Griffin O'Callahan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
icastsword) wrote2021-11-13 06:00 pm
icastsword) wrote2021-11-13 06:00 pm
Entry tags:
Session 90: E.T. Phone Home
Summary clarification from last week: Interplay is aware of the extraplanar realms but aren't sure how to get there.
----
Today's Portents: Nat 1 and 7.
-----
We open with Serra and Jericho. While they're driving through the Shadowfell, back to the checkpoint to return to the Earthly Realm, Serra asks Jericho if anyone else knows? No, not really. At this point, Serra and Jericho are finding things out together. Is Jericho going to tell everybody? Oh, that's a question.
Per Sal, at this point, Jericho is pre-death. He's hospice. Jericho points out that he is the ONLY death. It's metal as shit, but that's beside the point.
Pip might have some good insights, since she's got the whole small medium thing going on. Serra won't say anything if Jericho doesn't, because it's not her place. He's going to have to think about how he's going to break it to everyone, since considering everything that's going on, he's definitely going to have to bring this up.
Serra assures Jericho his secret is safe with her. She winks and gives him a thumbs up.
Out of character, Ant and Guy disappear into the Time Out Corner to tell secrets.
The next day, we reconvene at the bunker. Holt and Crimeny have been scanning Radio Chaos. Griffin has been helping Toit with the language learning. His understanding has improved rapidly, and his vocabulary is also getting better.
Griffin has Toit sing Baby Shark to everyone once they roll up in. Toit rolls a Nat 20 to perform. Now Ant has to determine how he wants to resolve this. Toit goes around, everyone gets a forehead touch and administers a full-on orchestral soundtrack to his song.
Holt is moved to tears. Griffin couldn't be more proud of his protege. Everyone applauds.
Nellie reports that she learned some things about Toit's people. They're called the verden, and the reason the RHoM had one was because they found a mystery book and summoned him. Nellie explains about the kooshy buddies and what will happen if the planar membrane breaks down.
Apparently it's not just books that have this "can't read" problem. It seems to be an information thing? Nellie explains what happened when Gastromodus tried to tell her Ambrosia's previous name.
How do we fix the planar membrane? Who the fuck knows.
Nellie suggests trying what Holt said, by getting souls to cross the barrier.
How are Serra and Jericho looking? They roll to deceive: 21 and 22. Crimeny rolls a 23 Insight.
Shane says something about not going on a crime spree, and Crimeny rotates their head around. Their gaze lands on Jericho. They roll a 1 to Perform and completely fail to hide that they've noticed Jericho being shifty. Their eyeballs extend out of their head, like when Bender zooms in. Jericho's standing there with his starbucks coffee, sweating a little.
Griffin is concerned about all the noises Crimeny is making. Holt has some maintenance goo or whatever, which he gives to Crimeny to stop the alarming noises.
Jericho turns to Crimeny, takes a sip of his coffee, and asks, "Need a little help over there, Crimeny?"
Holt assists Crimeny with their eye.
In response to Jericho's question, Crimeny makes the Windows error noise.
What did Shane learn at Interplay? Besides getting a minotaur's favor? Interplay knows the extended planar system is out there, but they don't know how to get there.
Griffin asks Serra and Jericho what they learned in Zarekhen.
They did find some things out about psychopomps. There's actually a list of them. Also, they're gone? Question mark? They're not dead, they're just disappeared. It's probably the reason soul migration isn't happening. It's like if the postal service just lost all of its people, there's no one to send and receive, and the souls seem to be just piling up. Or disappearing?
Nellie explains about her landlord's ghost, and that he mysteriously disappeared.
Which he shouldn't have been able to do if the psychopomps are gone.
Nellie rolls 18 Insight. She remembers telling her crew about her landlord haunting. She remembers going on vacation to hang out with her mom and asking Jericho to water her plants while she was away. When she came back, her ghost was gone.
Nellie's face right now:
She asks Jericho if he remembers house-sitting for her? Does he remember any problems with the water heater? He remembers that it was kind of clanky. Does he remember that it had cleared up when Nellie got back? Yeah, he remembers. It was working fine.
Nellie is staring at Jericho. So is Serra. So is Crimeny.
"Jericho, what'd you do with my ghost? Stop doing your thing where you try to deflect my question, what'd you do with my ghost?"
Jericho: All I can say, is that presumably your landlord is in a better place?
Jericho explains that he has this artifact that belonged to the previous death.
Toit points at Jericho: Santa-Death.
Pippinella sets up the ouija board.
While Jericho stares at the weggie board, Crimeny walks up to poke the scythe to see if they can hear the voice. They can hear the voice. Jericho and Sal begin to argue. While they argue, Crimeny slowly opens their mouth, and Sal's voice begins to project out of Crimeny's mouth.
After a LOT of old married couple arguing, Sal explains that ALL the psychomps are gone.
Shane texts Kojima.
SHANE:
Hello what do you know about psychopomps?
KOJIMA:
Hello, Shane! What would you like to know about psychopomps?
SHANE:
Where the fuck are they / are there other magic psychopomp weapons laying around anywhere? There's kind of a shortage of and I guess the universe is fucked?
KOJIMA:
...Oh dear.
Are the psychopomps not doing what they're supposed to be doing?
SHANE:
Apparently they've all vanished?? Aside from one who apparently sucks at it
KOJIMA:
🤯
SHANE:
Well that's a good sign
KOJIMA:
It is not
SHANE:
Are we just boned lol
KOJIMA:
I was going to make a Death Stranding joke but I do not feel this is the time
SHANE:
No it is not
KOJIMA:
If the psychopomps are gone then soul migration cannot happen. And if no one knows where they went then that likely means someone is making sure no one finds out.
I find it unlikely that if someone went to the trouble of getting rid of the psychopomps, they would leave their relics.
If someone were to find the relics, they could continue their work. So, if the psychopomps are lost, it's likely their relics are as well, I'm afraid.
Somewhere out there, someone has the power of several dozen psychopomps at their disposal.
💀
SHANE:
Thanks for the information
KOJIMA:
You're welcome, Shane. Good news, though. If you die, you won't be going anywhere anytime soon~!
Sal thinks of something: If one person has the power of several dozen psychopomps at their disposal, they're likely moving the souls around on their own.
Jericho immediately suspects Ambrosia.
We can use Sal as a short-range metal detector.
Nellie suggests we could reap a ghost and somehow track it??
We know someone who might be able to invent something to help us do that.
Hey, isn't that what Alistair was doing?
Crimeny remembers the hard drive they stole from Alistair's warehouse.
Holt has a question: What about Toit?
We have to get Toit home ASAP. Toit chooses that moment to cough dramatically.
Jericho asks Toit if he knows how to get home? Toit walks over to Griffin and hugs his leg. "Toit Home!"
;A;
Nellie asks Toit if he knows how he opened his Gate. Toit spreads his hands and nothing happens.
Toit fills a glass with water, and points to it. Toit. Then he dumps out the water, points to the glass again, and says, "Toit".
Toit needs more mana. Jericho asks if we can refill his glass. The Shard of Chaos Crimeny has is not big enough.
Can we make some Chaos instead of using the store bought chaos?
Holt suggests that we can still reach out to Toit's people to see if they can come get him. We didn't really hear anything from Radio Chaos, but that makes sense since apparently Toit's people communicate telepathically.
Since we've learned the nature of the boogedy, there's probably not a lot of risk bringing down on us. It's coming to get us whether we yell at it or not, so we might as well do something stupid.
Holt has prepared some helmets. They're all cobbled together. One is like a colander, one is a metal bowl, one is a shortwave radio headset. They're all hooked up to the main console he's operating from.
Once everyone is connected to the headsets, Holt will operate the frequency dial. As he changes the frequency, all of us will, I guess, think real hard and try to project our thoughts far enough that maybe we will get an answer.
As soon as Griffin is hooked up y'all hear the mii channel music.
Crimeny has just been told that the first thing he thinks is going to be broadcast out to an unknown entity, so we also get the intro riff to Never Gonna Give You Up.
What's going through Nellie's head? She's already trying to call out, "Hello, hello?"
Griffin is thinking about what he's going to have for lunch.
Serra has Baby Shark stuck in her head.
Jericho is projecting the feeling of Ben Afflek smoking through the pain of existence.
Shane is busy trying not to panic and also wishing he wasn't hearing Rick Astly right now. He's feeling absolute disgust and terror.
Back to Nellie for a second: Does anyone here realize what we're trying to do!?
This sensation is kind of like being in the desert at night. It's barren. It's not necessarily cold, but there is like an absence of temperature. The staticy sensation from the Shard of Chaos kind of encompasses our minds. It's almost like sifting/swimming through sand. It's a very disjointed feeling floating, and a hundred sensations that our mind is trying to set a value to but it can't.
Holt: Okay, you are LIVE!
Jericho: COME GET YOUR KID.
We can all hear each other's thoughts.
Nellie attempts to send a milk carton mental image of Toit out into the chaos. Griffin picks up on this and attempts to help, because pictures are probably a better way to communicate than language in this situation.
Nellie rolls a Nat 20 to Perform. Crimeny helps by projecting a giant neon arrow pointing to Nellie's mental image of Toit.
When that happens, we hear a cacophonous voice that sounds like the feedback from a microphone. Everybody roll Constitution. Shane rolls a 7, Griffin rolls 12, Crimeny rolls 17, Jericho rolls 18, Serra rolls 19, and Nellie rolls 22.
Griffin, Shane, and Crimeny take 10 Psychic damage.
We all hear what sounds like a bunch of different people shouting over each other. There's nothing that sounds like an actual word in the mess, just syllables.
Then we feel like something is trying to connect with us. Do we let it? Yeah, let's pick up the phone. Crimeny makes dial up noises. We allow this nebulous being in. It starts probing our minds.
Jericho smacks it mentally. It is not dissuaded. We roll Insight.
Crimeny, Jericho, and Serra notice that whatever is rooting through their mind is looking for something specific - it's looking for things that we fear. Bad things.
Jericho warns everyone that this thing has bad intentions. Trying to force this thing out is like trying to close a door in a tornado.
Inky reminds us about the scene in Mass Effect when something was trying to overwhelm EDI, and she thwarted it by flooding it with 4TB of porn. Jericho is going to curate some SHIT for this motherfucker.
Since Crimeny knows it's looking for fears, they're going to feed it things they have noticed other people fear, but shit they don't care about - fire, clowns, snakes, etc. They're feeding it false information.
Now Ant asks everybody to share what their characters are feeding this entity, and to do so using DMs. As soon as Inky starts typing, presumably, Ant loses his mind.
As we try to curate what this entity sees, we sense it growing frustrated, and it backs off all at once. But in doing so, it leaves behind sharp painful feedback, and then that desert wind sound is broken up by alerts going off in Holt's bunker.
Holt rushes over to another console - he doesn't know what happened but we might want to take a look at this. Nellie stays where she is, but everyone else takes off their helmets to look at the screen Holt is observing. He's pulled up the map of New Orleans Parish.
Six distinct breaches have opened up in New Orleans.
Holt brings up some visuals from various cameras he's planted across New Orleans. On six different cameras are the six different rifts. What steps out are some shapeless, formeless masses. Once they step into the Earthly realm, their form changes.
On one screen is a towering Long Furby in an ahegao T-shirt.
On another monitor is the mothman wearing a skin mask of a person.
On the third monitor is a mass of delicious-looking food that takes the shape of a towering Lord Ozamuth.
On the fourth monitor is a swarm of bonobo monkies that immediately begin having sex with one another.
On the fifth monitor are carbon copies of all of us, but they then mash together into a weird horrific amalgamation.
And finally, a 40-foot tall Weird Al in clown makeup with eight spider legs.
They are all appearing at different points in New Orleans.
Let's go take care of Clonezilla before Interplay sees it.
----
Today's Portents: Nat 1 and 7.
-----
We open with Serra and Jericho. While they're driving through the Shadowfell, back to the checkpoint to return to the Earthly Realm, Serra asks Jericho if anyone else knows? No, not really. At this point, Serra and Jericho are finding things out together. Is Jericho going to tell everybody? Oh, that's a question.
Per Sal, at this point, Jericho is pre-death. He's hospice. Jericho points out that he is the ONLY death. It's metal as shit, but that's beside the point.
Pip might have some good insights, since she's got the whole small medium thing going on. Serra won't say anything if Jericho doesn't, because it's not her place. He's going to have to think about how he's going to break it to everyone, since considering everything that's going on, he's definitely going to have to bring this up.
Serra assures Jericho his secret is safe with her. She winks and gives him a thumbs up.
Out of character, Ant and Guy disappear into the Time Out Corner to tell secrets.
The next day, we reconvene at the bunker. Holt and Crimeny have been scanning Radio Chaos. Griffin has been helping Toit with the language learning. His understanding has improved rapidly, and his vocabulary is also getting better.
Griffin has Toit sing Baby Shark to everyone once they roll up in. Toit rolls a Nat 20 to perform. Now Ant has to determine how he wants to resolve this. Toit goes around, everyone gets a forehead touch and administers a full-on orchestral soundtrack to his song.
Holt is moved to tears. Griffin couldn't be more proud of his protege. Everyone applauds.
Nellie reports that she learned some things about Toit's people. They're called the verden, and the reason the RHoM had one was because they found a mystery book and summoned him. Nellie explains about the kooshy buddies and what will happen if the planar membrane breaks down.
Apparently it's not just books that have this "can't read" problem. It seems to be an information thing? Nellie explains what happened when Gastromodus tried to tell her Ambrosia's previous name.
How do we fix the planar membrane? Who the fuck knows.
Nellie suggests trying what Holt said, by getting souls to cross the barrier.
How are Serra and Jericho looking? They roll to deceive: 21 and 22. Crimeny rolls a 23 Insight.
Shane says something about not going on a crime spree, and Crimeny rotates their head around. Their gaze lands on Jericho. They roll a 1 to Perform and completely fail to hide that they've noticed Jericho being shifty. Their eyeballs extend out of their head, like when Bender zooms in. Jericho's standing there with his starbucks coffee, sweating a little.
Griffin is concerned about all the noises Crimeny is making. Holt has some maintenance goo or whatever, which he gives to Crimeny to stop the alarming noises.
Jericho turns to Crimeny, takes a sip of his coffee, and asks, "Need a little help over there, Crimeny?"
Holt assists Crimeny with their eye.
In response to Jericho's question, Crimeny makes the Windows error noise.
What did Shane learn at Interplay? Besides getting a minotaur's favor? Interplay knows the extended planar system is out there, but they don't know how to get there.
Griffin asks Serra and Jericho what they learned in Zarekhen.
They did find some things out about psychopomps. There's actually a list of them. Also, they're gone? Question mark? They're not dead, they're just disappeared. It's probably the reason soul migration isn't happening. It's like if the postal service just lost all of its people, there's no one to send and receive, and the souls seem to be just piling up. Or disappearing?
Nellie explains about her landlord's ghost, and that he mysteriously disappeared.
Which he shouldn't have been able to do if the psychopomps are gone.
Nellie rolls 18 Insight. She remembers telling her crew about her landlord haunting. She remembers going on vacation to hang out with her mom and asking Jericho to water her plants while she was away. When she came back, her ghost was gone.
Nellie's face right now:
She asks Jericho if he remembers house-sitting for her? Does he remember any problems with the water heater? He remembers that it was kind of clanky. Does he remember that it had cleared up when Nellie got back? Yeah, he remembers. It was working fine.
Nellie is staring at Jericho. So is Serra. So is Crimeny.
"Jericho, what'd you do with my ghost? Stop doing your thing where you try to deflect my question, what'd you do with my ghost?"
Jericho: All I can say, is that presumably your landlord is in a better place?
Jericho explains that he has this artifact that belonged to the previous death.
Toit points at Jericho: Santa-Death.
Pippinella sets up the ouija board.
While Jericho stares at the weggie board, Crimeny walks up to poke the scythe to see if they can hear the voice. They can hear the voice. Jericho and Sal begin to argue. While they argue, Crimeny slowly opens their mouth, and Sal's voice begins to project out of Crimeny's mouth.
After a LOT of old married couple arguing, Sal explains that ALL the psychomps are gone.
Shane texts Kojima.
SHANE:
Hello what do you know about psychopomps?
KOJIMA:
Hello, Shane! What would you like to know about psychopomps?
SHANE:
Where the fuck are they / are there other magic psychopomp weapons laying around anywhere? There's kind of a shortage of and I guess the universe is fucked?
KOJIMA:
...Oh dear.
Are the psychopomps not doing what they're supposed to be doing?
SHANE:
Apparently they've all vanished?? Aside from one who apparently sucks at it
KOJIMA:
🤯
SHANE:
Well that's a good sign
KOJIMA:
It is not
SHANE:
Are we just boned lol
KOJIMA:
I was going to make a Death Stranding joke but I do not feel this is the time
SHANE:
No it is not
KOJIMA:
If the psychopomps are gone then soul migration cannot happen. And if no one knows where they went then that likely means someone is making sure no one finds out.
I find it unlikely that if someone went to the trouble of getting rid of the psychopomps, they would leave their relics.
If someone were to find the relics, they could continue their work. So, if the psychopomps are lost, it's likely their relics are as well, I'm afraid.
Somewhere out there, someone has the power of several dozen psychopomps at their disposal.
💀
SHANE:
Thanks for the information
KOJIMA:
You're welcome, Shane. Good news, though. If you die, you won't be going anywhere anytime soon~!
Sal thinks of something: If one person has the power of several dozen psychopomps at their disposal, they're likely moving the souls around on their own.
Jericho immediately suspects Ambrosia.
We can use Sal as a short-range metal detector.
Nellie suggests we could reap a ghost and somehow track it??
We know someone who might be able to invent something to help us do that.
Hey, isn't that what Alistair was doing?
Crimeny remembers the hard drive they stole from Alistair's warehouse.
Holt has a question: What about Toit?
We have to get Toit home ASAP. Toit chooses that moment to cough dramatically.
Jericho asks Toit if he knows how to get home? Toit walks over to Griffin and hugs his leg. "Toit Home!"
;A;
Nellie asks Toit if he knows how he opened his Gate. Toit spreads his hands and nothing happens.
Toit fills a glass with water, and points to it. Toit. Then he dumps out the water, points to the glass again, and says, "Toit".
Toit needs more mana. Jericho asks if we can refill his glass. The Shard of Chaos Crimeny has is not big enough.
Can we make some Chaos instead of using the store bought chaos?
Holt suggests that we can still reach out to Toit's people to see if they can come get him. We didn't really hear anything from Radio Chaos, but that makes sense since apparently Toit's people communicate telepathically.
Since we've learned the nature of the boogedy, there's probably not a lot of risk bringing down on us. It's coming to get us whether we yell at it or not, so we might as well do something stupid.
Holt has prepared some helmets. They're all cobbled together. One is like a colander, one is a metal bowl, one is a shortwave radio headset. They're all hooked up to the main console he's operating from.
Once everyone is connected to the headsets, Holt will operate the frequency dial. As he changes the frequency, all of us will, I guess, think real hard and try to project our thoughts far enough that maybe we will get an answer.
As soon as Griffin is hooked up y'all hear the mii channel music.
Crimeny has just been told that the first thing he thinks is going to be broadcast out to an unknown entity, so we also get the intro riff to Never Gonna Give You Up.
What's going through Nellie's head? She's already trying to call out, "Hello, hello?"
Griffin is thinking about what he's going to have for lunch.
Serra has Baby Shark stuck in her head.
Jericho is projecting the feeling of Ben Afflek smoking through the pain of existence.
Shane is busy trying not to panic and also wishing he wasn't hearing Rick Astly right now. He's feeling absolute disgust and terror.
Back to Nellie for a second: Does anyone here realize what we're trying to do!?
This sensation is kind of like being in the desert at night. It's barren. It's not necessarily cold, but there is like an absence of temperature. The staticy sensation from the Shard of Chaos kind of encompasses our minds. It's almost like sifting/swimming through sand. It's a very disjointed feeling floating, and a hundred sensations that our mind is trying to set a value to but it can't.
Holt: Okay, you are LIVE!
Jericho: COME GET YOUR KID.
We can all hear each other's thoughts.
Nellie attempts to send a milk carton mental image of Toit out into the chaos. Griffin picks up on this and attempts to help, because pictures are probably a better way to communicate than language in this situation.
Nellie rolls a Nat 20 to Perform. Crimeny helps by projecting a giant neon arrow pointing to Nellie's mental image of Toit.
When that happens, we hear a cacophonous voice that sounds like the feedback from a microphone. Everybody roll Constitution. Shane rolls a 7, Griffin rolls 12, Crimeny rolls 17, Jericho rolls 18, Serra rolls 19, and Nellie rolls 22.
Griffin, Shane, and Crimeny take 10 Psychic damage.
We all hear what sounds like a bunch of different people shouting over each other. There's nothing that sounds like an actual word in the mess, just syllables.
Then we feel like something is trying to connect with us. Do we let it? Yeah, let's pick up the phone. Crimeny makes dial up noises. We allow this nebulous being in. It starts probing our minds.
Jericho smacks it mentally. It is not dissuaded. We roll Insight.
Crimeny, Jericho, and Serra notice that whatever is rooting through their mind is looking for something specific - it's looking for things that we fear. Bad things.
Jericho warns everyone that this thing has bad intentions. Trying to force this thing out is like trying to close a door in a tornado.
Inky reminds us about the scene in Mass Effect when something was trying to overwhelm EDI, and she thwarted it by flooding it with 4TB of porn. Jericho is going to curate some SHIT for this motherfucker.
Since Crimeny knows it's looking for fears, they're going to feed it things they have noticed other people fear, but shit they don't care about - fire, clowns, snakes, etc. They're feeding it false information.
Now Ant asks everybody to share what their characters are feeding this entity, and to do so using DMs. As soon as Inky starts typing, presumably, Ant loses his mind.
As we try to curate what this entity sees, we sense it growing frustrated, and it backs off all at once. But in doing so, it leaves behind sharp painful feedback, and then that desert wind sound is broken up by alerts going off in Holt's bunker.
Holt rushes over to another console - he doesn't know what happened but we might want to take a look at this. Nellie stays where she is, but everyone else takes off their helmets to look at the screen Holt is observing. He's pulled up the map of New Orleans Parish.
Six distinct breaches have opened up in New Orleans.
Holt brings up some visuals from various cameras he's planted across New Orleans. On six different cameras are the six different rifts. What steps out are some shapeless, formeless masses. Once they step into the Earthly realm, their form changes.
On one screen is a towering Long Furby in an ahegao T-shirt.
On another monitor is the mothman wearing a skin mask of a person.
On the third monitor is a mass of delicious-looking food that takes the shape of a towering Lord Ozamuth.
On the fourth monitor is a swarm of bonobo monkies that immediately begin having sex with one another.
On the fifth monitor are carbon copies of all of us, but they then mash together into a weird horrific amalgamation.
And finally, a 40-foot tall Weird Al in clown makeup with eight spider legs.
They are all appearing at different points in New Orleans.
Let's go take care of Clonezilla before Interplay sees it.