COS II Session 33

## The Die is Cast

Session 33 thumbnail, depicting a die with Maq'kua, ERA002, and the Navarch of The Dreadstaal Imperium. The cubic shape is symbolic of a crate

### Campaign

Curse of Strahd 2: Pawns of a Greater Game

### Baked Good

Cranberry vanilla icebox shortbread with false white chocolate

## Starring...

* The Barovian Freedom Fighters
	+ Red, poor little sightseer
	+ Tokili, processing
	+ Galia Trey, comedy duo cornerstone
	+ Stone, finding out
	+ +2 shortsword, in his element
	+ ERA002, focused
* The crew of the Vistage, not really an applicable metric right now
	+ Faeana Taerine, chose to be here!
	+ Nickel, probably better off an orphan
* Viktor, MVP
* Kim, "can defend himself"
* The Dreadstaal Imperial Council, of clear mind
* Isidore l'Abime Crevantte, under control
* Dagon, will return
* Wyren and Gildradon, put together
* Brinn, incessant
* Leira, loading...
* Umberlee, giveth and taketh away

Notable absentees: Twiggy

## Long Time, No See

* *5 days before the Day of Silence:* Stone, with help from Brinn and the VRS, visits Viti-III during her daily 20-minute break. She claims to be her long-lost daughter, Nikola von Statchel, and spins a tale about escaping the Navarch's prison to try and find her mother.
* Viti, after offhandedly mentioning her Deadliest Poison Known to Man project, tells Stone to meet her in her garden after the Day of Silence.
* Back at the Collection, Viktor tells Stone that he's working as the first mate on a ship called the Armageddon, which departs after the Day of Silence. He offers to smuggle her aboard; she graciously extends this invitation to the heist crew.
* Stone tries contacting Leira for five days to no avail.

## Like Shadows in the Dark

* Smash cut forward to the Day of Silence, where we last left the heist group
* Mech'kua drags Al from outside the pyramid to inside with a misplaced but incredibly powerful anchor throw. This move also makes a coveted escape route (spoiler alert: no one manages to use it).
* Red dances around Mech'kua, eventually making his way into U'shina's (strangely unlocked) vault. He finds:
	+ Four 2-foot engraved obelisks
	+ A tattered contract
	+ An amulet
	+ Two superior healing potions
	+ Umberlee's trident (replica)
	+ A coral crown
	+ A dress that looks like crashing waves
	+ "The Complete Research of Doctor U'shina: An Extensive Guide to Faiths and Avatars"
* Red grabs the thesis paper.
* Al tries talking down Mech'kua. His *rapier of fire and ice* shatters upon parrying Mech'kua's immediate and violent response.
* Gildradon, the champion of Tsera that attacked the Vistage, appears—being the one who broke into the safe and activated Mech'kua to begin with. She proposes a truce with Red to take down Mech'kua, to which he readily agrees.
* Mech'kua pummels Red within an inch of his life.
* Meanwhile, downstairs, Commander Camilla Crevantte blasts through the barricaded door to the Silicone Menagerie. She maims and kills some scientists before ordering Nickel and Galia, still in Imperium guard uniforms, to follow her upstairs. They oblige.
* Camilla Crevantte pummels Al within an inch of his life.
* Believing all hope to be lost, Red resets to the last save point, gaining a level of exhaustion.

## Steam and Soot

* Tokili and ERA find themselves chasing Dagon/Isidore to Kol's volcanic forge, accompanied by Cha'sid, Security, and a quartet of Forsaken Scales not-paladins (again).
* Dagonidore is standing in an Ignan ritual circle, he's conjured monstrosities of sunken debris, the volcano's churning something awful, it's a whole mess (again)
* Fire elementals? (again)
* Tokili plunks an Instant Fortress down on the ritual circle, displacing and bludgeoning Dagon (again)
* The battle ends with ERA and Tokili back-to-back upcasting *disintegrate* on Isigon, turning Isidore's body to atoms and Dagon's form to Dagon (that's new)
* Tokili *soul cages* Isidore Crevantte's soul indefinitely
* Dagon reforms, then flees, claiming he will return (this guy thinks he rahadin 💀)
* Volcano erupts, everyone enjoys a moment of air time before landing safely thanks to Tokili's intervention
* With the battle over, Tokili casts *sending* to ask Red how his heist is going.

## Take Two

* Back at the site of the reset (the Imperium's only café), the heist team regroups and struggles to conjure a new plan. Their ideas include stealing a scientist's clothes, causing a gas leak, hiring a goblin, and doing the exact same thing again "but this time we don't let anyone see".
	+ Al tries to extort 100 gp out of Nickel in typical Chaotic Good Fashion™
	+ Al suggests setting up a bomb in a public place in typical Chaotic Good Fashion™
* Stone, aware of the reset and justifiably concerned about it, hunts down the burglars and proposes a new plan:
	1. Stone retrieves the book from the vault.
	2. Everyone else finds a crate for designated runner, Al.
	3. Stone hands the book off to Al, who hides it in the crate.
	4. Al moves "quickly and quietly" to the dockyard and loads the crate of book onto the Armageddon.
	5. Everyone else runs distraction if necessary to ensure Al makes it to the Armageddon.
	6. Everyone (except Stone) boards the Armageddon and departs in half a day: clean getaway, flawless plan! Hop to it!
* Stone phases into the vault with her re-negotiated channel divinity, spotting Gildradon whittling at the lock on her way in. She grabs everything in the vault, phases out, and heads to the meeting spot.
* Red and Galia distract a guard while Al (with Red's Blessing of the Trickster) sneaks into a truck carrying a shipment of rare earth metals. Red gets a couple teeth knocked out, because Imperium guards hate being distracted.
* Al tries to lift a full crate of osmium ore and ends up with nothing but a very loud noise. The guard, immediately alerted, attacks Al. Al upends the crate, shoves the guard out of the way, and breaks into a dead sprint away from the plaza. This, naturally, attracts every guard in the vicinity to chase after him.
* Faeana, understandably sick of this, heads to the meeting spot.
* Al begins running up walls and jumping rooftop to rooftop, crate still hoisted over his head like a trophy of war. The guards, of whom there are now squadrons and ambush formations, begin firing their tasers at him. One catches Al perfectly between buildings, paralyzing him and sending him sprawling on a rooftop. Guards climb up and begin to beat him while he's down.
* Red, Galia, and Nickel, in the now-empty plaza, quietly empty another crate and bring it to the meeting spot.
* Stone hands off her stolen goods to the crate crew sans Al, tells them to not watch the news for a few days, and asks Galia for a ride home (later). Nickel and Faeana take the crate to the Armageddon, while Red and Galia double back to retrieve Al.
* Stone walks back to the Collection, halfheartedly asking Leira if she'd be willing to help Al.

### Divine Intervention VI

* Stone finds herself in an office cubicle beneath a vast while void. Before her, a computer terminal running an OS called "Leira" asks for her queries.
* Despite not knowing how to operate a computer, Stone manages to type a few commands to the computer, learning some vague information, including:
	+ "This system is fragmented"
	+ "This system is hosted in an infinite warehouse"
	+ "'When' [this system is located] is meaningless"
	+ "Other instances of this system may have tried contacting you"
	+ "This system loves you"
* The system warns Stone that her time here is limited. Stone once again asks the system to help Al. Leira runs a series of commands as the world dims, concluding with "Goodbye" before closing the instance.
* Red and Galia find the Imperium guards in a state of disarray, having lost their quarry.
* Meanwhile, Al finds himself teleported into the contraband crate in a flash of static.
* Stone wakes up on the sidewalk, then returns to the Collection, while everyone else heads to the Armageddon.

### The Votes Are In

* Stone and Kim watch the Dreadstaal Assembly television broadcast:
	+ Chief Prosecutor Fritz von Statchel gives a charismatic, impassioned speech, voting YES.
	+ High Priestess U'shina, dismissing Viti's calculations, votes YES.
	+ Commander Camilla Crevantte, with mascara running down her face, states she has no faith in the Imperium, voting NO.
	+ Lord Angeles Ninetides says the people of the Imperium should not live in fear, voting YES.
	+ Viti-III opens with her calculations, then states she "didn't account for the strength and soul of the people of the Imperium", voting YES.
	+ Dale Diamondback smells a trade opportunity and votes YES.
* With the vote a success, Stone celebrates by bequeathing everything she owns to the VRS.

## "There's been a lot of death this session."

### Crate Crew

* Red, Galia, Nickel, Faeana, and luggage make their way to the dockyard, where Viktor grants them refuge on the Armageddon. To resolve the issue of smuggling five people onto a ship, they all pile into the contraband crate together as they wait for Galia's helm to recharge.
* In the meantime, they leaf through the thesis paper, only to find it is written in a mix of Elvish, Primordial, Undercommon, and Draconic. Between the five of them, they can read zero of these languages.
* Al tries contacting Brinn, unaware that he was publicly executed a week prior and is currently shirking his divine duties.

### Warspite

* Tokili learns fron Rags that Kurtulmak "probably drowned".
* Captain's quarters. Tokili tells ERA to check on him in a few minutes. He then consults the Tome of Boundless Knowledge for [REDACTED], getting a bonus horrific vision of his past(?) for his trouble
* Seconds later, the (locked) door to the captain's quarters opens, lets in a gust of wind, then closes.
* Umberlee makes an entrance. She takes the Tome from Tokili, skims it to get an idea of who he is, then drops the wretched thing into a vortex.
* Tokili makes a telekinetic grab for Umberlee's trident, which unfortunately does not work.
* Umberlee drops Xadriel Maverran's remains on the rug and takes her leave.
* ERA002 knocks on the door. Without cleaning up, Tokili lats her in. For reasons historians do not fully understand, she becomes agitated, leaves her *periapt of wound closure* with Xadriel's remains, and flees.
* Tokili instructs ERA to focus, and tells her that "nobody wins alone".

### Looks Like Hamlet in Here

* Stone is welcomed to Viti's lab.
* Viti informs Stone that she will keep her in her lab indefinitely, that Nikola was a half-orc (but Fritz, originally an orc, was somehow changed to a half-elf, so that's ok!), and that she intends to kill the Navarch. Stone acts horrified at the notion of her war criminal mad scientist mother stooping to the level of first degree murder and tries to leave.
* As Stone leaves, Viti injects her with Chekov's Deadliest Poison Known to Man, killing her in seconds.
* Stone, now a ghost thanks to Brinn's coin, returns to The Collection. She finds everyone there (including Kim) slaughtered by Wyren and Gildradon. The two champions curse being unable to find Stone, then leave.
* Stone spends five days chilling before she returns to Kim's room in the Collection. She reforms, but finds her new body to be slightly off-model: it's only fourteen years old. Brinn apologizes and calls his ability to cast *clone* "far from perfect".

## Developments

* And they all sail off to fight Umberlee!

## Trivia

* Xadriel knew Primordial.
* "Stone trying to kill Dale was probably a beneficial butterfly effect in the end—if she didn't give Dale nightmares, Lord Ninetides wouldn't have arranged a raid on Hikko's Beauty Parlor, so Prince Ninetides never would have went ahead and alerted the VRS, so they wouldn't have scattered, so they all would have been in the same place when Wyren went on his murderous hunt for Stone."

1. ↑ Crumpled note found in abandoned, supposedly haunted house, frequented by COS II's author prior to untimely demise