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: "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. (Note that the "Just Roll High" dojo on the train from Episode 6 allowed for short-term stocking of criticals, at least if you could manage to crit while you were there in the first place.)
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.
