Gauve Was Right

==Season Ten, Episode Seven==
Preceded by: Season Ten, Episode Six: It Grinds Our Gears
Followed by: Season Ten, Episode Eight: Our Destinies Were Foreordained, 1441
==Summary==
::Sending to Ethan Dragonslayer: I'm home. They'll probably send me off again soon, but for now, home. And I was right. I am the Chosen One.
: The rest of the party manages to catch up to Ashra when she reaches the door. Leilah manages to shoot off a mass cure spell before Ashra kicks the door down and runs off down a twisted corridor. 
: Ashra runs past a caster bot and in front of three clay soldiers, the first two of which hit her. The rest of the party follows more cautiously, with Cicero putting an arrow in the eye of the caster bot. Leilah asks Ashra to slow down; she refuses to, but as some of the clay soldiers' blows hit her despite the timerage she asks Leilah if anyone can help her get past. Leilah says someone can. Fab D, who has been with the party all along what are you talking about, takes out a spell storing gun and shoots one of the soldiers. Chain Lightning arcs from target to target, destroying the golems and striking another casterbot. Ashra runs off as soon as the golems are out of the way, with Zaphodel following. She catches a few glimpses of Xoth along the way; he is running at full speed away from her, and always ducking around corners. 
: The caster bot tries to enervate Zaphodel, but she is immune to the negative levels. It settles for shooting magic missiles at her, and is soon destroyed by the rest of the party. Another caster bot further down the hall fires a Stinking Cloud in front of Ashra, who blows it away with a gust of wind before running on. Cicero, Aether, Fab D, and Kruglor variously shoot, eyelaser, and stab more clay golems as Ashra runs into the Stinking Cloud that she had blown before her and promptly starts vomiting. She tosses her wand of Fireball to Cicero and stumbles through the cloud, emerging on the other side and running after Xoth. 
: Cicero Fireballs the cloud, destroying it. Zaph follows Ashra and triggers several arrow traps which did not trigger for Ashra. Aether flips and tumbles over the arrow traps, dodging around Ashra, then appears next to Xoth. He runs away and escapes through the doors. 
: Aether tumbles the rest of the way to safety. Cicero makes his way slowly towards the other door, dodging and triggering arrow traps as he goes. One of the arrows hits Zaph. She turns, stares at him with her emotionless eyes, and flips him off at Ashra's command. 
: Kruglor gets the idea to use the Dimension Die to glitch across the room, as he will reappear wherever it lands. Leilah says she'd like to try the die too, since she is at low health and both cannot afford and does not want to try crawling below the arrow slots, and holds his hand as he lobs it easily across the room. 
: The two disappear and find themselves in a dark, damp forest. Leilah recognizes that they are in the Pacific Northwest. Back to back, they wait. A vampire attacks them and gnaws on Leilah as Kruglor grabs a stick and whittles a stake. He fails to stab the vampire; Leilah grabs the stake and pierces it through, turning it to dust. The two return, confused but victorious, to the other side of the room. 
: Ashra notes that the traps haven't been going off for her and walks easily across the room. Zaphodel has to dodge arrows as she slowly makes it over to where Ashra is; she sets off an arrow that strikes Cicero, and he agrees this is fair. Fab Dick uses Dimension Door to avoid having to deal with the arrow traps. 
: Aether picks the lock, which had locked behind Xoth, and the party enters a small square room with white walls. The room has five doors and a trapdoor. Each door has a ten digit number on it. Ashra checks with the mirror and sees that each door is actually a portal. Kruglor uses his abilities to analyze the portals, revealing the following: 
:*The door to the left leads further into the matrix.
:*The door to the right leads to a trapped room.
:*The door ahead leads to shankbot storage.
:*The door behind leads back to the factory floor.
:*The trapdoor leads to the emotion stone room. 
: Ashra does a quick "if he thinks that I think that he thinks" and comes up with fairly good reasons to take or ignore any door. She says she's interested in the door further in and the emotion stone room, but wants to hear other opinions. The party decides to go to the emotion stone room first. 
: The trapdoor is locked, and when Aether picks the lock, the lock on the door out to the factory floor snaps shut. Brief experimentation reveals that only one door can be unlocked at a time. Aether unlocks the trapdoor again, revealing a portal like the one Ashra saw. 
: As the party drops down, they are overcome by waves of emotion. This room is like the last, but with eight emotion stones. Fab Dick and Aether are overcome by despair, Cicero and Zaphodel grow incredibly angry, and Ashra and Leilah feel sick to their stomachs. Kruglor, with his Mind Blank, is entirely immune. Aether begins to cut herself, and Cicero starts screaming at her and anyone else nearby. Ashra also starts screaming at people, but out of genuine frustration at everyone else rather than the effects of the stones. Her attempts to talk Aether into obeying her in her depression only make things worse, and Aether refuses to pick any of the locks and get the party out of this room. Cicero smacks one of the stones with his sword; he and Aether feel a burst of self-satisfaction as the stone dislodges. Ashra yells at him not to hit emotion stones any more. She identifies the other stones as anger, depression, paranoia, hatred, frustration, love, friendship, and joy. 
: Kruglor attempts to stop Aether from hurting herself in various ways, and when Aether eventually crawls off by herself, Leilah goes off with her. The two have a quiet discussion as Ashra fumes and taps on the friendship stone to no effect. A few minutes later, they emerge and Aether tearfully picks the lock, shooting murderous glares at Ashra. The party quickly leaves the room, and everyone's emotions return to normal as soon as they're out of range. 
: The next room has more doors, and appears empty. On close examination Fab D realizes that the walls are porous, and poisonous gas is likely to seep in. The party moves on to a random door. 
: The series of rooms that the party passes through grow steadily more dangerous. Ashra tries to recall the numbers from previous rooms, but can't remember the last digits. Cicero works on looking for patterns in the numbers and how they change from room to room; Aether gets interested as well and begins to help. Leilah, Ashra and Kruglor try to map out the space of where they've moved; Ashra thinks they've folded over in space, while Leilah disagrees. 
: Cicero finds patterns in the ways the numbers shift, but can't pin them down. Ashra worries that the room codes are being created by hash encoding, which would make hacking the code essentially impossible, but is reassured that that's not the case. Leilah comes up with a 3D coordinate map which is more precise than Ashra's, though either way there are some awkward spacial transitions. 
: While these discoveries are being made, the party is rushing from room to room before any one room grows too dangerous. They find a room with four golden rings which Leilah and Fab Dick identify as ethereal shackles, which bind creatures as servants. Aether grows temporarily suggestive and Cicero more servile before the party moves on. 
: The party then reaches a room of deactivates shankbots, which is what causes Ashra to think they've folded over in space; this room was also accessible from the first room. There is a ticking clock on the wall, and the party theorizes and calculates for almost fifteen minutes, then flees before the shankbots wake up. 
: From there the party reaches a room filled with petroleum; they are inside of an alchemist's fire, and a single spark will destroy the place. Thankfully Fab Dick knows knock, so Aether won't have to risk sparking with her thieves' tools inside this room. The party stays to theorize until it starts to feel uncomfortably hot, then flees. 
: They come to a room with a small cube in the center which is magically enlarging at a fairly slow pace. Relieved that finally they've found a room that at least will not kill them instantly, they spend almost five minutes talking and relaxing before they leave the crusher. They enter a room constantly doing them damage and run away as soon as they can. They enter a room filled with chlorine gas, start choking, and immediately leave. They run back into the constant damage room, swear, and take another door.
: They emerge in a room full of angry bees. Fab Dick casts repel, trying to keep off some of the stings, and Ashra pulls out an Eversmoking Bottle. The bees fall asleep, her status as a douchebag and a genius is generally confirmed, and the party has a good half hour before the room will become too smoky to breathe in. Leilah examines the bees and finds that they are actually mechanical. Ashra talks herself out of filling a bag of holding with their sleeping bodies and thus having a bag of angry mechanical bees. 
: The party leaves before the smoke gets to them and ends up in a room with a fire pit, the corpse of an elf wizard, and numbers scrawled everywhere including on stacks of paper and books. The wizard, who starved some three or four months ago, had written over everything, including his spellbook, working out equations. The equation (2^x - 1)^2 - 2 has been written and crossed out many times. He's also written many lists of primes, generally incomplete. The room appears safe, and Cicero and Aether start plugging things into the equation. Aether is convinced that the function is related to the phi function, and Leilah starts working on the phi function. Ashra is not very good at this kind of puzzle; she stands by irritably, answering requests for calculations. Suddenly she hears the Mother's voice in her mind: Ashra, help me!
: She's almost sure her mother is just trolling her to speed up her progress, but can't help still panicking and running around, trying to help the others solve the puzzle as quickly as possible. She's not much help, and doesn't actually tell the others that her mother is talking to her. 
: Finally Cicero cries out in triumph: when 15 is plugged into the elf's equation, it yields one of the numbers on the door here. Ashra congratulates him and mutters that he's ... the other person who solves puzzles ....
: However, there have been lots of rooms where neither of the 10 digit answers to that equation were present. Clearly, the party is missing something. Cicero, Aether, and Leilah set to work on finding more numbers, while Ashra tries to heal herself and Zaphodel with some of her wands. The Cure Moderate wand ends up with a knot tied in it, and Leilah heals everyone. 
: Finally the party is ready to advance, though they haven't actually solved it quite yet. They advance into the elf's second room, which has numbers all over every surface and the equation (2^x - 1) ^ (2^x -1)) - 2 . Ashra says something about this being a strict definition of Mersenne primes and is ignored in favor of more phi function geekery. Cicero and Aether find one more number that fits that definition. After some deliberation, the party decides to head on. Leilah heals everyone again, bringing the party up to their temporary maximums after being poisoned. 
: The party enters a room full of pure negative energy. After a few seconds of silence Leilah yells "We are going down!" She hasn't solved the puzzle, just chosen a direction arbitrarily, but the party takes her suggestion on faith. Aether opens the trapdoor and the party rushes through. 
: By sheer dumb luck, Leilah chose correctly. The party emerges, battered and bleeding, in a long hallway. Tapestries line this hallway, each depicting infinite gears. The party is met by Xeph with spears, holding them neutrally. They greet the party and ask them to follow; Ashra responds "Certainly", then telepathically explains to the party that these are Xeph, no one's actually seen them before, but she knows their language, and the party is going to follow now. 
: The Xeph lead the party down the long hallway. The gears in the tapestries change from steel, to silver, to gold. At the very end of the hallway is a shimmering blue portal, the color of infinity. The Xeph gesture for the party to go through. Ashra walks through immediately, commanding Zaphodel to follow. Aether follows immediately, and Cicero and Kruglor follow after a moment's deliberation. When the rest of the party is all through the portal, Leilah finally goes through. 
: They emerge in an enormous room of crystal. Five crystal tubs hold enormous brains, each the size of a house. Off to one side stand Grax, Xoth, another illithid no one recognizes, and a fourth illithid whose face is hidden from view. Everyone but Kruglor is awed by the feeling of cerebral might of the Mothers. As Ashra stares in wonder, two hallucinations manifest in the minds of everyone but Kruglor. They are beautiful figures suited to the personal taste of the viewer: dwarven women, ulitharids, etc. Their names enter everyone's minds as Analepsis and Prolepsis. 
: They speak to Ashra: 
:: Instantly, you understand.
:: It creeps into your mind, starting slowly and building in size, until it is eventually monumental, too large to stop, too important to try. For three years, we've been exiled. For three years, eon has torn itself apart. From the inside and from without. By gods and saviors, by angels and demons, by might and by magic, by fortune and by fate. It continues always. And so it shall. With you.
: Analepsis:
:: We chose you, Ashra. From the moment your host was born, to the moment you will die, you have been one. We see all parts of the timeline, from the beginning to the end, from eternity to eternity, through the middle conditions that define us, that expand us, that create us. That tell us who we are. You were taught Xeph to communicate with our keepers. You were given will so that you could solve what we couldn't. You were given an enemy to test your powers. And you were given a glimpse of the eternal, so you could see through time itself. You are us And finally, you have arrived.
: Prolepsis:
:: It is your timewalker's spark that will turn back the clock. There is one more thing you will do.
:: Ashra, Chosen One, bring us to the beginning.
Category: Episodes Category: Season Ten Episodes