Dramatis Personae
- Marcy. Grapefruit nomad Steppelander. Light-bending illusionist, amateur camel matchmaker, furniture fight emcee.
- Astia. D.W.A.R.F. Decapolitan Ambassador. Biomancer owner of the Buried Delicatessen.
- Finn. Greenlander Preacher from the Emerald City. Body-slammed an armoire. Talks to plants, wants to kiss a girl.
- Limon. Lime nomad Steppelander play-fighter. Bound in servitude to a demigod Bonsai Turtle named Glum.
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| Map I pulled from Dyson |
Catching Up
As Marcy walked down the hidden staircase behind the embassy's mobility tubes, Astia reached into his pack and produced a tortoise. Slowly, it transformed back into its original form: a young Steppelander named Limon. His pact with Glum had its benefits. Marceline (disguised as an amnesiac Spectrum Satrap) was given paperwork to fill out in order to have her personality backup restored, but used the opportunity to meet up with her companions in the basement instead. With everyone together, the crawling resumed.
Hearing footsteps on the other side of the door Finn was attempting to open, Astia ran back into the hexagonal pool room with the Delicate Seer. He grabbed the unconscious body of the scientist they'd knocked out and plopped it into a chair, giving the impression of a napping researcher. Marceline disguised Limon as a Spectrum Satrap, so when the six guards emerged from the other side of the door Finn was trying to unlock they were only mildly suspicious. Why were three scientists standing in a pitch black hallway?
Tensions nearly boiled over as the party failed to convincingly lie to the guards. Marcy claimed to be in the phytomancy division, but the guards knew phytomancy and seer divisions didn't intermingle, and no one could explain why they were in the hallway instead of at their stations. Astia finally managed to calm the guards down by implying that Marcy had come for a reading from the Seer with regards to the outcome of her "work." The six armed Rainbowlanders continued on their route through the facility.
Exploring Under the Final Embassy
Waiting for the patrol to exit earshot, the party pushed further into the underground facility. They found themselves in an aquarium room featuring a tank full of darkly occluded water taking up the entire north wall. Some glo-crystal wands attached to the glass tank via metal hookups recharged when electricity pulsed from somewhere deep within; Astia chalked it up to (electrically delicious) steppe eels and they pressed onward.
Sidling down a sloping hallway curving southward, the party found themselves at a crossroads. A stairway on their left headed toward the smell of dark phytomancy (care of Marcy's magical sniffer), but the room their current hallway emptied into was filled with swirling, multi-colored light patterns. Tempting as the lights were, the party decided to bee-line for their goal and came across an employee lounge. An end table's drawer hid a stash of cat coffee Marcy promptly pocketed and there was little else of interest other than a powered-off vidycrystal screen buzzing like a tube tv. They swapped it back on to find a looping text crawl in a language only Astia understood: Satrap Canto. Much of the feed referenced mundane goings on in the Last Serai, but an update on "the situation in The Violet City" caught Astia's eye. Apparently Purp. U had been swallowed by thorny vines on which bloomed blood orange orchids—the same kinda as Gelato brought back from Ynn and requested the Astrobotany department plant. Probably just a coincidence!
Continuing on, the group was faced with a crystal iguana sitting lazily atop a stack of crates in a storage room. From around a corner, guards could be heard making small talk, but Marcy smelled the source of the dark phytomancy nearby. It was coming from a hallway between their current location and a guard post. Our heroes successfully executed an "act like you belong here" plan, walking by while making casual mention of what they had learned from the vidycrystal news feed. It brought them to their destination: a jungly, vine-choked room at the far end of the facility.
The Lair of the Mind-burned Thief
Finn whispered to a nearby palm tree, hunched under the room's too-low ceiling, asking if it had seen anyone or anything suspicious in the room. Being a tree, it informed her that it had never seen anything ever, which triggered a brief conversation about exactly which senses plants were capable of experiencing. (I think I'm going with sound and touch. The creepy worm-vines can taste, but I think it's clear they're an exception.) This palm tree hated its life in this awful underground room and begged Finn to dig it up and plant it elsewhere. Moving further into the room in search of evidence of foul play, the party was ambushed by a bunch of worm-vines.
Three of the nasty flesh-colored vines swarmed Marcy and began draining her blood through their lamprey mouths. One began to burrow into Astia's torso damaging his armor, but he managed to prevent it from fully tunneling into him. Marcy showered her legs in sparks from her crystal focus, singing herself but getting the worm-vines fully off of her while Limon went to town with his dagger-axe. Finn splatted one worm-vine with his staff and stabbed another with the poisonous spur he'd gained as a mutation in Ynn. It fled and though he pursued, it died before he could interrogate it. Limon continued hacking these bloodthirsty vines into pieces until only one remained, which Marcy used her bow to pin to the ground. Finn spoke to it, discovering the location of their spawning grounds: a person kept alive by some enchanted, yeasty rose water.
They found the poor soul with his chest cavity full opened, worm-vines growing from within. Astia squished the baby worm-vines while Marcy found a helmet and uniform indicating that the body had once been one of Black Helmet 60-plurality's. An attempt by Finn to heal the unfortunate soul resulted in his passing (a kindness, truly).
Astia found a hidden passage up to the surface in the back of the room. The party collected the BH60-p corpse and whatever else they could find that might serve as evidence and skedaddled. To avoid suspicion while traveling back through the Harmonium, Marcy disguised the corpse as a Ynnian rose maiden using her Light magic, and they made it back to the anarchist collective.
Epilogue
Sodoba Purpureo hadn't been certain Marcy and her friends would survive their attempted infiltration of the Final Embassy, let alone that they'd be back in a few hours with a fresh corpse. Our heroes hadn't discovered enough to put every last piece of the puzzle together, but they'd learned enough to know they were in over their heads. Clearly the S. Satraps and P. Princes were in on it together (whatever it was) and going to either with their findings was unlikely to produce a desirable outcome for them. They gave Sodoba everything they found and told her how to get to the trap door leading to the surface, leaving her with a sole instruction: once she's verified their claims, burn the place.
Everyone resolved to leave the Last Serai as soon as possible. A lone palm tree reassured itself Finn would be back to save it as smoke filled the phytomantic chamber.
