Session 29

← Session 28 | Session 30 →

The party descends into Hell, in search of Samuel and some jewelry.

## Characters

* The Party
* Naberius MacLaughagan
* Shax
* Orias
* Fillan Bailey

## Summary

##### **Wednesday, April 7th, 543:**

The party (sans Sam) has most of a day to prepare for their venture into Hell. Kuno and Asa collect some equipment they think would be useful, and Nyx moves Sam's corpse onto a chair in her main room. She gives him a pair of sunglasses, and takes some time to air her grievances to the unprotesting body.

##### **Thursday, April 8th, 543:**

Everyone gathers at Nyx's apartment the next evening, with MacLaughagan arriving soon after. The demon is uncharacteristically disheveled, and starts drawing an intricate seal on Nyx's floor. He has some final warnings before everyone ventures into Hell: they'll only have an hour or so before the portal closes, and their souls will be the only thing that transfer, leaving them unable to bring anything with them. Their intentions will also be writ on their souls for anyone they encounter to read, providing yet another good reason to not get caught.

With these final warnings, Mac lights the seal, and Nyx's floor transmutes into a portal to Hell. It's like nothing the group has seen, but they don't have time to marvel, and head through.

On the other side of the portal, they find themselves in a janitor's closet. The cleaning cart is absent, but they don't stick around long enough to see more than that. Everyone heads out into a hallway, where they find a locked door. Going in search of keys, they find the janitor's closet again, and grab the key ring from a nail next to the door.

Equipped with keys, they proceed to find a different door, that leads into a large parking garage with a car in it (not that they're familiar with either concept). The group turns around, and the door opens to the hallway with the janitor's closet. In the closet again, Kuno rummages around, and provides the group with makeshift weaponry. The hallway outside once again leads to a locked door, and Nyx fumbles with the keys, eventually opening the door to a dimly lit library. On the other side of the room is an ornate wooden door.

In the waiting room, Sam has managed to sit still for close to an hour before he is bored enough to try the door. It opens, and Sam finds himself in a hallway. To the right, the hallway takes a sharp turn into the floor, which Sam doesn't know how to navigate, and ends up falling on his face. At the end of the hallway is an unlocked door, which leads into a temporary office space. Sam has little time to look around before the desk phone rings, and he answers it. Immediately, three person-shaped ooze creatures emerge from the handset. They corner Sam, and when touched start absorbing him into their mass.

The key to the library's large wooden door shuffles it's way into Nyx's hand, and she unlocks the door, revealing a carpeted hallway. The door at the end of the hall opens to the temporary office space, complete with the three spirits and Sam. Colby and Asa, the last ones through the door, notice four more oozing spirits emerge from the carpeting and advance towards the door. Everyone piles into the room, shutting the door behind them. It's a very tight fit.

A tight-quarters fight ensues, complicated by the fact the oozing spirits shove their way through the closed door and pin Colby to it, but Asa manages to drag Sam out of the ooze. The party summons another door, and Nyx fumbles through the keys again. Kuno frees Colby from the grasp of the spirits reaching through the door, and the party piles through the door into a room full of computer banks.

Sam, confused, demands answers of everyone. Nyx and Kuno explain the bare bones of the situation, which Sam isn't satisfied by, before dragging him through the door into a hallway. From down the hallway, the party hears the sounds of heels clicking on linoleum. On MacLaughagan's advice, they scramble for a bathroom, and hide in a stall. The door is opened and the figure following looks around, but the party isn't spotted. Once again, Sam demands answers of the party, and with some more explanation he's willing to go along with the objective. The party has barely made it back into the hallway when they hear the same footsteps, and pile back into the bathroom. The investigating figure throws open the door, but the party continues to evade detection.

This time, the door opens into a short hallway that fades into mist. A key provides itself from the key ring, and the party opens the door to a conference room. There are three doors on the other side of the room, one of which has indistinct sounds of conversation behind it. The party exits through the door they came in, into a hallway made of stone bricks and lit by torchlight.

A heavy wood and iron door is at the end of the hallway, and the key Nyx finds to open it is one she is sure wasn't on the ring before. The stone brick and torches theme continues in the room beyond, which is also lined with mirrors. In the center of the room is a circle of six full-length mirrors. There are no obvious doors, and any attempts to will one in don't succeed.

Looking into the mirrors, the party sees their flaws reflected back at them. The ring of mirrors in the center of the room doesn't behave like typical mirrors, and show one party member each, just standing. Asa, facing himself down, takes his hammer to the mirror, and all six in the center shatter identically. The figures in the mirrors don't shatter, however, and step out of the mirrors, going after their reflections. Nyx, after taking a bite out of her reflection, discovers they have the same burning taste as her soul water. When the reflections have taken enough damage, they dissolve into ooze, and retreat back into their mirrors in the center of the room. After all the reflections have fallen, a door appears, and the party leaves.

The door opens to a hallway with two doors. The closer door is open, with the janitor's cart outside, and sounds of cleaning are audible from the revealed room. The party ignores this door, opening the other into a hallway. In this hallway, the party hears the same footsteps, and once again pile into a bathroom stall. Nyx is a bit too slow, and the figure starts opening stall doors, looking for the party. They open the stall door to the janitor's closet, however, and aren't followed. Outside the janitor's closet is a hallway leading to a locked door, and footsteps echoing from around a corner. Nyx fumbles with the keys, and Asa takes them from her, finding the correct key.

Asa opens this door to find the trophy room. The room is set up like a museum, and full of objects that range from useless trinkets to magic artifacts, and everything in between. At the back of the room, Nyx and Asa find Mac's required jewelry. The party rummages for other interesting items, save Sam, who finds a crate of dynamite sticks and starts rigging the place. When everyone has finished looking around, Asa lights the fuse, and the party turns to leave.

Orias is standing in the doorway when they open it, who takes back the party's improvised weaponry, including the snake that Kuno had until now thought was a mop handle. He was specifically told to focus on certain parts of the building and not worry about anything else, however, so he lets the party go on their way.

Colby ends up with the key ring, and the party goes through another locked door into an office. The name plate on the desk is cycling through several languages, none of which the party can read. There is no decoration in the office, but there is a wine cabinet. Rifling through the desk, Sam isn't able to get into any of the desk drawers or the computer, but he does find a stamp with a logo the party recognizes from Morena's redacted paperwork. He also finds a sticky note with a phone number on it. When he shows the party his findings, Nyx recognizes the phone number as Neera's. Sam tries to pull the nameplate off the desk, but succeeds only in making a lot of noise, and the footsteps echo from the other side of the door.

The party leaves into a carpeted hallway, with a few more of the oozing spirits emerging from the floor. Sam almost gets sucked in, but Asa drags him out, and Nyx opens the door to the break room. There are a few brochures on a table advertising apartments in Lower Miami, claiming the best prices in Lower Florida. In the hallway outside the break room, the footsteps echo again, and Nyx barely manages to get the next locked door open before they round the corner.

This door opens to a dimly lit, well-appointed office in mahogany and red upholstery. There is a shifting portrait that never properly comes into focus on the wall behind the desk, and mounted above it is a pair of twisting golden horns. Asa finds a collection of pamphlets with a high-level, corporate overview of the Soul Acquisition and Trade Analysis Network, the central offices of which are located in Lower Miami, Lower Florida, Lower USA.

Outside the office is another carpeted hallway, as well as the same clicking footsteps, though they're muffled on the carpet. Asa cuts down the oozing spirits that emerge with Kuno's new cane sword. The party makes it to the set of double doors in the hallway, barely holding it closed against the approaching figure, and shifts it to a different location, overruling the figure's authority. They make their way through a hallway where Orias is cleaning another room, to the janitor's closet. Nyx hangs the key ring back on its nail. The party heads through the back wall of the closet, which has the same wobbly opalescent quality as the portal in Nyx's floor.

Everyone wakes up in Nyx's apartment. Sam is sat in the chair where Nyx left him, and the gaping hole in his chest has healed over. MacLaughagan is nowhere to be seen, though he did leave a sticky note on Sam's corpse, scrawled with a heart. Looking at a clock, the party realizes something like five hours passed on the surface, while they were in Hell for under an hour. They spend a while looking over the trinkets they pilfered from the trophy room, but by the time it's late and MacLaughagan hasn't shown up everyone heads home.

Kuno texts Fillan with the fact they have information about the paperwork, but the wolves are busy, so they don't have time to meet right now.

##### **Friday, April 9th, 543:**

The next afternoon, the party returns to Nyx's apartment. Sam tells everyone about being attacked by the Host, and Nyx fills him in on what she learned when Mac showed up with his corpse. At some point in this conversation, the demon speaks up, announcing that he's officially out of a job and laying low. Nyx hands over the jewelry they pilfered, and MacLaughagan is impressed the party managed to pull off the heist. Kuno asks after the seal they found, showing Mac the paperwork from Morena, and while the demon can't actually say anything he relays that it's isn't company iconography. He's loath to explain anything at questions from Sam, not wanting to get the party in any more danger, but does thank everyone for retrieving his teeth before leaving.

Conversation turns to the party's next steps, with Sam's need to fulfill his caul now on a strict time limit. At Nyx's request, he promises not to kill Neera if he has any other option. The Sculptor comes up as something for Kuno to look into. The party has been vaguely aware from the news that the police have been tracking down and executing copycats, with something like twenty found. Looking back on their knowledge of the Sculptor, Nyx realizes the layout of the room she saw in her vision looking for him was identical to the layout of Devereaux's lab, and invites Kuno to help her break into that building again.

## Quotes

**Kellen:** “So, rolls, right, with dice?”

**Kellen:** “You ever seen something that’s not a color? No. Get in the fucking portal.”

**Kellen:** “We are capable of thinking at the strangest times.”

**Kai:** “I think I’m part of the goo collective now.”

**James:** “That’s a solid zero.”

**Kuno:** “We’ll explain when we’re no longer in Hell.” | **Nyx:** “If we feel like it.”

**Kai:** “We *are* in possession of a hammer.” | **Ezra:** “And an impulsive little shit holding it.”

**Kellen:** “Colby, you watch Asa take a fucking hammer to your brains.”

**Ezra:** “Can I just hit Sam over the head with a hammer—not the real one.”

**Orias:** “‘…and don’t worry about anything else’, so I’m going to elect not to worry about anything else.”

**Parker:** “Those who knife together, wife together.”

**MacLaughagan:** “I’m just having a hard time reconciling to myself that you pulled this off.”

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