Present Party: Aria, Claudia, Emori, and Steve
Setting: Aboard the starship, Cave of Wonders, captained by a space pirate / genie, Theron, and his crew.
After their long day, the party decided to get some rest. The next morning, Claudia made sure to prepare the Sending spell she'd just procured from Aquamarine, the ship's magic item expert. She and Aria shared a room, and both wanted to know if this would work.
Claudia cast the spell, and thought her message.
In response, a woman's voice in her mind (not her fiancée's either) informed her, "I understand you are trying to send a message across worlds. If you would like this message sent, you must first understand that you will be compromising the integrity of this world and the world where this message would be received. You will also be affecting the flow of time in that world. Would you still like to send your message?"
"Affecting it how? Will all the years I've spent here pass there?"
"No, time is a mortal construct," the voice told her. "It is in your contract that you will return to your world the moment at which you left it. Time is infinite and it continues without you. So you will be creating a tertiary timeline."
Claudia said she would. There was a long pause, and then, very faintly because it was coming from far away, she received a response. Her fiancee, Amera's, voice echoed through her mind. She was confused, asking what Claudia was doing.
Claudia tried to send another message, and received the same warning. She sent it anyway.
Instead of Amera, that same voice replied, "There was a delay in sending your message."
Despite that, Claudia was overjoyed that it worked at all. Aria was overjoyed for her, but also quite upset. She couldn't learn Sending, and Claudia wasn't familiar enough with her lover Silas to contact him. The two of them made their way to breakfast after that.
In the cantina, they met up with Emori and Confidence. Steve was still working, having been studying Jorge the weponsmith's failed attempt at a teleportation device. During this breakfast, the girls telepathically conspired as to how they could get Confidence to reveal the location of Theron's lamp. They agreed that Emori probably had the best chance
At the end of breakfast, Confidence said he was leaving to go and work out, and Emori went to accompany him. On the way out, he placed his hand on Aria and Claudia's shoulders. While he drew away from Claudia quickly, his hand skated over the back of Aria's shoulder and up her neck. It was swift, and it startled her. Claudia began to move Aria's long hair to inspect her neck... and Aria's hair fell off, and into her hands. The more she touched it, the more came off. The two of them presumed that this was the revenge Confidence and Emori had been plotting after Aria accidentally shot him in the armory. They went to confront them.
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| Confidence Milton Tiefling, Bard Iteration Age 20 in World 9 (Art made by me, using Heroforge) |
He showed off his spellcasting prowess when Aria stormed into the gym, nearly half bald at this point. When she claimed he'd been responsible, he said, "What are you talking about? Emori and I have been here, how could we have been responsible? It definitely wasn't us."
Aria, having failed a Wisdom saving throw against Modify Memory, believed him. Claudia, although skeptical, said nothing. Confidence assured Aria that he'd seen this type of prank before. The hair should grow back in ten or fifteen minutes, and sure enough, it did.
~~~~~
Back in the armory, Steve was working hard. He commissioned something from Jorge: a very expensive tuning fork. It was something Jorge could make, but it'd take him a week to do and Steve would have to pay for the materials. Using the money he'd acquired from playing the stock market over the last few days, he had plenty to pay for it.
He also continued his study of the teleportation device, which was intended to be powered by electricity, but it had blown out some power on the ship. He discovered that magic could be used to power the crystals that linked the two devices together in place of electricity. The question was whether or not a spell (like Dimension Door) could be infused to power it. While that seemed likely, Steve did not know how that would be done - not yet...
Once he finished, after his all-nighter, he decided to finally get some rest.
~~~~~
That night, Emori returned to Confidence's room and presented him with the bracer she'd commissioned from Jorge. She explained to him how much she cared about him, and how she wanted to make him feel as though someone cared about him. She wanted to assure him that he wouldn't ever feel forgotten, like he had before.
"No one has ever... done something like this for me before..." Confidence was genuinely touched, and he seemed comforted by her sentiment.
Then, Emori started to ask questions about the lamp, and admitted that the party believed he knew where it was. They'd overheard him talking with Scarlett. His response was that she'd come to take something of hers back she thought he had. Confidence also insisted that he didn't have the lamp and warned Emori about the last people who'd gone looking. He claimed that Theron had turned them into cats that roamed the ship. He wanted to protect her from that; he cared about her.
He also reminded her, "Well, why would he leave it with me? I'm not anyone important."
"But that might be exactly why he would. No one would expect you to have it."
"I suppose, but... I don't. And I don't know where it is. I mean, someone has to have it because if not, then how's he out? As far as I understand it, he can't leave the lamp unless someone actually possesses it."
After that conversation, Emori made the excuse that she needed to grab something from her party, and said she'd be back later. Confidence let her go. On a successful insight check, she discerned that he'd been lying about a few things. The conversation she'd overheard between Scarlett and Confidence was definitely about something she didn't have or own. Additionally, having been on this ship for several days and not having access to too many areas, she was sure she hadn't seen any cats roaming, like Confidence said there were.
Emori reported back to the rest of the party, even waking Steve from his all-day rest. Claudia used her Awakened Spellbook feature and used it to sneak her eyes and ears into Confidence's room to spy on him. Her spellbook manifested itself as a bunch of floating, glowing runes. When she arrived, he was laying on the bed on his back, looking up at the ceiling. She cast Detect Thoughts through her book. His current active thoughts were that he was feeling guilty about lying to Emori's face. He started to sit up from the bed and Claudia attempted to hide, but failed. She watched as Confidence's eyes fell on her, and he waved his hands. She was jostled back into her own body, by their rooms. Luckily, Confidence had no way of knowing who that was.
They decided that, since Confidence didn't want Emori to get hurt asking about the lamp, it may actually be better for the rest of them to handle it. They'll assure him that Emori isn't involved in any way. Maybe then he would be more willing. They'd try in the morning.
Emori waited an hour before returning to the room. When she did, she found Confidence asleep in bed, as though nothing had happened.
~~~~~
Emori left the room early the next morning, before the rest of the party could come in. She needed to be separate from them at this moment.
Steve, Claudia, and Aria went to Confidence's room a little later, and knocked.
"Who is it?" he called from inside.
"Housekeeping," Claudia answered.
"No need for housekeepers today, thank you. I'm not taking visitors."
With two of them able to cast Dimension Door, the party decided that doors were unnecessary, and they teleported themselves into the room. A short fight ensued, that ended when Steve actually managed to pin Confidence to the wall in a fit of strength and Aria subdued him for a moment with Crown of Madness.
"Don't ever. Lie. To my sister," Steve berated, keeping Confidence firmly against the wall.
Claudia tied him up with rope they'd collected. They asked him about the lamp, and he again, denied he knew where it was. When they called him out, knowing that he was lying, they searched his room and found nothing. Then, they started interrogating him for answers, with Claudia applying Shocking Grasp when necessary.
"It's somewhere you're not going to get to."
"What? Did you eat it or something?" Claudia asked.
"Maybe I did," Confidence said, smirking.
In response, Claudia took her dagger and cut into his side. It wasn't a necessarily deep wound, but it was enough to make him scream.
Eventually, he declared, "You will kill me before I tell you where it is. I'm doing this because she cares about you, not because I do. If you all get hurt because of something I did, that's not fair to you."
Feeling as though, they were out of options, Claudia attempted to reach out to The System Hacker again: the spinning green cube that lived in the black void. Instead, she found that a different creature had answered her request. She found herself floating in a red void. A disembodied voice greeted her, and from it, she learned a few things. The players don't know this creature's name, so for now, I'll refer to them as "Red Void."
- When she asked about a genie lamp and the world they were in, Red Void had to look up what she was talking about, and asked a few clarifying questions about the world in order to identify it. She could hear the sound of pages in a book being turned as the creature was searching.
- Red Void claimed that there shouldn't be a genie lamp in the world she was referring to. One hadn't been written in, but if it existed it was probably the result of the Shard. Claudia told them that they found the Shard already; Theron, the genie, had been wearing them. The Void replied that if that was true, and the genie was still bound to a lamp, then that lamp would also have to have a piece of the Shard within it. Only a Shard of the System could contain another Shard's power like that.
- If that was the case, Red Void didn't know what would happen if a transmigrator touched the lamp. The Shard would be given to them, obviously, but they didn't know what that meant for the genie. If the genie was free and with the power of the Shard pieces still in his wrists, that might cause problems. They told her to be cautious.
- When Red Void learned that Confidence had the lamp, they groaned, "Who in their right mind would put Confidence Milton in charge of a genie lamp?"
- Claudia asked for this creature's name, and the Void claimed that they couldn't give it. It was dangerous right now.
- Claudia learned, however, that this creature's function was something of a storyteller. They'd been told that these worlds, in their purest forms, were just big stories. Red Void writes the stories.
Red Void also asked Claudia, "Think about a pie. What makes up a pie?"
"Um... the crust and the filling?"
"Right," they said. "There is a reason why you are a tiefling, why you have purple skin, and why your world looks how it does. I'm not that reason. But... I am the reason that you think the way you do. I'm the reason you like arcana, and you love your fiancee, and why you drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. I create the filling for everything."
- Since Red Void knew the story, Claudia asked to know what the ideal ending was. The Void said that Ali was supposed to take over the kingdom, but he could only do that if his sister didn't die first. Ali is the one who's supposed to tear down the wall around the city of Agrabah.
- Lastly, Claudia asked the Void where they might hide the lamp in a world like the one they're in, and it answered, "Probably... I'd put it in plain sight, you know? Like... somewhere so obvious it's not obvious anymore. Like if players in a TTRPG saw that item, they'd walk by it without thinking anything of it."
"I... don't know what that means," Claudia replied.
"No, I suppose you wouldn't. My bad."
Claudia admitted to this creature that she'd been trying to get information out of Confidence, and that she'd even hurt him to do so.
As this creature sent her off, they said, "Claudia, I like you. Do me a favor. Maybe don't torture the man who's going to save everything I've ever created."
~~~~~
Credit to @ijaymendell inspiring this awesome campaign!
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