Location: Old Vasselheim, Othanzia, Issylra
Date: 3 Sydenstar 845 PD
Party Members:
Rinn – half-elf sorcerer/rogue
Stubby – half-elf artificer
Tāmerai – gnome bard
Fisch – bear fighter
Absent Party Members:
Bob the Therapist – changeling warlock with a couch for a familiar
Tunk – bugbear monk
Previously on Yeeted & Yoinked…
After visiting the fallen titan, the foursome, led by the automatons, make their way to see the clockwork dragon they’ve heard of. There they meet Viktor Vonn, alive and still just as excitable as ever. He had been holed up in an old hunting cabin, slowly working to dismantle the dragon, scavenging it for parts and rendering it forever un-usable by anyone. He revealed that Ryo Yelmoira has been dead for five years, and the person currently believed to be Yelmoira is his own granddaughter Vanya Vonn.
Vanya, it seems, has been partly trained as a Volstrucker, something that strikes fear into Rinn as he learns that she was the party responsible for bringing him to Issylra. He’s even more creeped out as Viktor shows Rinn a drawing of Rinn on the ship he arrived on, made by Vanya: he was important enough to the Resistance’s plan, her plan, that she went to the effort of identifying and remembering him. Also, according to Viktor, Lydia is functionally immortal thanks to her siphoning of energy from “some relic” (it sounds very much like the Beacon that Tāmarai seeks).
Fisch takes his leave to go and ask some of his fellow Awakened animals (and non-Awakened as well) to keep an eye on Viktor and help him out. However, after he left, the other three made plans with Viktor:
* They will work together to make a magically infused liquid using the Gem of Flynn, the gem inside Viktor’s clockwork dragon, and some very specific mathemagical formulae. This liquid should be enough to put out the spire of magical ‘fire’ so that they can then go into the Platinum Sanctuary and retrieve the atriact of Tāmarai’s people.
- While the group enact this plan, Viktor will disguise himself with the help of his Ring of Disguise and go into New Vasselheim, contacting key people from the Resistance (starting with the rest of his family) to set up the rebellion to resume in earnest. Once the spire — hopefully — goes out, the revolution is ON.
* To signal the party in case it’s needed, they’ve agreed that Viktor will use fireworks to indicate whether the revolution is beginning, is on hold, or fucking JENGA (their password for “all is tits-up, please help ASAP).
[Please see Session 23.5: Between The Sessions for more.]
The Adventure Continues
Fireworks Code:
Yellow: Everyone’s dead, we lost, don’t bother coming back, all is lost
Blue: All clear, come on in, the Rebellion is a go
Purple: Requesting magical assistance quickly
Red: JENGA! JENGA! FUCKING JENGA!
The Little White Ones That Seem To Wiggle Like Goldfish: We won
already, just show up and let’s party?
Viktor and Tāmarai work together on the formulae, each checking through Viktor’s work one more time individually, then together, to assure themselves there are no miscalculations that could render the liquid inert and unusable. Viktor and “Little Percy” (Stubby, who will never live that down) create something that works similarly to a prism, a refractive device for casting spells into, which will then pass through Viktor’s gem and then the Gem of Flynn, turning both into liquids. They will be blended and have more spells cast into them. Viktor describes “something lightningy, like electriskity” which Rinn is able to cast, and “something that will weigh the magic down,” and Tāmarai realizes that her own Magnify Gravity spell should work. As Osysa and Ioun have told them all, they are uniquely qualified and required for this plan to work.
[OOC: Look up Victorian spectrometers, then add even more wires, tubes, and crystals to your mental image. Or, really, any Victorian scientific equipment. Or Steampunk-science equipment. It’s very cool.]
Fisch returns during the early stages of all of this, just in time to help Viktor haul out his enormous, heavy box of tinker’s tools, made of brass and mahogany and gorgeousness galore, in immaculate condition. Viktor and Stubby dive into the work, with Rinn helping to weld, as Tāmarai sings a happy little workshop song to inspire them to their highest level of craftsmanship.
“Workshop Song,” by Shikomi Tāmarai:
(Tune: “Workshop” Song from Babes In Toyland):
Welding handles, bolts, and braces, concentrating with a frown
Bolting wheels on axle braces so they never will break down
It’s all coming, things are humming
Busy, busy, in a tizzy
Tinker, tinker, tinker till it runs
Gluing, soldering, clamping, grinding, every little thing must run
Beep-beep, click-click, boom-boom, DUCK! Isn’t it a lot of fun?
Tacking, fitting, pounding, nailing,
Guarding, fighting, helping, healing
Tinker, tinker, tinker till it’s done
Whether this or their own well-trained abilities are to credit, the job goes very, very well. Viktor fits the purple gem into the device, makes a small adjustment, puts a crucible at the ‘output’ end, and slaps his hands together. “All right! SO! Together, you two have to do the magic part.”
Tāmarai lifts the Gem of Flynn into place with her Mage Hand. Stubby and Viktor once more check and adjust the device’s settings. Viktor sprinkles each gem with a faintly sparkly dust, then grabs Stubby to hide them both behind the tool rack, while Fisch hides behind a ceiling support post. Tāmarai starts her ‘heavy’ music (Magnify Gravity, also known in a very faraway place as Metallica’s “Orion”), and Rinn zaps out his Witch Bolt, and the stars align, and the gods smile.
Magic shoots into where it should go. Everyone expects the effect to be instantaneous, so there’s a brief moment of letdown when it isn’t. But it does work, after a few seconds. Light shoots out. It’s Rinn’s magical lightning, but where he usually produces white light with a slightly purplish tinge, this — combined with Tāmarai’s dunamantic spell — is noticeably bright purple, various lighter and darker tones swirling around the lightning bolt and holding it down, pulling and directing it into a focused, steady beam. The light bounces from mirror to mirror, becoming gold after the last bounce. The residuum dust sprinkled all around picks up the light and illuminating the whole room.
At last, the light shots straight through the Gem of Flynn, which… It’s hard to tell at first, but eventually they all realize that the gem is shrinking, as is Viktor’s dragon’s gem. Melting. Eventually the green gem melts away into their various funnels, and from there, into flasks. Rinn floats, and his eyes glow, and sparks fly off of him like the little hand-held fireworks that used to be imported here from someplace called Hupperdook. The resulting liquid appears almost like green mercury, not metallic but luminescent. The purple gem is smaller, but remains intact.
Stubby casts Message into the liquid, asking it “How ya doin’?” There is no answer. The two who encountered Flynn back in Ravinia are mildly relieved. But not completely. Something is “off.” Viktor walks up to the purple gem with a hammer, which Fisch helps him to drag over. “According to my math,” he explains, and Tāmarai nods confirmation, “they both should have melted. Something’s in this one.”
Flynn. Tāmarai immediately says it, and then checks with a ritual version of Detect Magic. Flynn indeed has grabbed a foothold in the purple stone that Viktor pulled out of his dragon robit. Fisch gives it a good hard smash, and then Tāmarai scoops up the Marquesian amethyst dust to analyze later.
“Well, that was unexpected. I need to learn from my mistakes,” Viktor mutters, then turns back to the group. “I hope one of you can cook.”
Fisch steps outside and comes back with a deer. “I can’t eat the whole thing. It’s not winter. Also I don’t get to sleep in the winter anymore, and that’s weird. I talked to my friends. The wolves will keep an eye on him, but… Are you staying here, Mister?”
“Your mother’s bear didn’t talk,” Viktor informs Stubby.
Once they’ve got dinner on the camp stove, the non-bears in the room discuss the gaps in their plan. The four adventurers will need to get into Vasselheim as quickly as possible once they “turn off” the spire of light, so that the empress and her people have as little time as possible to prepare. Fisch has a friend called Charlie, a moose, who can get them back to the baby Birth Heart in New Vasselheim, so that’s one problem handled; Charlie has other friends that will give Viktor a ride into the city in the morning so he can jumpstart the rebellion.
Meanwhile, while Stubby and Fisch were preparing the deer carcass for dinner (and hot-smoking some of it so that Viktor will have some good traveling food), Viktor gave Tāmarai the tool chest. “I’ll have my family’s tools once I get back to town. She should have these. They were a commission from her father, but I never got to give them to him. You tell her they’re her Highsummer present.” Tāmarai promises to keep it safe until then.
Once the workshop job is done, they all file into the ‘living’ portion of the hut. It’s a one-room affair with a bed and stove, but no chairs or fireplace. It’s also a mess, because it’s Viktors’s. He has a single bowl, which the three anthropoids all hope he washes before using it. That Bachelor Lyfe chose him, bruh. During dinner, which they all have to eat one at a time, with the bowl and spoon being washed in between, a moose face appears in the window. “So whom are we taking, and when, and where?” Fisch arranges a moose train to get Viktor back to town with this moose, “He Who Fords The Snow,” at the first leg of the ride. He’s become something of a leader for the other moose. (He had to be asked before Fisch could talk to Charlie, but Charlie is also a friend of Fisch’s sister, so it all worked out very well.)
Rinn makes himself scarce during the butchering and uses the time to double-check all his supplies and equipment. Tāmarai, useless in a kitchen, simply watches. At least until Rinn’s got everything laid out and is looking at it all. At that point she gets up and moves one of the daggers from its spot and into another. Off of Rinn’s questioning look, she informs him with a straight face, “Every well-bred petty criminal knows that the single-edged weapons belong to the right of the place setting.” Rinn attempts not to laugh, but can’t help a smirk.
Over dinner, Stubby discuss her own signal with the group, borrowing Viktor’s expertise in refining the mechanism she uses to Skywrite.
[Stubby’s player actually designed a Skywriting tool. It sounds awesome. We LOVE having a scientist at the table.]
The five of them also talk about the imminent vacuum of power, and what to do about that. Viktor thinks a council would be good. “The Free Republic of Issylra.” Rinn suggests looking for leadership amongst the guild leaders, because guild leaders tend to be practiced at dealing with the welfare of groups and the people in them.
Tāmarai uses Illusory Script to write to Ryo Yelmoira/Vanya. To the casual eye, it looks like Rinn has written to the empress indicating that he’s ready to talk about that extra money for spying on these outsiders. The real message, however, is for Vanya, indicating that things are about to happen, so get ready. They’re all conflicted about whether to actually send or give it to her, however, because they don’t know for certain that she’s still with them, and not mind-controlled or simply turned to the empress’s side. There’s also a cover letter, un-magicked. It says: Otel – Thinking back on some of the discussions we had about the Empress, and things you’ve mentioned about the situation in Vasselheim. (cant)The job overthrowing the head is planned and will happen. Watch for the lantern at the top of the hill to be put out for the start.(/cant) Otherwise, can you pick up something I bought at the Clocks and Cogs? The Vonns set it aside. Much Thanks -Rinn
As the group begin to sort out who’ll stand watch and when that night, they hear howling outside. It puts a shiver down more than one spine, but Rinn and Fisch explain that the wolves are setting up a watch for them. “I got first watch.” “I got second.” “Third” “Somebody wake me up if there are assholes to bite!” Fisch also tells them that the wolves tend to enjoy belly rubs and ear scritches, and goes outside to tell them that they’ve got volunteers inside who’ll pet them in the morning.
They sleep.
Early grey light greets them, along with a moose face at the window saying “Hi.” Viktor gets a boost up from Fisch, and the moose takes off running, and it’s the greatest thing ever. There’ll be two more moose along the way, who will help him (somehow) trade mounts so that the speed of his arrival in town won’t suffer.
[End session. Waaaaah, we wanna play more!]
Loot:
Marquesian amethyst dust
Stone crucible w/lid, containing Flynn Stone juice
Studley Tool Chest