Session 11, Arc II

Ticking

Played 11 July 2025 Watch the session (spoiler-free)

The party continued their treacherous journey through the edge of the Destitute Lands, following their guide Bazzur toward their destination near the mountain cliffs. The scorching heat reached 40 degrees as sandstorms finally began to clear, revealing the first glimpse of blue sky they had seen in days. The mood remained tense and fractured, with party members maintaining distance from each other and barely speaking. Bazzur estimated they were only a few hours away from their destination, a cove tucked into the edges of the towering Itumue Mountains.

When Nillituh questioned Bazzur about his intense hatred of magic, the guide explained the dark history behind the prohibition. He spoke of an ancient god who had enslaved the land thousands of years ago, turning people's magic against them and bringing about the Millennium of Darkness. The people who eventually ended this catastrophe had agreed that magic should never be practiced again, a belief ingrained into every citizen from childhood. The party defended their use of magic as necessary for survival, leading to philosophical debates about the nature of power and control.

As they traveled through the increasingly marshy terrain near the mountain's edge, Naeco spotted something unusual - a cave area with remarkably lush, green vegetation that stood out dramatically from the surrounding dry landscape. The cave appeared to be a natural sanctuary filled with ferns, hedgehogs, squirrels, and other small animals - the first wildlife they had encountered in four days. Suspiciously, Bazzur claimed he had never seen this cave before despite regularly traveling this route, which raised immediate red flags among the party members about their guide's trustworthiness.

Upon entering the cave, the party discovered it contained a beautiful oasis of life with ant nests, various small creatures, and thriving plant life. However, their relief was short-lived when Bazzur mysteriously vanished without a trace, leaving no response to their calls. As they searched for their missing guide, Bones stepped into what appeared to be solid ground but was actually a black void - a crack in the earth just wide enough for a person to fit through. The void began pulling him in with an otherworldly force that defied physics.

Desperate attempts to rescue Bones proved futile as Naeco's strength check failed to pull him free, and Crezzida's mage hand spell catastrophically backfired with a natural one. The party watched in horror as Bones fell into the void, his body distorting and moving slower and slower until he became a two-dimensional image on the surface before disappearing entirely. When Fe volunteered to enter the void tied to a rope, she suffered the same fate, and when Naeco pulled the rope back up, it was stretched and snapped with no trace of their companion.

The remaining party members frantically tested the void's properties, discovering that it felt like nothing - neither solid nor liquid - and extinguished fire when they dropped a lit rope into it. Crezzida's attempt to cast detect thoughts into the void resulted in a natural one, causing harsh static to penetrate her mind and deal 10 points of damage while blood began streaming from her nose. After treating Crezzida's injuries and debating communication strategies using the message spell, the remaining party members realized they had no choice but to enter the void themselves to follow their lost companions.

When Crezzida entered the void, she experienced the opposite effect of the others - instead of slowing down, she accelerated rapidly through the dimensional anomaly. She witnessed time passing at an incredible rate, watching Naeco leave the cave, seasons changing, and the cave eventually collapsing on itself before emerging into a strange waiting room. The room featured red carpet, wooden chairs, beds, paintings of various landscapes, and a desk with a sign reading "we'll be right back soon." She discovered that Bones had been alone in this room for six months before Fe arrived, and Fe had been there for two months before Crezzida's arrival.

The temporal mechanics of this place proved deeply unsettling as Naeco searched outside the cave for only five minutes before jumping in, yet arrived in the waiting room after another six months had passed for the others. Despite the passage of over a year, the party members experienced unnatural contentment and felt no hunger or thirst, though they aged slightly and their hair grew longer. Muscle the jackal proved instrumental in breaking through this artificial contentment, sitting by a doorway day after day and whimpering, conveying to the party that something was fundamentally wrong with their situation.

Eventually, the party discovered an outline of a doorway and investigated a desk containing a circular sigil carving with a dot in the middle. After numerous failed attempts to activate it with various items including coins, blood, fire, acid, water, and food, they realized the sigil required magical energy. When Crezzida cast Ice Knife at second level into the sigil, it absorbed the magical essence, lit up completely, and opened the door to reveal a beautiful garden paradise stretching endlessly before them.

The garden was a rectangular sanctuary filled with trees, flowers, vines, and various animals, with music playing throughout the area. After walking for about ten minutes to reach the far end, they encountered another identical door with the same type of magical sigil. Following another six-month wait during which they heard mysterious scraping and knocking from the other side, Crezzida used Ice Knife again to open the second door, revealing an impossible sight - alternate versions of Bones and Fe sitting on chairs.

This discovery led to a confusing revelation about multiple timelines, as the sitting versions had been in their location for a year longer than the party that had just arrived. The temporal mechanics created a paradox where different versions of the same people existed simultaneously, having taken different paths through the dimensional anomaly. Muscle the jackal's reunion with the party showed his ability to recognize the original members despite the confusing circumstances.

The party then explored the garden more thoroughly, where everyone except Bones noticed trees moving slightly out of the corner of their eyes. When Kailyn approached one of these trees, it revealed itself to be a treant - an ancient tree creature with consciousness and mobility. Bones' natural 20 history check allowed him to recognize these beings from childhood stories, understanding their rarity and deep forest origins. The treant initially attacked Kailyn for 17 points of damage before the party managed to communicate with it in Elvish.

The treants introduced themselves as servants of a master who was currently away conducting important research and experiments. They explained an appointment system with waiting times ranging from three hours to six thousand years, offering to put the party to sleep until the master returned. The treants revealed they were in a location called the Lightfoot Gardens, and through conversation, the party learned they had somehow traveled 236 years into the past from their original timeline. Servant Number Seven put most of the party to sleep for six months while Bones remained awake with the treant guardians.

When Crezzida and Naeco eventually arrived through their own journey, they followed the same path and awakened the sleeping party members. However, this created another temporal convergence where they encountered duplicate versions of Bones and Fe from a different timeline. Crezzida's detect thoughts revealed that these duplicates lacked souls and were possessed by ancient creatures older than time, something moving between planes like entities trapped between floors of an elevator.

Combat erupted when the duplicates became hostile, with the soulless versions attacking the original party members. The battle featured various spells and abilities including fog cloud, wild shape transformations, and eldritch blasts, but the most disturbing moment came when the duplicate Fe gave a suspicious "kill them" response to questions about their intentions. Naeco dealt devastating damage with reckless attacks, ultimately killing both duplicates, whose final words were an ominous "He will come" before they died. Kailyn's entangle spell finally ended the combat by restraining all combatants.

After convincing Servant Number 15 with a successful persuasion check, the party gained access to the master's quarters through a wooden door that led to a magically stretching hallway. The corridor took about ten minutes to traverse despite initially appearing much shorter, demonstrating the spatial distortions present throughout this mystical location. They emerged into a freezing cold storage room filled with scrap metal, gears, motors, and various mechanical debris.

In the cold storage, they discovered a damaged automaton named Bolts with flickering blue eyes, round head, square arms, and short legs. Using the mending spell and oil, Kailyn successfully repaired the mechanical being, who explained they were in cold storage where artifacts came at the end of their life. When Bolts scanned the party, he detected an "odd presence" in some members, describing it as feeling like being stabbed with 10,000 nails, lit on fire, and having air replaced with acid. Most disturbingly, Bolts determined these affected party members were "unfixable" and recommended termination.

The situation became dire when they discovered both doors were magically locked from an external source, and the room's temperature began dropping rapidly toward lethal levels. Despite attempts to break down the doors with strength and weapons, they remained sealed. Kailyn created a bonfire to provide temporary warmth, but the party faced imminent death from hypothermia as temperatures continued plummeting. Their only escape route was a narrow metal chute leading upward.

Bones wild-shaped into a raven and flew up through the complex chute system, emerging into a vast magical library containing infinite books with crisscrossing paths overhead. His investigation revealed that the library contained every book that had ever been or would ever be written, but many contained nonsense that could drive readers mad. A stained glass window functioned as a map showing different locations, and Bones discovered a manual about the automaton with diagrams matching Bolts exactly.

Kailyn also transformed into a raven and joined Bones in the library, where her ability to read Draconic proved invaluable in understanding the ancient texts. They learned that the library's books worked together to create magical effects and that the stained glass window served as a teleportation device. Meanwhile, the party trapped below faced increasing exhaustion from the cold, with Fe taking two levels of exhaustion as temperatures continued dropping to dangerous levels.

The party decided to dismantle Bolts using the manual as a guide, successfully taking apart the automaton safely though some components might be difficult to reassemble correctly. Most party members escaped through the chute to the library above, but Naeco's large size prevented him from fitting through the narrow passage, leaving him trapped in the increasingly deadly cold storage. The library proved dangerous as well, with characters suffering madness effects - Kailyn became incapacitated from screaming and laughing, while Nillituh compulsively ate acid from his own throat.

Working frantically to reassemble Bolts while searching for escape routes, the party discovered that the stained glass map could teleport them to different locations. Nillituh successfully teleported to the Astral Observatory, but when they powered up Bolts, a faulty memory core pin caused the automaton to malfunction catastrophically. Bolts cast Disintegrate at the party, and despite Crezzida's attempt to counterspell, the magic succeeded, dealing 74 points of damage and reducing her to a pile of fine grey dust that the party carefully collected in a water skin.

Bolts expressed deep remorse about accidentally destroying Crezzida and used his abilities to open the magically locked cold storage door, allowing Naeco to escape by jumping through a void portal that deposited him in the library. The automaton then transported the party to the astral plane using the telescope's targeting system, where they walked across a bridge extending through shifting, iridescent colors and holographic-like effects that created motion sickness as they traveled for about a day.

At the end of the bridge, they reached the Astral Observatory - a round platform with a singular telescope that allowed viewing and travel to any location within the astral plane. Bolts positioned the telescope to show them the master's location, revealing a featureless man floating in space who seemed familiar to Bones despite not being recognizable. When they plane-shifted to meet this figure, he claimed to be the master of the tree and boat and pointed to a small crying child with shaved horns, revealing this to be Crezzida's soul.

The master explained that resurrection required someone to sacrifice their tether - the spiritual connection binding souls to the material planes. The party discovered that the duplicate Bones and Fe had green, sickly, dying tethers, while everyone else's tethers led to the same point except for Bones, whose led to a different location entirely. After emotional discussion, Naeco volunteered to sacrifice his tether for Crezzida's resurrection, stripping off all his equipment and agreeing to the procedure.

However, when the master grabbed Naeco's tether and began pulling it, he transformed into a dark astral demon - a Phane that began consuming the tether instead of using it for resurrection. Naeco became untethered and started drifting in the astral sea while experiencing a false reality vision of his home in northern Mjovadalr with his wife and daughter. The vision turned nightmarish when the sky turned green and red, his daughter was swept off the mountain, and he realized he was trapped in a deceptive paradise designed to torment captured souls.

Fe made the desperate decision to pull out her own tether and give it to Naeco, effectively committing suicide to save him. Her wisdom check of 18 allowed her to successfully perform this sacrifice, splitting the tether between them and connecting them with a thin, fragile strand. Fe experienced her own false reality vision of being chained with thousands of people in a mountain city, forced to march by orc taskmasters while a distant figure on a mountain peak cast spells to control the nightmare scenario.

Both Fe and Naeco returned to consciousness in the astral sea, where Naeco grabbed Fe to prevent her from drifting away with a successful strength check of 21. They realized their shared tether meant that if one died, the other would die as well, but they had successfully saved each other from the demon's deception. Crezzida appeared as well, having aged rapidly from child to adult but remaining untethered and vulnerable.

The final battle began against the Phane, which had stolen Naeco's tether and was using it to regenerate itself. The party's conventional attacks proved largely ineffective as the creature could regenerate by consuming tethers, with swords passing harmlessly through its form. Fe managed to deal some damage with her quarterstaff, while Bones successfully cast Hideous Laughter to temporarily incapacitate the creature, though it shook off the effect quickly.

The battle intensified as Naeco landed significant hits for 12 and 25 points of damage, Crezzida cast witch bolt dealing 17 lightning damage with ongoing effects, and Bones cast two moonbeam spells that combined for massive 26 points of radiant damage. However, the Phane retaliated with devastating force, attacking Crezzida with a 72-point assault that killed her instantly. The session ended with the party realizing that conventional combat was futile against this creature that regenerated by consuming the very tethers that kept souls anchored to existence, leaving them to devise an alternative strategy to defeat this ancient evil and save their friend's soul.