Moon's Haunted/Session 5

The party parlayed with the mysterious tattooed individuals, lovingly dubbed Spork and Beans, whose marks Gaston recognized quickly as those of the slaves of perfect prince Vakhtang the Pious. Supposedly, more than 200 years ago Vakhtang ruled an empire in the same territory Sigvald held, earning it by leveraging the secrets gained from complete devotion and worship of Othal (to include marking every new slave with tattoos promising their souls to Othal at birth.) One day, though, it is rumored Othal asked Vakhtang to pay a greater price, ordering him to send his military to an unknown part of space to destroy something unspecified. They were not heard from again, and Leth the Conniving, Sigvald’s predecessor, swooped in on the undefended territory. Standing before the slaves now, the party suspected that Kamens was where Othal sent Vakhtang.

The individuals were loath to speak at all to the party until it could provide a modicum of rations; one held guard at the camp while the party took another back to the freighter to prepare a package of a week’s worth of food. The rescued miners there were suspicious of the party’s plans to give away food to random aliens just as the miners were getting there, but diplomacy by Gaston and a life-saving surgery on one of their number by Eleanor calmed them down. Gaston, le Fou, de Vranne, Lockheart, and Abbey prepared to travel to the Vakhtangian camp.

While they prepared, Nolwen reported the communications penetration she found on La Petite Mort to Kesdis. The party realized the tap had probably been placed while Dozir was passed out after his horrifying experience in the hold, instead of keeping watch. Realizing it was time to check in with McCabe, she had Lockheart repair the communications systems, sans tap; McCabe’s voice crackled to life almost immediately, indicating he had probably been trying to hail the party for some time. McCabe reported that because of the tap, the miners still on Nocturne had heard all the events of the vivisection of Renata aboard the ship and were revolting at the “assassination” of their union leader. They had lynched Dr. Larsen and locked down Port Muirkirk entirely—there was no way any extra supplies or help were coming for some time. McCabe then had a private word with Kesdis before signing off.

Meanwhile, Spork began to open up—apparently, the Vakhtangians had been living on Kamens in some number ever since the events of 200 years ago, and despite the death of Vakhtang they continued the practice of devotion to Othal because Othal was protecting them from going insane (signaling his direct and continued interest in this place.) They had been living on hunting and killing of Nocturnals on Kamens, and had been excited to raid the ATC cafeteria as a change of pace, but had never seen miners while it still operated, implying it had always been Nocturnals watching it.

Spork and Beans led the team of five to their camp, explaining that the vents peppering the mining tunnels were actually a network all across the planet that allowed the spiders to get around; the mining had cut the ones in the tunnel, which is how the Vakhtangians found the ATC. Sliding down deep into the planet through one especially large vent, the party found themselves allowed past the gates of a village of a few hundred, built into a great cavernous chamber and crafted entirely of scrap salvaged from vessels in the ship boneyard. Strangely, a stream of running water ran through the edge of the village. The party was challenged by the scrap-crowned chieftain of the village, Bata; Bata barked an eldritch word, interested whether the party would hear and react to it. When de Vranne did, Bata’s guards prepared for a fight, apparently believing that anyone who could was a threat—Gaston defused the situation, however, and an appraisal of the power of de Vranne and Abbey encouraged Bata to allow the party into the village to seek answers. However, the party was to speak again with Bata about an offer once they had spoken to the village priest of Othal.

The party explored. De Vranne made conversation with a group of Nocturnal-hunters, hoping to learn more about warrior culture. Sensing de Vranne to be a vicious killer like themselves, one of the hunters explained the source of the Vakhtangians’ raids’ success: a ritual taken from an intercepted Nocturnal religious text providing glimpses into the future of danger. The ritual itself was highly violent: the victim had to be flayed of the Othal tattoos that protected their soul, and become possessed by a spider. Once the spider was inside the victim, both had to be sacrificed, and the flesh of the spider had to be eaten. This would offer vision quests that the Vakhtangians would use to predict where ambushable Nocturnals would be. De Vranne was darkly impressed by the incidental way this controlled the size of the Vakhtangian population.

Meanwhile, Gaston and Lockheart investigated the river. They could not figure out whether drinking the water would hurt them, as the Vakhtangians were doing it, but they were protected by Othal; running tests, they found that it was ostensibly just a regular river. Scans revealed that the waters were collated together by water sources from a series of planets, none of them anywhere near Kamens; Gaston recognized one as from a river on an etherically superconductive planet in Celestial space. Efforts to determine if the river flowed in non-Euclidean ways failed, as its etheric charge seemed to disappear when the water disappeared into either of the vents it moved through. The party headed off to speak with Ketevan, the priest of Othal. Ketevan began to finally explain a bit of what was going on on Kamens, based on knowledge gathered through her worship of Othal and the Vakhtangians’ capture of Nocturnal holy texts during raids.

The spiders the party had seen were not of flesh and blood, but were actually demons of an entity dubbed (Ketevan struggled to name it without the horrible words of its religion) the Trapdoor Spider God—calling back to Lockheart’s discovery. The spider god claimed to have been an Elder God once, “weaving the fabric of the universe,” but its terrible hunger and horrific aspect led almost none to worship it when civilization was finally established; indeed, if Zulkir was the personification of Death, the spider god was the personification of Hunger. This inability to control itself or perception of it drove away any who could sustain its hunger, and over years and years the spider god lost its sanity and ability to control reality, becoming confined in form to its aspect, which had somehow arrived on Kamens. Now, its only goal was to consume as much etheric energy as possible, both by creating the energy-absorptive effect in the pocket dimension but also by conscripting religious followers for their souls.

Ketevan explained that the Nocturnals were worshippers of the spider god, and were not preyed upon by the smaller spiders but instead served them. This worship was possible because of the spider god’s apparent signature power: the ability to prevent others from perceiving its form. Learning over the eons that its true nature was the problem keeping others from worshipping it, the spider god’s abilities to affect reality faded, but its ability to affect memetics stayed; the spider god created a sort of buffer around itself and its paraphernalia and rites that would keep people from being able to perceive them if they were not already driven half-mad by the mental influence of the spider god, by which point they would be much more pliant for cultivation as worshippers. Simply put, Ketevan said, if you don’t believe in the spider god, you won’t be able to see its form or read its holy texts—but by the time you can, the spider god has enough influence on you that it might be too late. This explained why some in the party were seeing and hearing things that others could not: Lockheart remembered her inability to read the Celestial-Elder script word that was apparently the spider god’s name, and that the party seemed to keep almost-hearing some spoken word that was likely also its name. Privately, Gaston and de Vranne worried that in their dreams they had seen the beginnings of the aspect of the spider god.

Ketevan explained that this ability had allowed the spider god to manipulate the Nocturnals who were stranded on the planet thousands of years ago into worshipping it. The power of the extra worshippers, for the first time in years, was what gave the spider god the ability to slowly suck energy throughout the pocket dimension. The memetic ability was also what drew Othal’s attention to Kamens. Othal felt that the spider’s ability to mask and stop knowledge from being perceived was tied to the strange eldritch questions that Othal puzzled over eternally, and wanted to harvest the power to decipher them from the spider god’s world, wherever it was (and to kill the spider god, so that no one else could make unsolvable questions.) Othal had sent Vakhtang to do this, but Vakhtang failed; Vakhtang’s general, Evriksen, was possessed by the spider god once their raiding party reached Kamens. Evriksen and his officers assassinated Vakhtang and forced-marched much of the Vakhtangian party across the planet to sacrifice them. In exchange, the spider god made Evriksen the closest to an angel that it had. This all led Othal to continue to protect the surviving Vakhtangians on Kamens in the hopes that they would one day complete Vakhtang’s objective, but as one could see, they were all but cornered in the village.

The party resolved to help the Vakhtangians defeat the spider god. Ketevan supposed that because the spider god’s current level of power and latent absorptive effect were a direct result of the Nocturnals’ worship of the spider god, the easiest way to weaken it for a confrontation was to genocide the Nocturnals on Kamens; de Vranne agreed enthusiastically. Gaston asked where the Nocturnals’ home could be found. Ketevan explained that she was unsure, but that the Vakhtangians were certain that it was somewhere near the tunnel Evriksen had forced Vakhtangians into for sacrifice about twenty miles away, and proposed that the party could gain deeper knowledge by engaging in the bloody ritual the hunters explained previously. Gaston agreed to eat spider flesh for the ritual. Ketevan set to work with a ready-flayed sacrifice in her cellar, allowing a captive spider to forcibly possess the sacrificial victim.
As he screamed, Ketevan calmly explained the role of the smaller spiders as demons of the spider god: they were meant to force others to worship the spider god by whatever means were most relevant to the victim. This could mean a few things: individuals who mentally resisted the spider god’s influence were just killed outright by the spiders, and their bodies were taken who knew where. People who were weakened by its influence into compliance, however, were often possessed by the spiders, who controlled the host’s body to force the host’s soul to worship the spider god until the host’s body and soul gave out, at which point the spider would unceremoniously slough off the host’s flesh and move on. Individuals like the camp administrator whose body was mangled by the possession were the result of individuals trying to fight back against their possession once it had already happened. And of course, those individuals driven totally insane by the spider god did not need to be possessed by a smaller spider at all, but worshipped the spider god of their own accord—like the Nocturnals.

After relating this, Ketevan threw open the door and stabbed the possessed individual with a ritual knife, carving spider out of his back and offering it to Gaston. Steeling himself, Gaston accepted, and embarked on a terrible eldritch vision quest upon ingesting it. Gaston’s perception flew across the planet, showing him the entrance to the tunnels where Evriksen had led his sacrifices. Past that, through darkness and various chambers, Gaston saw a great settlement of cave rock resting on the edge of a subterranean chasm; this was the Nocturnals’ home, and it seemed there could be thousands of the little people. Gaston’s vision descended deeper, though, down a stone-hewn spiral staircase all the way to the bottom of the chasm. There, through a simple door, lay the great chamber and central abyss some in the party had seen in their dreams or had seen depicted by the Nocturnals’ holy symbol of three concentric circles. Evriksen, long spider legs dangling from his back, waited in the chamber, and attempted to assault Gaston; however, he was distracted by the mysterious arrival of tall, rag-cloaked figures carrying long rifles and wearing iron masks. Turning to deal with them, Evriksen allowed Gaston to fall down the pit. Gaston seemingly fell forever, but as his vision faded to black, Gaston thought he saw a sort of cathedral at the bottom.

Gaston reported his visions to the party; Ketevan had no idea who the figures concerning Evriksen were. Gaston further asked to copy the Nocturnal holy texts Ketevan had to retell the story, but Ketevan vehemently refused—again, the more people who were aware of the spider god, the more powerful it would become. The party left to speak again with Bata, and she made her offer: whoever came after the party, the Vakhtangians would help them navigate the world—but the party had to defeat the spider god and the Nocturnals. The party accepted; de Vranne asked for, and received, 20 Vakhtangian hunters with enough black powder for grenades and their far-outdated rifles. The Vakhtangians ushered the party out through another entrance into the ship graveyard, the entrance from which they pulled the salvage for their village, and the party returned to the freighter.
The party agreed that before venturing to the Nocturnals’ home, they would find Gant—if only because his office might contain an armory suited for arming the Vakhtangians with better than black powder. A final medical examination of de Vranne revealed that he had no black markings indicating possession, but one of the hunters made an apt note: the marks come from possession by a spider, not just being influenced by the spider god. One could be driven to madness without any outward physical signs at all...