The Endurance of Memory

Pre-Ritual Puttering

Gail and Diomarche bamf in. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here! Hmm. It seems early for Chapter End.

Vidan Gail looks at the map! The X is in the area just north of the mountains northwest of Rinyan. Vidan communes with the map so he can teleport to the X on the map.

We head back to Rinyan, to Stella’s shrine. Scout ponders Spirits in Orange– they tend to take qualities of the land around them, so they are more likely to be earth and fire than the Spirits in Green. They’re not specifically tied to Magic, so there will still be Tree spirits, but maybe not as many in Green. There could be a spirit of Merchanting, or Making? But that’s not so much about it being the Orange Zone, and more about the environment in general.

We sleep! Nothing seems to happen.

The Ritual

We go to the Cult of Al’an, and Leonardo sees us in. Vidan spends a DI.

We find ourselves on a mostly featureless plain. Huh. Oh. We bet we’ve forgotten what happened. Scout looks around, and sees a whole mess of Miracles and Magic over there. We’re standing on a Goddess area. Middlesea (the spirit) is over that way. Interesting.

Stella has spent 3 DI; Vidan 1; Diomarche 5. Stella asks the Goddess what needs Fixing, for one DI– we’re here to fix the Broken Miracle on us. We’re in stage 1. Vidan looks at the ritual space over there– we need to pull the mess over there and put it on the grid in the space. Red is Rush, Blue is Navere,

Managaratha looks for Magic. There is definitely Magic. Kind of like there’s a sky. Huh. He looks at himself– he definitely has a Detect Magic up. (Managaratha is not the platonic ideal of Managaratha, though).

Vidan draws a box. It’s Red for Rush. He changes it into a Blue for Navere square. He puts it on a Blue square. It gets a little black box on top of that– that’s the Breaker. Oh dear.

Nesh pulls an Oasis square (yellow). He puts it on yellow, and our space gets smaller. More isolated, okay. Diomarche draws an Oasis square, and puts it on Black. Oasis on Black. THe space doesn’t get smaller, but we all lose 1 Move. Hrm. Scout thinks the Oasis energies tried to do the Oasis thing, and couldn’t do it right, so they zotted us instead.

Black things will only appear when Blue tiles are put down.

Stella draws a black/blue tile– that’s a big Blue spell, says Scout. She puts it on a Blue/Black square. We can now see further off the map. The

Managaratha draws Rush. He puts it on an Oasis square, on the theory that Rush and the Oasis could fight. The Oasis takes a hit on the Scoreboard, but now it’s paying attention.

Well now that it’s a battle, Gale thinks about hidden secrets in a fight. There won’t be any actual fights until we get to Stage 2. How hard the fights are will depend on how much attention we’ve drawn to ourselves and how much damage we’ve done is unclear. On reflection, we think it damaged the miracle on us, more than the Oasis itself. Although the Oasis is standing Right Over There.

She draws 4 and chooses 1– it’s the white snowflake, which is the Purple/Twins time stop. She puts it on a snowflake. Not much happens.

Diomarche recognizes the Red tile as being his schtick. Not all his DI– a bunch of Fivist DI was channeled into it.

Scout draws Purple/Time, and puts it on Purple/Time. Round 1 is done.

Vidan thinks he could Sanctify that

The demons (spiritbreaker fortress) are not yet paying attention; Middlesea is over there on the edge of the battlemap.

Scout draws Blue, and after some discussion, everyone takes 5 lightning damage no toughness.

Blue Magic on Oasis – -1 Strength and the Oasis lost more points.

Stage 2!

We’re on a square battlemap, it’s largely featureless.

There are five orc-shaped things. They seem to take about 35 points of damage before they get stacked on top of another one. Stella uses her cleansing schtick to pop one– she thinks they have 5 levels of DI resistance. When they attack Diomarche, he loses 5 of a substat (he picks CHA).

We pop the last one and the combat ends.

We go into the Time Stop square– we spend a night without sleep. The END cost begins to get painful.

We move on to Navere square two– combat again! The fourth END starts to take its toll.

There are five orc-shaped Brokenness and one goblin. Diomarche attacks and pops an orc. Scout shoots the Goblin, who does something magic which pushes him off the map into Time Stop. Bye, Free Rangers!

The orcs take 5 Substat points away from Diomarche and Nesh. Ouch.

Vidan summons Scout back. The orcs do a bunch of us some stat damage; Managaratha heals some. We shoot them all.

Diomarche converts the Blue Magic on the Oasis square to a Rush square– we enter it, and engage a combat between ‘paladins’ and ‘cataurs’. The cataurs do hit point damage and are mooks, so we mostly clean up.

In round 3 of Navere/Broken, there are two goblins and 7 orcs. The goblins punt Managaratha and Nesh into the adjacent square, which is the un-encountered Oasis/Oasis square. Stella brings down the Hammer and sanctifies most of the orcs and one of the goblins. Gale says “THEY ARE ON MY BATTLEMAP” and part of the wall between our square and the Oasis/Oasis square. There are a bunch of cataurs over there, so we go that way to fight them. We think that if we’re all in that square when the combat ends, we’ll have moved forward a square in the larger map. Eventually, we do that, and enter the final battle.

Final Combat

8 orcs, 2 goblins, and a slith. We’re all very tired. The slith goes first, and has both a mini-smite and some serious damage capability. Diomarche takes down a goblin, but they stack. The goblin punts Stella from the board, and Scout just barely hangs on. Vidan brings down his hammer, and that takes out everyone except the slith. The slith hits Nesh fairly hard, and then runs into the middle of the board and hides. Diomarche runs around the center of the board and finds the hex he’s hiding in. We finally corner and attack the slith.

The slith falls! We fall out of the ritual, and into the ritual room in the Cult of Al’an.

“How’d it go?” asks Ritasi, as the run ends.

Loot

• +10 EPs
• +10 SPs