Session 4: Poppy Snort
Session Summary
Preparations having been made, Fluke suggests that the group skip town immediately, traveling north to Capreol in the night. The trail she’s been following turns that direction, and something about Sudbury is making her antsy and eager to move on.
On the way out of the city, Dewey spots the distinctive red and blue of police lights in his rear view mirror. After some discussion, he responsibly applies the brakes and braces himself for a conversation about illegal border crossings. However, instead of a police car, the group sees a rusted-out minivan rumble past. It grinds to a halt in front of Dewey’s pickup, where it can block them from continuing down the road. Three angry gentlemen emerge, and are recognizably some of the weirdos from the hunter bar, La Veillée.
Fluke seems uncomfortably out of sorts, and nobody else is in the mood for a fight, so Dewey uses some of his driving skills to escape while Sammy shoots out not one, but two of the van’s tires.
The invisible trail leads through Capreol and further north, past Milnet and into the mountainous woods around Sellwood. However, Dewey’s trusty pickup goes no further: something in it abruptly dies, the dashboard dims, and the engine lurches to a sputtering end. The group is forced to continue on foot.
During their hike, Albacore relays some of what he learned in the library regarding Sellwood. This whole area was a mining community, Sellwood itself being simply the head of the mine, and as far as the road reaches. Local ghost stories gleefully detail a “Death Cult” in the mountains, which spent many years making increasingly bold forays further and further into civilization to kidnap miners, townsfolk, and tourists, dragging them up into “The Spine,” a series of craggy ore-filled mountains in this area.
He doesn’t believe any of it (beyond the mining), but Fluke seems very keen to hear more. And so, the story continues: the cult was performing some sort of massive “ritual,” until twelve local “clerics” sacrificed their lives to “seal” something away, yadda-yadda-yadda, eyeroll.
Fluke eats it up, nodding vigorously; she says this whole area is the equivalent of a magical Chernobyl, so the story makes sense to her. She’s beginning to understand why Adustus is on his way here.
Distracted by the storytelling, the group is caught unawares:
What have we here?
Fluke shouts in alarm, but before anyone can react appropriately, our heroes are driven into unconsciousness by life-altering levels of pain.
Timmy
Tim finds himself seated on the ground, inexplicably, with his laptop out and ready to go. His fingers are poised over the keyboard as if he’s about to chop out a line of C++, but he doesn’t remember what he was doing. The code on screen looks like an elegant representation of a human: id, ego, an array of emotions, the ability to belch. It’s not abstract, though… it’s an implementation of someone specific. Timmy realizes he’s looking at his own source code.
Scrambling to browse through the codebase and find out what else is there, he finds himself splitting his mind into pieces for more efficient multi-tasking. He locates the implementations of everyone present: Dewey, Sammy (written in Visual Basic), Albacore, even Fluke. And someone named “Kingmaker.” Fluke and Kingmaker are too complex to understand, but the other four are comparatively simple. Timmy decides to try refactoring himself.
Dewey
Wasn’t he in incredible pain somewhere in Canada a second ago? Who knows. Right now, he’s driving his truck through a nondescript stretch of land that could be anywhere in the Midwest. Dewey dimly notes the lack of road signs, other cars, or any features besides the infinite plains of mud and puddles to either side of the road. Up ahead, an enormous snapping turtle sits in the middle of the highway.
Dewey tries to stop his truck and examine the turtle, but as if he were in an awkward dream, he manages instead to repeatedly crush it beneath his tires. When he does exit the vehicle, the turtle speaks: “Why did you run me over? I never did anything to you.” Dewey feels as though he can see straight through the thing, and watch its heartbeat slowing down. In the distance, he sees a water tower; instead of carrying the name of a town or city, it’s simply marked “HERE.” He feels compelled to reach it.
Albacore
Albacore awakens seated in a classroom, unable to move anything but his eyes. All around him, uniformed students sit motionless. At the front of the class stands a tall man in a navy blue suit. Light bends into a corona around the man, forming something like wings; his face is obscured by the hilt and cross-guard of a golden sword, which is suspended in front of him. Its blade points downward along the length of the man’s body, out of Albacore’s field of vision, giving the disorienting impression that it extends (impossibly) to the center of the Earth.
The man approaches, quizzing Albacore on the nature of skepticism and disbelief. He seems halfway satisfied by the answers he’s given, but ultimately the lesson boils down to one final commandment: write your name on the blackboard. Before he can comply, Albacore is forced to figure out how to budge himself from his seat.
Sammy
Time stops. Sammy feels an itch inside his head. Something is swirling around him, but… as if he had his eyeballs tied behind his back, he’s unable to see what it is. Until he opens his third eye, that is. Using this new sense to take it all in, Sammy observes his surroundings; currents rush and flow like smoky trails of Star Trek gunk. One particularly large tendril twists up the path behind him, terminating in his chest.
Sammy, being both suspicious and incurious, decides it’d be best to sever whatever this thing is. Beyond his understanding to even attempt such a thing, he nevertheless takes a crack at it, and against all odds he succeeds. He comes to in the forest outside Sellwood, lying inert on the cold ground, stunned into paralysis by excruciating pain. His friends are all around him, but appear to be sleeping peacefully, free from any discomfort.
At the side of the trail, he can make out a man standing bolt upright against a tree, seemingly pinned there by points of magnesium-white light. Fluke’s tiny form stands before the man, shaking fists, spitting and swearing angrily. The man’s legs are blackened, slowly turning to cinders and crumbling away as he burns like a wick.
In an incredible expenditure of willpower, Sammy manages to struggle to his feet, draw his pistol, and fire a spiteful bullet into Kingmaker’s face.
Session Experience Tally
| Character | Player | XP | Bonus | Arcane XP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sammy | Drewbie | 5 | +1 (roleplay) | 3 |
| Timmy | Gnorlin | 5 | +1 (roleplay) | 3 |
| Albacore | Liuv | 5 | +1 (recap) | 3 |
| Dewey | Sheil | 5 | 3 |