Session 340 - Set Fleshy Sail for the Pyramid!

Date: 25 April, 22 p.p.

Moon: First Quarter

Zenith: The Dead God

New Characters:
- Odo Grumblebelch, a "Dwarfbarian" on loan from the Mt Grumblebelch Co.

New Backstory:
- Grumblebelch was tragically left behind by his Dwarven outcast clan because he was slowing them down, and they abandoned him behind them. +1 to Fleeing rolls of allies ahead of you

New Mentors:
- Dorian has retired to become the owner of a Wyvern Sanctuary, breeding wyverns to make sure this rare creature takes to the skies once more! Mentor Power: Great contortionist - can basically squeeze through ludicrously small gaps.

- Grumblebelch has retired to create a new Dwarven hall and mining conglomerate in the mountains to the west. Mentor Power: Get Out of Blender Free Card - Escape a very obviously telegraphed death, once.

Events:

--- Jonathon Toast Comes in Clutch
- Some time has passed the destruction of Shub-Wizardwrath, and the dramatic nature of the intervening time is too dramatic to detail here.
- Suffice to say that the great symbiotic wizard combination was destroyed, the great fleshy airship named Jonathon Toast made its way round to the underside of Fortress-City Fate, and the party were rescued from the mechanical depths.

- They've been living the high life since, regaling the many LARPers of Fate with their tales of derring-do in the underworld.

- Notably the airship is now fully staffed. There's a little shop staffed by none other than the gold-masked demon Julgoor! He will be able to do all the usual buying and selling of a small town, plus he's got the access to the Gardens of Ynn that can be used to fast-travel between settlements!
- The requirements for access are twofold - a society that enforces free markets and private property under a capitalist mode of production... and a garden. Shrubberies are presumably a must!
- Julgoor also acts as a bank, since he is after all the ultimate source of the Obol-backed Debt Tattoos and the drug-peg that keeps them valuable. Swan sends money back home.

--- Down to Business
- Hyped up by all this talk of capital accumulation, Grumblebelch puts his vast fortune to work by founding Mt Grumblebelch Co. in the mountains west of Mt Death Frost. Strike the earth!

- Sydney spends their time working on some interesting new spells in the downtime, creating such stuff as Recolour, Animate Furnishing, and Control Zed.
- Jojo, inspired by Gimblewang's dyslexic spells, creates wonders such as Polymorph Elf and Earthcake.

- Swan the Swift opens up the Wheatlands Neo Spacedin Branch near the crashed spaceship in the shattered Dino-Dome, the serfs made up of savage human survivors and their loyal Mod Con allies. Finally, an alternative to poorly cooked pizza!

--- Bertha Returns!
- The party are called to the Sciotherico palace at the centre of Fate, it's once-bustling halls of penitent actuaries empty and silent.
- In the throne room the de facto rulers of Fate are gathered around a table that is clearly a repurposed miniatures game used to resolve some LARP-related conflict. In the absence of any real ruler, the people who'd been roleplaying Fate's rulers have been thrust into power!
- The inhabitants of Fate are, after all, simply sleeved copies of minds that were backed up into Fate during Styx's tenure. It's a long story, but basically it's the Matrix in the data stacks and those who want to live in the real world are sleeved into demon-clay bodies. They spend their time LARPing because they can't leave.

- More interestingly, Bertha has arrived! The Vampire Queen of Mt Death Frost is worried because her frenemy and sometime co-ruler of the vampires Cyrus has attached himself to the Darga and is now some sort of god-figure to the mutant nosferatu. Help killing him would be appreciated.

- She's also super interested in the POWERLAD novels collected by Swan and Dorian! She buys them at a fine price.
- Given that the Fate datastacks remain unfixed, the uploaded minds are slowly but surely being lost. The solution - uploaded minds are being incarnated!
- Most are being reformed into real actual fleshy beings from the flesh-sludge that remains of Shub-Wizardwrath, assisted by the Unravelled priests down there. They're pretty chill now that they're no longer under the wizard-boss' influence.
- A smaller contingent are being Remade into metal golem bodies with help from a certain family of fire robots from deep below. They call themselves the Firehearts.

- Grumblebelch works out a trade network between his mines, Bertha's undead, and Swan's Wheatlands. The Wheatlands will supply bread and beer to the mines and clean blood to Bertha's vampires. In exchange the mines get skeleton labour and the Wheatlands get stone for building on the rotting Meatlands and gems for a monetary system! It's a trade network baby!

--- Rumours, finally!

- "There's a place called New Moondin to the south that's protected by an energy shield and was completely untouched by the poison and the thorns! It's a miraculous place where they never even noticed the end of days!"
- "There's an insane version of Styx who lives in a huge tree north of the Dharga, surrounded by a thousand thousand iterations of himself which he keeps as slaves! He wants nothing more than to upload to Fate's mainframe and retake control... which is sure to disappoint him if it ever happens because Fate is completely broken."
- "A noble dragon as big as mountains roams the Drudge Wastes. Make sure not to wear metal around him, it offends him, and his legion of electric ghosts will eat it from your very body!"
- "The vampires that feasted upon the Dharga have become strange and mutated Nosferatu motherfuckers, and now they control the Dharga itself!"
- "A Styx iteration is burrowing into Fate's machinery and will soon activate the robots that will reset the whole place! They'll wipe everything and kill everyone who lives down there!"

--- Final Checks

- Dorian takes the wyvern eggs and sets up the Wyvern Sanctuary down on the savannah below Fate, eating one of the eggs first to absorb a Wyvern's maternal instincts.

- Grumblebelch heads off to begin mining in his new business venture, bringing at least seven freshly incarnated Dwarves with him.
- Some days later, his successor arrives! It is Odo of the Grumblebelches (Odo Grumblebelch for short) who is a worker in the Mt Grumblebelch Co located under Mt Grumblebelch under the management of Grumblebelch, and he worships the Old Grump. He's also more Barbarian than Dwarf.

--- Liftoff!

- With Admin Adventures over, the crew of the good ship Jonathon Toast unmoor and sail off into the sky! A summer storm rains against the taut sunburnt skin of the meaty airship, internal bladders full of extremely flammable lighter-than-air gas, and crewed largely by a bunch of people the party's never met under the aegis of Jonathon Toast's central brain!
- They float towards the ziggurat they saw on the map long ago, and from here they can spot the ramshackle goblin town that's grown up around it. More distantly they can see a high-walled and blimp-topped city... and roaming the wastelands is an enormous blue dragon wreathed in machinery and storms.

- Onwards into the Drudge Wastes!

Exp: 7000 exp

OOC:

- Chronicler: Carter

- Expedition Leader: George

- Paymaster & Vanguard: Tom

- Quartermaster: Ollie

Retired:

- Dorian "Ditto" DeMone
- Grumblebelch

Exp Calc:

- George / Swan the Swift, Level 8 Barbarian: 128560 (Level up at 256000)
Level Up! +1d8 HP! +2 Barbarian Powers! +1 to Saves! +Backstory!

- Carter / Sydney, Level 6 Magic-User: 49182 (Level up at 72000)

- Ollie / Jojo Fullbeard, Level 5 Muscle Wizard: 25926 (Level up at 36000)

- Tom / Odo Grumblebelch, Level 1 Dwarven Barbarian: 1600 (Level up at 2000)

- Kitty / Julian Aximander, Level 1 Languid Wastrel: 1400 (Level up at 2250)

Session 320 - Sightseeing in my Flesh Balloon

Date: 18 August, 21 p.p.

Moon: Third Quarter - Dragonwane
Zenith: Oberon

New Characters: 
- Jojo Fullbeard, Muscle Wizard daughter of Iskander who was once a Disaster Repairperson.
- Parabolus, a Specialist who specialises in... ventriloquism. Has a ventriloquist's dummy.

New Backstories:
- Suspiria attempted a forbidden spell and accidentally turned her entire school into an illusion. Countless lives lost and replaced by illusory simulacra. She went into hiding as a result, ending up as a taste tester at Ferfect Fried Chicken.

Events:

--- USS Abomination

- Negotiations have taken place atop the flesh tree Dharga. Aemilius will join the tree as Emperor - less a balancing force and more of an unhinged Emperor who will demand tribute and cause enough internal bickering that the Dharga will be reduced as a threat.
- Also, the Meatlands will be pulled back to the base of the tree, no doubt by merely cutting off circulation to the Meatlands proper. It's August, so the hot sun is sure to make the miles of gangenous flesh smell real good and tasty.

- Finally... they want a ship...

- The Unsightly Symbiotic Ship Abomination is formed!
- Featuring the dulcet tones of Jonathon Toast whose brain has been sacrificed and "upgraded" to form the ship's Awful Intelligence, the ship is huge and rather stupid. Suspiria's familiar loves hanging around the blowhole and pretending to be smoke from the engine. Most of the organs are in the rear, and there's a big Bucket Extrusion And Manipulation device known as the B.E.A.M. to transfer them up and down from the ship. It's... perfect!

- Swan the Swift retires to oversee the Wheatlands project. A wandering ventriloquist named Parabolus arrives conveniently.
- Iskander spends a little while in some sort of poorly explained time travel plot wherein Samantha Bread bears a child - JoJo Athena Fullbeard.

--- Neo-Spacedin
- After some time with all this, they set off on the USS Abomination! First stop - Neo-Spacedin.
- From above they can see the shanty-town that has sprung up around the crashed UFO. They land on the ship's retractable widdle  paws and disembark into what seems suspiciously like a quarry in Wales.

- There are a whole load of bright green blobs dotted around singing about how their god has come! As the airship takes off Parabolus throws his voice to make it sound like the airship itself is speaking and calling the party the emissaries of God.

- The blobs ask where the party is going and they tell them it's Neo-Spacedin. The blobs are all "oooh we can take you there! Help us get in so we can chill!". The party is suspicious.
- Nevertheless, the blobs do lead the party to town. A man in a watchtower holding a laser rifle hails the party... but warns them not to let the blobs in because they drank all the booze. The party get in, accidentally letting a blob or two in, and leaving the disappointed remaining blobs to wheedle at the guards.
- The party hits up the local pub, an extremely tacky reggae themed bar called the Rastaroid. They are, in fact, out of booze. The slimes drank it all!

--- Oven Pizza Horror
- The crashed spaceship is examined and the matter replicator is still stuck on hawaiian oven pizza mode. It turns out all the town's booze is pineapple liqueur made from the pineapple people pick off the pizza.

- [[[Extended jokes and several people crying with laughter here]]]

- There is extended discussion about whether they should try to fix the replicator, because what if they break it? Jojo manages to at least make the pizza come out faster so it doesn't start out reheated. The townsfolk are overjoyed and rename the Hawaiian pizza to The Jojo Pizza.

--- Other Residents
- In town there is a mysterious statue that speaks only in Psalms, worshipped by priests which dragged it here from the wastes. It's the original Snels!
- The Hyperchurch of POWERLAD is the town's main church. The grave of Flowers Penurious is here in the graveyard where grieving worshippers bench-press the gravestones.
- A house with darkened windows contains some vampire refugees. They are a bit pathetic, begging for blood. Suspiria decides against giving them some blood in exchange for a weapon.
- The vampire Luna tells them that Bertha still rules Mt Death Frost, and Cyrus has not been seen for years.

- Swan the Swift briefly arrives with an investment opportunity - the Wheatlands! Wheat beer to change up the pineapple liqueur, and non-pizza wheat products! Plus the vampires can have thrall serfs and be feudal lords! The townsfolk seem pretty pleased with the idea.

- A colony of Mod Cons still reside in the ship, where they have a gaming area set up. Each person in the party persuades a random Mod Con to come with them, from a dimmer bulb for Jojo to an electric toothbrush for Dorian!

- Suspiria, at a blob's behest, kicks it and catches the smaller blob that comes flying out in a bottle. It's a familiar in training! The smoke familiar is immediately jealous.
- Finally, Parabolus asks about the emergency transmission they picked up in Enoch. It was a transmission from Neo-Spacedin to encourage refugees from the growth of the Dharga and the fallout of the diamond dome being destroyed. They are taken to see a special guest... Grumpy the Dwarf!
- He's rocking slowly on a bed next to a stack of uneaten pizza, occasionally mumbling about having lived a thousand thousand lives. Sometimes people emerge from Fate far above, and they're compos mentis but have no memories, and integrate into the community. Grumpy is a little different though, and they don't know why.

- Sounds like someone should investigate Fate!

--- Ascending to Fate

- They return to the ship, satisfied that Neo-Spacedin is going alright and has some interesting stuff going on.
- Ascending back to the ship in the BEAM, they realise that some of these blobs have clung to the bucket! They're stuck under the bottom of the bucket for now, but they might escape...
- Suspiria installs the Mod-Con Playstation in the Hollow Deck. It only has xbox games but who knows what the future might bring? 

- They ascend into the evening sky, turning towards Fate, and blimp their way up and up.
- Lights glimmer below. Fearing air defences, they kick a blob off the ship... nothing. No lasers, no defensive turrets... just light and the faint sound of chatter and music.
- The blimp docks at the only place it really can - the top of the spire of the central sundial-shaped palace! The crew BEAM down, to loud gasps from the crowd below!

- It's just like old times. The steam and cogs of the great Fortress City, the streets filled with hurrying masses, the crowds in clothes from before the end of the world!
- Guards show up in sundial hats, of course. The entry was not exactly subtle. They demand to know who authorised this flesh balloon in the simulation! The party asks them to take them to whoever's in charge.

- Suspiria, hiding behind her mask, is nudged by someone in the crowd. She's been mistaken as a member of the Masquerade faction... but fails the secret codephrase and the person vanishes into the crowd.

- The guards take them through an official looking door and into a sort of backstage area. It turns out Fate is all a big LARP! They meet the LARP coordinator for this area and she's baffled that the party, and the airship, came from outside, she thought everything out there was meant to be dead!
- Suspiria casts Old News, causing everyone within a mile to think that the party's arrival is old news. Known, but not remarked on much any more. The party have entered the LARP...

Total: 6000 exp

Treasure:

- Mod-Con Dimmer Bulb
- Mod-Con Playstation 1 w/ xbox games
- Mod-Con TV Remote
- Mod-Con Electric Toothbrush

Exp Totals:

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 5 Inheritor: 28109 (Level up at 36000)

- Tom / Suspiria, Level 3 Magic-User: 6184 (Level up at 9000)

- George / Parabolus, Level 1 Specialist Ventriloquist: 1600 (Level up at 1750)

- Ollie / Jojo Fullbeard, Level 1 Muscle Wizard: 1600 (Level up at 2250)

Session 250 - Gifflewim’s Recursive Betrayal

In which I once again try to ruin everything HA HA HA

Grumpy gets a new lodger.
The wagons neeaarly reach the plains beyond the jungles.
Everyone is attacked by very small pteradactyls.

Also due to recap inflation I have endeavoured to keep this recap actually snappy for once. Tell me what you think!

Finally, Ollie supplies this intriguingly erudite version of Styx...

Session 250 - Gifflewim’s Recursive Betrayal

Date:

15 years after the End.

Character List:

- Andromeda, Laddite Cleric / Kitty

- DJ, Intergalacticist Cleric / Charles
- Granite “Grumpy” Ironjaw, Warden Dwarf / Carter

- Dargo, Inheritor / Russell
- Red, Duellist Fighter / Timothy
- The New Moondin Lost Boys, Extras / George
- Ratman, Ratman / Izzy

New Backstory:

- Grumpy helped run some suspected villains out of his town. +1 Strength
- Andromeda had a POWERLAD time-clone escape her man-farm during the early years of the apocalypse and join another Andromeda. Her revenge was petty in the extreme. Once per round, deal 1 point of damage to a creature that hit you.
- Big Smiles of the New Moondin Lost Boys stopped a lynching back before the Brotherhood took over New Moondin. As an action, block an attack against someone nearby but take half the damage.
- Red has owed her life to Andromeda on many occasions, saved by healing and lightning shields. Once per session while they’re nearby, drop to 0HP to cancel all Death Dice they have accrued.

Overland Exploration:
- 1 Random Encounter (50 exp)
Total: 50 exp

Loot:

- 9 Yi Qi rations (9 exp)
Total: 9 exp

Foes:

- A flock of Yi Qi (100 exp)
Total: 100 exp

Events:

--- Grumpy and Gifflewim
- The rest of the party see Grumpy vanish as he flips a coin into the air. It is the coin Gifflewim gave him in case he ever needed the assistance of the strange merchant Elf.
- Grumpy attempts to trade for a purported future bug fix for Fate, time-travelled to the present day by Sir Robyn. He offers Dwarven vitality for a limited time, amongst other things.
- There is a catch, though. Gifflewim transports himself to the infinite cyber-prison in which Snels is trapped and tries to start a bidding war for the future of Fortress-City Fate, playing the two foes off against each other. Grumpy wants the antivirus, Snels wants to return to the world.
- In the end, after a rain of Styxes forces the Elf’s hand, he gives them both what they want… to a point. Grumpy receives the antivirus for Snels’ cyberattack on Fate, but the reset messes with the rebirth system. Snels returns to the world… but he’s in Grumpy’s head. Between him and Styx’s earpiece-iteration it’s getting crowded in there!
- Gifflewim vanishes, laughing at how wonderfully he’s fucked everything up for them. Never trust an Elf!

--- Welcome to the Jungle
- Meanwhile, elsewhere, the rest of the party have been slowly slowly trying to get their carts full of food through the trackless jungle and out into the plains beyond, and the crashed spaceship full of modern conveniences they know is out there.
- On the way they meet Indomio and Goolliet, a man who wears a female goop creature like armour. Their relationship is... interesting.
- Nevertheless, they continue. In a particularly dense copse of trees Grumpy and Red manage to catch up… just in time for them to be beset by shrieking flying beasts! They are Yi Qi - winged dinosaurs!

--- Jungle Rumble
- The Yi Qi are weak but numerous, swooping from the trees to savage the party with their sharp fangs! Andromeda commands her monstrous proto-elephant thrall to smash them from the skies with its long trunk, which is does at the expense of overturning its cart.
- Grumpy forces the flock to the ground with expert beam rifle use, then gets one of them caught in his beard! Red uses her impressive duelling abilities to slaughter several at once. The Lost Boys blast haphazardly into the skies.
- Andromeda keeps grabbing them and draining their blood to feed herself. An attempt to whip one out of the sky and down to her fails though, and her whip is caught by the dinosaur and carried aloft! She turns into a bat to follow, but the other Yi Qi grab her bat-form! Her whip is lost!
- By the end of the fight, Grumpy has captured a couple of the creatures in his beard and Red has one by the neck. The others are gone, either killed or fled. Andromeda looks full… and somehow more wise than before.
- The corpses are gathered and field-dressed by the hungry party, always on the lookout for new culinary frontiers

Total: 3000 exp

Team Bonus:

- Aggressive Negotiations bonus
- Antagonist Appeaser bonus
- Best of Intentions bonus
- Brutal Kill bonus
- Classic Charles bonus
- Diplomancy bonus
- Dramatic Battle bonus
- Hard Bargain bonus
- I Immediately Regret This Decision bonus
- Infamy bonus
- Internecine Strife bonus
- Leave a Man Behind bonus
- Long Deliberation bonus
- Ludicrous Gore bonus
- Politico bonus
- Pyrrhic Victory bonus
- Split the Party bonus
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong bonus

Total: 900 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 (Carter / Grumpy - 100 exp)

- Vanguard (George / Lost Boys - 100 exp)
- Triage (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Chef (George / Lost Boys - 100 exp) - Art Attack bonus (Ollie - 100 exp) - Attacco d'Arte bonus (Ollie - 100 exp)- Mügmastyr bonus (Charles - 100 exp)

- Homebringyr bonus (Charles - 500 exp)
- Providyr bonus (Charles, Kitty - 500 exp ea.)
- Horrifying Realisation bonus (Grumpy - 100 exp)
- Cursed bonus (Grumpy - 100 exp)

Exp Totals:

- Kitty / Andromeda, Level 7 Andromedan Vampire: 96636 (Level up at 144000)

- Charles / Dustin Johnson, Level 7 Intergalacticist Cleric: 96239 (Level up at 112000)

- Carter / Granite "Grumpy" Ironjaw, Level 7 Warden Dwarf: 84710 (Level up at 140800)

- Tim / Red, Level 7 Duellist Fighter: 66536 (Level up at 128000)
Level Up: +1d8 HP! +1 to hit! +1 to crit/fumble! +Backstory!

- George / The New Moondin Lost Boys, Level 6 Extras: 42288 (Level up at 48000)

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!