Tuesday 12 November 2019

Session 246 - Lost Causes



Phew! Can't believe I got this out on time honestly! That was a lot.
I've got to get this out before the game starts in half an hour or so, so here we go!

Session 246 - Lost Causes

Date:
15 years after the End.

Character List:
- Andromeda, Level 7 Laddite Cleric / Kitty
- Red, Level 6 Duellist Fighter / Timothy
- DJ, Level 6 Intergalacticist Cleric / Charles
- Praise-God-For-He-Gave-His-Only-Son-So-That-We-Might-Be-Saved-From-Damnation Snels, Level 6 Snelsman Cleric / George
- Granite “Grumpy” Ironjaw, Level 6 Warden Dwarf
- Dargo, Level 4 Inheritor / Russell
- The New Moondin Lost Boys, Level 1 Extras / George

New Characters:
- The New Moondin Lost Boys, a group of orphans from New Moondin’s Denialist Brotherhood. They’re all at least 16 so they’re not technically child soldiers.

New Backstory:
- Choosing the Poison World over the perfect future rocked Dargo’s worldview, but if he could go back he’d still do it all again. Re-take an action and all associated rolls once per session.
Enemies Defeated:
- A Stygimoloch (100 exp)
Total: 100 exp

Salvage:
- World’s Longest Sausage (5 exp)
- Massive Kebab (50 exp)
- Book #308: POWERLAD: Mischief in Moondin (50 exp)
- 5 Boar Meat (5 exp)
Total: 110 exp

Events:

--- Grumpy’s World
- Grumpy is floating in white, telling everything he knows to the avatar of Styx in front of him. All about New Moondin, the Seraphim, everything he’s been through.
- “It’s ok! It’s ok! I know, I know!” says Styx, trying to comfort him. “It wasn’t real, Grumpy! You’re safe now. Please just come home with me.”
- The whiteness is split in two, doors opening to reveal the shining city of the real world. Grumpy sees his real self standing on the balcony overlooking the beautiful city, transforming omni-glaive strapped to his back.
- Grumpy rejects heaven, asking that Styx fork his personality and send this version back to the Poison World. Styx looks at him sadly, “it’s always the good ones”, before sending him back to his body in the simulation.

--- The Truth
- Snels is berating his false son in the real world, the shining city of Fate glittering below. He’s pissed that his son would abandon God to become a digital being. “You’re not real!” he yells, “None of this is real! Take me to the real world!”
- “Fine, pull him out” says Styx, dejectedly. Bright white light fills his being.
- …
- beep
- ...
- beep
- …
- beep
- …
- Snels is looking at a matte beige ceiling. Something is beeping. He turns his head to the side and sees his body, Old Man Snels’ body, lying on a hospital bed. The beeping machine is an Automated Dialysis Assistance Machine - an A.D.A.M.
- He looks down at his body - it’s a smooth androgynous flesh-coloured mannequin. Cables are slotted into the ports on his arms and body.
- There is a doctor who starts when he sees the Snels-mannequin sit up and begin undocking the cables. “Woah woah woah, you’re not meant to be awake yet!”. His badge shows his name - Dr Oliver, MD.
- The mannequin leaps at the doctor’s neck and starts to choke him! As he flails the door bangs open and an orderly runs in, followed by Snels’ beautiful wife. She begs the mannequin to stop and it skitters back to its feet, back warily to the wall.
- The orderly tries to explain. The body in the bed is the real Snels - George Snels. He’s been in a coma for 3 years. They’ve been trying to bring him back by forking his mind into a simulation, letting it gain different experiences, then merging it back in to jump-start his consciousness.
- George’s wife begs the mannequin to merge back into her husband’s mind. It’s their last chance. They’ve already tried it several times and each new merge makes the resulting mind more aberrant. If this time doesn’t work, he’ll be gone forever.
- The mannequin sees a goblin walking past in the corridor and goes mad, tearing past the doctor (still coughing and holding his throat) and scrambling out to kill the goblin! It’s not Styx, and the orderly manages to tackle the mannequin down before it does significant harm.
- It stands stock still as it looks out of the glass bay window to the shining city of Fate below. It looks more real, somehow. More grubby. There are fingerprints on the glass, and white foam scum on the distant beach, and tarnish on the rooftops of the brass city.
- It stands and turns to George’s wife, and in its scratchy synthesised voice says, “I need some time to think”.
--- The Actual World
- Grumpy’s final thought, as he’s thrust back into his body in the elevator, is “I want sunglasses!”.
- He jerks awake to find the others are already back and awake. All except Damnation Snels, whose body is trembling in the upload chair. Everyone gets a pair of sunnies to their specification, the glasses forming together from the black glass shards on the floors.
- Since they’re all in the elevator again, the party endeavour to check out some of the other rooms in here. If they express a desire to leave, the black glass of the central room forms steps down to the outside.
- Andromeda pokes her head into a room with countless glass cubes containing miniature animals. It’s pretty cool. On the other side of the room there are two mirrors facing each other. She stands between them… and disappears!
- The others see her look towards them in shock, skin now ghostly pale and her teeth now extended into vampire fangs. She’s not invisible, she’s a vampire! Plus her look has updated to a very exciting vampire chic. She immediately experiments with turning into various classic vampire transformations and it works! Way cool!
- She sees a horse amongst the miniature beasts and touches the cube it’s inside… which suddenly vanishes. The miniature horse jumps out, rapidly starting to grow, and the other cubes begin to shift and fall, releasing other creatures!

--- Snels Is
- Snels opens his eyes into the simulation he chose - the God Sim where he is the Fated King in the omnipotent city of Fate. The simulation is running at an arbitrarily fast speed, he will have thousands of subjective years to think in the space of an objective second.
- His first act is to annihilate all life on the planet in a wave of pale ooze. Komm, süßer Tod plays as the world is wiped clean and the substance of the planet is broken down over the course of centuries, all used to augment Fate into a machine the size of a planet.



- He reaches Kardashev II a thousand years later, sending countless vessels out into the galaxy to claim more energy for the great work. Dyson Sphere Fate's computational power grows exponentially. The simulation starts to break down, losing resolution as the thinking machine takes up every last scrap of processing power. - Snels, deep in the silent core of the impossibly vast computer, sees error codes flooding in. He smiles as the simulation collapses and he sees, for the briefest second, the myriad worlds beyond...

--- Critter Chaos!
- The animal cubes are falling and shattering, releasing the creatures within!
- Grumpy holds up one of the walls of glass cubes, flicking another to support another pile. A hippo, rapidly growing from its cube in the wall, bites him with its massive jaws!
- Andromeda’s horse whinnies, looks into her eyes, and is suddenly taken out by a rhino! They smash into another wall, right next to a crocodile which snaps at their legs! Andromeda turns to see a tiger beginning to pounce and makes it stop still when it looks into her vampire eyes. She controls a tiger!
- The beasts in the cubes smashed apart by the deadly rhino-on-horse combat start growing themselves. It’s chaos!
- Outside, in the central chamber, Damnation Snels’ body starts jerking and frothing. Andromeda can sense his heart seizing up and suddenly feels very hungry.

--- A Virus
- He’s back in the place he was thousands and thousands of years ago. A hospital bed, looking up at a matte beige ceiling.
- Voices, raised in alarm. “Oh fuck he was meant to dip in and have a couple of hours down these, how long was that for him?!”.
- A goblin’s voice, “I’m trying to shut it down!”.
- Another voice, sobbing, his wife. He looks to the side. George Snels’ body is shuddering, his eyes pop open, bloodshot, grinding his teeth. The Snels’ make eye contact. A shock of recognition. Then blankness. Whiteness.
- He’s floating in white again. Styx is there, but he seems frustrated and distracted.
- “You gotta make a choice man! Your simulation released a subneural virus, we can’t stay here long. Back into the simulation? Or merge with yourself in the real world?”
- Snels demands the truth, and Styx tells him that the Poison World is the simulation and the real world is reality. “You’re lying to me!” cries Snels.
- Snels chooses neither, choosing to float here in this white limbo. Time doesn’t scare him. After all, he’s lived for millenia.
- Styx disappears, telling Snels he pities him. As a last act of charity, he gives Snels a window to the Poison World simulation, leaving him to look out of the eyes of some other Snels below…

--- Mystery Meat
- Inside the room it’s clearly a lost cause! The room is filling up with more and more animals, compressing into a whole lot of miscellaneous meat! Andromeda leaps her tiger into combat and considers going to eat Snels. If she bites the back of the neck, nobody will ever suspect...
- She turns to look back and… Snels is poking his head into the room? She sees him realise that everything’s fucked in there, then run out to the centre room and collapse into black glass.
- The party absconds with great alacrity! Dargo grabs the remains of the crocodile and collapses into blob-mode, digesting the creature and upgrading his softshell crab armour to crocodile scales.
- The door shuts behind them… but it’s too slow. The sound of dying animals is deafening and horrific. The crushed up meat and bone and scales and feathers crams up against the closing door and slows it as it struggles to iris shut. The meat extrudes out through the centre of the door, creating the world’s most awful doner kebab and then the world’s longest and most suspect sausage.
- They look at the tube of gristly meat with a mixture of horror and genuine interest. The only sound the squishing, slopping sound of Dargo digesting his crocodilian meal. DJ hefts the kebab onto his shoulder, “Result!”.

--- Extra Time
- They leave the elevator, the other doors closing to prevent them fucking things up further, and leave down the glass stairs in the central chamber.
- The question is now what they do next! Andromeda changes into a bat, her vampire form unbothered by the artificial daylight within the dome, and flies up to get the lay of the land.
- DJ wants to investigate a plume of sparkling smoke, assuming it’s an alien crash site. Andromeda wants to go to Mt Death Frost now that she’s a vampire and check them out.
- They go to collect the minions who had to wait across the black glass and find a surprise - lots of people! It’s the New Moondin Lost Boys, the Brotherhood’s orphan division, led by Flowers Penurius. They’re all named after things which no longer exist, hence the name.
- Andromeda approaches her Void Pet which is extremely timid at her approach. It eventually warms to her again after briefly shying away.
- They decide to head to Mt Death Frost first, then come back to investigate the crash site. Vampires it is!


--- Road to Mt Death Frost
- Cutting back through the dense, horrible forest, they have a brief encounter with a couple of people near a dead body - one a human, the other a slime creature. They seem to be having a consensually good time, despite the dead body hidden in the ferns nearby. Dargo eats the body and finds he’s just a dead guy who died of natural causes… naturally occurring dinosaur causes.
- They lift the corpse’s gear. Some rope, a dino-bone sword, and a book! It’s book #308 - POWERLAD: Mischief in Moondin. A classic!
- Red stabs herself in the head “a bit” to allow Lonely Blade to talk to the version of the Lady in his head. She is… perturbed by the voice of RJ and says she’ll talk to Red any time as long as she please please please removes the sword from her head!
- They continue on and as they reach the foot of the mountain they come across a Stygimoloch, a species of Pachycephalosaurus, harassing a boar! It’s defending eggs, and Red is absolutely fucking delighted.
- Red tries to sneak in and grab the eggs, but it spots her! She easily evades its thick-skulled charge, and DJ quite circumvents matters by Abducting the poor dinosaur into the sky.
- Andromeda finishes off the wounded boar, draining all of its blood. Delicious. Grumpy gathers the bloodless meat for rations.
- While he dressed the carcass the dinosaur plummets out of the sky and slams into the ground. So much for that poor thing!

--- Vampire Queen
- They start climbing the mountain and are met by some rather charming vampires. “Vampdromeda” is warned about meeting Bertha. GJ hits it off with a vampire after offering his blood, so she takes him off for a threesome off-screen. Nice.
- After DJ returns, one of the vampires offers to take the party up the mountain so they don’t have to make the climb. He summons a horde of rats that take them all the way up to a cave mouth near the top of the mountain.
- From the darkness of the cave the slender Morticia Addams-like figure of Bertha approaches. Her voice screams out. “An Andromeda… vampire? You have some fucking nerve! You took my husband from meeeee!!!”.
- As she screams, a ghostly banshee form form screeches out of her, gliding straight towards Andromeda!


Total: 3000 exp

Team Bonus:
- Absolutely Disgusting bonus
- Aggressive Negotiations bonus
- Antagonist Antagoniser bonus
- Balls to the Wall bonus
- Best of Intentions bonus
- Better Part of Valour bonus
- Brutal Kill bonus
- Coitus boners
- Classic Charles bonus
- Deja Vu bonus
- Diplomancy bonus
- Dramatic Battle bonus
- Dramatic Escape bonus
- Enmity Inciter bonus
- Freudian bonus
- Heresy bonus
- Holy bonus
- Homoerotic bonus
- I Immediately Regret This Decision bonus
- Ludicrous Gore bonus
- Mountaineer bonus
- Noblebright bonus
- Pundemonium bonus
- Pyrrhic Victory bonus
- Split the Party bonus
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong bonus
Total: 1300 exp

Individual Bonus:
- Chronicler (Carter / Grumpy - 100 exp)
- Expedition Leader (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Cartographer (Carter / Grumpy - 100 exp)
- Paymaster (Charles / DJ - 100 exp)
- Quartermaster (Russell / Dargo - 100 exp)
- Vanguard (Russell / Dargo - 100 exp)
- Triage (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Chef (George / NMLB - 100 exp)
- JÜGBRINGYR bonus (Timothy, Charles, Kitty - 500 exp ea.)
- Art Attack bonus (George - 100 exp ea.)
- An Hero bonus (George - 200 exp)
- Lonely Death bonus (George - 500 exp)

Death (?) Toll:
- Praise-God-For-He-Gave-His-Only-Son-So-That-We-Might-Be-Saved-From-Damnation Snels, trapped in simulation limbo forevermore.

Exp Totals:
- Kitty / Andromeda, Level 7 Andromedan Vampire: 75501 (Level up at 144000)
- Tim / Red, Level 6 Duellist Fighter: 57314 (Level up at 64000)
- Charles / Dustin Johnson, Level 6 Intergalacticist Cleric: 54946 (Level up at 56000)
- Carter / Granite "Grumpy" Ironjaw, Level 6 Warden Dwarf: 42874 (Level up at 70400)
- Russell / Dargo, Level 5 Inheritor: 27266 (Level up at 36000)
- George / The New Moondin Lost Boys, Level 2 Extras: 1652 (Level up at 3000)
Level Up! +1d12 HP! +Named Character! +Backstory!

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