Chapter A.5: Tsem's Downtime

Tsem, what are you up to in the days following the weird hunt?

A day or so after the adventure with the weird, Tsem gets a letter from the director of the Dawn Commission thanking them for helping the Commission accomplish their recent mission. The Director, Phoenix, would like to offer a favor to Tsem if there is anything she or her organization could do for them.

And now, to carry on our story much further, it is useful to know Tsem's story so far. So gather and listen...

Once upon a time, there was a young Strider named Tesm who had exceptional talent in dream weaving and dream striding. They would spend much of their time spinning fantastical worlds into existence -- setting arbitrary and unorthodox bindings as the worlds' rules -- and exploring the how the story played out. Because of their talent, they found it much easier to go with their instincts and see how things went rather than worry much about the formulas for how such things are done. As such, they didn’t devote much attention to the formal study of the Art. Why learn the formal traditions and equations when your intuition serves well enough?

Then, one day, while Tsem was dream walking far afield in an ephemeral world dreamed up by someone who may not have even known that dreams could be traversed by others, the dream they were in unraveled from underneath them. (Such things happen when one dreams with too little structure, you see.) In the chaos of the dying Day dream, Tsem had little choice but to stride randomly into the first world they could find.

They found themselves in a massive, old, structured Age; one too solid and weighty to stride away from. They had stumbled into a world that was bound too tightly to tolerate their improvisations, with restrictions on forms that cared not for what the mind wills. The inhabitants of this world were only free to dream in the scant hours when their body let their mind roam free. (And even then, it seemed many inhabitants did not do even that much.)

Tsem was stranded.

Structured worlds do have some merit, however. Only in hardy Ages can records be trusted to persist against the mere whims of others. If other Striders had traversed in this world, their footprints may yet still be findable. Tsem knew it wasn’t impossible to leave a world such as this, for he knew of stories of Striders visiting and even living on tightly bound worlds. But to leave would require a link passage, or some other advanced strictured technique of the Art.

And so, with little solid to go on but instinct -- their favorite way to stride -- Tsem searched for the traces of those who came before. And as they flowed with their search, they found themselves drawn to the Great Library of Miskatonic. But the Library was guarded by bindings. Any writings the Library may have on the Art or other Striders were barred from any who had not attained the rank of "Grad Student." The ritual to fulfill the rule was years long, but it is the only likely path they found, so, with little choice they set about performing the ritual. Time seems much longer than one can’t montage the time away.

And thus is the state Tsem found themselves in before their fateful encounter with the Dawn Commission. Could this be a more promising path to the edges of this Age? Will Tsem be able to leverage this favor with a local faction leader into a way home?