Chapter 2.13: The Nest part 2

Phoenix removes her gauntlets and flexes her fingers. She looks over her agents and the kids. She pitches her voice to carry, "Is anyone in need of healing?"

Hope reloads. "Wasn't touched, thanks."

"I'm fine," I say. Privately, I can't help but wonder if this is a good idea. My magic didn't even scratch the shoggoths. If any of them had gotten past the others to me, I would have been completely helpless.

Phoenix looks to Scratch, Eustace, and Mori, who also indicate they are fine. Ellie also looks fine: she’s still enthusiastically eating her hunted shoggoth.

Then the group sets to work clearing the rubble well enough to descend into the basement and find the nest below.

Soon enough they find the entrance: a short meter-width tunnel in the wall of the basement ending in a structure that looks disturbingly like a meter-diameter closed sphincter made of knotted roots.

Would you like to do anything? If not, the NPCs can continue.

Not I

nope

Saint shuffles into the low round tunnel and is forced by the narrow space to nearly sit on the floor to aim a low side kick at the knotted roots.

The fleshy roots unfurl. Space twists and spirals into existence with a wet sucking sound until the one meter diameter tunnel opens into a grand round entrance ten meters in diameter; tall enough to surely poke out into the rubble of the old manor house above, yet it still seems to be entirely contained within the much narrower tunnel in the basement.

Aspen is now behind the party, peering through the tunnel at the gate. “Beautiful!” She breathes.

“It’s so cool!” Scratch agrees.

The gate might be considered beautiful, in a psychedelic Ridley Scott kind of way. It’s obviously organic. Plantlike in how the ridges and crenellations of tissue branch fractally until the finest details dip below perception in the dim light of the hunters headlamps. It’s more animal in the moist fluttering glossiness of the surface tissues, and insectile in the iridescent mosaics shining with vibrant garish colors in the hall just past the threshold.

Saint kicks at the gate, steps inside, then nods.

“Ms. Aspen, will you need additional time to account for the excess space?” Phoenix asks.

“It is somewhat more than I expected, but I’m well enough prepared. Deflate it slowly, if you can.” Aspen says. She tilts her head then puts her hand on the tunnel’s ceiling and seems to haul it up and out, expanding the tunnel up and outward until the others can walk through the still circular tunnel without stooping.

Phoenix smiles and nods to her. “Thank you. Let’s go.” She joins Saint in inspecting the gate for hazards but doesn’t yet cross the threshold.

Morgana's porcelain double moves to stand next to Aspen, quietly asking if she needs any messages passed to Weaver.

Ellie finishes her meal and trots forwards to peer at the hole with Phoenix and Saint, bouncing on the balls of her feet to burn off energy as her tendrils move restlessly behind her. "Are you looking for traps? What do we do next? Do you want me to jump through and see what happens?"

Saint doesn't like that suggestion.

"There has to be a better way to check for traps," I say. "What if I throw something through instead? Or do you think it has to be something living?"

Phoenix responds. “Yes, Miss Ellis, looking for traps. I don’t know that there are traps, but it would be good to at least check before potentially walking into them. Ms. Sellain, you may throw something in. Miss Ellis, wait at least until we see the results of that test.”

chromatic weave (conjure stone ball): [4 💥 2 = 6, 5] Result: Success! 🎯

The magic responds eagerly as I draw out a thread of stone, shape it into a rough ball, and force power through its pattern. It's so easy now.

I take a few steps back and toss the ball through the shoggoth door.

“Eagerly” meaning that it responds at all. Which, given Vesper’s previous experience of trying magic of her own, is pretty dang eager in comparison.

The rock bounces down the great hallway, and as it does it seems to warp, crumble, then meld into the floor.

Eustace watches Vesper as she conjures her rock, then intently studies the rock as it crumbles and disappears. He walks away to the back of the group, then returns and throws his own rock into the hallway. This one bounces and clatters across the bone-like ground following roughly the same trajectory as Vespers. But this rock doesn’t crumble and dissolve.

"Huh. What did you do differently?"

“I used a real rock, not a conjured rock. Do your conjures normally dissolve that quickly?” He asks.

"They normally don't dissolve at all," I say, eyeing the floor. "There must be an enchantment on the door, maybe some kind of dispel?"

“Maybe.” Eustace says, noncommittal.

“Space is warped inside.” Aspen says, stepping up beside the two wizards and leaning on her spear. “It makes sense that conjured things break; they fall out of alignment. You guys should get a move on.” She raises her voice. “Hey Saint! You guys should get a move on!”

Fall out of alignment? I glance at Eustace, wondering if he understood Aspen's explanation any better than me.

Rolled: [1, 1] Result: Critical Failure! 💀

The light in the tunnel is only provided by the belt lamp at Phoenix’s hip and the headlamps on everyone’s heads.

Eustace scratches his head to ponder Aspen’s words, but accidentally bumps the button on his lamp to set it to strobe—right when Vesper glances at him. “Ah! Sorry!” He taps the button again—setting it to a different strobe pattern, then a third time to turn it off and a fourth time to turn it back on.

Scratch throws his arms around Eustace’s shoulders. “Danger rave!” He sings.

“It was an accident!”

“Ah! Surprise party!”

The two boys fall into rapid banter that Vesper will have to cut through if she hopes to get any useful information out of either of them.

Saint cocks his head, looking back at Aspen and giving her a sharp nod. He moves forwards, settling both of his feet on the threshold before he stomps down hard, grinding the heel of one of his boots for a moment before he steps inside the gate.

He takes several long strides before he pauses to sniff the air, opening his mouth to take a deep breath in and waiting to see if something happens before he speaks. "... not noticing any immediate problems with the air. It's not great but it's not going to kill anyone."

He turns, pacing back to the gateway to offer his hand to Phoenix. "Ready to go?"

Phoenix takes his clawed hand in her gauntleted one with formality and decorum of a lady being assisted from a carriage.

She breaks away to continue assessing the area. “You may want your masks. Come along.” She calls back before covering her own face with hers and turning to face the depths of the hall.

It may be because of the hearing damage that Hope’s close-range gunshots caused, but Phoenix’s summons didn’t inspire the party to move on. She repeats her request to come along and gestures as well.

Hope, Vesper, Eustace, Scratch, Ellie, and Mori’s double all follow. Aspen stays behind and waves to the venturing party as they head into the nest.

The hallway continues to be tiled in mosaics of iridescent chiton framed with veins and bone. Here and there, bioluminescent organs trace dim undulating patterns—easily washed out in direct light from a headlamp. Organic scents waft through the air, dancing between appetizing and revolting between one breath and the next.

So far, there have not been any traps.

Still, Saint and Phoenix carefully move forward. Saint has equipped his shotgun and Phoenix her crossbow now that there are sight lines enough for more than melee. It’s a few minutes of walking later that the hall opens up into a great chamber. The walls and ceiling fall away into dark depths speckled with bioluminescent pseudo starlight. A humid breeze stirs the air.

Farther into the cavernous space, there is a gently swaying light, like a giant angler fish’s lure suspended a hundred feet into the air.

The Chandelier.

Phoenix freezes in place, staring up at it.

"Should we destroy it?" I ask.

Saint sways next to Phoenix, gaze fixed on the chandelier. He swallows, speaking slowly. "That's a person. That's a person. They need our help. We need to save them."

“They aren’t a person anymore. We should put them out of their misery.” Phoenix says.

I glance around nervously, looking for any sign of the shoggoths. In the middle of the hive seems like a bad place to take a hard-line stance and start an argument about what counts as a person.

look for enemies: [1, 4] Result: Success! 🎯

No shoggoths are visible currently.

Saint gives a low whine in the back of his throat, posture tense, an inhuman desperation coloring his tone. "We don't know that for sure. They're alive. They're alive. As long as they're alive, we might still be able to help them."

Morgana's double, in back with Vesper and Hope, winces.

Scratch looks between Saint and Phoenix and then at the Chandelier. “Gnarly.” He says.

Eustace glances at the macabre Chandelier, but for the most part watches the perimeter for shoggoths.

PCs, what do you do?

"Is it actually possible to heal that kind of damage?" I ask, still keeping an eye out for more shoggoths. "I was under the impression that healing magic wasn't quite that advanced yet."

But then again, if they're still alive, maybe the state of the art will advance enough to save them one day. Maybe there's magical cryonics?

“It’s not.” Phoenix answers.

Scratch hesitates, glances at Saint, then answers Vesper. “Saint and Weaver might be able to. I saw them free a kid from being mostly eaten by an Unseelie.”

Phoenix frowns at Scratch. “Shoggoths are not Unseelie. I doubt they would be able to help this one like they were able to help Simon.”

"Are stasis spells a thing? Could they be preserved until we know how to fix this?"

Phoenix purses her lips. “Stasis spells do exist.” She says with surprising venom. She schools her voice and continues. “That may be a good solution. I don’t have any relevant tools. Would anyone else here have relevant knowledge or abilities?”

Eustace and Scratch shake their heads.

Morgana's double hesitates before shaking her head.

Saint doesn't respond, attention fixated on the chandelier.

Ellie bounces on her heels, looking around with interest - eyeing the chandelier, checking that Morgana doesn't look scared, beaming briefly at Hope and Vesper, then leans forwards to wave her hand in front of Saint's face like she's testing his eyesight.

He shakes himself slightly, looking at her uncertainly for a moment before he starts looking around, gaze snapping back up to check on the chandelier every few seconds like he thinks it's going to vanish or stop being a twisted arrangement of flesh and turn into something easier to rescue any moment now.

"If we actually have a method of saving them, let's do it, but we need to move fast. Can we get it down?"

"How many times can you recharge someone's mana, Phoenix? I have a way to get within range to cut it down, but it would involve an exorbitant amount of mana to construct stairs underneath the chandelier."

"That depends. I wouldn't think more than twice before I would have to recharge myself." Phoenix says.

Eustace speaks up. "The aether in here is off. Remember what Aspen said? It will mess with conjuring."

"That's bunk, the vibe's just fine. Spooky-trippy-dreamy, but not unmagical." Scratch says.

"The conjured rock dissolved." Eustace says.

"What conjured rock?" Scratch asks.

"The rock Vesper conjured right before we went in."

"Well, of course. It couldn't rock to a new vibe. Remember what Tsem was saying about needing to match pace to stride?"

Eustace raises an eyebrow? "No? When?"

"It was like three weeks ago. Oh, it was in my dream, you weren't there. Sorry. Anyway, this place is really dreamy; the patterns on the walls shift when you aren't looking at them. I bet magic works a little different."

Works a little different. Hm. Could it be — no, probably not. But it's worth trying just to make sure.

chromatic weave - create metal: [1, 3] Result: Failure ❌

chromatic weave - create metal: [3, 3] Result: Failure ❌

chromatic weave - create metal: [2, 6 💥 3 = 9] Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

Vesper hasn't done all that much magic herself, but she has very closely observed Inara practice a lot of magic. Magic of this kind, wizard magic, uses the structure of the rote--the motions of the body and the words said aloud and in the mind-- as well as the will and intent of the wizard to give the world clear instructions to how reality should bend to the wizard's will.

Just changing her intent to create metal and following the pattern for conjuring stone does not conjure metal. A guess at what the incantation and gesture for metal would be also does not conjure metal.

The third time also doesn't conjure metal, though Vesper executes her improvised gestures and incantation with precision and yells her intent to produce metal with all her mind, focusing perfectly on the feeling of a spell gone right. Willing it into existance!

A beat later, a metal bud appears on the floor in front of her. Rapidly it sprouts upward, oxidation on the surface cracking like split skin as it balloons and blooms into the shape she had intended to conjure. The silvery surface is veined with grains like Damascus steel. Only on the largest scale does it resemble the structure she had intended to conjure. The details of the object all show that it had been grown into the shape of the mold she provided.

Wow, that's pretty. "Okay, it seems like my spell creates metal instead of stone in here. With metal we should need a lot less of it since it's more durable. And the structure itself can be narrower and steeper, more like a phone tower than a pyramid..."

It's not until I'm halfway through trying to calculate the volume of steel needed to create a climbable structure that occurs to me that there's someone much better suited to this sort of problem than me. I take out my phone and call Alric. Hopefully he's not busy.

Yeah, Alric's not getting any more research done today, is he.

His phone rings, and he sees that it's Inara. No, wait, Vesper. He carefully clips his pen to his notepad, puts it and his headphones to the side, then picks up the call.

"Alric here. What went wrong?"

"What? No, everything's fine, we just ran into a small snag — it turns out the chandeliers are about a hundred feet above us. And Saint insists on rescuing them. Since healing magic isn't good enough to actually fix this, I was thinking we could put them into stasis — you know, magic cryonics — which just leaves us the problem of getting them down safely. So I was thinking that we could use chromatic weave to create a structure similar to a cell phone tower — oh, right, chromatic weave creates metal instead of stone in here, for some reason.

"And I was trying to calculate whether I had enough mana with Phoenix's help to do so, and it's hard to do that kind of math in my head but I thought maybe you could help out. The chandelier is 100 feet up, but my spells can reach 30 feet, so we only need a 70 foot tall tower."

"Wait wait wait, back up a little. The chandeliers are people? Like, whatever makes people people is still recognizable as such by Saint? I thought they'd get.. processed?" But no, actually, that matches with Sawyer's research.. "Yeah, sorry, I need more context. Where are you guys, what's happening, what exactly are you seeing?"

I turn on the camera and pan across the room. "This is the first room in the hive."

"Okay, got it." Can't see shit. "So, it's dark, there's a glowing chandelier. And it's a person. How do we know it's still a person?"

"Saint says it is."

"Well, let's take his word for it." Mhm.. "It definitely checks out.. Okay, what have you guys tried already?"

"Literally nothing. Saint and Phoenix are arguing about whether to kill it or save it. I'm trying to figure out a plan for saving it that actually works, rather than wasting my energy being idealistic at Phoenix."

"..what about the others? Any ideas from them?"

"Not really. Hope wants to save it and doesn't have any suggestions on how to do so. Her and the others are annoyingly passive. What you would call —" I lower my voice and make finger quotes "— 'NPCs'. Though I'm sure they'll help out if I can provide directions. But that's kind of the problem — if anyone is going to figure this out it's me. Or us, I suppose."

Eustace is poking at the metal structure that sprouted up from the ground. "Um...Vesper, do you know what metal this is supposed to be?"

"It looks like steel, why?"

"It's not steel." He demonstrates by holding up his pocket knife and, with some effort, carving a small gash in the metal, right underneith the previous gouge he had carved before bringing it to her attention.

Poor girl. That attitude will earn you a lot of yelling down the line. Alric chuckles. "I don't think I've called anyone that, ever." Out loud. He gets up, and starts walking in circles. "Okay, okayokayokay, let me think.. So, I don't think your tower is going to cut it. You'll power yourself out just to cut down a single chandelier, and then it's still a chandelier. But it'd be one person saved, saved-ish, over zero.

He paces back and forth, more talking to himself than into the phone.

"So, the obvious thing first: What about leaving, doing some research, coming back later? Any reason we can't do that? Oh. OH. Do the time travel thing again, but instead have it work in our favor so we can take a few hours to do some thinking? Oooooh, we can Beethoven's Fifth this and time travel backwards from the future, and give ourselves the solution. Oh mhm but then it'd already have happened? Anyways, what do you think about the first two? There's something else I'm missing but I can't put my finger on it."

"Uh oh. Aluminum maybe? Something soft."

"Wait, what? Time travel?"

"If we leave and come back it'll be infested with shoggoths again."

"Yeah, that thing where you guys were gone for several days, but for yourselves it was just a few hours? Go back there, but have time go super fast there instead so that here in the hive it's only 10 minutes or so, and for the team it'd be several hours?"

"I... I don't think that's something Weaver can control. But yeah, it's worth asking."

I lower the phone and ask Morgana to pass it on to Weaver.

Morgana's double fidgets, clearly pretending she didn't hear anything said while she was in hearing range that wasn't relevant to Vesper's current question. "Okay, I can ask."

Her black eyes half close as she sags slightly, head cocked.

Then she straightens back up. "Weaver says it's not possible to turn time backwards but that it is possible to slow time down, but that it’s 'really, really, really costly'. Is there anything else you want to ask?"

_(In the background, Ellie’s watching the pendulum, mouthing words under her breath, brow furrowed and tendrils swaying.

Saint had wandered off to stare at the walls of the room, but has come back to circle the metal structure with an interested expression.)_

I relay that to Alric, and add, "I don't think I'd be able to talk him into it, he's been very generous with helping me out so far but he's also been clear that it is transactional. Maybe eventually I'd have that kind of clout with him but not today, not mere hours after he fixed my magic and... other things."

Alric, while all of this happened, kept walking in circles and muttering to himself, while occasionally scribbling something into his notepad.

"Yeah.. Let's skip that one then, I'd prefer to not get into any debt." Or, like, get their help or talk to them or be anywhere near them. "And also.." He draws a sharp breath. "Please skip out on telling me the other things, he made it clear that I'm not supposed to know. Let's.. not make the whole 'telling Alric things that can get him killed' thing a habit, okay?" He chuckles. "So. I have a few ideas..

"The gist is, the chandelier is a person doing dream magic. The room is dreamed up. You can summon metal because fuck it, everything goes in a dream. Building a tower is a good idea and cutting off and maybe even saving one chandelier would honestly be great, but we can dream even bigger here. We can probably save everyone by a) somehow dreaming up a connection to all other people in the hive, like a computer network, and us remote controlling all the dreams and b) dream them all back into their old bodies. I have a few ideas sketched out on how to actually make that happen. But.. what do you think so far? And do you happen to have a dream mage around? That'd make things easier."

"Weaver wouldn't actually — look, I can tell you what he did if I want to. It was my soul he operated on. I just don't particularly want to, unless there's a good reason to. It's rather personal." I shake my head. "Your plan sounds... plausible, I guess, but we don't have a dream mage with us. Tsem disappeared after the weird job and as far as I know none of us has any way to contact him. But maybe someone here knows of another."

I raise my voice to cut past Saint and Phoenix's argument. "Does anyone know any dream magic? Or know someone who would be willing to come help us out?"

"You just did dream magic?" Scratch says, tilting his head at Vesper and nearly blinding her with his headlamp.

I squint at him through the beam. "I did?"

... Saint is now investigating the metal structure that appeared after Vesper tried to do her magic. He's asking Eustace about the strength of the metal.

Phoenix is busy retching behind a spinal-column-like pillar.

Neither are arguing with each other.

Scratch's headlamp bobs in a nod. "Yeah, that thing." He says, pointing at the short metal tower.

"But I'm not a dream mage. I created that with wizardry...."

I trail off as I remember how odd the spell was. Two failures, and then the third time worked, but only from sheer force of will.

"Hang on," I say. "Let me try something."

I try casting another chromatic weave, but this time I don't make any gestures. Instead I focus on the mental aspects of the spell, recalling the sensation of forcing reality into a new configuration.

What are you trying to make?

A... default cube.

Scratch sidles up and peers at her as she does her work.

A rough cube of stone... chalk? buds into existence and forms a cube over the course of seconds. Spend 1 power point.

"Oh. I was wrong, it wasn't you it was that." Scratch points at the chandelier.

"Huh." I show Alric the cube and explain what happened. "So I guess the chandelier isn't entirely under the shoggoths' sway? I... don't know very much about dream magic, did you have an idea of how to form the connection between all the chandeliers and then transfer them into new bodies?"

Aight, vampire it is, then.

Alric laughs out loud. "Yeah, like I said, it's the chandelier doing the dreaming here. We don't need a dream mage, but an expert would've been nice to have. Mhm. You're probably doing your magic at the cost of the person we're trying to save, so don't overdo it. Can you put me on speaker?" He waits for her to do so, then repeats the warning. "So. I'm pretty sure that the room you're in right now is its own dream world, the chandelier's dream world. Imagine it like a tiny soap bubble attached to the big soap bubble that is our own world. I mean, It's far more complicated than that," - probably, not that I fucking know - "but that's the gist. 'Wibbly wobbly, spacey wimey', some would say. Not me, I'm never saying that again. Don't pop the bubble. That's the point I'm trying to make.

"Anyways. We want to connect to all the shoggoth victims, dream up their old bodies, then slowly drain all dimensional air from the small bubbles into our world. I think. So. I initially expected that we'd have to jump through hurdles to make the chandelier do the dream magic we want, but it seems that whatever you did just works out of the box. So, just make it happen. Just will up a remote connection to every soul in this hive that isn't on your team and that isn't a shoggoth, if shoggoths even have souls, and then we'll go from there. If you know how computer networking works, you can literally just imagine that you're opening the magic equivalent of remote shells to all the 'servers'. Wait, sorry, no, you probably aren't into tech stuff. Eh. You can make up your own metaphor, just find all the souls and dream up the connections.

He sighs. "Actually.. hold up. Maybe there's a catch to this whole thing. Can you ask Ellie before you try? We want to make sure this doesn't go wrong and you end up a part of the shoggoth hive yourself."

Close one. Great work cutting down my caution, Weaver. Sigh. That's gonna take some work to properly rebuild.

I glance at Ellie. "What do you think? Is this plan as crazy as it sounds or does it seem like it'd work?"

"Huh? What?" Ellie gives Vesper a bewildered look, knocked out of her silent calculations by the wizard's approach, then gives her a look of confusion as she's caught up on the problem. "Uuuuhm. Oh. Yeah, it'd probably work? It's the chandelier's dream we're in, that means they can do the dreamy magic thing, since the chandeliers dreaming is what makes up the extra space for the rooms, can't you feel it?"

Morgana's Double has followed Vesper, and gives a soft prompt of. "No, Ellie, most people can't feel things like that."

"Oh," Ellie thinks about this for a moment, then moves past the thought like a boulder going downhill and gaining speed. "I mean, each room's a dream, and the hive is a shared dream, so it might be hard to link them without going into the other rooms? You could try. I think the shoggoths have to get into you and make you all dreamy to use your mind to make their hive bigger. Dreams make it a lot easier to change the rules to match what you want them to match, they're..."

She waves her tendrils emphatically, trying to figure out the right way to describe what she's thinking. "Soft. Like how Sawyer says it's easier to do really big magic during a confluence, you've already got a place where the rules aren't the way they are in Not-Dream space. I don't know if that means their minds will have a harder time keeping their edges or not, though? You might just be able to yell at them. Do you want me to try yelling at them? I can yell in math, too, if that works better!" She beams.

"Ellie, that's fantastic news, thanks for confirming. But let's wait with the yelling until we understand our options. Mhm. So, networking can be done. I'm starting to think though that we should go room by room, for now. Because the difficult part here will be to get them back their bodies. We might not get it right on the first try, and if that's the case we don't want to do all of them at once. Mhm. They need to end up in a state that they can leave the room afterwards, without a dream around them. I don't know if that would work for bodies we just dream up. Vesper, could you try to bring the cube out of the room or hive? If it persists outside the room, it'll probably allow us to just dream up their bodies. And Ellie, what do you mean exactly by 'keeping their edges' and 'yelling at them'?"

I try to bring the cube out of the hive.

"If you get the rules to change so they get all connected up and become, like, a hive mind, it's probably going to be like trying to untangle a bunch of different stuff that's gotten all mixed up, except it's brains?" She speculates, rapidfire, then opens her mouth.

Morgana's Double hugs her arm and interrupts. "She means literal yelling, instead of thinking really hard at them. Ellie... I don't think the chandeliers think in math, not if they were human."

"... awww...." Ellie sags, disappointed.

When Vesper tries to pick up the cube, it resists like it’s stuck to the ground. Sure enough, when she tugs harder, it comes free with a wet pop. It’s light, probably hollow, and now that she’s touching it, Vesper can tell that it is more like bone than like chalk. The bottom has a small root like a tooth with a small bead of ichor welling up from the wound of being plucked.

Vesper takes the cube back out the hallway and to the real world. Upon crossing the threshold, the cube slowly starts to dissolve in patches, the outer surface desiccating into dust. After the initial decay in the first few seconds it doesn’t seem to decay much further. It’s a bit lighter now, and rattles some. Vesper accidentally pokes a hole in a weakened part of the surface as she handles it.

Aspen glances at Vesper over her shoulder, then goes back to excavating the area around the entrance to the nest.

I pass that along to Alric. "So I guess dreaming them new bodies won't work. It's one thing for the cube to decay a bit but imagine if that was a living body."

Alric responds. "I would've expected it to dissolve completely, so this is better than expected, honestly. Can you break it apart? If it's just surface decay, it might be fine."

It’s pretty fragile now; easy to break apart. The inside has an organic mesh structure like that of bird bones. Chunks of the mesh have broken free and are rattling around inside the hollows. There’s some damaged soft tissue too that mixes with the dust and forms a not-yet-rotting sludge.

"Yeaahh... I don't think this would work. Imagine if those were blood vessels. Or a heart. Maybe there's some way to reinforce it so it survives the transition better?"

Alric takes a deep breath. "Okay, Vesper. So. You've actually had the audacity to take the initiative to try to solve the problem at hand. I'm impressed. There is, however ..a lot more you could learn. I'd be willing to give you.. a taste of that knowledge for free, right now, for the purpose of helping the people in there. However, I should warn you that Weaver is likely to have a very strong opinion on what I'd like to teach you, and I'm giving it 60/40 odds for positive over negative, so I can't tell you which one it is, and I don't know the impact it'd have on your relationship to him. I can only make the offer.

"Do you want to learn more?"

What kind of question is that? "Of course I want to learn more."

Okay, now how best to describe this?

"I'd like to tell you upfront that you're the first person I try to teach this, so there'll be bumps in the road. That's an issue on my part, not yours, so don't get discouraged if you don't get what I'm saying.

"Okay, the first thing I'd like to explain is the virtue of what mere mortals call 'overconfidence'. And ..immortals.. apparently too. Point being, they make it sound like a bad thing. It isn't. Let me ask you a few questions. The rest of the team in the hive: What do you think, how optimistic are they about our chances of saving any of the chandeliers? Like, anyone at all?"

"Well... Saint seems to think it's possible. Phoenix I think... maybe she thinks it's possible but not worth the effort. The others I'm not sure about, they haven't talked much." Probably best to not point out that I actually kind of agree with Phoenix.

"Yeah, that sounds about right, taking initiative isn't really a thing most people do in group contexts. Now, please take a few moments to think about the following question: Under what circumstances would it be impossible for us to save any of the chandeliers? What has to be true, or has to happen, for it to be or become impossible?"

Taking initiative wasn't really something I did either, until Weaver made me a Sellain.

I don't say that. Instead, "Well... if they were dead. Or if they were truly inaccessible, or if there was actually no magic that could reverse what was done to them. Or if the chandeliers themselves didn't want to be saved — it's always better to be alive than dead but I can see why someone who's been a chandelier for a century might think differently. Really, there's a lot of reasons why we might not be able to save them. But it seems like we have a pretty good plan, so I'm not sure what the point is in dwelling on this?"

Ah, to be young again.

Alric chuckles. "We don't have a plan at all, yet. We have something that might end up becoming a plan. And patience, you're not going to get what I'm trying to teach in just two questions.

"Do you want me to continue, or do you want to take the lead from here? Maybe you actually do already know what the next steps should be."

"Well, we need to figure out how the get the dream bodies back into the real world, right? How are we planning to do that? Maybe we could heal the damage as they cross over?"

Alric sighs, disappointed. "Alright, I'll walk you through it, step by step. First step is making sure that no one inside destroys the chandelier. I hope I'm wrong, but I'd bet the team inside is already all out of ideas. It won't take long for them to collectively absolve themselves and then decide it's time to just destroy the chandelier and move on. Your first priority here is to stop them from doing so, should it come to it. The more time we buy, the higher the chance we can save the chandeliers, because us destroying the chandeliers is the most likely failure mode here.

"The second step will be figuring out the body problem. There's a good chance that the cube you made fell apart not because of you leaving the hive, but just because you didn't dream it up in a way that it can survive without being connected to the hive. However, I'm not sure that we can just dream up a perfectly normal human body, without its insides being completely messed up. And it also should be the original body of the chandelier, if possible. So, a bit of stuff to figure out. I'll wait until you're back inside with the others."

I'm already heading back inside. "Guys," I say. "Don't destroy the chandelier. Alric has a plan to save them, we just need a little more time to figure out the details. Something to do with the dream magic in this place."

Alric stares up to the sky, not saying anything. I don't have a plan, I have something that could become a plan given enough time.

"Okay," I say to Alric. "Done. What's next? What were you trying to teach me?"

Ah yes, I'm definitely going to play the teacher, while on speaker, with others around.

"Vesper..." He can't frame this in a nice way, and just sighs. "Let's forget about that for now."

He takes a deep breath.

"Okay. Vesper made a few good suggestions for potential failure modes here. Phoenix, what is your opinion on whether there is anything left to be saved from the chandelier? Is there still a soul connected or something?"

Now I'm really curious. But fine, I can bug him about it later.

Saint looks at Vesper like she just suggested he was considering kicking a puppy, expression stricken. "Destr- no. They need help."

He'll walk over, head tilted. "... is there something I can I help with?"

. Ellie squints, then leans back into Morgana's double, talking to her about "-on't think I could get the calculations with it moving, and if I miss, I don't think I could calibrate before I hit the ground."

"There's probably more ways to get up there than that, it looks like Vesper was working to make a ladder. It's okay to wait and see if there are better ideas."

"Actually, yeah, there is," Alric pipes up from the phone speaker. "I'm glad to hear that we all are on the same page here and want to actually put some effort into trying to solve this problem. I really appreciate that. I'd also appreciate it if nothing is done to the chandelier until we all have talked about the potential solutions we've each cooked up. We don't want to do anything that ends up an irreversible failure, that is, unless we don't have better options available.

"I don't know how to address you, but you mentioned they need help. You sound sure of that. It would be helpful if you could share with everyone what you know about the chandeliers. In particular, what exact state they are in, and how you know there's anything left to save."

Phoenix looks a bit gaunt in the harsh light of LED headlamps and faint bioluminescence. “It may be possible to improve their condition. I doubt it is feasible to restore them to their previous life. There remains enough of a mind to suffer.”

"We won't know if it's feasible or not unless we try," Saint says quietly to Phoenix, brow furrowed, before addressing Alric.

"You can just call me Saint, I don't need you to be more specific than that unless you're trying to be specific," he says. "I'm a guardian. Part of my purview is protecting mortals against monsters. I know that's a person and I know they're still alive. That's enough for me.

He frowns, looking up at the chandelier and pressing his lips in a thin line. "I don't see things the way Weaver does, so I can't tell you everything that he could. Vesper might be able to see how badly tangled things are. Weaver told me dreams are a knit, not a weave. That might help you tell what texture to look for?" He looks at Vesper.

"Ah... last time I tried using the thread sight on shoggoths it went badly. Apparently they're not just dangerous to look at with mage sight."

“The individual in the chandelier is tainted to my senses too.” Phoenix says. “I am unable to sooth them without harming myself.”

Saint taps one hand on his hip. "If you don't feel safe, that's okay. You don't have to look. I can ask Weaver to look if we get one of them outside. I'm sure he'll do it if I ask him to."

He looks at Phoenix, expression dismayed. "We helped Simon and he was only a thread, these ones can dream." He looks upset as he stares at Phoenix. "You know I can't just assume that nothing can be done. You know I have to at least try."

"I.. will call you Saint then, until instructed otherwise. I'm.. pleasantly surprised that we're on the same page here. It'd be.." ~~stupid, idiotic, pathetic~~ "bad to give up before any evidence suggests that this is actually impossible." Alric starts mostly talking to himself, again. "Okay, okay, think. Think. What can you- the obvious things first." He turns back to the phone. "Okay, I'll drop some ideas and it's yall's job to tell me why it's a bad idea. Don't sugarcoat anything because of status games or whatever, just hit me with honest reasons why you think they suck, so we can figure out how to improve them. First thing. We just find out then dream up the body of the chandelier, then grab their soul and hook it into it. The cube Vesper dreamed up was made from flesh and bone, grown from the hive, and didn't just dissipate when she went outside. It, however, became brittle. If that's because of the lack of dream around, or lack of connection to the hive, we can't tell.

"Wait, actually, we can just test this. Anyone seeing any flaw in dreaming up a rainworm and seeing if a) it'll live in here and b) live when carried outside?"

“I’ve been wanting to make a homunculus—” Scratch says, clapping his hands together in front of him like a reference to something,

“Flesh golem.” Eustace interrupts.

“but Mori said it would be unethical or something and threatened to stop talking to me if I did and then Ellie would beat me up. But I know how bugs work. I could make a bug if the girls say it’s ok.”

"I hate status games," Saint says bluntly, even as he thinks. "... if it works, it's probably better to have them try and dream the body around themselves, instead of trying to do it after. Even if we have to cut them out of the chandelier it's easier to do that than to try and re-anchor a soul."

He pauses, then thumps a hand into his palm. "Right. I think that matches what I've seen before when dream materials have been left in the age of stability. Objects made only of dreams don't last very long in the realm of stability because they're made of dreams instead of stable material. I don't know how much shoggoths being involved changes the specifics, or what the baseline is. It sounds like the cube broke down faster than the material I encountered before."

Okay, I might like this one.

"Makes sense to grow it around them, if we can figure it out. Mhm. Alright, what do the girls say? Green light on creating a bug? And are there any other ideas or objections from your side?"

"I said I'd beat you up if you made Mori cry!" Ellie calls over, attention immediately caught by the mention of her girlfriend. "I don't care if you make a bug!"

The porcelain skin of Morgana's double can't blush, but still can't hide her embarassment. "Flesh puppetry is definitely unethical at baseline, Scratch! Especially if you're making a Full Metal Alchemist reference when you suggest it! But.. sure, Scratch. Try to make a bug."

Scratch grins and salutes Mori. “Righto. One ethically-questionable spontaneously-generated dream bug coming up!” Scratch squats and places his hand on the ground.

do the thing: [4 💥 4 💥 2 = 10, 4]-2 Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

His smile fades as he actually concentrates on what he’s trying to accomplish. Still with his eyes closed he pries up a calloused chunk of the hive’s flooring. From the tissue under the cobblestone he extracts a brown pupa the size of a finger. He’ll continue to sit there a long minute before the pupa splits and the critter slowly emerges.

"Awesome, let us know once the bug is ready. In the mean time, did anyone else come up with any other ideas? Both for what we're currently thinking about, but also anything else? Anything goes, really. I'd rather hear bad ideas than none, I can work with the former, but not the latter."

"How are we contacting the ... patient, and getting them to dream of their own body? There also seems a substantial risk they dream themselves a shoggoth body or something. But we can handle one more shoggoth if that happens, I think."

"I was trying to think of a way to get them down. My best plan was to climb up the wall and across the ceiling. There's tunnels, though, and it's not easy for me to help if anything starts a fight while I'm doing that, I'd have to drop down and lose any progress I'd made... and getting down to the dreamer and getting them down would probably be risky. I'm heavy," Saint shrugs.

Morgana's double gives Ellie a gentle nudge. Ellie groans. "I could try to teleport up but it's moving and I don't think I can get myself to safety if I miss. The fall would be too quick. "

Alric, real quick, performs a few reality checks. As a treat.

Everything checks out.

"I'm concerned that everyone's ideas so far seem to point in the direction of 'going up to the chandelier'. I must be missing something, so, I'd like to ask: For what purpose do you guys want to go up there? Because cutting it off of the hive before they're back to human might just kill them. With that being said.. We could either dream the room smaller, or dream the ..cable? connector? the dangly part of the chandelier, that one, dream that one longer? We don't actually have to go up there, I think.

"But, no idea how to get them to dream their body. Actually, one half-cooked one.. So, one interesting property of dreams is that you can, as a human sleeping in non-chandelier form that is, hear things from the outside. They get somewhat mixed into your dreams. So, if for example, you wake up from a loud bang - please don't wake up the chandelier we don't want to pop the dream bubble - that might get integrated as you having a car accident or something in your dream, and waking up from that. Dreams are a little weird. There were even studies made with lucid dreamers that communicated with researchers while they're sleeping. I have to look that up some time.

"Point being: We could try to talk them into remembering their body. If they can hear us in their current form, we can yes-and them from whatever they're dreaming right now, be it just this room or something else, back to their old bodies? The alternative.." He sighs. "I'm going to regret suggesting this, but one of us could also somehow enter their dream? If there just so happens to be a dream mage around who didn't hear me the first time, now would be a great time to speak up."

“If my understanding of it is correct, we already are in their dream.” Phoenix says. “I have tried empathically connecting with the victim, and the attempt made me ill. I know a few dream mages, though I know of only Mx. Aldor who has interacted with shoggoths before, and they did not seem better for their interaction.”

Phoenix continues, “Previously Ms. Sellain suggested putting the victims in stasis after cutting them down or otherwise obtaining them. I have contacts who would be able to do that, though I would prefer to not to involve them if it can be avoided.”

"Yeah.. I just figured there might perhaps be some Inception thing going on or something. Dreams usually have more going on than just an empty room, and this gives me strong 'not being awake' vibes. Mhm. I'd be in favor of going the stasis route only after our other options are exhausted, but it's a great backup plan. If this is really all there is to the dream, we could just try the talking route and see if there's any reaction? If Mori is up for it and no one objects, she could try flying up a bird and give it a go. Also, how's the bug coming along?"

Scratch carefully holds up the large fuzzy moth on his hand. It shuffles a bit, shaking its still-crumpled wings. “The sphinx won’t be ready to fly for another hour or so, but he’s alive.”

"To get them down," Saint shrugs. "I didn't have any better ideas to get them out. The booklet talked about destroying the chandelier but didn't state disconnecting it was an easy way to do that. I was going to make Weaver help me try and get them put back together, but he'll fight me on it if I ask him to try doing it in a dreamy space, it's hard to make sure his Weaving won't have dreamy echoes, and that's how you end up surrounded and grabbed at by disembodied hands. I'm pretty sure whole bodies would be a worse horrorshow."

He looks at Phoenix, grimacing visibly. "What would it cost to make sure we could get them back? Aspen's not going to want them here," he scratches his chin. "...I'm pretty sure between Weaver and I we could maintain the barrier if he tells her she's clear to go. She'll probably be suspicious, but if you all want to call them in it's going to be much safer to get her out now instead of waiting until she's got someone at spearpoint.... and it's going to be more expensive to get her to leave if she knows why we want her to go."

He rocks on his heels. "... one of my hunting friends knows more about dreams. I can call her, if you want advice on coaxing dreamers if you've got them to hear you clearly, but if this place could hurt her I'm not going to open a door to bring her here, she's integral to the safety of another region I work in."

Interesting. If this is about Emeralds, and Weaver is fine with them around, it's probably not Shannon. What is this, 60% Weaver fine given Frank vs 5% Weaver fine given Shannon? Let's call it 4 to 1 Shannon to Frank prior, that's.. 1 to 3 Shannon to Frank?

"I'm not quite catching all of what you two are talking about, but do you object to us just going ahead with the experiments? Unless anyone objects, I suggest we just bring the bug outside now. And Mori can try to talk to the chandelier, if she wants to give that a shot."

. Morgana's double hesitates. "I could. Uhm. It might be better if we can figure out how to use my bird to directly pass messages on so I don't miss passing on words, or... to share what it hears to someone who isn't me? I'm not sure if trying to connect to the person up there would be dangerous, though. If it hurt Phoenix to try, it... my senses connect to my bird and my double? So. I don't know how infectious the shoggoth part is, but it managed to stick up Weaver's shears, so..."

She wrings her hands. "I'm a bit worried about what it could do if they got a foothold?"

Saint puts a hand on her shoulder, patting gently and smiling encouragingly. "You're physically by Weaver, right? If trying to connect directly comes up, tell him I told you to get him to protect the integrity of your threads."

Morgana gives him a wary look. ".... isn't that expensive for you?"

Saint gives sharp bark of a laugh. "I can handle my own -" his words catch, hiccup, and he gives a frustrated rumble, chewing on his words for a moment before he rolls his eyes and doubles down, speaking the word slow, measured, and pointed. "-brother. Even when he wants to be contrary."

He tips his head to Vesper and Vesper's phone. "... interpersonal conflict. Not a you problem. Don't let it get in the way of figuring out the best way to help."

Alric sounds confused. "Sorry, I'm not quite.. following. How's flying a bird up and talking to the chandelier different from creating your double and walking into the hive? Your double is already touching shoggoth material, isn't it?"

"If we need the message to be smooth I'd need to, uhm. Find a way to either have someone else speak through the bird or have the chandelier... person... uhm. Hear what the bird hears. Which might mean a more.. direct magic link? I might be worrying about nothing, but..." she fidgets, rocking on her heels. "Otherwise it's only going to be as even as my. Uhm. Repetition? Which means that there's going to be gaps between sentences and I could mess up the word choice on longer sentences. If they might have memory problems, then it's possible that gaps between sentences might have an effect on. Uhm. Efficiency? But. Uhm. I might be catastrophizing?"

"Actually, give me a second. I can literally see you standing" - he gestures in her direction with his one free hand - "right there, not actually talking. This is super fucking weird, one moment."

Alric puts his stuff in his backpack, then walks over to Morgana, putting his phone down as he speaks to her.

"Alright, if I gave you a piece of paper and you made a bird out of it and flew it in, would that still cause a delay or a repetition or something? I'm slow on the uptake here, sorry, I don't get this magic stuff. If it helps, it's only about testing whether the chandelier reacts to anything at all, there are no stakes here yet. I mean, if you want to, I could try the talking thing if you share the strings? But I'm, with some solid distance to the runner up, the person with the least charisma present. But it'd work for a first test?"

Weaver glances at Alric as he walks over, but doesn't comment, his attention focused on the map of the lot.

"Uhm. I mean. That's not really the source of the delay thing?" Morgana hesitates, hands fluttering as she thinks. "I mean. If you or Vesper or Hope or anyone else say a sentence and I have to repeat it before you get to the next sentence, it's going to be. Uhm. Disjointed? But...."

She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. "I... yes, I think I can share the strings so someone else could talk. I haven't tested it, but I think it should be something I can do."

"I... don't think it's about charisma? I think it's about what you say and if it... works to direct the person to do what you need them to do? So. If everyone works together, then... maybe anyone could say it?" She starts looking uneasy as she talks, and startles when Weaver's gaze swings up and he nudges her with an elbow.

"Anyone except you?" He asks pointedly.

Morgana's cheeks flush a flustered pink. "I. I. I. I just. I don't think I should be in charge of that. I-"

"I didn't ask why. You're not that hard to read, little puppeteer," Weaver gives an amused snort, looking away and gesturing vaguely. "Can you have this conversation ten feet that way or something? I'm trying to concentrate."

Morgana will quickly trot fifteen feet away before speaking again. "... I... look. I would be happy to let someone else do the talking. It's just.... right now I'm not comfortable trying to talk someone else into ... reshaping themselves. Even if it's for a good reason."

Is Weaver trying to allude to something important here?: [10 💥 1 = 11, 1] Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

Weaver is doing more than just chiding Morgana for trying to duck responsibility.

Morgana is specifically upset at the idea of her personally trying to reshape someone. She’s afraid of exerting undue influence on someone. Of being the worst kind of Puppeteer.

Weaver is softly challenging her to think about why she is avoiding talking to someone to try to help them.

"Isn't.. what you say and how people react to it.. charisma?" Alric shakes his head. "Eh, doesn't matter, whatever works for you.. Oh, fuck. The whole seer thing. Can you limit the amount of senses you connect to your bird? If I'm going mad, I'd prefer it not be the shoggoth kind if I can help it."

"Uhm. You'd be seeing and speaking through my senses, I think? So..."

She sways, thinking. "... I don't know if you could See through it. It's disorienting to have less senses connecting than I'm used to, but... I can try? We might need to take it to where my double can see it through the hive entrance and I can try to do. Uhm. Move it with that visual input. Like a video game with a fixed camera perspective?"

Alric chuckles. "God, that sounds awful, let's not do that. So.. seeing isn't really 'sight'.. It's a different sense, difficult to describe. Mhm. If you just manually unlock senses, it probably won't be part of it. But we can just try it? Like, you bird me, and then I try to see? Also, speaking of sight, do you have Darkvision?"

Scratch brings the moth outside the shoggoth nest. It seems to get lethargic but it doesn’t outright die while under observation. After pestering Aspen and being told to look for flowers elsewhere, Scratch heads back up to the surface to find nectar for his moth

"Darn," Morgana mumbles. "I wasn't sure if you were the kind of Seer who would have an easier time not seeing or not. Uhm. Sure. Sure. We can test it," she pulls out a piece of paper and starts folding, movements quick. "Uhm. No? No dark vision... But. Uhm. Well. Let's just. See how this works."

time for birds: [6, 5] Result: Success! 🎯

Morgana breathes out as the bird starts to stir, the strings attached to it visible, shimmering and ephermal as she holds them out to Alric.

Alric sits down before taking the strings.

"You know, just in case."

And then he takes the strings.

Alric takes the strings. It feels like a glove. It feels like how a keyboard, mouse, or video game controller can easily become the route of an extension of self into the digital environment. It feels like the bird is a shoddy jank hack of a flash game being controlled by a top-of-the-line precision engineered controller interface. But away the flappy bird flits, responding erratically to the smoothly precise strings.

Alric, of course, is absolutely awestruck. "The kind of shit I could build with this.." he whispers to himself.

He'll play around with the bird for a while, and once he got the hang of things, turn his attention back to Morgana.

"Okay. Okay. Jesus, this is amazing. Okay, so, how does the whole seeing / hearing / speaking through the bird thing work?"

It only really takes asking the question for the interface to present itself. Seeing, hearing, and speaking can be done just as easily with the bird as with his own body. It’s not the best fidelity; the sight is filtered through paper eyes, the hearing buzzes on paper membranes, the speaking is reedy as though spoken through a paper kazoo. The strings could provide a much better bond if only they connected to a better puppet.

"Like breathing," she replies absently.

Alric, of course, will use the bird to look at himself, to see if he has black eyes.

He has a black tint to his bright circled eyes. More noticeable are his hands; now articulated with ball joints.

He'll try to switch back to himself, and check his hands.

With his own eyes his hands look like nearly normal. There’s a slight almost optical illusion—now that he is looking for it—that he could interpret the light and shadows on his hands as the shape of ball-jointed hands connected to etherial strings.

"So, uhm.. why do I look like a puppet? Shouldn't this magic make me the puppeteer?"

“It’s my magic. That’s what my magic looks like. It looks like that when I use it, too.” Mori says in a small voice, fidgeting with her gloves. "I… I… I wish it didn’t, but it… does.”

She hesitates, then tries to smile. "It's. They're not puppet joints, though, they're doll joints. It's. You can have puppets with those joints, but puppets are ... they're controlled by other people's strings. And. And I'm not."

"Aight, cool. I was just curious." He's already back in the bird and busy doing flips and barrel rolls. "Whoo! ..okay, seriously Morgana, this is fucking amazing. Okay, wait, what was next? Oh, right, the whole seer thing."

He flies over to Weaver's map - that's definitely magic - and tries to see through the bird.

The map is magic. It would take a lot of focus to detect the direction of the magic, but yeah, it’s detectably not mundane.

Alric will switch back into himself and try again, from where he's sitting. Does the map feel like it's at a different relative position?

Yeah, there’s something like parallax going on. Just a slight qualia shift.

(Clarification: I imagined Alric sitting in a way that's somewhat sideways to the map, whereas the bird looks directly at it.)

Comparing the two perspectives: one from the point of view of his body, the locus of his self and the reference point from which all other extrasensory perceptions have been gathered. And the second perspective—a paper bird set within silken strings backed with the power of Morgana Short… There is parallax in the vector of the map between the two views. The binocular vision reveals a depth in the direction sensed, multiplying the length of tensors needed to understand the precise direction. It’s a strain to tell much more than that the map is closer to the view of the bird than to the view of the body.

Would you like to take a point of fatigue to continue to look?

No, it was just about finding out if the map is perceived from a different reference point when Alric switches, which indicates that yes, he can also see through the bird. He'll stop looking.

"Interesting.. So, Morgana, I'm using your senses when I'm in the bird?"

Morgana fidgets as she thinks, looking for a good way to try and explain. "You're using my magic. I haven't done this before, so I... well. I don't know if part of that is experiencing the same sense information that I usually do. I assume it might be, but I don't know if you're... sensing anything you don't usually sense?"

She looks up at the bird. "You've got a good handle on the movement, though. I should have brought one of the nicer ones, a little more articulation goes a long way."

Articulation makes for a better puppet.

"So.. it looks like I can still see through the bird. Indicates to me that perhaps everyone has the ability to see, but perhaps never practiced it enough? I doubt I was born a seer, honestly. Anyways, we could still try the whole bird-hive thing, but it's a little bit of a risk. I assume you are also linked in and could cut the connection at any time?"

Alric's also curious now to see if there are any other sense available in bird form. He'll switch back to the bird and take a few seconds to see if there's anything he usually doesn't sense.

Anything he doesn't usually sense?: [7, 1]+2 Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

No. There are only filters on existing senses as seen from the second point of view.

Where did that intrusive thought come from?: [9, 4]+2 Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

That thought about what makes for a better puppet is the same kind of thought as the impulse to doodle when you pick up a particularly good pen, or the impulse to cut when you pick up particularly sharp scissors, or the impulse to strum when you pick up a nice guitar.

"Oh. From what I've heard Seers are born," Morgana hums. "But being born with a talent doesn't mean you'll wake it up. There are lots of people who have an innate knack for something, people who could learn magic, but never have that possibility become actuality. Mh. I mean. My understanding is that the more you know the easier it is to pick out less obvious signs, and obvious magic can leave a feeling in the air, but... mmh. Most people just need to use an actual spell to detect or see magic."

She looks at Alric. "I've got one hand on the strings. I can pull them away if something happens, but... I'm one step away - it.. felt hard to give up the controls if I was going to be paying perfect attention to what you're doing. It's ..."

She closes her eyes and Alric feels the echo of something metaphorically passing in the dark, the pressure of something else trying to look through the paper bird at the same time, like someone jostling to share his binoculars, and then the feeling passes.

"... way more uncomfortable than being a passenger in a car."

A completely on-brand thought for Alric, then.

"Mhm. I mean, I can always pull out of the bird, that's probably enough on its own. The scary part was not being able to leave if I start seeing things, but I can kind of do that on the drop of a hat? Let's just try it."

Alric flies the bird up high, then makes his way towards the mansion. Or what's left of it.

On the way there, he spots Scratch. He'll fly over. "Yo. How's the bug doing?"

"Still alive." Scratch says. The moth hasn't made much progress in drying out its wings, and bits of it seemed to have flaked off, but at least it is eating from the flowers Scratch is feeding to it.

Alric can fly his bird into the mansion's basement, past Aspen excavating a path around the truck-sized exterior of the shoggoth nest, over the threshold-which causes a frission of pressure to wash over the paper puppet, and to the lights of the party huddled a hundred feet below the chandelier.

Eustace is explaining to the rest of the party that the metal structure Vesper summoned is starting to heat up. He, at least, is no longer going to be messing with it and suggests that no one else gets near it either. He's drawn a ward around it, but is unsure if that will do anything productive. It at least seems light weight enough and doesn't glow, so he's pretty sure it isn't radioactive, but he doesn't have a Geiger counter to check.

Alric will ask Scratch to have Aspen or someone else with expertise check whether his moth is absolutely zero part shoggoth, we really don't want to introduce mini flying shoggoths to the world. Besides that he otherwise offers Scratch some water from his backpack. Alric doesn't really know how bugs work, but it might help.

Inside, Alric will fly over to the summoned structure, and see if he can spot what material it is. Because, you know, mechanical engineer and all that. Metals should be his thing. Shoggoth metal, perhaps, as well?

Detect Metal (Science): [7, 1] Result: Success! 🎯

Eustace is reluctant to take down his ward, so Alric's bird can't directly touch the structure.

Eustace reports that the metal is soft and light, and that it was originally a dark-ish silver with grains of even darker streaks. It now has a yellowish patina. It didn't start hot, but warmed up over time.

From this, Alric can guess that this structure is primarily metallic calcium, and it is doing what alkaline earth metals do best and is exothermically oxidizing with the moisture heavy in the air.

"Aight, no need to worry. Looks like calcium. It shouldn't oxidize this quickly, it's usually slower than iron, I think, been a while, but the air in here is funky. It'll stop once its surface is fully oxidized."

He flies over to check in with Phoenix and Saint. "Sorry, got kind of lost outside in the whole 'who does the bird thing and how does that work' discussion. Anything I missed? Otherwise I'll go ahead and do the whole talking thing now."

He hasn't missed anything big between the phone call and flying in. Saint has been noting where all the doors are and speculating on if there is a 'servant's quarters' passageway that would take him to that door up on the ceiling that he senses.

Alric notes that he probably won't be able to tell from the inside, but he'll take a look at it and around the room before doing the talking thing, just in case he picks up on anything important, door related or not.

He does a quick sweep through the room (making sure to stay in the lit areas to not get ambushed by any tentacles), then checks out the place where Saint pointed out a door to be.

Does Alric notice anything important?: [7, 6 💥 6 💥 4 = 16]-2 Result: Success with 2 raises! 🎯🎯🎯

The many doors are disguised in with the decorations around the room. In the shadows on the other side of the grand room from where everyone entered, there is a large shape on a dais, like a vast shallow dish. The chandelier hangs suspended in the center of the room.

Alric will return to the group, tell everyone that he hasn't found anything new, point out the doors and dais to everyone just to have everyone actually be on the same page, then flit up to the chandelier and start talking to it.

"Hi... There's been some changes in ..management.., and thus we'll reorganize things a bit. I'm here to walk you through what's about to happen, so you don't get surprised by anything. So. The whole swaying thing you got going on? Great job. Notice how it feels? ..well, you're soon to start feeling some resistance to it. That's completely normal. You'll notice yourself very slowly coming to a halt, with each coming sway being just a little shorter than the previous one.."

He'll continue talking towards the chandelier, reaffirming the current position in the dream, then setting up the expectation that a small change will occur, then repeat. If it sounds like hypnosis, it's because it pretty much is.

He'll try for a minute and see if there's any reaction. The chandelier might not hear him, at all, lacking ears and all that.

Roll Persuasion

Talking to the chandelier.: [1, 3] Result: Failure ❌

benny

You better work with me here buddy: [2, 6 💥 5 = 11] Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

There is a vague humanoid shape to the chandelier, and flitting closer and talking to the part of it that looks like it used to be the head seems to work better than talking to it at a distance. Its swaying on the long umbilical cord seems to slow. The undulating bioluminescent cilia curling out of it shift to slowly writhing out of sync with each other. It's slow heartbeat still throbs in the same sleepy rhythm.

Alric will switch back into himself.

"Hey, Morgana. So, the whole talking thing works.. but it's taking some serious effort on my part to.. not act like myself. I.. I'm stretching myself quite a bit here.. So I'm going to pass the torch to someone else on the team. However, because you in particular seemed to have a particularly strong issue with people being reshaped against their will, I wanted to check in with you first to make sure you really don't want to tag in, because, well.. This would be your opportunity to undo the reshaping someone else did to them against their will."

No fucking clue who of all the people in there could even remotely be considered charismatic enough to do this.

Conversation outside The Nest has been moved to 2.12 Chapter 2.12: Outside Information

Morgana's double will move to join the larger part of the group, aiming to be where Hope, Vesper, and Phoenix are.

Chapter 2.12: Outside Information

He'll fly back down and explain what exactly he did up at the chandelier: the process of 'yes-and'ing the current state to next state, what exactly he said, what reactions he observed.

The stations Alric currently envisions are:

• Bring the swaying to a stop (to confirm it works)
• Slowly scale down the room, which will also lower the ceiling
• Lower it down the rest of the distance
• Have it imagine the body of their best self (why not give those people something extra here)
• Have it grow that body out

He'll also quickly point out that it'd be great if someone could cast a silence spell or something on any guns and bombs present, just in case shoggoths still do decide show up. Unlikely, but they really don't want to wake the chandelier.

Then he'll give the stage to Morgana.

Mori asks Phoenix if she could be the one to talk to the chandelier more through the bird, and she agrees.

Mori's double holds out a set of strings, and Phoenix removes a gauntlet to take them. Alric can no longer sense strings or bird as Phoenix takes over the shared link.

Alric can still hear over his phone call with Vesper.

"The idea is to convince it to dream a body for itself?" She asks as she steers the paper bird back upwards with surprising grace. "I'm going to start with convincing it to come down."

Phoenix persuasion: [7, 5] Result: Success! 🎯

After some time, the chandelier begins to descend as the umbilical cord connecting it to the ceiling lengthens. The distant corners of the ceiling seem to glow brighter as their bioluminescent stars drift closer down. The air pressure seems to increase, and the structures of the pillars grow less elaborate in their construction and more grounded by rules of biology and gravity.

When it touches the ground, Phoenix hands the paper bird back to Mori and relinquishes her hold. She approaches the chandelier to speak to it with her own body.

"Very good. Now the room is getting smaller, cozier, and lighter. A fresh breeze is refreshing the stale air and making it easier to breathe despite the walls enclosing an area the size of a chapel rather than a cathedral."

Space seems to fold away as the walls crunch down. The bioluminescence gets brighter as the walls get closer. A dark round shape on a dais looms closer now, now visible to everyone in the room; a vantablack void.

A shoggoth peeks in from a hidden doorway.

notice shoggoth: [1, 5] Result: Success! 🎯

"Look out!" I call out to the others, but don't waste mana on an attack. My magic isn't nearly strong enough to hurt these things.

Phoenix seems to have this. Alric waits.

Phoenix focuses on guiding the meditation of the chandelier; brightening and shrinking the room and then on returning their body to something more human like.

Eustace, Ellie, Mori's double, Saint, and Hope all form the defending team. Saint is on guard and kills the shoggoth before it can venture into the room.

More shoggoths poke their appendages into the room, but each small one on their own doesn't form much of a threat and the defending team can keep them at bay.

After many long minutes of guided meditation, the chandelier appears to be an exaggerated caricature of a sleeping man, shaped by someone who only vaguely remembered what humans were supposed to look like.

"Progress. Mhm. But this isn't good enough." Alric stares into the middle distance for a moment, thinking, then returns back to the phone. "Okay, everyone, please bring forth at least one idea each on how to fix this. Even a bad one if you don't have a good one, anything but giving up has at least a chance of helping here."

He'll go last, for obvious reasons.

"We should talk him through fixing the body. Like an art critique, sort of."

"Okay, yeah, could work, I like it. What about the others, any ideas?"

Phoenix is too busy monitoring and guiding the chandelier to spare more than a glance at the others.

The chandelier is now more visible as brighter biolumenescense highlights everything in blue and yellow. The body is still chimerized with shoggoth and curled into a fetal position. Its flesh shifts and smooths, grows more exaggerated then less as Phoenix continues speaking to it in the low cadence of a lullaby.

Eustace watches, nearly mesmerized, in between trying to keep an eye out for more incoming shoggoths. At Alric's ask for ideas, he shakes himself free from watching and approaches Vesper's phone to answer. "Who was this guy before he was made into this? Is this Dyer? Maybe if we remind him who he was before, he'd have a better time of making a body for himself?"

"Good thinking. Possibly? This is the first room, which is where I'd expect the person who summoned the shoggoths to end up. That is, if the way to summon shoggoths doesn't require cultists or human sacrifices or anything, in which case we don't know how this is. Mhm.."

He'll wait for a few moments, and with no one else chipping in, continues.

"Alright, here's my ideas, maybe we can puzzle something together. First idea. We just magic-shape the body into a proper form ourselves based on what we're seeing here, the same way Vesper did her 'summoning' earlier. Second idea. If anyone here can cast some form of a magical image or hologram, they make one that's a proper human, based on what we're seeing here, and let that guide the transformation. Third idea.. nope, that's it for now. You bring up a good point with the whole remembering who they are, that's a thing Sawyer is supposed to help with after they're out of the hive. Mhm. See if you guys can come up with something based on the ideas we have in the pot, I'll call him real quick and see if he has any ideas on that."

This also happens to be the time Scratch walks up. Alric will hang up the call, and.. not call Sawyer, actually. He'll do a one minute quick google search on the Dyer people and see if there's anything on them anywhere, perhaps in some indexed history books? Newspaper articles about them? With pictures, hopefully? And if he can't find anything, then he'll call Sawyer.

Look up anything there is about the Dyer family and perhaps any personell: [8, 5]+2 Result: Success with 1 raise! 🎯🎯

Online, Alric can find a "Spooky Arkham History" column from the Miskatonic Student Gazette's halloween issue from a few years back talking about the rumored history of the Dyer Estate. In 1948 a Kenneth Dyer, a Misketonic student and son of the famous explorer William Dyer, mysteriously went missing. William Dyer had spent the family fortune funding globe-trotting expeditions, leaving Kenneth with only the family estate when he died... and rumors of strange and valuable artifacts brought back from his travels. Kenneth grew desperate in his attempts to make ends meet, going crazy under the stress, but never did he sell anything from the house or drop out of school. Rumor has it that he got into debt with the mob and when they went to the house to collect, he killed the collectors and himself rather than hand over any of his father's treasures. To this day his ghost haunts the property, preventing any looters from leaving with their lives.

Alric calls Vesper again and waits to get put on speaker.

"Okay, I haven't called Sawyer yet, I've first done some googling." He relays the info he dug up. "Another interpretation of the events is that he probably summoned shoggoths and fed the mobsters to them. Or he was already shoggoth'd by that time and the mobsters became shoggoth food simply by walking into the lot. Same for any looters, I guess.. Anyways. We can try the name 'Kenneth' and see if that jostles free any memories."

Ellie's tentacles slowly wave behind her, holding pieces of destroyed shoggoth for later. "Are we sure this was a human-shaped person to start with? I mean, they probably were, but there are people who aren't shaped the same as humans, so if they had anything extra, maybe that's why?"

Morgana, next to Alric, is texting, frowning faintly. In the hive, her double is more occupied with paying attention to the area within the hive.... and also has no phone.

Saint has been texting one-handed while keeping a defensive perimeter, shoving his phone in his pocket whenever a shoggoth appears. He'll offer some seond-hand advice as he circles past again.

"My friend Red says that they might be able to persist in the Dreamlands if we can get their minds back, even if their bodies don't work in the Age of Stability - that's home for all of you. If they're ... out of their minds, or traumatized, they'll probably need to have minders to try and keep them from making nightmares. She's worked with people who have been stolen away to the Dreamlands before, so she's had to deal with people who have had a difficult time reintegrating into a non-Dreamy world."

Saint runs his fingers over his hair, looking a little wary before he passes on the next piece of information. "She says that pulling some dreamstuff into the stable world might help convince physics not to punish their body too badly and kind of... gradually wean them onto stable physics?" He pockets his phone. "I'd be careful about trying that, at least here in Arkham. Somewhere else maybe, but.. lots of things want to break through here, and dreamy stuff makes it easier for them to push through. It makes the rules more flexible."

"So.. are you suggesting we rather not have them dream up bodies? I don't think I got all you said there, but the last part sounded a lot like 'the more bodies we summon, the likelier it is something breaks through and whatever it is, it's not a good thing'

"And Ellie, you're right, probably human. Nothing here indicates anything other than human to me, based on what I've found online, but true, we don't actually have any way of divin-" - he hears Scratch explain the bug experiment to Weaver, looks at them both, then makes a connection - "actually, you know what, fuck it, we do. If Weaver and his magic reef can divine whether or not I was actually the one breaking the seal around the lot, it should also be able to divine if this was a human. So. Saint, I offer you this deal: I owe you a beer - standard human understanding and terms and conditions apply - if he was fully human before he got shoggoth'd." He waits a moment, then smacks his lips. "So.. Any additional debt qualia on your side?"

Saint shakes his head. "No, the body thing seems good? I'm saying it would be dangerous to try and make the weave in Arkham more loose than it already is by trying to make the nearby area more dreamy because... uh. Dreams are... knit, not woven, they're stretchy and the rules are looser - which is why you can use that to our advantage to try and help them make a better body. We're in a Dream Age right now, not Arkham itself. So. You're good."

He blinks, slowly, then laughs quietly, rubbing the back of his head and looking at the phone. "Uh. The Reef? Oh boy, uh, that's... who mentioned The Reef? That's... The Reef is where stable ages exist, like ours, it's -" He trails off. "Not important right now. Uh. One, Weaver didn't divine anything, I was there when Hope told him you were the one who broke the last barrier. That's what let the hungry debt connect to where it belonged - it wouldn't have been able to connect to anyone else, even if someone lied and told Weaver they were the one who did it, which, yeah, sounds like bullshit, but a lot of f- this stuff does."

He clears his throat. "... Two, while, like, sure, I'll take a beer in trade, now's probably as good a time as any to point out that you've already got a positive balance with me? ... but, uh, sure, I can see if I can sniff something out." He'll pad over to sniff the humanoid shape of the chandelier.

Saint looks surprised, then leans in to sniff again, head cocked. "... huh. That's weird, okay, I... yeah, they're just human-human under the shoggoth smell. Maybe I should take small favors for stuff like this more, it's way easier to smell it out than usual."

???

Alric, now on alert again, recalls the interactions he had with Saint - not that many really - and tries to figure out if he somehow accidentally gave away or promised anything.

He comes up blank. One more thing to figure out and fix later.

He also won't point out that Hope suggesting one possible explanation for the unleashed shoggoths doesn't mean that it's the only possible explanation, let alone the truth. He makes a mental note to bring that up later though.

"Ah, mhm.. So, they are human, which means we can try both Kenneth's and his dad's name, either will probably bring up some memories for him, and from there he might crystalize the rest of the memories, even if he's not Kenneth himself. This would be the point to object if anyone has any objections, otherwise Phoenix can just try it out. It's also interesting that you can still make out the human underneath all that. I would've expected that to be mostly gone, but if that's still around that strongly, the person they were is probably too, maybe in a way you can sense as well? If you could just intuit who this person is, or anything that help jostle their memory, it'd make saving him and the others easier."

Saint lets out an uncertain sound. "Uuuuh. I don't know if I can pull that off. If I knew them personally, maybe?" He scrunches his nose, then straightens, cocking his head as he thinks. "The esoteric stuff isn't my specialty, my focus isn't really on... that? I mean.. they're. Uh. To put it really roughly, they're still, like, made of human flesh, too, so that makes it easier to follow that scent to the more abstract one."

His ears twitch. "I'm more specialized in the literal rather than the metaphysical. Identity is complicated, and 'this is a human' is a lot easier than drilling down to the... well. You're basically asking if I can sniff out his Name, right? Who he is, his identity, that kind of thing. It would be really useful to try and call him forward, but... I don't know him."

Phoenix overhears and tries addressing the chandelier by the names Kenneth Dyer and William Dyer.

He seems to respond and the body grows more into that of a young man. It seems likely that this is Kenneth Dyer.

The room is now a tenth of its previous size and still quite spacious. The walls have buckled and bulged in strange ways as the matter within compresses. The air pressure is high and the gate sighs with matter trying to find space.

"Standard-issue human name would've been enough, I think. It.. already seems to work though."

[Chapter 2.12: Outside Information]

When Kenneth's body seems to be mostly human, Phoenix tries guiding him to expel the shoggoths from himself. There is still an otherworldly look about him, but the umbilical cord connecting him to the room thins and dries, slack from the shrinking of the room and billowing in the breeze of escaping air.

The changes become more gradual. Phoenix continues talking in a soothing voice, stopping only occasionally to cough up sticky clumps of viscera. Eventually she addresses the group. "We're not making anymore progress, I don't think. We should try disconnecting or removing him now."

"Do we just... cut the cord? Anyone got a knife?"

"I could swear at least one of y'all had claws or something. I mean, if this is all we're getting, I guess let's cut the cord and bring him outside? Weaver can check if there's any connection left, and if all's good, we can ship him off to Sawyer and move on to the next room. The room's back to normal size now, right?"

"Saint has claws, but they're life draining. I don't think using them here is a good idea."

Phoenix looks around the room: nearly cramped now at a fraction of the size it once was. "It appears so." She says. She raises a clawed gauntlet to rip through the umbilical cord.

"Ms. Aspen?" She raises her voice to carry though the now much shorter distance to the outside of the nest, "I'm attempting to sever the dreamer from the dream. Are you ready?"

"Ready!" Comes the reply.

And Phoenix breaks the cord.

Kenneth inhales and screams! A pressure wave rolls through the room as the walls shudder, bulge, and groan under new stress. The air is filled with the panicked smell of tissues leaking chemical pleas for repair.

Outside there's the sound and shaking of a muffled explosion and landslide. By Founder, Aspen's map shifts to reflect the new territory.

Aspen laughs and leans into the now much smaller doorway into the nest. "A minor bit of turbulence while coming in for the landing, but you've safely touched down. Welcome to Earth and thank you for choosing Dynamic Leylines! Please be careful as you exit the nest, as space may have shifted somewhat from the bumpy Euclidizing."

Kenneth is still screaming as Phoenix pulls a Mylar blanket from a pocket and wraps him in it then picks the new man up and carries him outside the nest.

With the explosion - something sounding like an explosion at least - happening, Alric looks back to the mansion, concerned.

But then he hears Kenneth's screaming. A gut wrenching sound, but.. as long as someone is able to scream, they're not particularly close to death. And with him, so the others.

Nothing Alric can really do here. He waits.. no, he'll send Sawyer a message with an update on the situation. Morgana probably already did so, but just in case. And then he'll go pick up his flamethrower, it might be needed if Weaver has to cut anything shoggoth again.

The party all leave to take their rescue to the surface.

Chapter 2.12: Outside Information