S06E16: The Gang Has a Nice Chat with a Homunculus and Leaves

== Previously on MCVFD ==
We killed Thessalar! But it’s okay because we found another one, so the status quo has been maintained!
We’ve managed to retrieve all but one of the infernal machine pieces, the last one Gearbox had pointed kinda northward in a direction we hadn’t gone yet. The fighting has all just wrapped up, weird dead face Thessalar is now entirely dead, all the gas he filled the room with out of the drain hole. We’ve recovered the gem stones off of his desk and off the control panels in the room, and the two-headed owlbear had just chased off the last 2 lizard folk.
We have a moment to catch our breaths and figure out our next steps, standing next to this Thessalar holding his lab coat closed and poking the dead body - he doesn’t look too bothered.
== Session ==
Nissa: Did we just kill all the people that would help him figure out what’s going on?Kanye’s Speed spell has also ended and he’s now fatigued at Exhaustion level 2. (Every time he takes a long rest, he removes a level of Exhaustion, right now he gets disadvantage at ability checks + halved speed).
He slumps and the computer in the suit offers a speed boost. He asks to reset his cookie preferences to “Deny”.
The group spends 10 minutes deciding whether or not real Thessalar was the dead guy, our version, or the homunculus because Kanye recently was watching Evangelion.
Kanye: Usually this isn’t my area, I knock them unconscious and you guys interrogate
Nissa: What if I told you you could grapple him?
Kanye grapples the homunculus, it’s somewhat conscious. 
Kanye: What beverages do I have?
Computer: You have water, coke, coke zero, coke with lemon, coke with coffee, coke with mountain dew, coke with mountain dew with lemon, coke with mountain dew with lime..
Kanye: What does a homunculus like to drink?
Um: That could be the first interrogation question
The homunculus says he was Thessalar, Kanye is so excited and then he says gotcha.
Nissa asks for his name and he denies, but he says he doesn’t give a shit, so she calls him “Give a shit”.
Kanye uses know your enemy to see his hit points - he is at 1 HP.
Kanye: He’s surprisingly saucy for something on the brink of death
Nissa asks why clones, GAS says he’s a weird dude. “Grandious plans, etc.”
GAS was only made to manipulate his facial expressions. Apparently all the clones will get crazy at some point, Kanye starts offering the homunculus a job, asks him what he eats.
Kanye: There’s a surprising amount of third party interest in my blood.
Averlyth starts to leave for the lab.
Kanye asks if he’s been to limbo, he says it’s a horrible place. He knows of the four horsemen, says they’re an archetype, but otherwise he’s been underground for awhile, he doesn’t know anything about them.
Kanye: I too am not afraid of dying!
GAS: All right, that sounds like you should unpack with your therapist!
Kanye asks Gearbox where the last gem is - we have a map, we guess it’s the warden’s office - and we can still hear hooting and howling from that hallway.
Kanye suddenly thinks he could ask Averlyth about the demon, but she totally walked away.
Kanye closes the lid on his visor in order to talk to her.
Averlyth didn’t exactly study demonology but she knows that if she knows a demon’s name she has power over them. Usually people negotiate with them. She hangs up on Kanye and finds a bunch of research notes that make no sense - they’re pictures of bears and owls and various combinations of the two.
Kanye is no longer on hold, Averlyth says she has no idea, just try negotiating with him.
GAS asks “did you have a good call? It got dirty right? It was probably dirty”
Kanye: “........ yes”
Kanye lets him go and tells him who MCVFD is and that if anyone sees us in the future they should surrender.
Averlyth invites Nissa to look at fancy paper and she hops out of the harness and runs over to the lab. Nissa casts comprehend languages and finds herself reviewing a large stack of research notes - Thesselar is clearly not the tidiest thinker or most organized note-taker, so it’s pretty rambling and jumping from page to page.
But included are his most recent creations, including Thessalbeasts, owlbers, and most recently two-headed owlbears. The miniature human in status on the wall is described as a prototype phylactery, which is something about lichdom? Also an apprentice named Nullsder? And some experiment with his magical blood, and Thessalar has been injecting it into his own body with various results. We also find some notes on how the silver wires can be used to attached the organs of creatures to other hosts. Organs on the outside, people with extra organs, plugging the organs of a creature with another.
We recall Thessalar’s journal that indicates how his blood is so fucked up that healing potions are poisonous to him. Nothing in here indicates which Thessalar was the real one, or why the clones.
Kanye is contemplating the logistics around potentially having an extra liver, to survive things like the poisonous attack before. The suit regrettably informs him that the current organ capacity is zero, but that Qualish might be interested.
Kanye negotiates how to use his woodworking ability to examine the desk and hack the dryads off for trophies. There’s something weird about these dryads, they don’t look like any woodcarving technique that he’s familiar with.
Averlyth looks closer and is convinced they’re not carved and are actual dryads that have been petrified and miniaturized. Kanye asks if dryads are good or bad. Nissa says chaotic. We remember that Restoration is usually how this is fixed.
Um gently pries off the dryad legs because the glue during this time is not very good for wood/metal connection. He doesn’t really want them though, so he gives them to Kanye, who wraps them in bubble wrap to put them in the inventory slot.
This Thessalar clone says “not that he’s ungrateful”, but he’s now asking why we’re here and wondering what it’ll take for us to leave.
Nissa says we’re here for Big Gedai, we say we’re just a drinking buddy and we’re here looking for him. He looks at her in a moment of doubt and then he says “yeah who cares” and then he points it over and asks can someone flip this over I need to use the control panel.
He rummages around until he finds the comms button and you hear the intercom crackle to life. “Uhh attention, this is Thessalar Prime, all staff please report to main laboratory for a debrief session, warden please stand by to receive guests and release some prisoners”.
The sounds of chaos lessen somewhat, though we can tell there are still owlbears loose.
Thesselkraken (the clockwork heart) and a big dangerous hunter looking dude that we didn’t run into comes in holding what is obviously a severed owlbear head, which is actually just an owl head. Thessalar frowns, then goes “eh we can put it back on”.
Thessalar says he’s motivated to get us out, just tell the warden whatever prisoner’s we’re here for, just don’t come back.
Nissa hops back in the harness and we walk north at half speed to accommodate Kanye.
We decided not to go in the direction of mauling noises and go back through our secret door. We pass by other people making their way to Thessalar’s lab.
We’re standing in the secret hallway, the door to the north supposedly opens to the Torturer's office. It does not appear to be locked, it appears out into the hallway.
Um opens the door very quietly, just in time to see someone with very broad shoulders disappear around the corner. We’re now in the torturer’s office.
It’s nondescript, there’s a desk, there’s paperwork, a telephone, I don’t know. There’s nothing of particular interest in here. We can hear vaguely muffled unhappy sounds coming from outside.
Despite his best efforts, Kanye finds no energy drinks.
Nissa looks for paperwork and finds some notes clearly in Thessalar’s handwriting for an experiment for the torturer to carry out, which was taking the blood from a lycanthrope and connecting it to a rat and another prisoner, and trying to transfer the lycanthropy.
Averlyth asks Gearbox where the gems are - he points in the direction of the torture chamber.
Sorith goes into the hallway to keep watch. He gets a glimpse of the main torture chamber filled with racks, implements of pain and other foul devices. We can just barely make out the shape of 2 prisoners strapped to tables who are connected by silver wire to a control panel.
The group enters the room, Um asks Gearbox if the gem is in the visible control panel.
Tied up in this room are a small weaselly looking guy, a great big lady and a normal rat. What is happening is horrifying and still happening, because the torturer appeared to have left with the experiment turned on. Every few seconds, a jolt of electricity hits the weasley looking guy and then the rat turns into a duplicate of the big lady, and then a few seconds later the electricity turns off and they are all left gasping and panting.
As we get closer, the lycanthrope, the weasley guy is asking for freedom.
The group suddenly realizes we don’t actually care about Big Gedai and are totally fine to disappear back to our timeline right after taking the gems out of the control panel. Although we left Woodhouse in town, so the DM reminds us we can teleport.
Um removes the gems from the control panel, alarms do not go off because one of the Thessalar’s turned them off. Nothing bad happens but Kanye really wants to release all the Thessalar clones now.
Just kidding, first he is going to celebrate with a hit from the mystery drink. It’s Canadian Creme Soda, tastes exactly the same but looks bright pink.
We walk back to the body tanks; 4 of them are filled with bright blue liquids, 3 of the bodies appear to be inactive. Kanye taps on the glass of one of the inert Thesselars. Nothing happens. He opens one tank, the body collapses to the floor in a lifeless tangle of limbs.
Nissa feels Gearbox tugging on his sleeve. He says he feels weird in here, the gems are vibrating weird. Kanye wants to ask Nissa to magic this thing to talk to us. She attempts to Speak with Dead on this body. She gets the psychic equivalent of a phone that is ringing off the hook.
The first two infernal gems that we discovered are attached to Gearbox (the red and blue ones, which in some contexts have operated as a fast forward and rewind button). We glued all the gems on his head as a tiara.
We leave the room and now he feels a little better, but still a little weird. Back out in the entry chamber, he’s still a little weird. Um asks if he’s felt weird the whole time - he says it started since he got all the gems. It feels like they’re talking to each other.
Kanye asks if they are good talking or bad talking. He doesn’t know how to answer that. He asks order or disorder - as their order increases, Gearbox’s decreases.
Kanye: “oh that’s bad, that’s called bad. Next time if we ask you good or bad, you can just say bad”.
Gearbox: Okay!
Nissa asks if Gearbox will take us to Woodhouse. We boop his button, there’s the familiar dropping sensation, but it feels like it’s been supercharged - there’s way more lightning. We appear outside the tavern back in town and we find Woodhouse already with the wagon loaded up with the flamethrower and all of Kanye’s shit. He was just about to make his way down to us.
Kanye asks to be proper, Woodhouse reaches up to unpin the epaulets??? “You always know what to do, Woodhouse”.
Kanye asks if he can take a long rest, Nissa boops the button. Gearbox sparks way more than he should, we’ve never seen that before. The jolt as we teleport back to our own time is alarming - before it felt like being pulled down a tunnel, now it feels like we’re ricocheting through, like we’re moving faster than we should be.
When we pop up, instead of reappearing in the departure space that the Drakeguard has set up for outgoing adventures, we reappear about 20 feet above the ground, above the parade round in the middle of the island. We’re not seriously hurt, but wondering what’s going on.
Few things stand out:
# The sky is the wrong color - there is a blood eclipse, the sun has turned the color of blood. This isn’t an unusual astrological phenomenon, but it’s still an alarming sight and we weren’t expecting it
# Over the last few months as we’ve been operating out of this base, we got used to seeing Drakeguard staff moving around, overhauling the island, cleaning itup, etc, making it more habitable. We don’t see any staff. NO drakeguard operatives anywhere. What we DO see, at the far end of the parade grounds, walking towards us, are the remaining 3 of the 4 horsemen.
# Esmeralda Moneybags, Rorith (wizard / Slaad), flanking them on either side are a half dozen cultists wearing silver masks and carrying wicked curved knives
As they approach, Esmeralda says “thank you so much for doing the work for us”, we’ll e taking the little robot from here, unless you’re prefer to fight.
Averlyth: “Can we boop him again?”
Nissa: “That was my idea”
Um: “I was going to do it if Nissa didn’t”
Nissa: ”our team culture is well established”
We move to slap the button - before we can, a crackling field appears around Gearbox, who now appears locked up and overwhelmed. We can’t tell if he’s in pain or anything, but he doesn’t look healthy. Esmeralda Moneybags is holding her hands out, she’s forming a stream of energy and pulling him back towards her.
Before she can, the color of the light changes again - it goes from sickly red to crackling electric blue, the horsemen all look a little alarmed. She drops Gearbox, who falls to the ground in the middle of the parade ground, equidistant from us and them. We hear a sound and look up - standing on top of the control tower, propped up with one arm around the second in command, and it’s Momma P.
She is radiating power, but she looks like she is still recovering. She’s on her feet and she’s furious.
We blink and see two things at once - for just a moment, we are suddenly reminded that she is a dragon. Instead of an elderly woman leaning on her colleague, there’s a very large golden dragon draped around the tower.
“No you won’t be taking anything”
And a squad of Drakeguard operatives bursts out of the nearby barracks
“Take it back guys”