The Widening Gyre Campaign/Session 6

The action has subsided, and we have a willing captive to interrogate, introducing himself as Karastes. He doesn't have any "uncanny valley" look to him; he seems to be a normal Shantine in his 40s. (There's an OOC sidebar about real-life race equivalents for Shantine and Fialta and why there's tension between them, as well as descriptions of Greater/Lesser Fialta.)
The Kidney asks him how he got here. Karastes says he's been here around 7 or 8 years. He reveals he's a Knight of Adarnum, sent here as part of an attempt to "restore order during Leandra's betrayal." During the Leandran War he ended up going into hiding and doing outside missions. He's ashamed he wasn't martyred alongside his brothers. This begs the question, of course, how the Adarnans even survived here with the Fialta scavengers around. Hesitant to go full genocide mode, the Fialta struck a deal with the "good" Shantine (see: Adarnans) who oppose Leandra, allowing them to hunt down Leandra's supporters freely.
Do the Adarnans know about the Basilica? Apparently so, they found it around 2 years prior to our mission. It seems to be intact, and some artifacts likely survive, according to Karastes. However, the Basilica is crawling with Leandrans, who keep appearing there for ritual purposes. Maybe they're summoning something to reopen the War? Does this place hold some kind of gateway for them to enter and exit the Exclusion Zone?
Karastes clarifies the "Leandrans" are not, in fact, uncanny spawn like Malo and Galo, these are actual Knights of Leandra, and he speculates there are a few hundred of them milling around the area. The party debates teaming up with the Adarnans or using them as a distraction, hopefully sneaking in under the cover of battle. (OOC we also wonder whether the Knights Mercantile have sent us here under false pretenses.)
We ask Karastes to describe the Basilica and the area around it. He describes, as we get closer and closer, the graveyard leading to a sheer cliff face, mounds of crumbling masonry giving way to a heaping, swirling field of ash. Within that ash lies a ring of city ruins that encircle the Basilica. A few interesting points: the Knights of Leandra seem to mill around inside the limits of the Basilica, but they've never been seen crossing the ash. The spawn society lives in the graveyard area and physically can't get any closer to the Basilica, always pushed back somehow. Even more interestingly, any Adarnans that get too close to this ash are bombarded with visions that deteriorate their minds to the point of insanity. This is clearly concerning, as we still have no idea how to get in. The Kidney thinks this vision effect isn't Leandran in origin, and Sylvia is convinced it's a curse put in place by the Unnamed. The effects do, however, seem to line up with null space exposure.
Karastes also informs us that there are a couple hundred Adarnans on site as well, but the Leandrans seem to outnumber them 2 to 1. The Leandrans have mostly ceremonial weaponry, while the Adarnans have weapons they've scavenged from the graveyard. The Leandrans also don't seem to be consistent on what date it is. Karastes views this mission as a failure, since they've been here all this time without a hint of progress, so he doesn't seem to mind sharing all this information with us.
Gundahar (barely conscious) wants to collect and study a sample of this ash, so it's time to figure out how to approach the Basilica. Karastes, though disgusted by the idea, says he could impersonate a Leandran if necessary. He also offers to direct us away from his fellow Adarnans, who won't take kindly to us passing through. A recently awakened and drugged Malo also adds that from his vantage point he's never seen the Leandrans go all the way to the Basilica, they just stop at the ash and then disappear, never coming back.
Planning time:
*Can our crawlers survive the null space-like effect inside the ash? This space seems to stretch for miles, so we have no idea how long we could stay in it.
*Any person that's ever walked into the ash has never been contacted again, not even through occult means, so throwing ourselves at it might not be ideal. We could try to drag Malo with us and throw him at it. Those who have been spotted leaving the Basilica don't show up from the ash, but at random points a few miles away, so we could try to hunt down these entry points.
*If there's time loop shenanigans involved, then we could assess that using scavenged radioactive samples from the ships around here. This seems like a decent first step to understanding what the ash does.
*Barring all logical options, we could go "Kirvan Abbey 2.0" and summon something to help us.
We finally make our way to the ash cloud. Karastes and Malo are kept in separate crawlers. The Kidney attempts to heal Gundahar despite its better judgment. On the way, Karastes mentions that the Leandrans he's interrogated have claimed to come from contrasting times, whether past or future. He's captured one of them twice, but that one didn't remember being captured previously after being caught the second time.
We decide to go with the radioactive test as an initial marker for what to do next, creating a unique signal that we can measure for a change in decay. Only now does Karastes bother to ask us who we are. We tell him we're on a Fialta-led threat assessment mission. He clearly doesn't believe us but chooses to anyway, deciding we're insane. He's sticking with us regardless, so his compatriots don't get caught up in our ludicrous suicide mission. Zylch pilots the lead crawler blind, using the capuchins as a hivemind perception point, taking the column through Karastes' suggested path. We end up encountering nothing: no Adarnans, no Leandrans, and no automata. As we get closer, something odd happens: the crawler order somehow switches. The crawler Malo is in is imperceptibly slowing down, as if it recognizes Malo's soul and physically pushes the entire crawler away from the ash. We wonder whether we could just kill him and keep going.
The radioactive testing squad moves in toward the ash. We take a baseline reading, toss the sample in, and watch. The time changes to a fixed point, stabilizing for a few seconds, then blinking out of existence. The reading comes back: 15 years, 3 months, and 2 days before the present. This is the day of the Destruction of Bishant. Duplicate samples result in the same shift. We're at a loss, since as it stands now, the Basilica seems inaccessible to us without diving into the past. While we debate what to do next, Zylch investigates the ash, seeing the abyss gazing wildly around. It gazes back at him, and he witnesses the Destruction of Bishant once more, this time significantly magnified by the swirling ash. He goes immediately insane, and he starts babbling out questions and answers as follows (Forbidden Lore time):
*Who am I, and why am I here?
**No name or backstory given. You're highly competent, and even more expendable.
*How do we get in safely?
**Option 1: Give yourself up to the ash, have Leandra reforge your soul.
**Option 2: Exploit the quantum entanglements. Bring them to a common point, and overload them to shunt yourself into the time of the Basilica as we can see it now.
*Is there anything worth taking?
**Plenty of things. If we're quick enough (~2 seconds), we can get in, grab the artifacts present, and get out before the protection from the ash wears off.
*How do we get out safely?
**Option 1: Ask Leandra.
**Option 2: Use the quantum entanglements to entangle with someone or something outside. Use an etheric shock to teleport yourself out.
*What's with this weird perception vision?
**There's a bleed-through effect with Leandra's reality and our "real" reality. In this space, perception shapes reality. This altering of perception could in theory be accessed by anyone who has their sight knocked out for long enough and could help traverse the etheric storms.
Zylch is suddenly extremely happy about all this new insanity he's acquired and jumps into the ash, taking his fancy sniper rifle with him. Before he phases out, he calls out to Leandra and gives himself up to her. He opens his eyes to see infinite perspectives resolving and converging on to the Basilica. He sees Leandra, and she sees him. She seems to have been swayed by his call to her, and she invites him into Paradise. However, she also sees his pathway in, and she follows it all the way back to the rest of the party. She knows we're all here…
Category:Session Summaries