So, over a breakfast of hotdogs and bagels, the party discusses how best to get home. Merlin wonders aloud if the Evil Puppet is still inside the television, and it turns out he is! Alkahest calls in that second favour, and EP says there’s a shortcut in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Specifically, it’s in a Rothko painting.
There’s some discussion of National Treasure and paintings with Nic Cage in them, but before long they make their way to the museum. There’s a skeleton on the ticket booth, but they trade her a little badge instead of paying for tickets.
Inside, they find the painting, but Nora chucks a sausage at it instead of walking in. There’s a crackle as the sausage blackens and falls to the ground. An astral projection of EP appears and says ‘haha, you fell for my single-use electrocution trap, losers!’ But it wasn’t them. It was a sausage.
Nora tries to hit him with the sausage, but it doesn’t work since he’s basically a hologram. She instead persuades him to imagine the worst, smelliest sausage in the world hitting him instead, and thanks to Ursa’s D10 Bardic Inspiration, it does actually work. A specter of the sausage appears and like, gently lands on his face. He explodes.
Nora tests the real sausage on the portal again, but it bounces off. Alkahest wonders if it only permits things with souls, because it’s art? He applies some honey mustard, because it’s soul food, right. Nora asks the sausage to remember the animal it once was. It sails through the air and thinks, ‘My god… I’m alive… wait, I was never an animal though’ but passes through unhindered this time.
They all go through. On the other side is a vast, glittering desert of purple sand under an orange sky. Ursa spots a skiff, which has a couple of dead skeletons on it. Nora steals the jacket of one, and finds a palm-sized emerald ball in the pocket. Merlin steals the hotpants the other one is wearing. He senses that they are magically potent; extremely so.
They find that the ship has parallel drive. It must have crashed here or something. Alkahest explains that here is outside the Outside, off the axis of worlds. There’s shit out here that‘s like deep sea fish, but for reality. Bad.
They sail onwards, aiming for a massive shape in the distance that’s maybe a tower or something.
But a mountain sized cosmic horror erupts from the sand and begins chasing them – it’s a huge maw that’s dragging itself along on thousand of spindly, stretchy little arms. Merlin lightning bolts it but despite the million points of damage he does it just keeps coming, launching its arms toward the party. He and Nora are grabbed, but Ursa dodges, and thunder steps herself and Alkahest to the little eye Merlin’s lightning revealed. Alkahest stabs the thing.
Nora, freed from the grapple by Ursa’s thunderstep damage, shoots at the arms rummaging through Merlin’s ribcage, and he realises once it’s let go that it was going for the magic hotpants. That’s what it’s chasing them for!
So he heroically throws them to the maw of the beast, and is only slightly put off when he rolls a 0 and they just blow back into his face. After this he simply drops them off the side.
The cosmic horror lunges for them, slamming Ursa and Alkahest to the sand, but Ursa’s able to thunder step back to the ship. Getting further away, the party is able to see the horror siphoning down into the hotpants. Its ass looks as incredible as it does incomprehensible.
Merlin gives a solemn thumbs up. The cosmic horror gives a hundred thousand in reply.
Arriving at the central tower, they unscrew the steering ball and screw it into the parallel drive lever. And after pulling it, land in the middle of the Leeds-Liverpool canal. They’re home! Woohoo!
Roll History 