four remaining players gather at Judith's house to gameplan and just hang out for a bit. Here, another one of the Liar's deceptions is revealed: Oliver Grant is the Liar. In fact, Oliver never existed— he's been a front for Bezend Katora, the Savior's ex-moirail, this whole time. There's a few more things they do here, too— namely, the last few bits of alchemy, and some long-overdue conversations about relationships and vulnerability.
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One unresolved point of contention, though. What to do with the Savior when they reach him? Victoria sees it simply: free him from his prison, and while he's weak and disoriented, kill him to stop this from ever happening again. Exocoe, however, refuses to get behind this. The point is left open, even as the time approaches rapidly.
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There's only one thing left to do before confronting the Liar, the Savior, and the hordes of singers under his command, and it's something only she can do. Victoria takes on the Wards, descends to the source of the Flame, and steps into it. Then— she *pushes,* mustering up every ounce of her willpower to stay in existence long enough to mold the Wards into a sphere around the Flame, stifling the nascent scratch at its source.
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It's not enough. Her Rage runs thin and the Flame consumes her, erasing her from the timeline now and forever. But the champ just won't stay down. In the space between existence and oblivion, she finds herself looking out of a television screen at her younger self, flicking through the highlights of her existence. She gives herself the pep talk she needed to hear all those years ago, teaching her everything. And with undying determination, she gives one last push— and breaks the laws of Time itself to force herself back into existence, now a fully-fledged god-tier.
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In the wreckage of the Scratch Construct, she sees an old rival: Cadwyn, back for one last match. He wants to go out here, on his own terms, rather than on the front lines as one of the Savior's footsoldiers. She tries to change his mind, but it's set, and he flies at her in an empowered frenzy. He pushes himself to his limits, enhanced also by one of the Savior's singer-players, but Victoria comes out on top. His soul returns to the Savior's New Empire smiling, and now there's only one thing left to do.
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The final march on the rift. All the players team up— including Silv, now repentant after his escape to the Furthest Ring— and set out with the goal of killing Bezend and sealing away the Savior until he can be redeemed. They roll through the Savior's last defense, a group of his former co-players turned singers, and find Bezend waiting by the rift. Even combined, they're barely a match for her, but Silv and Takzek manage to break one last lie— the lie hiding her from the Savior's view.
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Finally able to see her, the doubts put into his mind by the players over the course of the session make him look a little deeper. Seeing the depths of what she's done, he gives the players one last boon— a crippling mental rebuke to Bezend that allows them to finally kill her. Victoria, in light of this, finds commonality with the Savior: just as she was betrayed by someone she trusted, so was he. So she lets the others close away the rift, the Savior left to live another day.
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And with that done, the war is over. Old wounds are closed in Victoria and Silv's relationship, a second chance. The worlds of the Incipisphere are hers to explore, bringing stories of her adventures with her. And she gets to do it all with the friends she's come to love.
Takzek Zhasix
Takzek Zhasix is an archer who's been on the run since a gang of highbloods burnt down his hive and killed his moirail, Mulrik. To his relief, though, Mulrik's voice lives on within him, giving him advice and encouragement as he hones his skills to more effectively defend himself..
Things go sideways almost immediately as he gets a tip that the same gang of highbloods who attacked him the first time are coming back, and he immediately gets to work preparing traps to fight them off. In the middle of this process, though, former player Emily Seeker approaches him with an escape route, taking the form of a game he needs to play.
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Oh, and the end of the world. That's here too.
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Starting up the game generates a cloaked figure in the shape of his moirail atop a nearby tree, right as the highbloods start to converge on Takzek. Scrambling out of their grasp, he reaches the figure, and yanks off the cloak to reveal... nothing. The world around him blinks away as he realizes that, whisking him through space and time to another world.
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He opens his eyes on the Land of Streetlight and Swampland, a city of sunken skyscrapers and murky marshes. After Rocksprite draws a complete blank on leads for him to follow, he decides to hop onto one of the land's oversized lilypads and investigate some of the ruined skyscrapers.
Respite
In the first one he checks, he finds a dead fly consort lying in bed. They had a diary, though, and Takzek learns some important things from it: some time ago, an entrancing song played throughout the land that tempted them to leave their life behind for a new world. In the wake of that, a President Orunmila offered them sanctuary from the song in the Silver City. This fly, evidently, chose to embrace the song instead.
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Carefully moving through the building, he notices something amiss. Not all of the thick vines growing over the sunken skyscraper are actually vines— some of them are disguised electrical cables, and some are even cameras. As he makes this observation, a robotic voice addresses him. The voice tells him that he's the second hero of this land, the first being a Seer of Breath, and asks him to ascend through the building so his abilities can be assessed before more is explained.
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The ascent is a mad dash through obstacle after obstacle, culminating in a fight against a giant rotting flower at the top. After taking out the flower, it's time for answers, and the robotic voice is more than happy to give them. He explains the concept of classpects to Takzek, though he's unable to tell him his, and informs him about the calamity besetting the Incipisphere.
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The song described in the diary is something they call the Soulsong, and the reason Takzek's group has been brought in is because the original players failed to stop it, the original Heroes of Light and Hope perishing in their attempts. The song tempts you with your deepest desires, and if you don't give into it, the souls of those who have listened are brought back for an hour each day to "persuade" you. Finally, the source of this is someone called the Savior, but details about him are very sparse.
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Respite is a supercomputer designed to combat the song, and has come to some conclusions. The first is that the singers are searching for something. The second is that, given that the Seer of Breath can scry anything in the Incipisphere and cannot find it, it must be supernaturally hidden somehow. Finally, he intends to create a device called the Network to locate the source, and he will need Takzek's help once his abilities are realized.
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First, though, he needs information, so he sends Takzek to sleep to assess the state of the dream moons. He wakes up in the abandoned subway tunnels of Prospit, just in time to find a bunch of Prospitians having a run through it. One of them introduces themselves as the Aloof Traceur, and immediately recruits Takzek to help in a raid of one of the Savior's generals, the Forsaken Conductor. Mulrik's ghost convinces him to join on, and off they go.
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The raid quickly turns into a personal tour of the factory by the Conductor in a sales pitch to get Takzek to join up with the Song. To punctuate his point, he shows Takzek video of a trap that he's luring Victoria and one of the other previous players into— a prison that's designed to be crushed as soon as they're inside. Takzek distracts the Conductor long enough to let Victoria escape, and swipes his personal notebook on his way out.
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Meeting up with Victoria and the others, they check out the contents of the notebook. It warns of an upcoming attack on the Prospitian palace, as well as notes on The Black Queen's personal ship, which crashed months ago with her inside. Nobody knows where it went down, but it looks like the Conductor was looking for it. They make some preparations to foil the attack on the palace by causing a scene back at the factory, and head back to their lands in the meantime.
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Back on the land, Respite asks two things of Takzek. The first is to look into Sydney, who they have nearly no information about, and the second is to pay a visit to the Sage of Silence, who may have more answers as to his classpect.
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The journey goes quickly, and he finds himself face to face with the fly sage. The Sage asks some abstract questions: what does it mean to be real, or true? Can something that is not influence what is? To illustrate his point, he posits that the Silver City may not even be real, but the idea of it was enough to move thousands of flies. This is what Takzek can do, he explains, as a Prince of Void— leverage things that aren't real to a very real effect. To awaken his powers, he instructs Tazkek to take a seat and meditate with him.
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In his mediation, he has a vision: the day Mulrik died, except he changes it this time. Mulrik lives, and for a fleeting moment, a Void recreation of him flits into existence in the real world. This, Void explains, is his power as a Prince of Void. Pleased, the Sage of Silence suggests that follow next in the footsteps of the flies of the land and seek the truth of the Silver City, before returning to his meditation.
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Before that, though, Respite calls Takzek into a meeting with Emily and Josh, the Seer of Breath and the land's first hero. Here, they pitch the Network: it's a surveillance network that will span the Incipisphere, using Josh and Takzek's powers in conjunction with Respite's computational abilities to track down the Savior by process of elimination. The first step to doing this is to find Sydney, who's reportedly been in contact with the Denizen of Light, so Takzek and Josh leave to find her.
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Taking a transportalizer to the Land of Oracles and Opulence, they find her, but she's not what they expect. It turns out Sydney's actually a puppet, controlled by the spirit of Elga Zherdev, a fated player who died young. There's a bit of a misunderstanding at first, because Elga's been told that a Void player ordered her death all those years ago, and she pins the blame on Takzek before they talk things out.
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Once that's all sorted out, they go to find Jenna Grant, the mother of the deceased Hero of Light, Oliver, and a mage of repute. She takes some time to explain the natures of Light and Void, before putting them to work training their aspects. Then, given that it's about time for the Song again, they head to sleep.
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Back on Prospit, the ambush begins, waves of singers pouring into the factory they're using as their headquarters. Victoria starts beating them up with her mechsuit while Takzek goes after the Conductor, and after a quick skirmish, the Conductor is captured and a copious amount of singers have met their end.
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They decide to rush to the palace while the iron's hot, to find whatever it is the singers were after there. A frenzied sprint through abandoned subway tunnels brings them to the courtyard out in front, but the palace's door is locked and they're trapped outside. Worse, a monster made of roiling black glass emerges from the fountain and they only just barely get away as Victoria smashes in the wall and escapes into the palace.
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Inside, they meet the White Queen, who chose not to open the door for them for reasons unknown. Takzek goes with the Queen while Victoria stays up front to defend the doors, but that proves to be a mistake: another one of the Savior's generals, the Singing Bishop, is waiting with a sleep spell, and the Queen leads him right into it.
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Trusting his friends to get him out of the situation, he resigns himself to returning to his land and setting sail once more for the Silver City. On his way, though, he finds a half-sunk laboratory that he decides to explore. Within, he finds strange notes, scrawled pictures, and a covered robotic replica of a human. Right as he decides to nab it and leave, Respite interrupts— this is Josh's house, so he suggests Takzek abstain from theft.
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When pressed about the contents of the lab, Respite gives up a secret: Josh has listened to the Soulsong, albeit in a controlled environment as an experiment. These notes and images were results of what he saw, gifts seemingly given by the Song. Respite explains that this is how the Song works: it starts by offering boons, and progresses to deals, before finally inviting the listener to join the Song in its entirety.
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That being said, it's time for Takzek to finish his journey. He boards his boat and sets sail for the Silver City, getting briefly lost but eventually finding his way once more to arrive at the fabled sanctuary itself. Only one problem: the bridge's broken.
Nodes
The city's on a hill, surrounded by a deep chasm of roiling black and brown rot. The bridge is far gone, broken beyond repair. There's one upside, though: a house at the base of the bridge, the sound of faint singing from within. Takzek meets the Sage of Solemnity within, who tells him that the Prince may restore the bridge to what it was when he's ready, and refuses to elaborate on what that means.
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Takzek's not sure if he's ready, so Respite appears to give him some busywork while he figures it out. The Network needs nodes on all the lands, and he gives Takzek a prototype to place on the Land of Gardens and Reflections, midway through one of the land's many mirrors. He also gives him the name of someone that might be helpful, a clerk named Malidea.
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He heads over to the crystal land and meets up with Silv, who just so happens to also be in search of Malidea for reasons of his own. She's vanished, but he's found the culprit in one Lady Dusa, an ex-noble who is soon to star at one of the city's upcoming balls. What's more, she's claiming to have discovered the secret of resurrection, and during the ball, invites Takzek to see it in action.
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Silv interrupts by appearing and interrogating Dusa so aggressively it causes her to breakdown, her regrets surging through the mirror to fight the players. They go down without much incident, leaving the heroes victorious and now with a mirror in tow. Before they free Malidea, though, Silv sits Takzek down and tells him about an opportunity: if he listens to the song, Silv might be able to put Mulrik into a body. Eager to go with it, Takzek closes his eyes and listens.
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He finds his mind in the Void, a non-existent prison that keeps the Savior— a fuchsia-blood— trapped. Here, the Savior explains his plight: a small rift has been opened into Takzek's session, and he hopes to use it to escape back out into the real world. Takzek is one of the only players whose abilities might facilitate the widening of this rift, and he wishes for Takzek to at least consider the possibility of descending to the core of Prospit and freeing him. Notably, he also tells Takzek that he has no knowledge of any death inflicted by his singers, but promises to look into it before returning him to the real world.
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Bidding Silv farewell and returning to his land, Respite comes with another briefing. He's meet with Elga now, and has learned of the Void player she was talking about earlier: the Great Liar. He believes that the Liar is the source of obfuscation around the Savior's rift, and warns Takzek to be wary of them. That being said, it's time to place another node, this time on the Land of Spires and Storms!
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Arriving on the stormy land, he finds Silv, Victoria, and Exocoe already there, about to set off to confront a Warden of the land, a powerful consort named Brenin. Takzek joins up with them, alongside several of Victoria's consorts, as they march on Brenin's city. It turns out he's a colossus, towering over the city itself, but the assembled players make quick work of him in a chaotic battle that involves Takzek using his Void powers to save one of Victoria's consorts from being squashed underfoot.
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Unfortunately, the only reason the consort was in that position in the first place was because Silv put them there, and Victoria and Takzek find themselves at odds about it, Victoria adamant that Silv's a bad person while Takzek tries to defend him. Agreeing to disagree, Takzek places the node and goes to sleep, returning to Prospit.
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It's that time of day again, and Takzek's recovered dreamself teams up with Judith to protect the surviving Prospitians as the Song begins once more. They successfully hold off a horde of singers with the help of their carapacian allies, but find themselves cornered by the black-glass monster from before, with nowhere to run. Judith gets caught and absorbed into the construct, and at the behest of Mulrik's Voidform, Takzek follows her in.
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Inside, they see a series of scenes, recreated in shimmering shards of black glass. Emily's creation of the rift, the Oliver getting on her case about a neglected land quest, and a scene of her designing the ritual to summon the Savior. But something's wrong. Takzek reaches out and shatters a lie, revealing the Great Liar present in this flashback, dictating the ritual's instructions to Emily while obscuring its true purpose.
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With that lie broken, Judith casts an anti-curse spell, sending the construct crumbling. She has another lead, too— her book's revealed a secret room in Prospit's crypts to her, and inside, the two of them find the not-so-dead Oliver sleeping in a coffin. He immediately wakes up and takes charge, having Takzek and Judith fill him in on the state of things. With that, they decide that the best path of action is to continue along their land quests, which means it's time to rebuild that bridge.
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Returning to the bridge, Takzek steps up to the edge of it, preparing his biggest lie yet. He lies the bridge into existence, Mulrik's Voidform appearing to accompany him. As they cross, Mulrik muses on Takzek's powers: as the Prince of Void, he not only destroys lies, but destroys *with* lies. Respite's explanation of Takzek's powers was wrong. The reason he can summon Mulrik is not because he's destroying the untruth of his survival: it's because he's using him to destroy his own ability to move on.
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But is that so bad? Mulrik makes an offer: Takzek can make him real. Or, Takzek could cross the bridge, and lose the opportunity forever.
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He takes the offer, the bridge vanishes, and he plummets into the chasm of rot below him.
Rot
Takzek wakes up in his recuperacoon, Mulrik insisting that he help him unpack. They've just moved, after all, and the past sweep's just been a bad dream. The two of them get up to various antics in their new neighborhood, before Takzek passes out in the middle of a clurch sermon.
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He wakes up in his dreamself with no recollection of anything after stepping onto that bridge. Everyone thinks his waking body's died, so he's on his last life now. Regardless, there's no time to rest— Emily's been kidnapped, and Josh wants Takzek to help with the investigation.
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They meet up with Judith and Oliver at her house to start looking for clues, which lead them to Silv's transportalizer. As they get there, they feel something invisible dart out of his house and go through to the Land of Spires and Thunder. They pursue, meeting up with Victoria and Exocoe on their way, and give chase to one of the land's cities. There, they find Emily, having lost control of her reality-destroying powers. And worse: Silv Goldant, having been working with both the Savior and the Liar this whole time.
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In the ensuing battle, the players manage to save the bystanders, but Silv gets away, bailed out by the Liar. As a parting gift, he sends the group into emotional disarray as they fight over what to do about him. Exocoe storms off in frustration, and a disagreement between Judith and Victoria on how to deal with Emily's unstable powers leave the group fractured and uneasy as they go their separate ways.
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Takzek returns to his land in pursuit of Exocoe, tracking them down with the help of Respite. They have a quiet alchemy session for a while, taking a moment to calm down after the big fight and prepare for what comes next. At that, Exocoe takes off, leaving Takzek to consider his next move.
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Respite has an experiment they want to try. To illustrate this, they bring Takzek back to the bridge and show him the result of his plummet— a rotting dome within the chasm, growing by the second. He asks Takzek to sleep so he may observe the dome, which he readily agrees to.
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Waking up in his dream body, it's back to the slice-of-life experience for Takzek and Mulrik! They make their mission for the day a visit to the supermarket, and after some shenanigans regarding crossing a bridge, they make it to the local supermarket, Storemart. While there, he gets glimpses at the reality of the situation, rationalized as sopor hallucinations. Rattled, Takzek goes back to sleep, Mulrik supporting him.
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Waking up, he's met with Exocoe and Respite. The latter reports an increase in the dome's growth while Takzek was sleeping, and Exocoe turns their mind to what's really happening here. They come to the same conclusion that Mulrik posited, that Takzek's using the Void to inhibit himself from healing. And to prove their point, they step backwards off of the broken bridge, asking Takzek to save them.
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In the heat of the moment, Takzek breaks past some internal barrier, Void flowing through him as he restores the bridge to what it once was. What's more— his memories from within the dome come flooding back to him. The truth of the matter is hard to swallow, but after a few quiet moments with Exocoe and Josh, Takzek readies himself to go on.
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The Savior and Takzek speak once more, this time more in-depth. Takzek and Exocoe have come to agreement— the two of them want to free the Savior, as long as he will stop his Song. He's not open to that fully, and the issue is kicked to a later date. A smaller deal is made, though: Takzek delivers the Savior a bottle of distilled Void in exchange for being guided to a way to open his waking self's eyes and break the dome.
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The Savior's solution turns out to be throwing pieces of the broken bridge into the dome, so Takzek does that before sleeping once more, hoping to put an end to this once and for all. When he wakes back up in the dome, the neighborhood of Subspite is experiencing a meteor shower: one that, curiously enough, none of the residents are acknowleding.
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After an unsuccessful attempt to grab one of the meteoric objects— a wrench— a clown approaches him, threatening to kill him if he ever tries to leave Subspite. Mulrik, of course, claims to have heard none of this. In wake of this, he makes another attempt to get the wrench, and after a lengthy argument, grabs it.
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The world around him crumbles, and he sees the truth of it in full once more. Mulrik isn't Mulrik. In his place is a monster of blue-black glass, held together with rot. He pleads with Takzek to hear him out, but he's interrupted by a scuttlebuggy full of murderous clowns that crashes into his side, leaving Takzek to hold them off while he regains consciousness.
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After the fight, he comes clean to Takzek about everything. He restores his memories to him, showing Takzek that he asked for this, and he's just trying to do what Takzek wants. As Takzek resolves himself to leave, Void gets desperate, [[You'reNothingWithoutYourPhlebotinum alternating between pleading with and belittling him]] in a last-ditch effort to get him to stay.
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It doesn't work. Takzek says what's always been true: Mulrik is dead, and has been for a sweep. The dome shatters, and he learns the ability to break lies, even those crafted by the Great Liar. And he steps out of the broken dome, the title of Prince of Void finally feeling like it fits.
Truth
Respite meets him on the other side, with one more secret for him. Respite isn't just a supercomputer: it's a hivemind. All the flies in the Silver City are in it, as is President Orunmila, and Respite has sensory control over them all. He suspects that the swamp and the rot are his byproducts, not Takzek's, as he has to lie to himself a thousand times each day to prevent his component flies from hearing the song. He does, however, assure Takzek that as soon as the Song is over, everyone will be freed.
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He doesn't have much time to dwell on this, though. The Conductor's been sprung from jail, and has used his electrokinetic abilities to bring a warship to bear above Prospit. Regrouping with the other three players, they make a plan: Takzek's alchemy lets him become invisible, so they're going to toss him up into the warship to place a transportalizer that will allow a takeover from within.
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The fling upwards goes without incident, and Takzek finds himself within a suspiciously familiar spaceship manned by singer-piloted warsuits. He tries to sneak through, but is caught by Cadwyn, one of the Wardens from Victoria's land turned singer. Their trap is interrupted by the arrival of the remainder of Derse's fleet, and in the chaos, Takzek places the transportalizer, Prospitians flooding in to retake the ship.
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Takzek and the newly arrived Oliver go to confront the Forsaken Conductor while they have him, storming through the ship until they reach the reactor. The Conductor panics, claiming to be willing to share important info if they don't kill him here. The Black Queen knew one of the Great Liar's lies, and fled to Victoria's land for safety: he's about to share it when suddenly, he chokes on his own spit and dies.
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A quick debrief on Prospit, and they're off again. The Network's online, and Respite's found a place worth investigating. Takzek and Exocoe set off to an asteroid in the Veil suspected to be one of the Liar's bases, to see if they can gleam anything from it. Here, they find a lone spider who tells them the Liar's ultimate plan: to dangle the carrot of freedom in front of the Savior's face for long enough that he'll become desperate and make a more lucrative deal than normal with them. They also find Ankh, a bounty hunter here to nab the Savior, offering to work together to get the job done.
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As the final pieces fall into place, the remaining players meet up for one last moment to recover, relax, and gameplan. While they're there, they break one of the Liar's lies, revealing Oliver as a front for the Liar, Bezend Katora, the Savior's old moirail. Various pale feelings are also confessed, a weight off of everyone's shoulders as the final march approaches.
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Before that, though. The Savior makes a deal with Takzek: Takzek cannot open the rift, and in return, one of the Savior's old coplayers turned singer will perform a seance so Takzek can speak to Mulrik one last time. They arrange it to happen on Takzek's land, in a cave under the Silver City. Here is the core of Respite, and coincidentally the bones of the highbloods that entered with Takzek, which they need to form a connection.
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His last conversation with Mulrik is short, but sweet. He tells Mulrik about all the adventures he's had since they've been away, and quickly enough they're back to their normal banter. Respite suddenly interrupts their reunion to offer Takzek the chance to godtier, opening up a passageway to his quest bed. A moment before he's to die on it, though, Takzek checks for lies as a precaution— and the quest bed shatters, a trap revealed.
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Flies step out to attack the pair, a giant robotic fly holding a corrupted Network node being used by the Liar to control Respite. Void flows through Takzek, materializing Mulrik, and the two of them fight one last battle together. Their time's running low by the time they're done, so they bid each other farewell— and Takzek promises to have lots more to tell when they finally meet again. And then it's over.
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Then it's just Takzek and Void. Void takes the moment to apologize for everything. The two of them steel themselves, reminding themselves of what they've been through and what lies ahead, and then become one as a god-tiered Prince of Void.
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There's nothing left to do then but the final march on the rift. All the players team up— including Silv, now repentant after his escape to the Furthest Ring— and set out with the goal of killing Bezend and sealing away the Savior until he can be redeemed. They fight through the Savior's last line of defense, his singer-coplayers, and waiting for them at the rift is the Liar themselves.
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They fight, and find themselves barely a match for them with the combined powers of all the players and a last-minute assist from the Savior, the lie preventing him from seeing the Liar broken and his resolve shaken. Takzek strikes the final blow, ending the Liar and putting an end to this whole ordeal. The Savior lets his rift be sealed for the time being, and the legion of singers cease to be.
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Takzek, in the new era of peace, takes to writing. He chronicles his adventures, the adventures of his friends, the entirety of this chapter of their lives. As he steps into the next chapter of his, he knows that when the time comes, he'll have plenty to retell for Mulrik.
Exocoe Barbad
Exocoe Barbad is a limeblood who lives in complete isolation on an iceberg, an arrangement made by their ancestor and lusus to keep them safe from the Empire. This, unfortunately, has the side effect of being very lonely, and they've taken to watching nearby seadweller cities and longing to be able to join them..
The end of the world, for Exocoe, begins with a seadweller approaching their iceberg— and notably, not trying to kill them as most seadwellers in the past have. They bring word of the end of the world, as well as a strange package addressed to Exocoe, before returning to their city to enjoy their last few hours on their mortal coil. Turns out the package was a game of some sort, and sliding it into their state-of-the-art computer, they begin to run it.
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The program creates strange machines over their iceberg as meteors begin to shower around it, and with some graceful maneuvering, Exocoe makes it to all of them before the iceberg breaks completely apart. The whole process creates a door to a seadweller city, but Exocoe hits an invisible barrier as they try to step through it, the world around them fading to white.
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They open their eyes on the Land of Memories and Starlight, a land of sprawling plains and distant peaks. Seeing an encampment of nearby beetle consorts, they go forth to meet them.
Heading
One of them introduces themselves as Rwydon and explains to Exocoe what they're doing. They worship a god called the Sun, and every year the Sun creates something called the Radial Boar for them to hunt. They're gathering in anticipation, as this is usually the time it appears.
He also tells Exocoe about the war they're fighting on two fronts: from the east, soul-ghosts that spawn from something called the Soulsong, and to the west, undead from the cities. The explanation is interrupted by a ghost attack, but many of the ghosts are dispelled as golden wind blows across the land— a boon of the Sun, they explain.
Gizel, the wanderers' shaman, introduces themselves to Exocoe, asking them to accompany her the next day to find another group of wanderers whose arrival is overdue. They agree, but head to sleep first and foremost, spent from the battle.
They wake up on the dream moon Derse— or, at least, a small portion of it that's been enclosed within a red-blue dome. They're quickly met by Joshua Rowan, who introduces himself as a Seer of Breath from the first group of players to enter this Incipisphere. Proceeding down the line of introductions, the two of them go to meet the Silken Bureaucrat, the current leader of Derse.
The Bureaucrat lays out the current situation at hand: the Soulsong. It's a song that sounds for an hour every day, offering for the listeners to leave their world behind for a
