Episode 7

The Biting of The Donut

The conversation continues in Eepiy's boxcar after the party tested out the powers of the Hyperspace Anomaly entities which were summoned by using the Experimental-type time spells Iosefka recalled from his original research foray with Eepiy, long before The Apocalypse, when they got caught up in The Ambiance's disaster and skipped ahead to the present eon. The room is filled with a loose grid of curtains with red, black, and white squares, which obscure most sight other than light and shadows beyond a couple feet anywhere in here. Most of the floor is full of lounging cushions and some small tables with games or pipes or luxurious bullshit, and there's a little kitchen space off in one corner, while most of the walls are dominated by book cases, a couple small writing desks, and a clockwork-scale metalworking table. Yayik is present with her armor, wig, and Charisma buff removed, and is serving refreshments and maintaining a servile manner distinct from her hotshot adventure-hero persona from the casino.

The episode proceeds as an exposition-monologue-driven phantom battle, ending with a full restoration of spent resources (including lives, but you can't take back the things you say)

Eepiy addresses Iosefka throughout: "We have dawdled long enough. There is much use we yet have for each other's... perpendicular goals, and to continue, I must bring you more fully into the present state of affairs, the changed universe, and our new place within its order. You meant to find where person and place meet in that order, to make the world of your world, with your self between them. I was a spirit of Gehenna, born where person and place meet and with my self as its eyes and its claws and its teeth, and I sought to destroy your mortal worlds.

"Much has changed since then. I will tell you the story of the end of the world, and what it has done to us."

She produces an instrument, a type of bowed lyre or lute with a long soundboard set in the side with small finger-drums set with beads touching coils of metal beneath which add a low thrum to the percussion. The bow is a curved wire like a flattened question mark, and the inside of the hook is abrasive. As she starts tapping a simple rhythm, she brings up a box of hot sauna coals and pours a potion on it. The walls and shelves of the room disappear when seen through the steam, but the grid of curtains extends beyond, into infinity. And when the steam reaches the ceiling, a light brighter than the overcast day shines through, and where it shines, their skin chills; Where the steam turns the ceiling invisible, the party sees the ghost of the Swallowed Sun, the devoured star of Ysgard which fills the Shadowfell with blinding cold light. But the steam grows warmer in the light, and envelops the party, and as Eepiy begins plucking a few slow, sharp strings, it glimmers with colors which obscure the rest of the room and the light and bring the party to a series of phantom landscapes. Eepiy continues her narration, appearing as a ghostly face in the sky.

They stand on the marble top of a tall, thin stone tower on the slope of a burning volcano which extends endlessly up and down. Rivers of lava, fireballs and landslides surround them, and the sky is black smoke.

"When your people see Gehenna, you see the cities which crawl upon the cliffs, you see stone and cave and structure and violence. But you see oh so little, standing only on the single thread among many in which your feeble body can survive. See more."

A meteor streaks out of the clouds, striking the mountain below them. The twoer tilts and crumbles beneath the party, and as they fall they see the mountain exploding upwards around them. They're engulfed in a vision of nothing but fire and lava, but feel no pain, and amid the flames they find themselves standing on an invisible surface.

"In Gehenna, mortals stand on one timeline among an endless field where the world could not hold together, where all matter crumbles and blows away in nuclear fury. East of Hell, we know the power of Law not as the ascension of our own selfish creations, but as the inevitable downfall of all ambition. The mote of Chaos within all Law is the doom which surrounds you and closes in. It is the opposite of Carceri, where the more of Law within Chaos makes freedom intolerant of the freedom of others, such that each finds themself frozen in isolation, so unlike the seething frenzy of the Eastern planes.

"Now, I shall speak of war."

The party fights a whole crowd of crowned phantom warriors made from the flames and lava which surround them. They die swiftly with 13AC and 1HP, but the survivors of the first round of combat explode for minor burns.

"As a spirit of Gehenna, my heart beat always with those whose memories are never told; My mind thought with the thoughts of those who were ending amid the wickedness they brought to their worlds. In those days, you were right to fear my motives and to limit the entanglement of our fates during our brief research." She smiles, her mouth and teeth extending far to the back of her head like no real dog. "For I was a spirit of War, and mine was the claw and the tongue which brought to the needy their greatest weapons when all was lost, so all could join them in ruin."

She cackles, and the flames recede. The party has a vision of medieval armies clashing on the snowy fields of ancient Rhone in the twilight of sunrise. Eepiy's ghostly narrator-image fills a sixth of the sky, and instead of her red and white flame robes of The Serpent's Way, she has black robes woven with red texts which the party intuitively understands as military chants. A greatsword falls from the sky and the vision follows as it lands next to a knight, wounded and disarmed before a horseman; The knight picks it up and slashes through horse and soldier alike, then rushes forward into the slaughter. Then the vision swerves out and veers a mile away to the party, who have to fight their way through phantom warriors.

After that section of combat, the view zooms out again and the sun rises red as we see wielders of the sword eventually get cut down by overwhelming numbers, and new wielders charge on and on back and forth. The vision fast-forwards to a lifeless battlefield, the sword now still and collected snow, surrounded by corpses. Then, on some other day, a passing cyclops in a loincloth plucks it up, tries to pick something out of its teeth with it, then walks off with it stuck in its belt, to face the party in battle with its shitty giant axe. This is the first enemy that doesn't have 13AC and 1HP, and Yayik serves as main tank while Ashara's player is absent.

After the fight, the sword lands next to Alerion and turns into a rapier. This is the Sword of Destruction, and he still has it when the phantom battles end. It has a base damage of 1d6 per two character levels, fails to hit if it doesn't crit because it destroys its own destiny, when it does crit it summons a Hyperspace Anomaly as punishment. It does not require attunement, is Evil(tm), can teleport back to its sheath when dropped, and currently has a +1 bonus. Time fast-forwards again, fast enough for the trees to grow, and just before this scene fades out a castle rises to the west. The party now stands on a high-tech metal catwalk above massive machinery.

"Heroes. There are always heroes. And often, it was our own plans which came to ruin."

There's a brief fight against cyborg knights, vampires, werewolves, turtles, ducks, etc; Like the other mass mob phantoms, they get swept away by any damage, while taxing the party 1HP for each that lasts long enough to explode, in addition to some token melee swipes. Alerion tests out the Sword of Destruction, confirming that it's mostly useless outside of guaranteed criticals. (see Sensei Critsmith)

At the end of that combat, a slow-motion explosion encourages the party onward to the boss platform, where they engage with a phantom of The Dark Lich, the penultimate boss of Secret of Mana. It goes through five rounds of preset mechanics to dole out AoE damage, melee counters, and a variety of potential debuffs which turned Willow into a moogle for a round. The party's damage against this enemy was multiplied by 5 and added to the base mission pay of 100 gold at the end of the session.

"We know that we cannot know what holy powers our enemies might wield. We do not worship our egos in Gehenna. We make cracks where we an, and widen them as we can, wherever that happens to be. Who can tell something how to shatter? There are always flames to feed upon somewhere." The party dissociates and is replaced by the actual characters from the scene. They watch the fight against the Mana Beast, and as Eepiy portends "And no victory is entitled to perfection..." the scene switches forward to the boy and girl standing over a landscape without their sprite companion, in an absolutely brutal assault on multiple players' and the DM's own childhood feelings.

"Such was my people's life then, drinking tragedy and breathing strife. Until the end, after you and I had already slipped out of time with our would-be colleagues. When I returned, years before you, I drank of my people's memory, and I had to seek it, for Gehenna, whatever gods it once hid now lost beyond the end of time, is no longer the master of our hearts; As we now change, it changes for us."

The view becomes a symbolic depiction of The Outlands as it once was. In sixteen directions, the party can see the landscape conveniently just before the horizon shift in the direction of another plane, while a bit to their north stands the Spire, which nobody here but Iosefka and Eepiy have ever seen, and the then-intact Donut of Sigil above it. Their attention turns to the south, where dramatic silhouettes of demons and devils fighting line the edge of the sky. The view zooms into them, and suddenly the party is standing in the middle of the Blood War.

The last combat starts as large waves of 1-hit mobs, and Willow's AoE conal meant to ignore the party and only damage demons and devils also damages Iosefka, because he is Evil(tm) from the pre-apocalyptic Alignment System, and "Evil" mortals born in the current era function as neutral for those spells. He's knocked out, and immediately healed by Yayik, and everyone is thinking about what just happened. :) Then the phantom pit fiend general showed up, and a round later the surviving phantom 1-hitters exploded. As an unrealistically weak phantom depiction, the level 5 party does take the pit fiend out, but with a melee AoE and an onslaught of four attacks per turn, Yayik is knocked out during the final round.

The view zooms out to the warring landscapes between the top layers of Old Hell and the Abyss. "My people won the Blood War. Perhaps you could have said the same for Asmodeus, or The Lady, if you could ever interpret what their stories mean to them, but not for his empire in Old Hell. The intelligent powers of the cosmos were set to tear each other apart, and even without our fervent efforts, to bring it all crashing down around them. In their dread Calculus of the Good(tm), the top two heavens of Celestia itself fled, sealing themselves away in bliss rather than risk joy multiplied by eternity to help the rest of you."

The view zooms back to the Outlands map. There's a horrific sound, like metal twisting loudly enough to shatter planets (back in the real room, Eepiy shows the use of the jagged interior of the bow on the strings), and the land folds like origami in five dimensions. In the southwest, there's a noise like cracking ice, and a huge section twists into a tight spiral, obliterating its contents before they freeze, and the southeastern horizon turns inside-out as the maw of the Abyss becomes the may of the serpent-form of Asmodeus, freed from Hell and turning the cosmos inside-out around him. In the east, the Outlands rip open into the Dreamless Void, and in the north it crumbles into The Fold. The characters born in the present day know him as Homer, the massive frozen serpent encoiling the cosmos, ending in the sky above the Outlands where he and his Donut, Sigil, are frozen until the end of time in the moment a bite was taken from it and it began to fall. The party watch as the Great Devourer plunges into the spire, biting and shattering it, and the landscape in the center of the Outlands ripples and spills into the Oubliettes as they exist now. And in the moment the Spire snaps, the sky turns off, black. Then, colors swirl in like growing afterimages, taking the form of eyes and mouths and strands of flesh in an infinity of impossible colors. Then Homer snaps back up and bites a chunk from the Donut, and he freezes, and the sky returns to the overcast day it was.

The party, and the general public, knows a metaphysical explanation for the forestalling of the ultimate end of the whole Wheel in that moment: Where time was supposed to end, it instead condensed, and as each moment drew closer to the end, time spiraled in on itself, containing more and more within faster and faster paths of time, and this continued without end. From within the universe, things continued, damaged and changed, but similar. And, supposedly, the minds of the gods existed beyond this boundary, and they lost sight of time as it compressed inward before an end they themselves simply passed, rendering their planar forms what they are now: slumbering beings like plants, or fungi, or bacterial mats or viruses, or else as tombs with the radiance of their "honor" or suchlike, but not as thinking, speaking beings from before.

"There is no perfection, neither in desire nor in ruin. The Wheel was breaking, as we intended, until we faced our inevitable catch. We were the will of Gehenna, and as the Wheel bent, so did Gehenna. So did our vision. So. Did. Our. Need."

The black war-chanter's robe of the pre-Apocalyptic Eepiy, narrating still as a faint sky-face, bursts into pure white flames around her head. "Death begets life. Suffering begets hope. As worlds crumble to ash and salt, the very blindness of lifelessness rushes forward through the aeons until ash becomes mud and somehow, mud turns again to flesh to think to slow time to its moments and enjoy...

"And as Gehenna bent, we came to see the nature of our own thoughts, the nature of motive and choice and feeling and how it could be changed... by ourselves."

The view changes to blackness. Then a spotlight shows an elegantly-robed man with deep red skin, a black goatee, and two long, curling horns. The party feels an intuition they could not have imagined, a sense that the cliche before them is The Original, a temporal abyss in fashion form to a time before the Wheel. This is an image of Asmodeus.

Another theater spotlight shows a womanly figure covered my silk scrolls embroidered with unknown texts. Her face is a stone mask with a mute and somewhat severe expression, surrounded by some kind of spiky ornamentation; The Lady of Pain.

"Desire changes," says Eepiy.

Asmodeus steps forward, and their spotlights just touch. He says, "My love, I have returned."

When The Lady replies, the vision turns black with lines of white text like a voiceless movie, using the Exocent font from the Planescape books, then returns to the scene.

¹My love, I have followed you to this place, and
²I have waited, and in honor of our grief
³I have brought suffering to those that would deny that grief
⁴To them I have shown that form is subject to rending
⁵To them I have shown that thought is subject to eternity

They both step forward, close enough to reach each other. Asmodeus says, "My love, I have fashioned of this world a road home." She replies,

⁶My love, these people to whom I have shown light
⁷They have shone upon me, too
⁸For they have shown me Time, and knowledge thereof
⁹And they have shown me Cause, and knowledge thereof
¹⁰And thus do I taste the sin they call justice

And Asmodeus's head explodes backwards like a comet's tail.

It's still an imploding head in a certain sense, you see, because the inside of the Great Devourerer, and the Old Abyss he swallowed from beneath, were now inside-out beyond the horizon of the cosmos.

The party returns to themselves sitting in Eepiy's room, and the monologue ends. Yayik, the only one who ended the battle unconscious, is visibly nauseated and bending forward, but everyone's HP and resources are otherwise restored. Though, The Sword of Destruction is still on Alerion's belt. Willow and Eepiy lay hands on Yayik.

"You did beautiful," Eepiy tells her.

"I don't feel beautiful..." she replies, groaning.

Eepiy pets her scalp. "You will be beautiful when I make you beautiful, and that is all we need." The party all looks at each other like UM and Yayik hesitates, but then leans into Eepiy, who smiles her all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-skull smile.

Eepiy reiterates what the party already knows about the Way of The True Apocalypse, and speaks more of how since the silencing of the gods, her people have been free to mutate both themselves and the themes of their planes. She asks Iosefka if they can look at each other's spellbooks, and offers her desk with her fancy Arcanaloth writing implements (i.e. no spell copying time or cost). He agrees, and his Eepiy's Experimental Acceleration and its debugged version are upgraded to Acceleration/Deceleration with the choice to increase or reduce the target's initiative. He also gets a 1st and a 2nd level spell he's normally allowed to learn, and Eepiy is delighted.

After some more niceties, the question of the actual mission the party was hired for comes up, and Eepiy tells them dismissively that she already has that taken care off. As she passes out the party's massively inflated reward (each of the three quests were given at 100gp per person, but Eepiy adds five times the damage they dealt in the Dark Lich fight for 815 total each) for just partaking in this and the previous episode's catchup session and spell experiments, there's a knock on the door, and Yayik lets in who Alerion recognizes as the two "Hot Babes" who were clinging to Yayik in cocktail dresses at the casino, now wearing modest ninja gis. They report to Eepiy, saying the sketchy carbonite-people-looking-slabs the Trust in Hell was shipping westward were coming from a place called Androlynne.