So, I’m back to hyperfixating on Star Wars because Light of the Jedi, the first novel in the new High Republic stuff, just got released and I accidentally looked at a picture of a lightsaber. This triggered a chain reaction that led to me binging all of the Mandalorian in a single weekend, watching the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special (which is a masterpiece) despite it being January, and reading page after page on Wookieepedia about ‘Ponda Baba’ or ‘Tip-Yip’ or ‘Glup Shitto’ or whatever.
Star Wars is easy to hyperfixate on, because there’s always more.
Anyway, as I usually do when I’m into something, I began planning a tabletop RPG campaign. The plan is to use the Star Wars hack for D&D 5th Edition you can find online, because while I do agree that you can’t just use D&D as an all-purpose ruleset for any game… I know 5e really well. It’s like that Top Gear meme.
This one
Sami indicated she’d be willing to play and wants to make a Mandalorian, which is of course extremely cool. I asked Mari too, but she said she was used to the Star Wars RPGs made using the 3rd Edition SRD system, with their thousands and thousands of steps to making a character. If she didn’t have the option to make a force-sensitive half-droid half-jawa half-sarlaac with stormtrooper training, what was the point. I’ll put you down as a ‘maybe’, Mari.
The next step was to think about when to set it. If you’re not up on Star Wars, there’s as many different eras as Ariel has legs:
Pre-Republic, before there were even Humans. I don’t think this is canon anymore?
The Old Republic, about a thousand years before any of the movies, with loads of Jedi and Sith gallivanting about the place
The High Republic, about 800-200 years before any of the movies, after the Sith have experienced severe budget cuts
The Fall of the Jedi, when all those clones were there
The Reign of the Empire, when the Empire reigned
The Age of Rebellion, when the Empire reigned but people did something about it
The New Republic, after Palpatine got dunked into a big space well
and The Rise of the First Order, when the First Order rose.
I’m leaning more towards either the Old Republic, so I can include as many lightsabers as possible, or after the Rise (and fall) of the First Order, so I can do whatever I want without worrying about canon overlap.
After that, you need a plot, or at least some kind of conflict. Star Wars likes to have concrete villains to work against, though that can feel a bit arbitrary – like, Palpatine is the villain because he’s evil. What does he want? Power. Why does he want it? He’s evil.
I’d prefer to work in some more nuanced motivations. I’ve got this concept for the antagonist that’s rooted in a particular frustration I have with Star Wars, namely; just how inflexible the morality of the universe is.
It’s absolutely black and white, with its frustrating good vs. evil fairytale viewpoint. I know Star Wars is practically a fairytale, but…
I don’t remember which game it was, but there was a mission in one of the Star Wars where you’re playing as a trainee in the Jedi temple on, uh, Bodega or some other planet. You hear rumours of two other trainees that are in love, and they want to run away together. You’re given two choices: help them, or report them to Jedi Miss Trunchbull.
I, of course, helped them escape. Two students desperate to be together, in spite of a culture that said that wasn’t allowed? It spoke to my queer little heart. And the game gave me dark side points for it!
Yoda’s ghost floated from my computer. ‘Mm, bad person you are,’ he said. ‘A Jedi must not know love.’
‘What about Ki-Adi-Mundi and his four wives?’ I asked.
‘Talk about him, we do not,’ he said, before being eaten by my cat.
The Jedi order are a bunch of hypocrites. The whole ‘attachment leads to jealousy-> greed-> fear-> anger-> hate-> Dark Side’ business is a load of crap. Fear doesn’t necessarily lead to anger! I’m frightened every day and I’m not mad about it, I’m just tired and depressed.
But that’s because I don’t live in the Star Wars universe, see. My life isn’t dictated by fairytale morality. In-Universe, if you’re afraid, it always leads to anger, because the Force itself… uh, enforces that.
In the Mandalorian, there’s a scene where the Baby Yoda misinterprets an arm-wrestle as a threat to his Dad, and force chokes the other participant a bit (she’s fine). According to the rules, this puts the little frog closer to the Dark Side – a literal baby! – and means he’s more likely to do evil stuff again.
Because both sides of the Force have a will of their own, and the more in touch you are with the power, the more exposed you are to that will. The Jedi suppress their emotions, the Sith are ruled by them.
Normally, this would be the point the article would argue for the case of Grey Jedi, a force-wielder that finds balance and embraces neutrality. But Mari pointed out to me, as we watched Attack of those Clones, that the Jedi order are already neutral, in that cowardly ‘staying out of it’ fashion.
There’s even a quote from Count Dooku on the subject, though aimed specifically at Yoda:
The Jedi Order’s problem is Yoda. No being can wield that kind of power for centuries without becoming complacent at best or corrupt at worst. He has no idea that it’s overtaken him; he no longer sees all the little cumulative evils that the Republic tolerates and fosters, from slavery to endless wars, and he never asks, ‘Why are we not acting to stop this?’ Live alongside corruption for too long, and you no longer notice the stench. The Jedi cannot help the slaves of Tatooine, but they can help the slavemasters.
From Karen Traviss’ Clone Wars novelization
And he’s right! Karen Traviss is out for BLOOD!
So, back to the RPG. What if our antagonist felt the same way about the Force? They saw its influence, pushing people to either remain aloof from making a real difference or actively make things worse, and thought ‘this is evil’.
What if their goal was to destroy the Force itself, on humanitarian grounds?
Or maybe that wouldn’t work for the villain, because they’d obviously be CORRECT and anyone opposing them would be in the wrong.
From the journal of Vanivieve ir’Coralyn d’Sivis, with a small word of warning: today’s entry concerns wealth, police corruption, and a somewhat gruesome murder.
This whole affair began with us – that is to say, the version of us from our two years of lost time – performing some great service for the city of Sharn. I’m told it involved an orphanage.
It seems our lost-time-doppelgangers were something of a force to be reckoned with; alas, not a solitary one of us could hope to measure up to their prowess. Nor the channeling of that prowess toward the public good.
Nevertheless, when the stream of their accomplishments broke its banks, it would be dishonest if I said my companions and I were willing to swim against the current. And so, we found ourselves attending a gathering of highest society, the crème de la crème of Sharn’s Skyway.
Star Caller, a Fae Dragonborn of unbridled social sway and factor-500 sunny disposition, had thrown together the event as both a celebration, and a fundraiser; both of which were thanks to our efforts. I can perhaps imagine there might have been some collateral damage.
I am not equipped to write on the fashions present at the event. No doubt with Aster’s help, I could have a detailed account of the looks on display, with – I’m sure – several points deducted from myself for choosing an outfit more or less copied from last year’s Skyway Gala. But I don’t intend to trouble her with such trivialities. Everyone else is decompressing, in their own ways. This journal is mine.
Vanivieve’s Fancy Party Look
Upon our arrival, Star Caller greeted us with a warmth we hadn’t earned. Her dress left her shoulders bare; blue-purple skin setting her apart from the other guests. The external gills coming from her head trailed as though she moved through water, glowing with a soft, pink bioluminescence.
‘I’m so glad you could all make it,’ she beamed. ‘There’s been a few people that couldn’t attend, what with us having to relocate and reschedule!’
These amendments to the occasion came at the behest of Efir Van Quisse, a Police Captain moonlighting as a Security Guard for the night. It appeared that our Great Detective, Robyn, has had dealings with him in the past, so she went to make a few inquiries as to why such amendments were necessary. Mock elected to accompany her, I assume to loom in the background and crack her knuckles at dramatic moments. Or fluff up her tail; whatever it is Tabaxi do to appear threatening.
We made sure to keep our Sending Stones on their loudest settings, so we could communicate despite the crowds and music.
Security was fairly tight. While Robyn and Mock were acquainting themselves with the guards, we were doing the same at the coatroom. The party had a strict no-weapons policy, which included magical devices, staves, and even jewellery if it was too pointy. There was a Goblin complaining about having to check in a knife she’d brought. ‘I know, but this is not a weapon, it’s an heirloom,’ I heard her saying to the poor clerk. ‘I’m close friends with Star Caller herself, you know!’
We later learned, when Robyn reported back, that Van Quisse was operating under the idea that there was an incident about to happen. That DAASK, that anti-social gang of monsterfolk, was planning to make an appearance. And that Star Caller herself was wrapped up in some kind of scheme with them.
This made no sense at all; Star Caller just obviously wasn’t the gang type. That said… very little made sense to me at the time. I’d been attempting to calm the nerves a little, and in doing so found that the barman mixed a superb tequini.
The fire of the tequila – plus the heat of the chilli twist that was the garnish – certainly melted away the chill of my anxiety, and the cold sweat on my palms was soon replaced by a sort of garlic residue from the shrimp hors d’oeuvres I was shoveling down my gullet.
I may have embarrassed myself somewhat.
(A note on the hors d’oeuvres – there were at least eight different types of shrimp, ranging from simple tartlets with guacamole, to a blue-cheese stuffed offering that I couldn’t have said no to even if, say, a corpse were on the floor before me)
My companions had found some rumours going around the place. Many were relating to the apparent DAASK attack, though others mentioned some kind of incendiary device. This did set off alarm bells for each of us; I think not unreasonably, considering our recent altercation in a burning library. Of course, sometimes rumours are just that. Rumours.
It wasn’t just a party with rich people milling around a ballroom. For the fundraising angle, Star Caller had arranged a variety of games and events – a bake-off, broomstick races, dancing duels; and fireworks at 8pm. We participated in some of the events ourselves; Jacqueline in particular wanted to try a dancing duel. This will be relevant later on.
We heard more as the party went on. It wasn’t just to be an attack, but an assassination. And Star Caller wasn’t a member of it, she was the target! This we heard from an older woman with an incredible veneer of ruffles, who in turn had heard it from an uncomfortable-looking guard going through his orders with Van Quisse.
And this led to my trying, and failing, to persuade Star Caller to leave and get somewhere safe. We found her judging the entries of a cake-decorating contest, and she would not be convinced of the danger.
So, I chose to attempt something… less than ethical. Since my breakdown embracing of honesty as a guiding force, I’ve found my faith in Truth… rewarded. I can do things some conjurers would envy, and these abilities are only becoming stronger. But they’re new to me, and as with any new tool, I still look for excuses to put them to work.
I run the risk of being misconstrued here. I am not trying to defend my actions. I reasoned at the time that it was for her own protection; that I knew better the threat to her safety. Arrogance. I was correct about the danger, but that is irrelevant.
I Suggested that she get away from the party and find somewhere safe. I did this because I was unable to convince her without resorting to magic. Strange, is it not, how I go into a moral (and emetic) crisis if I speak anything but the truth, but I may attempt to subsume another’s will without so much as a hiccup?
At any rate, it didn’t work. I would love to excuse myself from guilt because the spell failed; after all, Attempted Murder carries a much milder punishment. But why? Should one who tries to kill another be excused because they are incompetent? I think not.
I don’t know if she even noticed the enchantment I’d woven into my words; if she did, she chose to spare me the shame of having to explain myself. That woman is better than any of us.
The fireworks display was when things went wrong.
I was mulling over ethics when we heard the scream, just as the last fireworks were fading in the sky. We sprinted back to the main hall, followed by what seemed to be the entire guest list, and luckily we arrived seconds before anyone else.
I should mention the incident with the dancing duels. As I mentioned, this was part of fundraising efforts similar to the cake decorating. When a duel began, a whole side-room full of participants – under some enchantment or other – would dance and dance away until they couldn’t any more. And whoever was the last one dancing was the winner.
Yes, it sounds like a punishment from the end of a fairytale, but the fatigue wasn’t anything that couldn’t be remedied with a short rest and a small cup of orange juice.
Several members of our group took part, and who should win but our resident Bard, Jacqueline. She may have the temperament of a baby duckling, but she can move with the grace of a swan. Of course she won.
Which led to her being whisked away to the Winner’s Room, where those victorious in each round of the dancing duels would wait, rest up, and convalesce with their citrus beverages until the final showdown.
Only it seems that Jacqueline never made it inside. We didn’t see her until the murder.
Star Caller was dead, her blood seeping between the boards of the main stage. An assistant of hers had been the one to scream, alerting the gathered guests to the body.
And to the person standing over it with a bloody knife. Jacqueline Rantique.
If you’ve read my previous entries in this book, you can see why this would be cause for additional alarm. Jacqueline’s ami jovial had struck again.
But that didn’t quite add up.
‘Drop the knife,’ I heard Aster snarl. Jacqueline did so without hesitation.
Straight away I’d dropped my bag and found myself sprinting for the assistant, who stood with her mouth open in horror. Damage control, I thought. Someone else in our group had a similar idea – a cloud of fog filled the room, and I barely made it to the assistant before I’d lost sight of her.
‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘You need to tell the guards what you’ve seen. But-‘ and here I found myself feeling my way around the truth, like prodding at a sore tooth with my tongue – ‘It’s vitally important that you don’t mention the woman you saw until we return to you. We know her. She’s part of the investigation.’
See? That wasn’t even a lie by omission.
Luckily, the assistant seemed to be in shock, and was mostly just pleased to have a clear voice to direct her. When the fog cleared, and the guards arrived, Jacqueline had been bundled into a room behind the stage.
She didn’t remember anything, because nothing that simple could have happened. She’d been sent to the winners’ room, then the next thing she remembered she heard a thump and saw a corpse at her feet. The knife was already in her hand when she came to.
Now, it would appear that our ami jovial would be the prime suspect, would it not? But as I said before, that didn’t add up, and for one simple reason.
We knew the results of that thing’s work. There was too much of Star Caller left for it to have been him.
So whodunnit?
Being heroic guests of honour at this party, there were certain privileges when it came to events such as murder. Plus, we had a well-renowned detective in our midst.
Le jeu était en pied.
That, uh, doesn’t translate especially well to Common.
The first thing Robyn wanted to do was to inspect the body. Van Quisse and his lackeys were crawling all over the stage, with the former sneering at anyone who seemed unsettled. ‘Get a grip, man!’ he barked at one particularly shaken officer. ‘It’s only a body. You’d think it was your first murder.’
In retrospect, I’m interpreting that comment differently.
Van Quisse’s brusque demeanour paired well with his stature. He was imposing, in a powder keg sort of way; a barrel filled with the potential for sudden, explosive violence.
His eyes narrowed when Robyn approached, though his glare did little to bore through her noble background and quiet competence. He simply stewed as she inspected the wounds, matching them to the knife, before she stated that the angle of entry meant the assailant must have been someone taller than Star Caller.
Van Quisse guffawed at this. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Well, I happen to have already found the culprit, and unless she has a pair of stilts…’
He revealed a goblin, looking very uncomfortable in the fine surroundings – though that may have been more to do with the handcuffs digging into her wrists.
We’d seen her earlier at the cloakroom, complaining that it was an heirloom, not a weapon. The knife did indeed have a ceremonial quality to it. It was gold or at least gold plated, with so many sharply-cut jewels embedded in the handle that it might have hurt the wielder more than any potential victim. The blade was also about as sharp as a cheese knife. It was a sloppy tool for murder.
Plus, some goblin masquerading as a guest was altogether too obvious. Especially with the ‘DAASK attack’ rumours, that, now we thought about it, we had first heard from Van Quisse himself.
This time I felt less ethically dubious when using magic, considering Van Quisse was potentially covering up a murder through his assumptions. So I cast Zone of Truth, and I asked if he had concrete proof that the goblin – Lady Sucrocene – was responsible for the murder. He didn’t, of course.
Robyn saw a prime opportunity. Under the compulsion of the Zone of Truth, Van Quisse struggled to deflect the weight of her inquisition.
‘Why are you so quick to blame this Goblin?’
‘I don’t like goblins,’ spat Van Quisse. ‘So it’s an excuse to clear out one with ideas above its station.’ He could feel the spell affecting him, and struggled against its bounds.
‘So you admit she didn’t do it.’
‘Fine.’
Robyn pressed on. ‘Do have a lead on the actual culprit?’
‘You can’t force me to cooperate.’
‘Why? What are you hiding? Are you the one responsible for the murder of Star Caller?’ she asked.
‘How dare you accuse me!’
‘Answer the question, Van Quisse. Did you kill Star Caller?‘
‘No,’ Van Quisse said, with a grim smile. ‘I did not.’
Now, did you see what happened there?
I’m quite an expert at the difference between honest truth and technical truth, and it nearly slipped past even me. Van Quisse wasn’t lying, no… but Robyn hadn’t quite asked the same question the second time around.
But now he was stonewalling us. The fact that he knew he could only speak the truth just made him refuse to speak at all. Robyn would ask another question, and he would simply say ‘I already told you I didn’t kill her.’
So we made our way to questioning others. We learned from the clerk we’d seen with Sucrocene earlier that the cloakroom safe with all the confiscated weaponry in wasn’t actually locked; it was more for show than anything. So really, anyone could have waltzed in and took the knife.
We learned that when the judge of the dancing duels took Jacqueline back to the Winners’ Room, he didn’t actually stick around to see if she’d gone in, as there was the next round to manage.
We eventually tracked down Star Caller’s assistant – the one who’d found the body – and gently pressed for more information on what she’d seen.
‘It was… he didn’t have a face,’ she wailed. ‘It was horrible.’ Seeing the body and the figure standing over it, she’d looked around to try and find help. When she’d turned back, the faceless man was gone, and had been replaced by our friend Jacqueline.
So, our ami jovial really had been present, which was why Jacqueline had the blank spot in her memory. Fortunately, the assistant hadn’t connected the two.
‘He looked right at me, and he said something,’ she told us, staring into the cup of tea she’d been given. ‘He said… uh. He said to “tell her I got her a present”, and he just… patted his pocket. I don’t know who he meant, though? Maybe the girl that got there afterwards?’
We quickly excused ourselves after hearing this, and made our way back to the room behind the stage – our sort of base in the investigation.
‘Do you even have pockets?’ asked Mock.
Jacqueline reached into her jacket, and slowly, slowly retrieved a slim book from within. Its title was written in gold foil, all calligraphy and heavy swirls. ‘It’s a romance,’ she said, leafing through the first few pages.
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘Huh,’ everyone else agreed.
They, like me, had assumed it’d be a clue of some kind.
‘Well, maybe it is a clue,’ said Aster. ‘What if it was taken from the murderer?’
So, a plan came together. We’d make an announcement – could the owner of this book please collect it, we found it (technically it was truth, so I shouldn’t get that urge to sabotage things I get if someone is lying on my behalf). And we’d watch for reactions in the crowd; the beefier members of the group guarding the exits, coordinating through Sending Stones.
In the end, we got lucky.
It turned out that the book had nothing to do with it, but when Jacqueline got on stage, and Robyn had the guards gather everyone in the main room, the murderer got jumpy. It was Aster that spotted him; I couldn’t actually see over the bannister we were hiding behind.
It was the guard we’d seen Van Quisse barking orders at. His head was spinning, looking for ways out we hadn’t covered. His eyes darted to his Captain, silently pleading for support, but Van Quisse only shrugged at him with a smile on his face.
He made a break for it, bursting from the milling guests around him like a blast from a siege staff. He was heading for the stage, bulldozing his way through the crowd at a full sprint. I realised, too late, there was a trapdoor he was aiming for.
Then Robyn stepped out from stage right, and the guard was spinning in the air before landing hard with his arms pinned behind his back.
Robyn’s voice was patient. ‘You, sir, are under arrest.’
We’d finally moved Van Quisse to action. He marched up as we regrouped onstage, his massive frame flanked by slightly less-imposing officers.
‘You lot are causing a scene, you know,’ he said, slowly. ‘I’ll have you release my Corporal there, and you’ll be coming with us to explain just what the hell you’re playing at. From behind bars.’
Robyn pulled the Corporal to his feet. ‘You can’t cover this up, Van Quisse,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ Van Quisse’s reply was much softer now, so the crowd couldn’t hear. ‘And who are you going to report it to? We look after our own, you know.’
‘Yes, I’m quite aware of that fact.’
She nodded to Jacqueline, on the other side of the stage. Then she leapt backwards, pulling the guard along with her, down the route he’d used after the murder to make his getaway; the route he’d been hoping to use again. The trapdoor made the thump that Jacqueline had heard when she first came to.
Before Van Quisse and his lackeys could pursue, Jacqueline hit him with a spell I’d never seen before – Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. Van Quisse doubled over, laughing that booming laugh of his, and when the other officers turned back to see what was wrong, Jacqueline dropped the Laughter and enthralled them with bardic music.
A haunting tune encircled the stage. The guards, stood and listened with an air of intense melancholy. I wasn’t even a target of the magic itself, and it still filled me with this delicate ennui, like I was lost in the woods…
We pulled Van Quisse below the stage to join his Corporal. Without Jacqueline’s ensorcelled music, the other guards woke up and began hammering at the trapdoor – both Shiira and Mock using all their strength to keep it closed against their assault.
I reached out through my faith again, too desperate now to even consider ethics, and cast another Zone of Truth around myself, Van Quisse, and his Corporal. We needed them to confess! But even if I could compel the truth, I couldn’t compel cooperation.
‘Do we just need to persuade them to talk?’ asked Jacqueline, stepping toward our captives. ‘I can help.’
‘Jacqueline, I don’t think pulling off your own face and turning them into steak tartare will exonerate us,’ I said, without thinking.
She looked hurt. ‘I said I can help. Not Jeeves.’
‘Jeeves?’
She ignored me, putting her panpipes to her lips. A single note flowed from her as she cast Charm Person on them both. ‘Alright,’ she said, sounding almost like a school teacher. ‘Do you want to explain what happened?’
‘The Captain made me kill Star Caller, and he was going to frame some monster!’ said the Corporal. ‘He said if I didn’t do it I’d lose my job. I’ve got a family to feed!’
Van Quisse interrupted, the Charm Person only prompting him to treat us with respect, not his patsy. ‘Either that or I’d toss you in a cell, you sniveling maggot.’ He turned to Jacqueline and began chatting away like a cab driver spouting conspiracy theories.
‘See, they call Star Caller’s work “advocacy” but everybody knows it’s a setup to replace normal humans with monsters from Droaam. Can you imagine living in a city like that? You’d have DAASK, or worse, on every street, in every window! And then what? Riots is what. People will die.
‘So yeah, she had to go. You can’t sort someone like that out through legal methods, not when it’s all people like her that are really in charge. Lucky for Sharn, I’m willing to protect our way of life.’
He grinned, all self-satisfied. I noticed then that the hammering at the trapdoor had stopped.
‘I think that’s quite enough,’ said Robyn, handing Aster’s sending stone back to her. Van Quisse’s confession had been broadcast through Robyn’s own stone, lying above on the stage itself, still set to the loudest volume.
Van Quisse’s smile faded as the Charm Person wore off and he realised what he’d said. He’d proved himself much more of a monster than those he was so afraid of. It’s ironic, especially seeing as his actions will likely push moderates in the opposite direction.
Until all this, I would have counted myself among those moderates. Now, I’m… thinking quite hard about my views on DAASK, and Droaam itself. I don’t want to be on the same side Van Quisse was.
Droaam, as a nation, isn’t recognised by the Treaty of Thronehold, no. But neither is Cyre, and nobody seems to discredit its natives as thieves and pillagers (though the tragedy of the Mourning may have something to do with that). Despite Van Quisse’s insistence, public sentiment on those from Droaam skews negative. The best they can hope for is “noble savage” or “criminal pretending to be respectable”.
I’d never really thought about it before.
And that’s where I assumed it would end. Van Quisse might have the backing of a corrupt police force, but he’d been heard gloating by a whole room of influential socialites and Dragonmarked House representatives. He’d be taken away by his own men, and they’d be forced into following the law at pain of funding cuts.
But the evening had one last thing in store. As we emerged from the cellar, we found that the entire guestlist had been knocked unconscious, sprawled out across the floor like a fallen tray of gingerbread people. I saw Aster shudder at the sight of it, but looking back it may have been more at all the glamerweave getting creased.
A figure in a heavy cloak stooped over Star Caller’s remains. Power thrummed in the air.
We rushed at it, determined to keep it from whatever its plans were for the body of our friend. But whatever magic it had at its disposal was far beyond anything we could handle – I was frozen in place, as were my companions save for Robyn and Mock. Somehow they resisted the hold, and flanked the figure, though it noticed Robyn’s advance and kept its guard up.
‘Please. I’m not here to cause harm,’ said a feminine voice from within the cloak. ‘Just trust me.’
And the power in the air coalesced. Mock shot forward to interrupt, but Robyn herself stepped in and deflected her falling hammer. She must have recognised the person before them.
And in the silent ballroom, Star Caller drew in a ragged breath after laying lifeless on the stage for hours.
Zagorda of the Third Eye removed her hood and helped Star Caller to her feet. I recognised her too, now. She was one of three rulers of Droaam, a Night Hag, a being of such arcane potency that not even the combined might of the five nations had been able to dethrone her. And she and Star Caller were chatting like old friends at a school reunion.
Zagorda thanked us for our assistance in finding her friend’s killer, and gave us a business card, saying we seemed competent enough to warrant her doing so. If we were in need of work, or in need of aid, we may contact her.
Zagorda’s Card, courtesy of Sami Gibbs
She also… “dealt with” Van Quisse and his accomplice. I hope that just means he’s in prison.
But with that, the party was over. Zagorda had modified the memory of the collected guests, having them believe that there’d been an attempt at Star Caller’s life, but nothing had succeeded. They all knew Van Quisse had been responsible, though I later heard some of the guards wondering why his punishment was so severe for just attempted murder.
‘Should one who tries to kill another be excused because they are incompetent?’ I asked them. ‘I think not.’
Please. I’m allowed to be a tiny bit smug, I think.
Before she disappeared, Zagorda thanked us again, and promised she’d leave our memories of the evening intact, but I still can’t help but feel paranoid. She was too real, in a metaphysical sort of way. Like she was the only letter penned with enough ink, and the rest of us were pages of scratchy grey indentations instead of words.
Her card is a discomforting weight hidden in my journal. I hope we never want to follow up on it, but that isn’t just up to me. I keep writing “we”, you know?
I was shown several times tonight that I don’t always know best; whether that’s about the severity of danger, or getting people to talk, or the number of hors d’oeuvres to eat before they make you sick.
So, I suppose I’ll have to talk to everyone else about it, instead of just my journal.
It was easier to park when the three arrived for their night shift. A smattering of cars still loitered near the lights of the entrance, and Nora, Merlin, and Ursa marched into it like alien abductees.
‘Hey, if we find the ghost, we can leave early, right?’ asked Ursa.
‘Oh yes, that’s the law,’ said Nora, without so much as a smirk.
Brian was waiting for them in the staff room, as agreed. He’d sat himself directly beneath the damp patch on the ceiling, positing himself as someone apparently fine with being dripped on. This could be taken as a metaphor. ‘Righto, good to see you three,’ he said. ‘Heston’s here as well, but no sign of Monty just yet.’
Alkahest, never one to discard an expressive pose, sat once more with his feet on the table. ‘Brian is referring to Montparnasse,’ he offered.
The loss prevention manager let out a hearty chuckle. ‘Never used to have all these weird names when I were a lad!’ He’d never been a particularly observant man, which was something of a detriment to his performance at work.
‘Ha ha ha,’ said Alkahest. He didn’t laugh. ‘This guy. I swear.’
Nora looked from one man to the other, and promptly decided her team had to escape this awkward staffroom purgatory. ‘Why don’t we three do a bit of a sweep through the showrooms? We can, uh, check if anyone suspicious is trying to hide in a wardrobe.’
Brightening at the prospect of no longer being in the room, Merlin chimed in as well. ‘The old SMÅSTAD stowaway.’ He’d made a conscious effort to familiarise himself with the Ikea catalogue before their shift. ‘Good idea. You two stay here and wait for Montparnasse.’
*
Ursa held out both pairs of the mind-shielding headphones when they got outside.
‘Before that creep shows up,’ she said. ‘It’d be smart for you to put these on. I think I’ll be safe if I set up some mental defenses to keep him out of my head.’
Merlin reached up to take the black pair as Ursa began to murmur under her breath, ‘One maca two maca three macarena, four maca five maca something Pasadena…‘
He let them hang around his neck, more an accessory than anything functional.
Nora’s hand hesitated over the remaining pair of headphones. They were white with pastel-turquoise accents, and had fur lining that made them look more like earmuffs. Oh, and they also had fuzzy, light-up cat ears on top.
‘Tell you what,’ said Nora. ‘You keep hold of them.’
‘Heeeeeey, maca… Really? Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. They, uh…’ They didn’t fit her aesthetic. ‘They wouldn’t go over my hat, and I can’t take it off because, um, I have hat hair. You should definitely keep them.’
Ursa slotted them over her ears, unfazed or oblivious to Nora’s less-than-graceful lie. They did look cute.
Their sweep of the shop floor was to follow the route a regular shopper would take, travelling up an escalator that deposited them in the first of the showrooms.
Considering it was 20 minutes before the store was due to close, it wasn’t exactly strange that there were no customers. But even so, it had that air of kenopsia you find in empty hospitals or shopping centres. The three of them, quite unconsciously, huddled together as they hiked the showroom trail.
Until Nora stopped. ‘Something isn’t right,’ she said, and for maybe half a second her eyes flashed with a little ring of code, her Eldritch Sight coming on.
The section of the store marked ‘Living Rooms’ was designed to mimic the real deal, with a variety of sofas, and armchairs, and coffee tables and bookshelves, and lamps and rugs and cushions, and even tasteful, soulless art on the walls. The effect was completed with fireplaces that weren’t for purchase, and windows and doors to nowhere.
It was one such door that had caught Nora’s attention, though nothing about it registered as magical according to her Eldritch Sight. But it was odd somehow.
‘Is this… crooked?’ Bit sloppy for a showroom, if so. ‘See? It tilts to the left a bit.’
She indicated the top of the door frame, which was indeed crooked, tilting to the right. There was a gap of just a few centimetres.
‘Your other left,’ said Merlin.
Nora just blinked at the door. She reached up to feel the gap; there was an intermittent breeze coming through the crack. And the door was crooked on the left again. She felt it move.
Like it was shifting in slumber. Like it was breathing.
‘Haha, living rooms,’ said Ursa, with something of a manic air. ‘We should move on.’
The next area, ‘Offices’, was much the same – fabricated rooms to show off Ikea’s enhancement of your home and lifestyle. This one had a variety of desks and spinning chairs. Each desk had an approximation of an iMac on it, eliciting a snort of derision from Merlin.
In one corner, a young couple – a vanilla-human man and woman in maybe their early 20s – were admiring the plane of an ARKELSTORP.
‘Excuse me,’ called Nora. ‘I’m afraid it’s nearly our closing time. If you could make your way to an exit, that’d be…’ she struggled with a dusty corner of her brain marked Friendly Language for a moment, eventually settling on, ‘swell.’
‘Oh we’re just having trouble choosing between this one or a MALM!’ said the woman.
The man looked disgruntled, and checked his phone.
‘It’s true that the MALM is more affordable, but the ARKELSTORP has that natural wood finish that I think makes a place feel more authentic,’ said Merlin. ‘It’s more unique,’ he added, when he noticed the others had turned to stare at him.
‘That’s just what I’ve been thinking!’ said the woman. Her boyfriend/husband/brother/whatever checked his phone again, huffed out another sigh, then put it back in his pocket.
‘Well, unfortunately for a larger item like that, you’ll need to head down to the warehouse,’ Nora continued. ‘So… do that.’
Ursa watched the couple’s retreating backs, eyes narrowed. Nora watched her in turn. ‘You…’ Another trip to the Friendly Language corner – ‘…ok?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I don’t know if he was just doing stereotypical man things, but I suppose I’ll find out once I steal his phone.’
Nora watched as a spectral, pink Mage Hand shot forward from Ursa, towards the man’s back pocket. It was much too fast for any sort of pickpocketing finesse, because on another layer of reality, someone had just rolled a 1.
Nora moved without thinking. If she was going to get killed tonight, she didn’t want it to be because of an arcane slap on an Auditor’s ass.
The man straightened up as he felt the probing grasp of the Mage Hand, and turned to see a slightly-out-of-breath Nora with a rictus grin on her face. ‘M-may I help you?’ she choked out.
The couple left more quickly after that.
*
The hairs in Merlin’s nostrils detected something as they entered the ‘Kitchens’ section in their sweep. It wasn’t too strong, but it smelled like… well, like a bin bag full of rotten food. He checked his companions’ faces to see if they’d noticed too.
Nora looked uncomfortable. She might have noticed, or that might just be her resting face. Ursa absolutely hadn’t noticed; she was bopping away with her headphones loud enough to block her sense of smell. Merlin could hear the slightly muffled music as if they were on his own head:
‘…Don’t you worry about my boyfriend He’s a boy whose name is Vitorino I don’t want him, couldn’t stand him He was no good so I…‘
Ursa pantomimed along with the laughter on the song. So no help there. Merlin broke off from the other two without so much as a word, and made like a breakfast cereal toucan.
His nose led him to one of the fridges, a built-in model KÖLDGRADER. The smell had gotten more pronounced as he’d closed in on it, with individual notes of rot and plastic and something effluent, and it was a near physical presence by the time he found the source. Gingerly, he reached for the handle.
A squelching sound greeted him as he wrenched open the door. Threads of something sticky stretched and parted as it moved, like melted cheese. The stench threatened to make him hurl. From an olfactory standpoint, that might actually have improved things.
Inside the fridge was the usual faire for a kitchen showroom: a selection of empty bottles and tupperware containers, and an assortment of plastic toy ingredients – chicken legs, vegetables, blocks of cheese, pots of marmalade; all to illustrate that fridges could be used to store food and drink.
And all of it was carpeted with mold. The plastic food had decayed as if it were meat, dripping with some foul fluid that seeped down the fridge’s walls and spilled out towards Merlin’s low-heel lace-ups. He took a step back. Flies buzzed around his vision, crawling in and out of the bubbling plastic pores of the ‘food’.
With an effort of will and surgical focus, he summoned up a Mage Hand of his own and extracted a plastic jar of jam. The fridge’s door closed with the soft sound of some crust being broken. He ignored it. Instead, he brought the jar to a nearby sink, and ran it under the cold tap.
‘What the fuck kind of haunting is this,’ asked Nora, joining him. She wore a similar expression of grim nausea.
‘Its nature eludes me. But it’s somehow made inorganic matter decompose like a corpse would.’ Merlin’s Mage Hand held its jar to the light. The contents were black and slimy. ‘You’re the one with experience of this.’
Nora looked from him, to the jar, and back again. ‘No, I’m not.’ Her eyes flashed, and her brow furrowed. ‘Nothing about this is registering as magical either. I don’t know how to explain it.’
‘Hmm,’ said Merlin. The jar had clouded over and begun to ooze with ichor again. He set it on the side and turned back to the fridge itself. ‘Perhaps if we–‘
Tinny music filled the air. Do you believe in life after love? I can feel something inside me say, I really don’t think you’re strong enough, no!
‘Hey, what are you guys lookin’ at?’ asked Ursa. ‘You gonna eat some toy food?’
Merlin turned to see her holding up the plastic pot of jam, the bristling mildew on it rolling in streams down her arm. He felt himself retch.
Ursa frowned at him. ‘It’s just plastic, Merlin.’ She inspected the little toy’s label, which read SYLT LINGON, and the crude plastic approximation of berries through the clear plastic, before noticing Merlin’s expression.
A light came on over Nora’s head. ‘Wait. What does this look like to you, Ursa?’
‘Uh. A fridge.’
‘No, the things inside it.’
‘Toy food? Not real food; do not eat.’
‘Nothing gross about it?’
‘Well, not if you’re just looking? I don’t know what it’d taste like.’
The fridge filled with horror and decay was something only Nora and Merlin were experiencing. Ursa, on the other hand, saw her companions apparently terrified of plastic food.
Nora drew her gun. ‘Whatever it is, it’s targeting me and Merlin. Ursa, you might need to take point.’
‘Oh,’ said Ursa. ‘I’ll, uh, pick a more appropriate playlist then.’
*
Ursa led the way into the ‘Bedrooms’ section of the store, with Nora and Merlin bringing up the rear.
The whole section was dark, lit only by one or two bedside lamps that flickered on and off like dying braincells. And hovering in the centre, a slightly closer patch of darkness… the specter itself.
It was coming closer. Nora aimed down her pistol’s sights, but couldn’t get a clean shot in the shadowy room. Merlin snapped his fingers, to conjure up a Firebolt to lob at it, but somehow the magic wouldn’t come.
Ursa wandered past them toward the sound of snickering coming from behind an ottoman. The lights were still on. The room was quiet. Merlin and Nora were staring wild-eyed at nothing in particular.
The figure behind the ottoman hugged its knees and tried not to laugh. When Ursa prodded it with her foot, its emerald grin quickly drained away.
Merlin and Nora heard a familiar voice say ‘Oh, you caught me then,’ as the lights came back on and the ghostly thing they’d been looking at turned out to be a HOVNÄS floor lamp.
Montparnasse was eyeing Ursa as if she were a stubborn stain. ‘How come you weren’t affected? I was aiming at all three of you.’
Before Ursa could answer, a black mass hammered down upon him and stuffed the barrel of a gun into his mouth. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ growled Nora.
‘Ic waff jus a pank,’ said Montparnasse around the pistol.
‘Well, nobody is laughing.’ Merlin was right next to him too now. His Firebolt was working just fine now, and he held one close enough to singe one of Montparnasse’s dreads.
‘No, but seriously, how come I can’t read your mind?’ asked Montparnasse, when things had calmed down a bit. He glanced over at Merlin. ‘Ohhhhh, the headphones?’ he asked. ‘Why aren’t you two wearing any?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Nora, wiping spittle from her gun.
‘Ah, no need to explain. You just thought about it so I get the picture.’
Nora scowled at him.
‘Are you limited to reading only surface level thoughts?’ asked Merlin, a note of curiosity in his tone.
‘If I’m not concentrating, yeah. And if I do try and look deeper, usually people can feel it. So surface stuff is what I’m usually overhearing. Like how you were panicking before!’
This time Merlin scowled, and sedulously put his headphones on.
Montparnasse just kept talking. ‘Well, I say overhearing, I could turn it off if I wanted to. But why would I limit myself like that? Psionic power isn’t too common among the fair folk, so Queen Titania took a notice of me, even though I’m originally from the Winter Court. She knows I’m loyal, but she thinks I don’t take things seriously enough. This is my chance to prove just how much I can do for her. Maybe I could even join the Royal Guard!’
None of those with him were more than half-listening. Ursa’s playlist had moved on, her attention spirited away on the Vengabus. Merlin was stewing in his plans for revenge. Nora, without any headphones, made a mental note to see if her Patron could provide any thought-shielding in future.
Montparnasse stopped mid-sentence. ‘Nora. What the hell is that?’
‘What?’ asked Nora.
‘What?’ asked Merlin and Ursa, at the same time.
‘That thing you just thought about!’ Montparnasse was panicking, much more disturbed than when a gun was in his mouth. ‘The thing on your computer. Talking to you through your wrist. I don’t understand; what is that?!’
Nora’s thoughts quickly moved to violence, and all the ways she could shut him up.
Realising he’d hit a wall, Montparnasse switched to pleading with the others, though he couldn’t read their minds. ‘Listen, something’s not right. She doesn’t even know what it is herself, but she knows it isn’t normal! And she’s just fine accepting power from it? Ask her about it!’
But nobody gave him a response. The tannoy interrupted them. ‘Attention shoppers: the time is now 10pm and the store is closed. Please make your way to the exits. Thank you for shopping with us at Ikea Middlemarch.’
*
Nobody asked Nora about what Montparnasse had said on their way to the staff room. Nobody asked when it was agreed that the three of them would sweep the warehouse area while Alkahest, Montparnasse, and Brian himself would tackle the showrooms.
It didn’t seem like the right time.
While Ursa and Nora trawled through the boxes for any potential remains they could torch to deal with the haunting, Merlin found a convenient plug and booted up his laptop. Yes, they’d have to check the boxes to be thorough, but the apparent thousands of routers were preying on his mind. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was one of those hauntings where the house had been built on an ancient burial ground. In which case, the solution would be to… burn the Ikea down.
He negotiated with the local council’s website, which looked like it had been optimised for Mosaic 1.0, and unearthed the paperwork that had been submitted for planning permission to build the store.
‘It’s odd,’ he explained, when Nora and Ursa returned. ‘The floorplan is nonstandard for an Ikea, and you can see here that it’s been built around a central courtyard or something – this big empty space here – that the architect stated was a ‘place of outstanding natural beauty’ he wanted to preserve.’
‘I didn’t see anything like that,’ said Nora.
‘Right, because it isn’t real. Just page after page of the architect talking about his ‘inspiration’, and nothing in the real world to have prompted it. Anyway, did you two find anything?’
Ursa held up a phone that wasn’t hers. Its background appeared to be a smiling couple, who they’d last seen in the Offices section. ‘Just this,’ said Ursa, swiping to show hundreds of texts all reading:
help us
Then a single one that read:
FOUND YOU.
And the lights went off. After maybe half a second of terror, they remembered that they’d been told this would happen at 11pm on the dot. Nothing had ‘found them’. It was fine.
A scream came from the direction of the showrooms.
‘Well, this is why we’re here,’ said Nora, and took off running.
Sprinting along the reverse of their earlier route, the three skidded to a halt in the ‘Bedrooms’ section. A body lay in the centre of the path.
‘Oh, no, Montparnasse,’ said Merlin, clinically.
‘What a terrible shame,’ Nora agreed.
Ursa went over to inspect him. ‘I don’t think he’s dead, you know.’ There was a sort of hum in the room, just off the cusp of audibility. Sometimes, magic came to her as sound, and the air around Montparnasse still held the last fading note of a lullaby.
She knew that particular note. Something had cast Sleep.
Merlin took the opportunity to rifle through the unconscious Fae’s pockets, though all he found was a wallet. It contained about £20, a visa listing Montparnasse’s home as ‘London, UK, Earth#C0027’, and a picture of him in some kind of renaissance-era military uniform next to a tall woman with opalescent hair down to the floor. She was looking at him with a great deal of fondness.
‘I think I can wake him up.’ Ursa waggled her fingers in a mystical sort of way, then bopped Montparnasse on the nose, just hard enough to hurt.
‘Owgh!’ he said, shooting upright. ‘Oh god, where did it go?!’
‘Calm down,’ said Nora. ‘Where did what go?’
‘I, uh, I… don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember? It knocked you unconscious.’
Montparnasse had the decency to look embarrassed. ‘Actually, I did that myself. See, whatever it was just burst out and snatched up Brian, and Alkahest took off running after it, but it had really affected me – maybe because of my psionics – and I could feel my sanity slipping… so I put myself to sleep and wiped it from my memory. And now I’m safe!’
He took in the three looming over him. Well, Merlin wasn’t really capable of a loom, but it’s the thought that counts. ‘Mostly safe, anyway,’ he finished.
‘Hmm. You’re coming with us.’ Nora pointed her gun at him, as a kind of rhetoric aid.
‘I’d really rather keep out of the way, if that’s alright,’ Montparnasse tried.
‘After the shit you pulled before? Nope, you’re staying where I can see you. Move.’
The four of them made their way backward through the showroom, more slowly now that there was an unknown monster that apparently ate both sanity and loss prevention managers.
Within minutes, they’d come to the very first section, ‘Living Rooms.’ Merlin was the first to notice the visible cloud of his breath in the sudden cold.
Each and every one of the ‘doors to nowhere’ was open. Crude stone corridors stretched out beyond them, dwindling to single points in the distance like diagrams on 3-point perspective.
All except the one door Nora had thought was crooked earlier. This was firmly closed.
Obviously, this was the door of most note. It’s human nature to be most interested in the one route sealed off to you. And it’s in a D&D party’s nature to spend at least 30 minutes trying to get a door to open.
After force, tools, Knock spells, and trying to somehow fit behind the doorframe had all failed, it was decided they’d need to try one of the others. But not without sending a canary first.
‘Go on then,’ said Nora, gesturing with her gun.
‘You know I’m from Outside, right?’ said Montparnasse. ‘That thing might not even hurt me.’
‘Oh, do you know what kind of bullets are in it?’
Montparnasse hazarded a glance at her thoughts.
Nora nodded at his dawning horror. ‘That’s right. Cold iron.’
Montparnasse sucked in a breath, then fled through the nearest door. He’d disappeared from sight by the time the others looked, despite the apparent lack of bends in the tunnel.
‘That’s not exactly heartening,’ said Merlin. Nevertheless, they had a job to do.
Eventually, the tunnel came to a T junction. It had narrowed down such that they were now in single file, Ursa leading the way again – she turned right. A slight breeze had been coming from that direction, and she was rewarded when the tunnel opened up.
They’d come out into a vast cavern, the ceiling so high in the dark that it couldn’t be seen. Far above, thousands of wireless routers were affixed to that ceiling, their lights blinking like synthetic stars.
Shelves towered around them, each filled with boxes filled with flat-pack furniture. There was a sign above, like the ones that had been in the warehouse and showrooms, only hanging from massive lengths of chain like a gothic pendulum. It read ‘Offices’. In the distance, above the shelves, another could be seen that read ‘Panic Rooms’.
‘I don’t remember seeing panic room stuff in the warehouse,’ said Ursa.
They weren’t in the warehouse. They were in the labyrinth.
That’s probably the most lukewarm take imaginable, but it’s true. You have to act as narrator, supporting cast, rulebook, judge, game engine, researcher, tactician, and even psychiatrist, if your players have woven their personal trauma into their characters (which they absolutely will have).
Plus you have to be ready for questions like ‘What happens if I drink the slime?’ or ‘Can I try to join the Rat King’s hivemind if I tie my hair to it?’ and you can’t even hit your players because there’s a pandemic on because that would be unethical.
But then… is it really that hard? Sure, you’re responsible for everything in the world of the game, and you have to plan what’s going to happen (or at least get good at improv), and you’re the one that’s desperately searching through your books for a table of slime flavours… but it isn’t as hard as everyone seems to think it is.
It’s simple if you know the tricks.
I mean, all you did was roll on a chart in the book. All you did was ask what the players wanted to do, and then let them do it. In that fight where the Druid did 100+ damage in a single round? Yeah, it was cool, and everyone remembers it even months later, but you forgot the lightning resistance and now you feel like you cheated them!
When your players are saying thanks for a fun session, all you can think is: They wouldn’t be thanking me if they knew what a shambles it was. But you can’t say that out loud! Just thank them for being good players! After all, if they knew the mess that had been going on behind the scenes, that’d ruin the illusion of competence you’ve set up, maybe forever.
This is the Magician’s Guilt.
Magician’s Guilt is a term I first heard in a conversation with the owner of my Friendly Local Game Store. He’d usually set up at a little table near the back and try to cure my psychological issues whenever I went in (In the years since the store closed, I believe he’s actually gone on to become a therapist. Good to know I was an appetizer).
Anyway, we were talking about being the Dungeon Master vs being a player. I’d lobbed out the same analogies I always do:
‘Running a game is all about spinning plates, but the plates are behind the DM screen. Your players don’t realise how hard you’re working to keep everything spinning unless they hear one break.’
Or my favourite: ‘The DM is like a swan in a pond, looking all serene and graceful above the water, but underneath their legs are kicking furiously to stay afloat, and also they just want to eat some bread.’
When he didn’t look sufficiently mind-blown by my tepid insights, I ended up asking, ‘Do you know what I mean?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s Magician’s Guilt.’
He explained it thus: there’s no such thing as magic. The magician knows this. The audience knows this. Therefore, the magician must trick their audience.
But because the magician knows how the trick works, and the audience does not, the magician begins to see themselves as some unscrupulous deceiver.
Sure, close up magic seems hard, but really all you’re doing is distracting them with patter while you palm a card. And they thought they’d drawn one at random, but you’d made sure it was the twelve of clubs or whatever with a false shuffle.
It’s simple if you know the tricks.
He told me he feels this guilt so strongly that it sometimes impacts his ability to run a game. And I knew exactly what he meant; there are times I’ve had to call off a session because all I had prepared was a table of random encounters and my players would see right through it and feel cheated.
‘So how do you get past that feeling?’ I asked.
‘I wish I had a solution,’ he said. And the conversation moved on. But, like most of my conversations with the guy, it stuck with me (I’m writing a post about it months later).
If you look into Magician’s Guilt as discussed by actual magicians, their principle concern is not with the guilt itself, but with its impact on their performance; on their ability to lie and say ‘this is an ordinary £5 note’.
Their solution is simply to practice. According to close-up magician and Magic Circle Member Ben Williams, ‘People don’t really know what a magician has in their pockets… You can always justify it by telling yourself that you cannot give someone the wonderful experience of magic without a little white lie here and there!’
Like I said before, the audience knows magic isn’t real. But they still show up. It’s irrelevant what is or isn’t going on up the magician’s sleeve, what matters is that moment when the magician asks ‘is this your card?’
Chances are, the players can see the swan’s legs kicking away, at least some of the time. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not about the tricks. It’s about the fact that you learned them well enough to focus on the show itself.
When I’m a player and I think the DM is pulling names from a table, I don’t think ‘Bah, look at them needing to roll, I know how it’s done’. I marvel at how they implement the results of the roll into the story.
Look. I get wanting to make your games look effortless. Back when I started DMing, more than a decade ago now, I actually used to pretend I hadn’t prepared anythingat all, to try and fool my players into thinking I was better than I really was, and maybe have them look past my mistakes.
Nowadays, I’ve grown past that way of thinking, at least most of the time. Being the DM is hard, even when you feel like it isn’t. If you’re feeling the Magician’s Guilt, maybe that’s because the difficult behind-the-scenes stuff comes to you easily now, and you’re devaluing the effort you put in to learn it?
Maybe you’re forgetting why your players want to be a part of your games. The tricks are easy if you know how they’re done. But it’s not the trick itself where the magic happens. It’s with the person performing it. You.
Notes on the little coffee stand we went to, just outside the Fairhaven lightning rail station:
I ordered the Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino, Extra Hot With Foam, Whipped Cream, Upside Down Double Blended (with Ice).
Fairly typical order I’d ask for at any old Sharnbucks or Café Miron.
It was ok. Their roast was a little dark for my taste, but that was offset by the vanilla and gingerbread.
Is writing a review even relevant here? The place might not even be open anymore in our own time.
The year is 998 YK (again). We have returned to our own time, and all is right with the world as far as internal chronology is concerned. I’m writing this entry from a lightning railcar bound for the Sharn Skyway, where we are to be guests of honour at a party that – I’m told – is a more exclusive affair than the annual Skyway Gala.
It’s apparently been a successful two years we missed. But to the point:
Back in 996 YK, we learned a few things about Janek’s involvement in the blaze that eventually led to Cannith West’s downfall – it was quite odd seeing him before he rose to prominence in politics. His image as an unmarked Orien administrator, dismissed and disregarded, is quite incongruous considering the clout he has in the current day.
As I’m certain you’re aware, O reader, the fire that broke out during this party was incredibly important. People have speculated for years what might have been the result had Jorlana d’Cannith been present for the Dragonmarked House Conference.
A brief aside: the topic of this conference was allocation of House resources during the peace efforts after the war – houses like my own insisted upon neutrality, whereas others of a more mercantile nature saw unprecedented opportunity for profit. If you aren’t up on trade news, as I suspect of my audience (i.e any of my companions that might steal this journal), this conference was the fulcrum around which the present day business practices of the Dragonmarked Houses rotate.
Perhaps Jorlanna’s presence could have tipped the scales in another direction? She was known to have little respect for the highest bidder. But, then again, who knows (Me. I know, on account of the time travel)? She instead withdrew from society after the fire to care for her precious Janek, lightly toasted as he was.
Daja tells us this was an act. Considering Janek was indeed the one to start the fire, I’m inclined to agree.
He’d written several letters in Jorlanna’s hand to other house nobles that might agree with her more altruistic intentions, asking, cajoling, or outright threatening them to back down. Aster and I found these in his personal quarters, and quite convincing forgeries they were! I doubt I’d have been able to tell were it not for my own Dragonmark!
He’d placed an incendiary device in the Fairhaven Cannith estates, where the party was being set up. This we found in one of the back rooms, Aster demonstrating an affinity for technology that I really need to ask her about when I have chance. She’s suspiciously familiar with the Cannith approach to building a firebomb.
He’d also employed around a dozen Mirror Images of himself, keeping the various plates of his schemes aspinning. These copies of Janek attempted to thwart the efforts of our allies in their separate endeavours.
Robyn and Jaqueline went to find Jorlana herself, and prevent her from even attending. Through Jacqueline more than Robyn (who is taciturn as ever), I found out that they simply tracked her down and told her the truth – omitting the time machine angle – which I can very much respect. They’d found her bickering with the real Janek, who’d been insisting she come to a birthday party she did not want to attend.
‘We’ve received information that your life is in danger,’ Robyn had told her, after Janek had stormed off. When Jorlanna had grown dismissive, Robyn stated that ‘We do, of course, have evidence,’ producing the forged letters that I had helpfully notarised in the House Sivis style.
‘Did my daughter put you up to this?’ asked Jorlanna, but the elemental drained from her dragonshards upon looking closely at the letters. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Only Janek and myself would have access to everything in these.’ Daja had spoken of her overhearing Janek speaking with his gestionnaire of sorts, an entity belonging to the Lords of Dust.
Jorlanna grew tense upon mention of this group. I know little of them myself, but after our confrontation with Janek and the power they’d lent him, I suspect this tension has been earned.
Also, Jaqueline popped a Janek that was hiding in a nearby tree. That’s not a metaphor; she gingerly poked the Mirror Image with her rapier and it burst like my youngest brother Pommerique’s dreams of becoming a baker.
Our other companions, the rowdier two, were sent to disrupt the party itself. I initially assumed Daja had them do this to maintain the regular timeline – after all, the party needed to be destroyed for consistency’s sake. Upon further reflection, I’m more inclined to think she did it just to spite Janek. I’m told Mock and Shiira tore down several walls, chopped every piece of furniture into firewood, and reduced a cake that cost upwards of a hundred platinum dragons to a sort of sugary foam. They also popped two or three Janeks themselves?
‘Popping a Janek’. Sounds like something to take if you have a headache.
At any rate, we regrouped and I was able to use a description of a ring Janek wears to track down the man himself. Robyn, being the Great Detective and all that, had managed to frame our case in such a way that Jorlanna entrusted us with the cleanup.
I want to write about my tracking spell first, though! I’ve been finding greater success by diversifying the objects I use when performing magic. The three that work best are my House Sivis Pen of the Scribe, the lantern by the light of which I used to write the letters to next-of-kin during the war, and this very journal you are reading from now! Holy symbols to me, all of them!
When I cast the spell to Locate Object, I spoke a prayer to Aureon and opened the journal to the page I am currently writing on, which was of course blank at the time. And ink began to stain the page, the source of which was nothing I could see. Before long, an elaborate illustration of a compass had appeared, as if on a map drawn by a master cartographer (it rather reminded me of my sister Suzette’s trademark compass rose on all her maps). But the ink kept flowing around the page, the arrow of the compass spinning to point in the direction of Janek’s signet ring.
I’m terribly proud of this, as you can perhaps tell.
Janek was in the Cannith Library, of course. He’d resorted to creating fires through magic, as his device had been disabled by Aster. At first, he seemed a capable conjurer, but nothing too threatening, especially considering our force consisted of:
Aster, a ranger who can fire off more arrows at once than I have fingers and toes
Robyn, a rogue that I’ve seen backstab someone from the front using reverse psychology
Mock, a fighter who may be around seven feet tall, wielding an hammer just as large and twice as heavy
Shiira, the Bleeding Heart; I’ve seen guillotines back in Zilargo that came down with less force than her axe
Me, who admittedly is quite bad in a fight, but I did find a sprinkler system and say ‘Après moi, le déluge’ which is very funny if you speak Zilargan and know a bit of history
and Jacqueline, who… well, I’ll get to her in a moment.
But the battle against Janek quickly became absolutely terrifying. With all the fire and weaponry flying about, I could hardly concentrate on my spells. Which is bad if you’re trying to, say, keep everyone alive. But Janek had been granted power by the Lords of Dust, and he shrugged off our combined assault, growing more and more warped and grotesque as he did. Soon he was this huge, crimson, demonic thing, tearing around the room like a mage chariot, leaving destruction in his wake.
At one point he battered into Jacqueline and sent her sailing across the library to crash down under a pile of burning books and ruined shelves. I honestly thought she was dead under there.
And that leads me to the most… difficult bit to write.
Jaqueline is – and I write this without exaggeration – perhaps the purest soul I’ve ever encountered. In the time I have known her, she’s tried to do good without want of reward at every opportunity that presented itself. She’s gotten incredibly invested in the plight of others she’s only just met. Zut, she ended up bawling when she heard from Jorlanna just how much she loves her daughter, despite her stubborn streak.
(There is a part of me that feels it’s unfair to describe Jaqueline with this ‘purest soul’ status when we’re travelling with Shiira, as Shiira’s whole obsession is maintaining such a state. I might be more inclined to address Shiira as such, if not for her predilection with karmic good and evil.
The fact that she is so concerned with the karmic outcome of her actions has me worry that when she does good, it is not because she wants to do good; instead it is because she’s afraid of what might happen were she to act otherwise. A fear of karmic retribution should she act in accordance with her actual nature. She certainly destroyed that cake with an unhealthy glee.
Alright, now I feel guilty, and rightly so I think.
If she were to ever read this, I think she would be justifiably upset with me psychoanalysing her actions. And does it matter the reasoning for an act of good if the world is better for it? Karmic good and evil are explicitly framed in terms of the net morality of the entire world and not of one person; so even kindness for selfish reasons makes the world a better place. Doesn’t it?
But there’s a quote I can’t remember who to credit for. ‘You’re supposed to good because you’re good, not because you’re seeking moral dessert’.
My head is beginning to ache. Perhaps I need to pop a Janek myself??
…Which brings me back to Jaqueline. I’m procrastinating.)
We couldn’t do a thing to the demon Janek. Spells bounced off, and our arrows and blades couldn’t pierce his hide. As I said before, in the melee Jaqueline had been sent flying, and ended up unconscious in a pile of rubble. But it wasn’t strictly Jaqueline who pulled herself from the wreckage.
I was hiding behind a desk when it first appeared, so I didn’t quite see the whole thing. A laugh rang out through the room. I struggle to describe it, but I’ll do my best.
Think of those who, when confronted with gore or trauma or whatever, get a little lightheaded. They can’t quite face what they’re seeing, so they retreat into themselves, disassociating. They grow giddy, almost as a form of self defense. They begin to laugh at the horror.
Hold that in your mind. Now imagine a person who created said gore and trauma. And this person considers said gore and trauma the greatest thing they’ve ever accomplished; some grotesque magnum opus. And also they’re operatically trained, so they can really project.
A laugh rang out through the room.
Jaqueline was gone. Her clothes had changed, her face had… well, the thing didn’t have a face. At first I thought it wore a shining theatrical mask, but I soon realised the mask was its face. Looking back, it must have been polished bone. The mask had no eyes. Just a mocking, comic smile.
It wheeled through the dying fires, dropped behind Janek, and eviscerated him. Whatever defenses we’d been unable to surpass were reduced to nothing. And then it didn’t stop. Janek was reduced to a fine red mist.
We all stared as the thing that used to be Jacqueline gave us a deep bow… and then she fell to the floor, herself again. Mock ran over to her, in a remarkable display of either compassion or idiocy.
The rest of us, who saw our companion turn into something more dangerous than a literal demon, and then collapse amidst the fleshy confetti of its victim, were rightfully a bit wary. I noticed Aster kept her bow trained on Jaqueline, despite her lack of consciousness.
I need to ask some follow up questions. But Jacqueline, quite understandably, didn’t feel up to talking about it. And me writing anything else now would just end up sensationalised and inaccurate. I’m upset and I’m frightened when I think about it.
There’s better news to focus on, so I shall do so.
We travelled with Daja back to our own time, and people seem to recognise us. I’ll attach some newspaper clippings at some point to give further context, but it seems that we’ve changed things quite a bit.
The foiling of Janek’s plots and Jorlanna’s presence at the conference has resulted in a tectonic shift in the nature of the Dragonmarked Houses. Yes, they’re still businesses first and foremost, but they seem to be less cutthroat than the ones I know. They perform charitable work! And actually introduced regulation to discourage monopoly!! I can hardly believe what I’m reading.
And in this altered timeline, we are a crack team that Daja assembled to save the world. Multiple times. The business with Janek Vonet was but the first of our many escapades – over the last two years, Daja and her team have taken down monsters and mafias, solved problems and perils, faced dungeons and… well, you get the point. And none of us remember.
We’re on our way to a party in our honour. Or, more accurately, in the honour of whatever heroic versions of ourselves we’ve returned to replace. I’m trying not to dwell on that part. I shall instead distract myself by picking out an outfit for the event, with Aster’s help, and try to live up to this stolen life, with the help of everyone else.
The construction of the Ikea had been completed about 9 months ago, its garish blue and yellow walls marking it like a carbuncle amid the other squat, grey warehouses. The industrial estate it had sprung up in was a little out of the way of any main roads, so the car park was quiet when Nora’s bike rolled to a halt.
Merlin had clambered out of the sidecar almost before the engine had stopped, his face a shade of hospital-green. ‘You drive like a Roomba full of crack,’ he said, when he’d managed to take a breath.
‘If people don’t want to be overtaken, they should drive a little faster,’ said Nora, in the tones of one that had explained this hundreds of times before, possibly to the police.
‘Yeah Merlin,’ said Ursa. ‘I thought that was pretty exciting!’
She was leaning on a nearby car for support.
*
Inside, there was a bored girl – probably still a teenager – on the reception/customer service desk beyond the revolving door. An escalator stretched up to the showrooms.
‘Hi,’ began Ursa. ‘We’re here about the loss prevention cover?’
‘The four of you?’ asked the girl, not looking up from her phone.
‘Four?’ asked Ursa.
An unnaturally pale man leaned against the wall behind them, dressed in a well-tailored, white and black suit. He gave a little wave, and when the three focused their attention on him, they could see one of his eyes, too, was black. He wasn’t trying very hard to hide his Infernal nature.
Before anyone could question him, though, the Loss Prevention Manager came bursting from the staff area.
‘Right, good afternoon,’ he announced, his accent thick and blunt. ‘My name’s Brian. I know you’ve already gone through’t interview process, so we’ll just have a PowerPoint induction to get through before we can get started.’ He paused, surveying his troops. ‘I see we’re one short, though?’
‘Oh, no, I got here first,’ said another new voice. There was a fifth person stood with them, his grinning mouth full of sparkling emeralds. He had hair in purple locs, perfectly smooth brown skin, and wore an understated button-up shirt with jeans. Obviously, he was Fae. He had not been there before.
Brian, though, just seemed to accept it. As he led them back towards the staff room, Nora kept herself to the rear of the group. That two Outsiders were also here, presumably for the same reasons as she was? That probably meant things would become… complicated. Though, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise? At least she wouldn’t have to work with vanilla human staff members. No risk of getting Audited, she hoped.
She eyed the back of Brian’s balding head. Well, almost.
Oblivious to her gaze, Brian was talking them through the responsibilities of a loss prevention officer. Ursa alone nodded along in feigned interest, as the others had stayed far back enough to escape his notice.
A buzzing interrupted Brian halfway through something about waiting for a shoplifter to leave the premises. He glanced at his phone, then gave an exasperated grunt. Ursa bore down on the opening right away.
‘Everything ok, Boss?’ she asked.
‘Oh. Yeah, just another stupid text.’ Seeing Ursa’s expression, Brian explained. ‘Some joker’s got hold of the list of employee phone numbers. Sending texts at random, pretending they’re stuck in a wardrobe or somethin’. When I find out who it is, believe me, they’ll wish that was what’d happened.’
‘Excuse me, Brian, but could I request a visit to the nearest bathroom?’ said Merlin, quite suddenly.
‘Eh? Oh. Yeah, toilets are just a bit back there. I’ll only be setting the PowerPoint up so just find us in the staff room, yeah?’
‘I would also like to use the bathroom before we get started, actually,’ said Nora, thinking along similar lines to Merlin.
‘Yeah, yeah, no worries,’ said Brian. ‘Come on, whoever doesn’t need the toilet.’
Ursa and the others followed him into the staff room. It was a fairly standard affair, with a few tables and a corkboard with notices for employees. The walls were an inoffensive off-white, and other than a damp patch in the middle of the ceiling, it seemed quite well-kept.
Ursa made an excuse to leave near-immediately. ‘Oh, one sec Boss, I just need to make a quick phone call,’ she said, brushing past Brian on her way out.
Back in the bathrooms, Merlin had opened up his laptop and promptly broken into the store’s network drives. He’d spotted the Wi-Fi password on a corkboard through the staff room door, so he was in and poking about within maybe a minute.
The list of employee phone numbers wasn’t particularly hard to find either. The file was password protected, but said password was ‘Password1’. He gave a derisive little snort as he pressed enter.
He also threw together a quick program to extract text logs of messages, and their senders, sent to devices on the Wi-Fi network. This he set to work on Brian’s phone.
The source of the message Brian had received was a signal bouncing around the various routers in the building, with no apparent provenance. Oddly enough, there appeared to be over six thousand routers on the network.
In the bathroom next door, Nora prodded at a holographic projection of a phone screen she’d conjured with a Remote Access spell. It wasn’t a simulation – her spell allowed her to physically affect the targeted hardware; in this case, Brian’s phone. The text he’d received was a simple two words:
Help us
As Nora pondered this, another message appeared:
Where are you?
Ursa had just pressed send on the phone she’d plucked from Brian’s pocket. ‘Where are you?’ she’d asked of the cry for help. If whatever spirit was trapped here was communicative, Ursa wanted to do what she could to free it. She waited for just a moment, and paled a little at the response.
Are you a threat?
Nora finished her reply. She didn’t know how the thing knew she was accessing Brian’s phone, but the fact that it did was worrying. What she got in reply was somewhat horrifying.
No, we just want to free you!
Merlin, having pieced together what was going on, emerged from the bathroom, though not before snickering at the chat log for a while. After a moment, the three were on the same page.
‘So it’s the Wi-Fi itself that’s asking for help?’ asked Ursa.
‘More like something riding it,’ Merlin replied. ‘Though I haven’t yet thought of an explanation for the number of routers on the network.’
‘There’s a few options. None of them good,’ said Nora, before adding dryly, ‘Come on, we don’t want to miss the PowerPoint.’
*
In the staff room, the PowerPoint had not yet begun. Brian lay slumped over a desk, with the green-toothed Fae working some kind of glittery magic over his head.
‘Ah,’ said the Infernal man, from the back of the room. He’d put his feet up. ‘I believe introductions are in order. You’re from the Institute, are you not?’
He got up and gave a shallow bow. ‘Azoth Alkahest,’ he said. ‘It is not a pleasure to meet you, but I have only just told you my name.’
‘That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’ asked Ursa. ‘Doesn’t the name ‘Alkahest’ throw normal people off?’
‘My name is my name; if it raises a red flag with a mortal or two, that is the price they must pay for my honesty.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ said Ursa.
Nora butted in. ‘More to the point, what are you doing?’
The room’s other occupant straightened up from behind Brian’s sleeping form. His emerald smile flashed in a face with bold, handsome features; the unnatural beauty of the Fae much more at the forefront than earlier.
‘Montparnasse,’ he said. The accent didn’t match the name. ‘This guy here isn’t in pain or anything, so stop worrying about that. And Nora, if you’re going to pull the gun you have, I will wake him up and I’m sure you don’t want to explain all that, do you?’
Nora’s hand paused where it had been slowly moving towards her pistol. Had he read her that easily?
‘Yes, I had,’ said Montparnasse. ‘But I do have a bit of an advantage.’
Oh, wonderful, a fucking psychic. The thought arrived before Nora could stop herself.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Now, you three are here for the same reason Akahest and me are. The plan is to come back after closing tonight and deal with it.’
Alkahest, having sat back down, gave another little wave. ‘We aren’t working together, mind you,’ he said. ‘We’re just both here on common business.’
‘I am here to destroy the thing haunting this place, on behalf of my Queen,’ said Montparnasse.
‘What about him?’ asked Merlin, when Alkahest didn’t volunteer a response.
Montparnasse just smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s thinking if you agree to assist me?’
‘No,’ said Merlin and Nora, simultaneously.
‘Hey, can we get a couple of minutes without you reading our minds?’ Ursa chimed in. ‘Just so we can all get on the same page and negotiate properly?’
Montparnasse watched her for a second, then shut his eyes. ‘Okay,’ he said.
The three quickly huddled together, speaking in hushed tones. ‘Right, what do we think?’ asked Ursa.
‘Obviously we can’t trust either one,’ said Merlin. ‘One can literally tamper with memories, and the other’s a demon. Or a devil. And I’ve never met one of those that could be relied upon.’
‘We’ve only been given orders to clear the haunting out,’ said Nora. ‘So it doesn’t strictly matter what happens to it afterwards. I vote we go down the ‘keep to ourselves’ route and only deal with them if we absolutely have to. Though I would like to know the Fiend’s motives for being here.’
‘Hrmm,’ said Merlin.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. I’m just not used to you agreeing with a sensible option.’
‘I don’t like them either,’ said Ursa, ‘and I’m not too happy about the prospect of coming here after dark with a couple of psychos! But if it’s all going down tonight, there’s not much…’
She trailed off. Montparnasse was grinning at them.
‘You said you wouldn’t listen,’ she said, loudly. ‘Are you breaking your word?’
His smile continued unabated. ‘Of course not. But your two minutes are up. I tuned back in at the part where you called us psychos.’
‘There are some who might take offense at that,’ said Alkahest. ‘Luckily, I am magnanimous. What do you say to our proposition for this evening? I believe the phrase is, ‘the more the merrier’?’
After a shared look between the three, Nora spoke. ‘We’ll be here tonight. In fact, why don’t we come in at closing time? That way we can be on hand before anything might kick off.’
This time Montparnasse and Alkahest shared a look. ‘Deal,’ said the Fae.
*
When Brian awoke, he ran through the plan that had been fed to his unconscious mind. ‘Right, you lot come back a bit before closing, and that way we can get a patrol set up through the night and find whoever it is that’s been breaking in and vandalising the Grönkullas. Hopefully I’ll have found my phone by then.’
That last part about his lost phone had been at Ursa’s request.
Once everyone had filtered out of the staff area, the three of them set about their preparation for the evening’s work. There were still about eight or nine hours before they’d need to be back.
Merlin immediately set to work on his laptop again. When Ursa prodded, he’d simply muttered something about the ‘source of the messages’, and added another skewer of binary digits to the smorgasbord on his screen.
Ursa left him to it, taking out her mobile phone and calling Emva at the Institute. She was worrying about the mind reader, who upon leaving their meeting had just wandered away through the car park. She hadn’t seen which way the Fiend had left.
Which was because he hadn’t. Alkahest was sat in the café, with a heaping plate of meatballs.
A screeching sound heralded Nora’s arrival at his table, as she pulled up a chair as noisily as possible. ‘Hi there,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said Alkahest, without much enthusiasm.
‘You’re going to explain a few more things.’
‘Am I, now?’
Nora gave a pleasant smile of the kind a dentist offers before showing you their biggest set of pliers. ‘You are.’ There was the distinctive click of a pistol being cocked beneath the table. ‘You can start with why you’re here.’
She reached across the table with her other hand and helped herself to a meatball.
Alkahest sighed. ‘I’m here to deal with this haunting. Same as you.’
‘That’s not what I’m asking and you know it.’
‘Fine. The other guy, the Fae, apparently has orders to destroy the cause of it. I, on the other hand, am here for the purpose of retrieval.’
‘Why? What’s special about this?’
‘I’d gotten a tip that whatever’s causing all this could be useful for future plans. A friend of mine can sense when something powerful comes into play. Though, they can never give me any details; that’s not how it works.’
Nora paused to think about this, covering her hesitation by making a show of enjoying another meatball. ‘So it’s a bigger deal than just a run-of-the-mill haunting. Great. Whose future plans do you want it for?’
‘Ahhh,’ said Alkahest, drawing out the sound with a grin. ‘That’s a good question. Currently, on the Infernal side of things, there’s something of a… power vacuum at the top. Lots of people trying to claw their way upwards.’
‘That’s not an answer,’ said Nora.
Alkahest just kept on smiling like a wolf, so Nora decided that was all she’d get from him. Well, she also got one more meatball, but that was just to make a point.
Ursa was still on the phone when Nora got back. ‘No, no, like some kind of item that could stop our minds from being read. Yes, I know it’s short notice but it’s an emergency. Yes. Yes? Alright, I can, uh… get you some great baking kit in return? Yeah? Ah you’re a lifesaver! Ok. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Thanks again!’
When she saw Nora’s raised eyebrow, she explained: ‘That was Emva, at the Institute. I was asking her for something that might shield us from a psychic Fae. She said she’d see what she could put together if I got her something in return, so we’ll need to nip back to the office before tonight.’
‘Good,’ said Merlin, suddenly at their side with his computer under his arm. ‘I should like to visit the coffee place across the street. I can’t concentrate on coding here. The atmosphere’s just terrible.’
*
Nora and Merlin glared at the chatlog on the laptop’s screen. Neither of them had touched their coffee. Merlin had been trying to track the source of the messages bouncing through the Ikea’s hundreds and hundreds of routers, picking his way through the string like he was untangling Christmas lights.
Ursa had gone to get a peace offering for Emva. The three of them had gone to pick up their mental shielding, and been given a single pair of headphones that Emva had promised would protect them from mind reading, mental control, and charm effects. That they were pink with cat ears was irrelevant.
‘There’s only one pair?’ Ursa had asked, quite sweetly.
‘Yeah, sorry, it was short notice and I didn’t have the bits. I’d have had to disassemble some other stuff!’ said Emva.
‘Emva, I’m grateful for this, but you can see that there’s a problem here, right?’
Emva seemed oblivious to her tone. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘There’s only one. And three of us.’ She gestured to Merlin and Nora, who’d begun to back away as the temperature of the room began to rise.
‘Yeah, I did what I could on short notice. As a favour.’
‘Well, you could have tried a bit harder couldn’t you?’ snapped Ursa, before she could stop herself.
Emva went still as a marble bust. Merlin felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Nora nodding towards the exit. The two had surreptitiously absconded when Ursa next looked to them for backup.
There was shouting as the door closed.
Back in the present, Ursa walked into the coffee shop with nary a scratch upon her. She meekly held a carrier bag filled with baking paraphernalia. ‘I’m gonna head back up in a min,’ she said. ‘I might have been a bit of a jerk before so I wanted to apologise.’
‘Probably smart,’ said Nora. ‘She’s known to hold a grudge.’
Ursa shuddered. ‘What are you two up to?’
Merlin didn’t look up from the screen. ‘We got more messages,’ he explained.
The screen read:
IS SOMEONE THERE?
I CANNOT SEE YOU.
WHY CAN’T I FIND YOU?
WHERE ARE YOU?
COME OUT. COME OUT.
AM I GETTING WARMER
WARMER
WARMER
‘It’s trying to track our IP,’ said Merlin. ‘It shouldn’t be able to because of my VPN, but it seemed to be managing it… then Nora did something.’
Nora had cast a spell she’d learned from her computerised Patron. Digital Phantom, it was called, and she’d used it in the past to conceal her presence in computer systems. It seemed to have worked on this thing, too.
Not that she mentioned any of that to the others.
Ursa went back to see Emva and present her offering. ‘Listen, I’m really sorry for getting huffy about the headphones. I was just stressed about the prospect of having this creep read our minds again, and it got to me more than I’d have liked. That’s not an excuse though. I’m sorry.’ She held out the bag.
Emva took it gingerly, as if it might explode. Though she herself was much more in the business of exploding bags than Ursa. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I might have… overreacted a bit myself.’ She reached into a drawer and produced a second pair of headphones. Black ones this time. ‘I, uh, wanted to apologise too. I don’t think there’s time to make a third pair, but–‘
Ursa scooped her up into a hug, which Emva didn’t seem to like, but definitely appreciated.
Rather than reuniting, the three went back to their respective homes for the afternoon, to try and rest up before the night ahead. There were ghosts to bust.
[I should mention that the accent of Zilargo in Sami’s Eberron is a French one, hence the occasional bit of the language. I’m not just being pretentious, I swear]
From the journal of Vanivieve ir’Coralyn d’Sivis
I have little time to recount the events of the last few hours. As I put pen to page, we are waiting for Daja d’Cannith to calibrate her time machine. I am little bit irritated that this is a real sentence I must write.
I truly thought I would die in the Mournland. We fought our way through the d’Cannith estate, toward the reason Daja had brought us here. This was no mean feat, as the floorplan had completely given up the ghost as far as spatial logic was concerned.
It had also given up the ghost in that actual ghosts were everywhere.
Throughout, whatever entity it was that had caused such damage to Starrina was stalking us from room to room, quite separate from the other spectres. An eater of knowledge. An epistemophage, if I can coin a term that’s a bit of a mouthful. As we went deeper into the estate, it bore down upon us.
And it caught Daja. Despite her protection being the principle reason for our hiring (though under admittedly false pretenses), Asra, her Kalashtar companion, was the one who managed to wrest the thing from her mind… but by then the damage was done. A kind of grey sludge leaked from Daja’s head, dripping down to cover her Dragonmark and dissolving into wispy smoke before our eyes.
She grew erratic – more erratic. Her memories and knowledge were haemorrhaging from her, the tide only stemmed with psionic help from Asra. Her short-term and working memory seemed unaffected; she remembered us, she remembered we were here to retrieve a device, but she couldn’t remember exactly what said device was.
Nevertheless, we pressed on.
A side note – after almost being murdered in the estate’s now-haunted library, we came to what appeared to be a gallery of Cannith inventions. I was somehow able to intuit the exact operation of a device I’d never before encountered; a jet-propellant jump-pack. I cannot reiterate enough what I wrote in my previous entry – I am not technically minded; not by any stretch of the imagination.
But I petitioned Truth, the concept; similarly to how I’d pray to Aureon, or the Traveller, or any other god. And the nature of the device’s operation just… came to me. This is something new; an ability hitherto alien to me.
There are theological implications I haven’t the time to dwell upon now. Could what I’m addressing as ‘Truth’ be some other deity; perhaps the Traveller partaking in a bit of identity fraud? Or something new? Eberron’s gods are distant. Am I simply reaching a little further afield? Or something else?
I’m getting off topic. Eventually we found Daja’s strange device, though she was unable to remember how to set it up. I tried praying to the Truth again, but to no avail. I know not if this was due to my own lack of conviction, a limit to the deity’s power, or the arcane nature of the device. It doesn’t matter now.
Daja attempted to puzzle out the device’s function for a time, but relented under Asra’s needling that we leave and get her medical attention. ‘You’ll likely figure it out when something on the ship jogs your memory,’ Asra offered, which to me had the scent of an offer for Daja to leave with her stubborn pride intact. Asra knows her very well, it seems.
But, as we tried to leave, it seemed the estate had other plans. We made it back to the main hall and moved to descend the stairs, when the frontmost wall of the estate, the one with the exit, opened its eyes. Rising, flowing upward, it became a massive stationary wave, towering over our attempted escape like some dreadful ocean ready to crush a seaside town.
Through the hole that was the nightmare thing’s mouth, we could see that the ship we’d come in was just gone. Even if we miraculously escaped the Cannith estate, we were still stranded in the Mournland.
This is it, I thought. The best case here is a quick death. This is the end, and nobody will even find the work I leave behind.
And then Daja switched on her machine. And suddenly we stood by the ship again, hours ago.
A flash of pink hair caught my eye, and I watched our group vanish into the estate. How strange it was to see the back of my own head. It felt like we should warn them or something, but then, I don’t know the etiquette for travelling back in time. Perhaps it’s like that old saying where if you step on a butterfly, you end up killing your own grandmother?
I never quite understood that one. My grandmother was a Gnome, not a butterfly. Although, there was that time she’d fallen out of bed, and she whispered to a butterfly, which told a sparrow, which told a pigeon, which told a chain of progressively larger birds until a giant eagle came to rescue her.
(That story is not true. It isn’t a lie, though; it is a joke.
It’s just delightful to see that my neuroses apply even when writing in my personal journal, a record of events for my eyes alone. I shouldn’t have to clarify the honesty of my words to myself.)
Anyway, none of this is what I even wanted to write about. I wanted to write about my new friend Aster.
I’ve attached a drawing of her to the top of this entry. She’s got this… feral look to her. I don’t mean her Shifter heritage – I mean the look in her eyes when we’ve been in crisis. She has the eyes of one willing to do whatever is necessary to survive, and capable of it too. One who could (and would) kill a man with a whisk if it came to it.
When I first met her, I thought her aloof. She’d kept herself to one side, kept the rest of the group at arm’s length. Then, I saw her in battle, moving faster than I could track, loosing arrows as if there were a rail guiding her shots to foreheads. After that, I thought her not aloof but alert.
The scarf she wears confused me at first. It’s glamerweave, enchanted to look like a glittering night sky. And it just didn’t match her functional suit of brown leathers. Was it a memento from some slain enemy? A gift from an old friend? An affectation to seem less threatening?
But, knowing what I know now? Her clothes are not what I initially perceived. The palette of her outfit has been meticulously selected. Her boots may be a simple brown, but they’re of a craftsmanship I’d expect to see on a runway. The fit of her jacket is immaculate.
The glamerweave scarf isn’t an anomaly, it’s an accessory. One that gets you thinking about her whole look, and the intentionality of an otherwise ‘simple’ set of clothes. Like a little spoon of crème fraîche on a berry tart, balancing the sharpness.
I try not to dip into hyperbole too often, but Aster is a fashion genius.
Leaving the Mournland on the ship we commandeered from our slightly younger selves, we made a quick stop in Fairhaven to gather supplies. Daja’s plan, as was explained to us, was that we would be using her machine to go back several years and thwart a certain calamitous event.
I won’t go into details on the plan, as if this journal is taken while the work is in progress, I could compromise the whole timeline – like that business with the butterfly I mentioned before. Suffice it to say that for Aster’s and my role in the plan, we’d need disguises. And Aster knew just where in Fairhaven to get some.
We made an incredibly brief visit to her home. The very fact she’d joined Daja’s group probably meant her house wasn’t safe, so we were in and out in a matter of minutes. I won’t comment on the house, except to say it was like a dressmaker’s studio mixed with a magpie’s nest. Then cross-pollenated with an industrial laundry room.
Glamerweave was everywhere. Aster sprinted around gathering it up, leaping over furniture, our need for disguises gone from her mind like grey sludge from Daja’s head. At one point I think she slid down the banister, swatting pairs of shorts from each stair.
Disguises have been achieved. She also gave me a beret with a little rainbow toast cat on it!!! My new friend Aster is capable and dangerous, but she’s also thoughtful and generous. I never realised how good I’d look in a beret, but she knew that about me before I did.
Daja’s going through the last bits of the plan now. The machine is nearly ready. And once we
[The rest of this page is illegible. Vanivieve apparently broke a pen or spilled some ink on it, as the paper is stained completely black. The next page has only a few smudges, and is written in a different ink.]
From the journal of Vanivieve ir’Coralyn d’Sivis
Daja’s machine worked. As I write this, it’s the 16th of Sypheros, 996 YK. Two years ago. Two years after the Day of Mourning. We’re still in Fairhaven. This wasn’t a quick pitstop at all, but our actual destination – the ‘pitstop’ was the Mournland. It seems Daja can keep her motives under wraps if she puts what’s left of her mind to it.
That date is relevant, if you’re not up on your politics. Today is the day of the fire at the celebration of Jorlanna Svehla d’Cannith’s birthday; the one that led to Janek Vonet – later Janek d’Cannith – being gravely injured and requiring months of supportive care, which Jorlanna retreated from the public to provide.
Before that day, Janek had been a minor poussoir de crayon for House Orien, who’d been assigned to assist Jorlanna in an interhouse project she was overseeing. Always one for Dragonmarked Houses working together, she was.
The two ended up in a relationship, one which only deepened on the day of the fire when Janek pulled her from the flames at great personal cost to his own health, and manifested a dormant Cannith Dragonmark in the process.
It’s long been suspected that Jorlanna’s priorities shifted away from leadership of her house in no small part thanks to Janek’s presence in her life. Rumours swirled that he was the reason there was no Cannith voice at the Dragonmarked House Conference later that year, as he and Jorlanna were off eating grapes in a gondola somewhere.
House Cannith West fell into sharp decline soon after, with the new rumours being that Jorlanna and Janek are not ‘Ruler and Advisor’, but ‘Puppet and Controller’. Such a reputation must surely have been a source of consternation for someone as stubborn as Daja. I’m sure she’d seethe at the gossip at her house’s expense. Maybe enough to try and ‘fix’ it?
We confronted Daja about this plan of hers. ‘Why are you so interested in preventing the events of this night?’ I demanded. ‘Is this some 3D Dragonchess political coup you’re running? Trying to raise your house’s profile?’
‘What?’ Daja looked perplexed. Of course, she often looked a bit perplexed when someone asked her a question she thought beneath her. ‘The fortunes of Cannith West aren’t important. That’s not why I’m here.’
‘Something more personal, then?’ I asked. My mouth was working a little bit faster than my brain was. I can get like that if I smell a scoop. But that is a flaw I can admit to, which means it isn’t really a flaw at all. ‘Are you perhaps here to make a name for yourself in the fire’s aftermath? Seeking favours from Janek d’Cannith?’
Daja’s eyes had begun to bulge as I went on, and by the time I mentioned Janek they were ready to burst out from her skull and bounce off my jacket. ‘Now why would I want to help my Mother’s slimy, backstabbing boyfriend?!’
She realised what she’d said as our collective jaws hit the floor.
Daja is Jorlanna d’Cannith’s daughter.
Normally I’d jot down some thoughts on such a revelation. But I can’t right now. There’s work to be done.
[This is a recap of Sami’s Eberron, in the form of an in-universe journal written by my character, Vanivieve, a Gnomish cleric. She was an investigative journalist with a pathological inability to lie! She came to Sharn from Zilargo because she’d found a list of members of the Trust! It was a big, six-player group! Oh boy!]
From the Journal of Vanivieve ir’Corralyn d’Sivis
It has been something of a long day for me.
I awoke to my fourth Sharn morning, the sounds of traffic outside my hotel drifting up through the open window. I hadn’t quite reached the stage of paranoia where I’d prioritise security over night-time comfort, and the duvet – a feather-and-down behemoth thick enough to shield the bed from Detect Magic – was hot enough to fire clay. The breeze helped, but I still ended up wanting my shower cold.
I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in a nearby pâtisserie I’d been eyeing. The menu was nothing revolutionary, but then, there are only so many permutations of pâtisserie faire one can arrive at before each plate needs to be inlaid with dragonshards to keep the sauce aflame.
It was a pancake sort of morning. They arrived with mascarpone, honey, and a few mint leaves artfully perched atop the stack. They were light and fluffy, like you’d expect.
And then I found I couldn’t pay. My personal accounts had been frozen, or drained, or something. I’m still not sure. It’s an awfully big coincidence, though, considering the reason I’d come to Sharn in the first place. Luckily, I had a fair amount of my initial travel withdrawal leftover, and I left the pâtisserie with a few coins and my half-finished coffee on the table.
Of course, had that been the extent of the day’s misfortune, I wouldn’t currently be stranded in the Mournland, would I?
Someone was following me. He made no particular effort to conceal his pursuit; looking back it seems an obvious scare tactic, meant to frighten me into trying to hide away from the bustle of the main streets. I’m ashamed to say it worked. I ducked into an alley and tried to make myself invisible with the aid of a few barrels.
The man who’d been following me entered the alleyway. He stopped by the barrels I hid behind. His voice was rough; shabby, as was the gentleman it belonged to. ‘Alms for the poor?’ He rattled a tin cup down at me. It sounded surprisingly full.
It’s times like those that I miss having the capacity to bullshit. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any…’ Nausea interrupted me. I couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. ‘I’m afraid I… ugh.’
The man seemed unoffended, which was good. But he’d produced a roughly gnome-sized sack, which was bad. At least I wasn’t just being paranoid, I suppose.
From my crouched position, I slid through my would-be kidnapper’s legs, and sprinted away as fast as I could manage. His shouts died down as the distance grew, and by the time I leant against a red brick wall, gasping for breath, lungs feeling like a portal to Mabar, I was quite confident I’d lost him.
I’d ended up in the lower city. The bricks were roughly cut and uneven, leaving a red dusty residue on my hands as I straightened up. I hastily wiped them on a nearby poster.
NEED COIN FAST? shrieked the poster. HARDY ADVENTURERS NEEDED RIGHT AWAY. Enquire at the Crooked Cat – Departing IMMEDIATELY.
I peered at it. An opportunity to get the hell out of town. I mean, I didn’t have access to my money – no doubt another arrow in the Trust’s sizeable quiver – so I wouldn’t be able to secure passage at short notice. I spoke a quick prayer to the Traveller in thanks, and peered at the poster more closely.
Below the high-impact title, it featured another line in a more reasonable font size: No questions asked, no answers given. Then a dotted line, as if one was supposed to sign. After a moment I realised the dots were, in fact, letters.
Not responsible for any loss of life.
*
And so, I found myself in the Crooked Cat, perhaps the most unkempt place I’d been in since my stay at the infamous and ill-fated Lhesh Haruuc’s Arms. The proprietor of the establishment, a Tabaxi by the name of He Who Cares Greatly for Cats, welcomed me to this ‘cat café’ and directed me to a table that had been set aside for those who had ‘come about the job, wink wink.’ Yes, he actually said ‘wink wink’.
Six chairs on one side. Two on the other. There was one person already at the table; a Shifter I soon learned was named Aster. She had the demeanour of a stranger in a strange land, as though she was admiring the very idea that there could be a building in this place. It was a look I’m sure I’ve worn myself on my travels, though in my case it would be closer to the ground.
I immediately mistook her for one of the employers. She was on the side with fewer chairs, after all.
Shortly after, another Tabaxi arrived. She introduced herself as Dancing Heart of the Mockingbird, and didn’t make any comment on the fact that her face was just COVERED in blood down one side. It seemed she’d had a fall (a fairly blatant lie, but it’s none of my business) and stitched up a gash in her face on her own. Without anaesthetic. Or a mirror. I offered to help, but as it turned out, she’d done a surprisingly competent job. Since then I’ve learned she’s happy to be referred to as just ‘Mock’.
Funnily enough, who should walk in next but Robyn ir’Viva-Kalistro? She hadn’t replied to any of my letters in some time, but here I am in Sharn and the Great Detective herself appears as if the city is no larger than a backwater village! It’s an awfully strange coincidence, and I found myself thinking back to my earlier muttered prayer to the Traveller.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when she feigned ignorance that we’d been in contact. It’s how she often acts with other chroniclers, and there’s no reason I would be any different, house and mark be damned. Still, if I was apprehensive before, Robyn’s presence got me feeling properly nervous about the place.
The next ‘HARDY ADVENTURER’ to arrive was a meek girl who couldn’t have been out of her teens. She seemed to mistake those at the table with fur for the cat café’s featured felines, and turned bright red when she had to be corrected. It did raise a fair point though: where were the cats? The Crooked Cat surely failed to live up to even the most meagre expectations.
After I politely let the girl – Shiira Mahimahi, she said her name was – know that I was a gnome, not a human child, the final member of my current companions made her way past the table to stand in the corner.
There were scuffs on her clothes, like she’d been climbing, and her eyes kept darting to the door. Her name was Jaqueline, and of all of us, she was the one I thought had least business being at that table. She seemed afraid.
A short while later we did get to meet the cats, which in all honesty was cute but not conducive to a comfortable dining experience.
And then we met our would-be employer. I must say, I’d been expecting some seedy pirate type with fewer teeth than toes. Instead, we were joined by two women: a Kalashtar with that serene expression so common to those from Sarlona, and an unkempt Human bearing the Mark of Making on her scowling face.
Daja d’Cannith. That Daja d’Cannith.
Considering the poster that had led me here, it seemed the Mark of Making granted no special mastery in the field of Graphic Design.
A brief interview followed – we were asked if we’d done this type of bodyguarding work before, could we wield a weapon, were we allergic to oranges… the usual. Well, except the last part there, but who was allergic to oranges? (As it turned out, Shiira was allergic to oranges. She won a special bracelet as a result.)
*
We were bundled onto a ship of d’Cannith’s own design, a vessel held together with blackberry jam and the wishes of children that she’d christened The Investigator. Robyn informs me that it functions similarly to the Lightning Rail, projecting a track before it and simply riding along it. She says it’s quite ingenious, and I’d have to agree, albeit through gritted teeth.
‘Some safety guidelines,’ announced d’Cannith. ‘Don’t fall off.’
After a time travelling – I’m not sure how long as I believe I went into a kind of fugue state when the ship took off – Daja and her companion, Asrasri, ran through a quite obviously rehearsed exchange on how ‘Oh no, there’s something wrong with the engines, where is all this smoke coming from, oh no we appear to be about to crash land in the Mournland right on top of Whitehearth’.
Of course, just because something appears to be scripted, that doesn’t stop it being terrifying, does it? My throat is still raw from the descent.
As far as the sliding scale of crash landings goes, this one was certainly skewed more to landing than crash. When we ventured forth from the still mostly-intact ship, we found we’d arrived at the estate of the late Starrina d’Cannith. Shiira had gotten separated in the crash, but ostensibly whisked away by a Fey entity named ‘the Bleeding Heart’, who offered to join us and help navigate the Mournland.
Something about the Mournland I feel I should make particular note of: it is beautiful.
Cyre was always a picturesque land, and of course the grounds of a Dragonmarked House estate would be kept and cared for with the utmost respect, but I was ill-prepared to find it likely just as it was. The scenery, obscured as it was by pervasive fog, had a serenity that one would be hard-pressed to find in even the most remote points of Khorvaire.
Crystalline flowers dotted the gardens (surely these would not have been present before the day of mourning, though?), and there was a subtle scent in the air, as if the land had just enjoyed its first rains after months and months of drought.
Oh, and the Bleeding Heart was wearing a special bracelet exactly like the one Shiira had received. Presumably citrus allergies are more common than I thought.
Daja seemed very interested in making a ‘detour’ to investigate the estate. No doubt this was the whole reason for our hiring. Though it seemed unwise to plunge headlong into this oddly-intact mansion, I certainly didn’t want to stay outside, alone. I may have been impressed with the beauty of the place, but beautiful things can kill you just as easily as ugly ones.
That’s not me waxing poetic; I once saw a marble sculpture of Lady Miravella Uruvai d’Thuranni fall and crush a goblin.
The front doors – massive oaken things, the kind you’d use as a roof on a lesser building – swung open to reveal… a small cupboard. It wasn’t quite as grand as I’d expected. D’Cannith explained, with no small degree of exasperation at having to talk us through such a simple concept, that the estate must have gotten confused in the Mourning, and the rooms no longer knew where they were supposed to lead to.
So the cupboard took us out onto a comfortable lounge, complete with roaring fire, record player, and the ghost of Starrina d’Cannith with a glass of brandy and a cigar. I didn’t recognise her at first, I’d only really seen pictures of how she used to look; fortunately she was quick to introduce herself.
And she wasn’t a ghost, she was a memory. ‘It’s the estate itself that’s remembering me,’ she explained when we pressed for details. ‘I can’t move from this chair. I can’t do anything. But I can have as many cigars and glasses of brandy as I like.’ Something was eating away at the memory, though. Something that eats knowledge.
She answered Daja’s enquiry about the location of something called a Wavelength Amplifier (though I could be mistaken about the specific name, I’m not technically-minded) in a somewhat condescending manner. Daja didn’t seem to care as long as she got the information she was after.
And then the image of Starrina reset itself, and welcomed us to the mansion again.
The next room was a dining hall of some sort; figures at the table had been frozen in crystal mid-meal. A spirit sat at the head of the table, and invited us to eat, drink, be merry. It was a trap we narrowly avoided. Aster demonstrated just how dangerous she was, flashing forward and dropping the ghost before anyone else could even move, and frankly, I’m impressed.
And terrified.
We’re going to be moving on soon, but now seemed like a good point to update my journal. I’m hoping I can keep adding to it frequently, especially as we’re in such a dangerous place. I don’t know whether any given entry will be the last.
If there’s no more entries after this one, I’d ask whoever is reading it to turn to the last page of this journal. The list of names there are all the current members of the Trust as of the time of writing. It’s dangerous knowledge, but I suppose you’ll be used to danger if you’re finding my writing.
Do what you will with the list. I’ve so far kept it to myself, and if I make it out of this alive, I’m going to rethink what I do with it.
If the Caliber Institute itself doesn’t police the raising of the dead, then what does? Surely there must be those who make sure there aren’t Necromancers running all over the place, or we’d be up to our eyeballs in eyeballs, on account of all the zombies.
It can’t just be one person, because it’s a big Earth, this one. So there must be some sort of code or order, right?
I’m putting the Abhorsen, from Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom books, into Caliber as an NPC class. I’m planning on having control of the undead work similarly to in the Dresden Files, with the Necromancer providing a beat to substitute for the thrall’s heartbeat. And the sounds of the bells and such work quite well with that. Is an Abhorsen just a Bard subclass?
Maybe one day I’ll turn it into a proper playable class, with progression and all that. I’ll give Garth a ring and see if he wants to work on it with me. ‘How did you get this number?’ he’ll say. He’s such a card, is Garth.
Bells
An Abhorsen’s bells affect any creature that hears them. Their effects cannot be resisted if heard, and as such a creature must fail a perception check to resist.
This check is usually DC10. The wielder can ring the bell quietly to increase the DC to 20 for any creature further than 10 feet away. Or they can be rung with force, for a DC of 5. Creatures that take action in advance to impair their hearing have disadvantage on their checks, obviously.
(These rules are by no means set in stone, by the way. Just putting my thoughts down. And presumably, non-Abhorsens could get hold of the bells too.)
The seven bells, in order of their size and power are (lifted from the Old Kingdom website):
Ranna, the first, the smallest bell. Ranna the sleepbringer, the sweet, low sound that brings silence in its wake. (Puts listeners to sleep, as with the Sleep spell, only without the Hit Point limit)
Mosrael, the second, a harsh, rowdy bell, the waker. The bell whose sound is a seesaw, throwing the ringer further into Death, as it brings the listener into Life. (Functions as any resurrection spell short of True Resurrection – so Animate Dead, Revivify, Summon Undead, Danse Macabre, Raise Dead, Create Undead, or Resurrection. It’s a bit more straight forward here than in the books, as I don’t want to use the precincts of Death unless absolutely necessary)
Kibeth, the walker, a bell of several sounds, a difficult and contrary bell. It can give freedom of movement to one of the Dead, or walk them through the next gate. (A forced movement effect; the listener will move its speed in a direction of the ringer’s choice. Even towards a big pit or whatever!)
Dyrim, a musical bell, of clear and pretty tone. Dyrim can return the voice that the Dead have so often lost, but Dyrim can also still a tongue that moves too freely. (Can cast Speak with Dead or Silence)
Belgaer, another tricksome bell that seeks to ring of its own accord. The thinking bell, the bell most necromancers scorn to use. It can restore independent thought, memory and all the patterns of a living person, or slipping in a careless hand, erase them. (Does what it says on the tin. It basically grants full sentience to an undead thrall. And I guess it would turn the living into shambling zombies)
Saraneth, the deepest, lowest bell. The sound of strength, the binder, the bell that shackles the Dead to the wielder’s will. (Casts Dominate Monster. Does it work on the living too?)
Astarael, the Sorrowful. The banisher, the final bell. Properly rung, it casts everyone who hears it far into Death. Everyone, including the ringer. (Power Word: Kill without the Hit Point requirement. Powerful immortals – the Queens of Fae for example – would be unaffected.)
Anyway, read Sabriel if you like fantasy books. More info here.
[This adventure is hugely inspired by Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör, Mark Z. Danielewski’s Houseof Leaves, and SCP-3008]
It had been about a month since Ursa and Merlin began their employment at the Caliber Institute. Merlin had been attempting to gain access to the R&D Department, despite not yet being approved for fieldwork, and Ursa had been looking for studio spaces in her time off. The work itself was simple, and their two office days a week were mostly clear of actual work to do within the first hour or so.
Nora was still getting used to having colleagues that didn’t actively avoid her. She wasn’t entirely sure if she was okay with the adjustment. Sure, it was… nice to know they weren’t vilifying her. Was that the word? Nice? But it did come with its own baggage.
Maybe a week after her new colleagues had received their prophecies, Nora had been making her way home from work when she became astutely aware of a presence following her. She’d ducked into an alleyway and turned the tables on the hooded figure in pursuit, slamming it against the wall and hissing, ‘So you’ve caught me. Now what?’
Frightened red eyes looked back at her. Some Vamp kid.
‘Whoa, whoa!’ he said, without the accent that Vampire gang members seemed to favour. ‘Not looking for trouble!’ He scrabbled with his hoodie for a second, making sure he was completely covered despite Nora’s grip on him. There weren’t any direct rays on an overcast day like this, so he needn’t have been so concerned. Nora herself was a much more pressing threat. Maybe she should remind him of that fact.
But no. He was practically still a child. She held him to the bricks for a moment more, just for emphasis, then let go and stepped back. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘It’s just… uh, you’re with the Institute, right?’
Nora said nothing.
The Vamp kid groped around to fill the silence, as Nora expected him to. ‘Well, me and a few of our boys saw you a couple weeks back. With a gnome and someone else. Middle of the night, right?’
‘I also exist at night, yes. Get on with it.’
‘Well, your friend – not the gnome, the other one – doubled back to uh, give us a talking to. And I recognized her, like. P.C Hardgard, it was.’
‘Hardgard? Really?’
‘No I’m serious!’ the Vampire protested. ‘People take the piss out of her name but she’s sound about it, not like some of the other coppers. She’s alright. Always asks how it’s gone for me in court and stuff.’
‘So, let me know if I’m following you,’ said Nora, pun unintended. She’d been stood in a cold alley for longer than strictly necessary, a fact that was rapidly bleeding the patience from her voice. ‘You’ve stalked me through the city so that you could enquire if I… have a friend in the police?’
‘I wanted to ask if she was working for the Institute as well. ‘Cause that’d be a bit shit, you know?’
It was obviously Ursa he’d encountered, but that raised the question, was Ursa moonlighting as a PCSO? Or had she engaged in a bit of identity theft? It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Nora grunted. ‘That’s a good question. Now, don’t let me see you again, or I promise you’ll regret it.’
She gave him a friendly couple of slaps on the cheek and departed the alley unfollowed.
*
Nora hadn’t found an opportunity to bring it up with Ursa during the weeks since then. Which was to say, her method of ‘not really caring enough to pursue answers’ had yet to yield results.
She’d been drinking her first cup of coffee when both Ursa and Merlin had planted themselves at her table in the canteen. This too was something she was ambivalent about – company was nice, yes, but the effort of conversation was… taxing.
Mercifully, before Ursa had even opened her mouth, Cepheus had appeared and was hovering patiently on the outskirts of their table. ‘Hey guys,’ he said, when Nora acknowledged him. ‘Exciting news for you today! Merlin and Ursa have been fully approved for field work!’
The three of them watched as he did a jazzy little flourish with his hands. It drew the eye to his piano-key necktie. ‘And what’s more, I have the details of your first assignment as a team,’ he continued brightly.
‘Oh boy,’ said Nora. ‘Whatever could it be?’
‘Well, it’s just a routine haunting.’
Ursa looked up from her phone. ‘A routine haunting? That’s a normal assignment?’
Nora leant over. ‘Yeah, it’s a pretty average job. Mostly they’re not even proper ghosts, just sluggishly malevolent echoes of someone who died. You just need to find their remains, salt them, and burn them.’
‘That sounds quite similar to how one might describe a normal ghost,’ said Merlin. ‘A lazy one, anyway.’
‘Proper ghosts are rarer. They’re still sentient. Your average poltergeist doesn’t even have any consciousness at all.’ Nora paused to consider for a second. ‘Like a jellyfish.’
Cepheus grinned again with his big, flat teeth. ‘Well, this is a jellyfish that can text, then. All the employees have been getting texts that just say “help”. Penelope raised the flag here.’
Ursa was the first to say it. ‘What do you mean, employees? I thought we were going to a haunted house?’
Cepheus at least had the decency to look embarrassed. ‘Actually… it’s an Ikea.’
This earned a raised eyebrow from Merlin. It sounded an awful lot like a novel he’d read. ‘So less a haunted house, and more a haunted household goods store?’
‘Something like that,’ said Cepheus. ‘We’ve organized a cover for you to get in employee-only areas and the like. You’ll be joining the loss prevention team as temps.’
Ursa physically rose from her seat. ‘Loss prevention?! Have you seen me, Cepheus?’ She gave him a moment to consider her pink hair, diminutive stature, and Harajuku fashion sense. ‘Loss prevention is for like, balding men with beer bellies and stranglers’ hands!’
She slowly sank back to her seat, leaving the others wondering if her outburst was a symptom of some weird past trauma.
‘Well, couldn’t you shift yourself to look like that?’ Cepheus began, but ran out of steam under the encumbrance of Ursa’s stare. ‘Um. Anyway. It’s the one just north of here, so it’ll only be about half an hour’s drive. You’re expected to be there for orientation at 12.’
‘Hold on a sec,’ said Merlin, a slow grin spreading below his moustache. ‘Does this mean we have official access to the R&D department?’
Cepheus blinked. ‘I think she’s baking right now.’
*
The door to the Caliber Institute’s R&D department was a fairly sturdy one, with a reinforced pane of frosted glass in the upper half. The glass bore an inscription that read:
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Below that, someone had scrawled an addendum in red permanent marker. It read:
and baked goods such as cake, pies, and flapped jack
This door currently hung ajar, with a light plume of dark smoke issuing from it. Merlin led the way with Nora and Ursa trailing behind.
‘I don’t know why you’re in such a rush,’ Nora was saying. ‘We’ve still got hours.’
‘I want as much time as possible to examine the R&D facilities here.’
‘They’re not much to write home about.’
‘Perhaps not to you,’ Merlin said. He marched through the open door with the eagerness of a soldier returning from overseas.
The room within was smaller than expected. Several benches were laid out with beakers and Bunsen burners, all bubbling away in the refinement of some alchemical concoction. Against one wall was a lathe; an antique that was powered by a pedal and flywheel rather than a motor. Currently there was a staff clamped into it, with runes carved up maybe half its length.
There was also a Goblin stood in the centre of the room, sniffing at the air occasionally and looking confused. She was wearing casual clothes with a white lab coat on top, then atop that, an apron emblazoned with the words ‘YOUR TEXT HERE’ in a large sans serif font.
Merlin’s attention, however, was entirely focused on a set of decrepit-looking servers clustered in a corner. It rather looked like they’d been just left there to gather dust. A sticker, mostly peeled away by now, read ‘This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!’
‘Hello, Emva,’ said Nora. ‘Smells like something might be burning.’
The Goblin’s eyes widened like detonating fireworks. ‘My muffins!’ she cried, vaulting a bench and sprinting into a little en suite kitchen area. There came a clanging sound and a shriek, then Emva reappeared with a tray of grey, igneous rocks that might have been muffins before whatever cataclysm had occurred in the oven. Or perhaps she’d used a kiln?
‘Oh man,’ said Emva. ‘Got ‘em just in time!’ She brandished the tray in their direction. ‘Wanna try?’
‘Oh, we really should let them cool,’ said Ursa, carefully.
Nora nodded, grateful for Ursa’s silver tongue. ‘Besides,’ she said. ‘We’re here on business.’
‘Plus I’d like to take a look at those servers if you wouldn’t mind.’ There was a revulsion in Merlin’s eyes, quite unrelated to the calcified muffins.
‘What? Why?’ Emva put her tray down. Nora and Ursa found themselves still watching it, as if expecting it to lunge at them.
Merlin rushed over to the servers while he was talking. ‘I can hear that they’re running, but they’re not in great shape, are they? I was hoping to investigate the, er… well, I was expecting some state of the art blending of magic and technology.’ His voice grew muffled as he stuck his head through the gap behind one. ‘Good god, they’re all plugged in on one extension?!’
‘Oh. Yeah, they’re not really my thing,’ said Emva. ‘I’ve been trying to get rid, but nobody will help me shift ‘em.’
Merlin emerged with a look of horror and a patina of dust. ‘This room isn’t even air conditioned.’
‘Oof, I know right? The kitchen makes it ten times worse, too.’
Merlin’s gaze moved to the kitchen area, taking it in properly this time. There was a sign above the doorway that said ‘server room’.
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Well, uh, Emva, if you’re ever in need of any assistance with these, I would be more than happy to lend a hand.’
‘Ah yeah, clear some space! That’d be great!’
Merlin didn’t correct her, but Nora took advantage of his silence to redirect the conversation. ‘So Emva, we’re going to be dealing with a ghost. These two are new recruits.’
‘Oh!’ said Emva. ‘Yes. I made up some stuff for the newbies!’ She scrambled over to a workbench with cupboards below it, throwing open the doors.
*
Emva had apparently been given a brief description of their talents and needs, and only listened to maybe half of it. Ursa received a guitar shaped like a cat, which produced a sort of synthesized meowing instead of normal notes. Merlin came away with a bowtie that, when tied around an electrical device, would apparently recharge its battery. He was instructed that under no circumstances whatsoever should he put it around his neck.
Nora was also given something Emva kept calling a ‘Bitch Crystal’. When pressed for information, Emva told her it was ‘for bad bitches only’ and would ‘increase her power’.
After that, the three of them headed over to the car park. There was a company car they’d been given permission to use, though they did hit something of a snag.
‘Who’s driving?’ Ursa asked. ‘I mean, I don’t have a license, so…’
‘Well I can’t do it. I only know how to ride a bike.’ Nora nodded toward a motorcycle, a sleek black monster of a sport bike that couldn’t decide if it belonged more to a cyberpunk futurescape or apocalyptic wasteland. There were a couple of empty spaces to either side of it, like it had scared off the surrounding cars. Or eaten them.
‘I’ll handle it,’ said Merlin. The gnome trooped over to the car without checking to see if they were following.
‘Wait, won’t you need like, pedal extenders?’ said Ursa as she settled into the back seat. ‘Adaptive devices, or whatever the term is?’
Merlin climbed into the front passenger seat and began typing away at his laptop.
‘Uh, Merlin?’ Ursa watched as he highlighted a program named Unseen_Servant.exe and selected Run as thaumaturge from a list of options. The engine rumbled to life.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ said Nora. ‘We can’t go driving through town without a bloody driver! People are going to see. Do you want auditors chasing us down through the streets?’
‘Google,’ said Merlin, by way of explanation.
They were sat in a 2001 Honda Accord. Pedestrians were more likely to suspect it was haunted than self-driving. Of course, Merlin’s Unseen Servant was a sort of hybrid of the two.
‘No. Nope,’ said Nora. ‘This isn’t happening. They gave me a sidecar for my bike. We’ll use that.’
Merlin closed his laptop in a somewhat sullen gesture.
‘How did you teach a program how to drive, anyway?’ Ursa asked, as Nora fitted the side of her monstrous bike with an incongruous little carriage. ‘I thought you had to ride around on that little electric scooter thing?’
‘I don’t have to. I choose to,’ said Merlin, patiently. ‘For the environment. I know how to drive a car.’
‘Really?’ Nora chucked him a helmet. ‘What did you learn to drive in?’
Merlin said nothing for a moment. Then, very quietly:
‘A clown car.’
The others just about managed to stop laughing by the time they arrived at Ikea.
Roll History 