Session 55 — The Absence of a Person

Session Recap

A quiet morning in a laboratory, and then the worst thing the party has ever done by accident. The party wakes at 2 PM on the 23rd of New Summer in the facility's upstairs quarters, level 8 and rested for the first time in days. Lash has spent the night at the forge and hands out two commissions: a set of claw tips cut from the old Gravek's claws for Fenric, and — reforged from the short sword she stole off him while he slept — a +1 silvered longsword for Silithane. Magra and Silithane take The Deciphering Tablet to Minimika, who manhandles a priceless artifact like a speedcuber, panics on learning she wasn't given a toy, and then hands over two more numbers — tipping the puzzle from insolvable to solvable — and asks to make herself a clay copy. Jex, hunting an answer to what they actually are, submits to a battery of sentience tests built out of plyboard by the facility's handyman Tink and administered by Long Tim, who diagnoses them as gelatinous, rates them 4 out of 7 on the sentience scale, and files two additional findings: dromomania, and invasive oral species predator.

Then Thalia asks the gemologist Anita to look at the Void Stone she has worn as a necklace since Session 42. Anita reports that something is in it, sometimes, and proposes one last test: touch her shard to it, at the end of thirty-two feet of custom calipers. The stone cracks open, a silhouette that can only be seen out of the corner of the eye stands up in the room — and the shard kills it. Then Anita starts crying over a locket with a beach painted on one side and nobody on it. There were two desks in her workshop. There were two chairs, and two of everything but the shared tools. The void stone had eaten the existence of the other gemologist — her wife — and nobody in the world remembers her. Fenric's reading of it is worse: the void is barely a school of magic at all, both void things the party has met came from space, there are only about five stars left in the sky, and light takes time to travel, so this planet and its sentient sun may be the last life in the setting. The party votes to destroy the two jarred symbiotes with the shard; Lash refuses, and keeps them. Four of them swear an oath to use the shard only against these things, and Anita gives it to them. Out through the north door, the party kills a Morkid that touches nobody, walks fifteen to twenty hours uphill, and shuffles into daylight a hundred feet an hour on the 24th of New Summer — then takes the long way round the mountain and reaches the outskirts of the Menagoles on about the 26th, with the mine's forty guards still pointing crossbows down an elevator shaft nobody is ever coming up. Still level 8.

Key Events

Claws, filed by hand. Lash hunts Fenric down with a drill ("I already feel ominous when a drill comes out") and produces ten claw tips and ten metal bands, the tips cut from the six Gravek claws she has been carrying since Session 12 — a segmented two-part fitting so his claws still retract into their sheaths, plus soft gum caps so he doesn't scratch himself poisonous in his sleep. It needs the front inches of each claw shaved down about 20%, and 5% more behind that for the band. Fenric declines the drill and uses his own nail file, which is coarser than most. Worn as a weapon rather than an unarmed strike: +1 to hit, +1d6 poison. See Gravek Claw Tips.
Nutrient bars and water too hot to drink. The party climbs down from the upstairs quarters and Dr. Xiao Li brings breakfast to them: pressed nutrient blocks on a platter, and a jug of fresh water that has to cool first — everything they drink comes out of the fire tubes. The plan is confirmed unchanged: out through the scientists' north tunnel. Her honest assessment of it: "a cave that large will attract the attention of something that wants a den that large," and nobody has been through it in a year.
The tablet, spun. Fenric has been carrying The Deciphering Tablet for no reason anyone can remember ("I think I just have it because I happened to pick it up first"); Magra takes it onto her sheet, corrects its name from cube to tablet, and finds its provenance logged as Candleman Cave. The bookkeeping is reconstructed at the table: 20 days recorded, plus scattered untracked downtime, and the GM meets them in the middle at 30. The rate is one clue per cumulative in-character year — 365 days across seven people.
Minimika breaks the seal. In a library where a minor tremor overnight has dumped every book off every shelf, the chief translator takes the tablet in four higher-level Mage Hands (Silithane clocks the multicast at once), one to a corner, and starts flicking and spinning it like someone far too into Rubik's Cubes. Told it is a Foredweller artifact and not homemade, she freezes: "Oh, I should not have been spinning this so much. Oh, I am in so much trouble with the archaeology department. Please don't tell them." Two natural 18s later she places two numbers in the corners — and with the 3 in the centre the party already had, the GM rules the puzzle has gone from insolvable to solvable. She asks to write down every option on every face and build herself a clay replica, non-spinning and erasable, to work on after they leave. Granted — with more clues promised in future.
A translator who now has to be told everything. Minimika is already on the party's Sending list with her anti-spam rune from Session 53, and Jex makes sure the arrangement runs both ways: the facility can call for help, and can send progress updates on the tablet.
Chain of custody. Thalia brings the invisible Void Stone to the gemologist Anita, who is scratching engravings into a fist-sized red gem under a monocle with a second monocle on an arm. Probing the empty setting, one poke in ten goes clean through and the other nine tap something. Anita's professional advice, delivered gently: "in Investigatory terms, they call it the chain of custody. You should log everything you find and where you found it — and if you really want to be scientific, draw a little sketch of what it looked like before you touched it."
Left with her for two hours, not for keeps. The party argues it out — Jex and Magra point out these people work for Laewendas and may be compelled to hand things over; Thalia counters that losing it would only give them a reason to go and take it back, which Jex correctly identifies as entrapment. Anita gets two hours and cheerfully announces she will "do all the most dangerous experiments first." Thalia pickpockets the goggles off the top of Anita's own head — hat off, goggles off, hat back — and hands them to her as a find.
"A doctor of the physical body." Jex, looking for someone who can say what they are, is pointed at Long Tim: seven foot seven at least, arms to the ankles, the only person in the facility who can reach the top five shelves of his own bookcase. He gives his name as Timothy Leisten and his field as the physical body "including the mind, which is a physical item that is contained within the head. No matter what you may read in controversial opinion pieces that claim the mind is a separate entity, it is not. It's all in there in the grooves."
Over a hundred sentient species — and a controversial word. His lore, offered flatly: there are well over 100 species of sentient humanoid, though "the term humanoid has become considerably controversial since the Human Empire performed such horrific things to non-humans." Then the differential diagnosis — acidic? sticky? comfortable in water? splatter or stick when thrown at a wall? Slimes are dangerous to the touch; goo is sticky and kills by constriction and engulfment; Jex splatters and is neither, and is therefore a gelatinous creature. Colonies of them live under rocks and comprehend neither speech nor self.
"A bold conclusion to draw with a sample size of one." Told that no one has recorded a thinking jelly, Jex concludes they are the first; Tim declines to let that stand. "Sentience had to evolve somewhere for everyone at some point, so perhaps you are just the first observed case of a jelly waking up and thinking… I would presume that other gelatinous creatures have awakened themselves before. I just haven't met them. That doesn't mean they don't exist." On being asked whether Jex at least has a brain: "Perhaps. Or a simulacrum of one."
The enclosure. Tim proposes tests, notes that some are dehumanising to experience ("which would not be ideal if you were sentient"), and has Tink build the rest out of plyboard, nails and an hour of redneck engineering. Inside, the world goes completely silent — no chatter, no coffee machine, no rumble of the water-boilers — and instructions arrive through a tin can on a string. Five chambers: identify yourself; a mirror; a cardboard box propped on a stick over some very appealing berries (ignored); two podiums, an apple, and boxes descending to cover them (Jex lifts the box he watched the apple go under, finds it still there, and leaves it); a tapestry with a puppet behind it that jumps out. Then: "Please return to the room with the podiums." The podiums are gone.
Into the doctor's mouth. Left with no instructions and nothing to do, Jex slithers an eye up the speaker tube to see what is happening — and it comes out inside Tim's mouth, who chokes and spits them out. He hangs up the tin can and walks off to write up his notes. Jex finds the softest sheet of plyboard, forces it on an Athletics check, and leaves through a dog-sized hole.
The diagnosis, folded three times and stamped. Tim delivers it to the party with a solemn expression. One: the patient suffers from dromomania — the urge to wander — "for which I would suggest a leash and harness." Two: on the 1-to-7 spectrum of sentience they score a 4, "semi-sentient or presenting" — "it's better than a dog, so there is nothing to prescribe." Three: they attempted to enter his body orally, and are therefore an invasive oral species predator — "for the predation, I would suggest regular and intense feedings." Fenric: "I can guarantee that's not what happened." Tim: "I understand that you may prefer to live in denial, but this is my lived experience as the scientist that conducted this experiment." Jex's complaint that the tests lacked direction is added, as a note, to Jex's file.
Tink is not a scientist. The twin-goggled tinkerer clarifies his standing: he's the handyman, brought in because "these science people, they needed a handyman" — "not really, unless you consider engineering a science, which none of them do." His own view of the ruin, sincerely held: it has flushing toilets that clean your ass, and we don't even have them on the surface. He then takes a sledgehammer to the enclosure he spent an hour building.
A thought experiment about flavour. With Jex rated semi-sentient, the table works through what everyone would taste like — Magra as minted lamb, Thalia as venison rather than chicken (she'd hoped for cinnamon bark), Lash as gator — and Thalia insists on fairness: "otherwise it's just weird, like we're trying to eat Jex, who is only a 4 on the sentient scale." Lash arrives mid-conversation with bloodberry jelly she has made out of Thalia's berries, and cannot work out why Jex is offended.
The longsword, and a smithing apprenticeship. Lash trips flat on her face presenting Silithane with the finished piece: the Silvered Short Sword she stole from his bunk overnight, reforged into a +1 silvered longsword balanced to handle like a short sword. He asks her to teach him to smith; she offers the only version she has time for — "you can watch me work if you want some nights" — which suits a man who barely sleeps. She has two magic items delivered, and the next one is "3 sleeps" out for anyone who names what they want. Silithane also notices, for the first time in months, how large Salamandine has got; Lash waves it off — "He's always been this big" — then admits in the same breath that he was a young one when they got him and is probably just growing up.
"I think something is in it." Anita emerges from behind her curtain after two hours of drilling, sawing, sampling and hydraulic-pressing an unknown rock, and whispers the result: "I think something is in the stone. Sometimes, but not all the time." She has never met a Void Mage or a Void Researcher — but the word itself worries her: "I'm a Healing Mage, you know, that sounds nice, friendly, well organised… but I am a Void Mage. That's how that comes across."
Thirty-two feet of calipers. Her one remaining test: touch her shard of the Autarch to the void stone and see what an unknown domain does to a known one. She will not do it by hand, and asks Tink for extra-long caliper handles; he builds 16-foot handles that extend to 32 and warns her they'll be wobbly. Thalia's Insight can't tell whether Anita's "oh no, that would be terrible" about the Autarch turning up is genuine dread or the single thing she wants most in the world.
The experiment. Welding masks on, safety squints engaged; Marge walks out rather than watch; the rest of the staff leave and shut all four doors. At ten inches apart, something like a heat haze starts dripping from under the vice, and everybody's vision fills with visual snow. Anita hesitates. Thalia tells her to go a little closer. On the first contact of the tips there is a cracking, shattering noise, and the void stone's shell clatters across the floor as semi-transparent, blacked-out chunks.
The thing that stood up. For a moment something looms in the room — invisible when looked at directly, visible only in peripheral vision, an eight-foot silhouette the GM likens to Slenderman, turning its head, perceiving, "showing at least 3 out of 7 on the sentient scale." The shard's dim one-foot glow flares to three or five feet and blasts it; it lets out a burst of radio static and ceases to be alive, then ceases to be. Thalia's Arcana is the one that registers plainly that something has been killed. She kneels to gather the shell fragments and it is "like touching your own shadow" — then a shade of dust, then nothing at all.
Opposing domains. Silithane (24) and Fenric (27) get the framework: this is what it looks like when two opposed domains of magic meet — fire and water, life and death. A void thing that had hidden itself, with semi-sentience and an agenda, was found by a domain nobody can name, and completely unmade by it. The GM's cautious silver lining: the green comes from this planet and the void stone did not, so the green winning may be the good outcome. "But it's hard to say."
The two desks. Anita is standing with her head down and tears pouring, holding an opening locket — on the left a small painted pictograph of herself, on the right a painted beach with nobody in it, framed around the absence of a person, and an engraving that reads "to the love of my life." There are two desks in the workshop, two chairs, and two of every piece of equipment except the shared tools. There was another gemologist on this expedition. The void stone took her existence, and now she never was. "It is good that we destroyed it, I think… How do you grieve the memory of somebody you don't know existed? But they had to have." Thalia: "I suppose the very absence of them means more. As long as you acknowledge it, then that's not truly being gone."
Checking the party for holes. History checks all round. Lash finds she isn't entirely certain who is currently in the group — she's "pretty sure Brebo's in the group, but no one else ever talks about him that often" — and genuinely wonders whether Draak existed. Magra remembers her sister, and only afterwards remembers she has more than one. The three who cleared 10 are confident nobody has been erased beyond those who left naturally — with the caveat that if they went looking for Ashlyn and found an empty house, they would know.
What the void actually is. Fenric's high roll buys the campaign's clearest statement of it yet. The void is barely a school: it has no scrolls, no glyphs, no books, no teachers, and if you drew the elements as a circle of opposites and allies, it isn't in the circle — it's the background noise outside it. It is also the domain closest to what Fenric himself does, because he doesn't cast magic, he destroys it. Its signature is making things disappear, hiding things, unmaking memory — "Modify Memory, for example, is very void adjacent."
Five stars left. The two void encounters the party has had — the stone's occupant and the ten-thousand-handed thing that made Caressa a queen — share a thread: they came from space, they don't belong here, and they aren't up to anything good. Fenric remembers watching a star blip out on an ordinary evening walk. There are about five stars left in the sky and the historical records imply there were more. Then the part that puts him on his knees: light takes time to travel, so the suns that have gone dark to his eye died a long time ago — and there is a real chance that this planet and its living, sentient sun are the only life left in the world. "So probably best not to let the void get all that is left."
The vote on the symbiotes, and the one refusal. Fenric reports it back and says let the shard kill the two jarred grafting-gland symbiotes. Thalia is emphatic — "Just kill the things in the dark. Kill them right now" — and Magra and Silithane agree. Lash refuses, angrily: "I don't even kill plants anymore. We eat berries." Her argument is that the party has carried these things for months and they have done nothing; that the Gray Veil atrocity was Caressa's doing and not the symbiote's ("she wanted to be hugged and she got all those hands"); and that judging a pudgy slime in a jar by a shadow in a rock is "like comparing that rock monster we fought to Jex." The symbiotes live, in Lash's backpack, and she leaves the conversation furious with the party.
Two damning details about the jar, all the same. Asked by Lash whether the green crystal looks good or bad, the symbiote moves to the far side of the jar from it. And the GM's own note: it "doesn't not resemble" the thing that came out of the void stone — one fleshy and tangible, one shadowy and ethereal, but "the colour schemes and the textures and the amount of eyes — these things seem to be of the same brand of family." It is also, as ever, tapping the glass and doing a come-hither gesture at whoever looks at it.
The oath, and the shard. Anita's terms: "If you vow an oath to me that you will only use it to kill these things, you can have the one that I have." She wants at least half the party behind it — these are one in a million. Thalia swears on her honour, her life and everything she holds dear; Magra swears on the life of her twin sister; Silithane and Fenric swear. It is a pledge, not a rolled check — but this is Rivalon, and breaking it would decay a person's honour horrifically. Jex declines the oath (wanting only to test whether the shard would cut them at all) and is refused permission to touch it, which lands badly. Lash was upstairs fetching the scientists and never swore. Anita hands it over inside an inverted glove — razor-edged on every face, it will cut clean through a gripping hand, but is otherwise safe to hold. The rumour attached: if the Autarch or one of her agents ever demands it, you hand it over. "It is partially why they are so rare." It goes in the galley wagon as a shared tool.
Out the north door. Rosa works the Fallout-Pip-Boy panel beside her control window — the exit is the door past the sun lever — and it grinds open on crumbling dust, loose rock and the flat darkness of a bored cave. Something drops off the ceiling onto Fenric before anyone has taken a second step. See Combat & Encounters.
Fifteen hours uphill, then a hundred feet an hour. Roughly two hexes of continuous incline, 15–20 hours of walking with one break too tense to count as a rest. They see daylight in the distance in the early morning of the 24th of New Summer, and then have to stop: after some 100 hours underground they would blind themselves walking straight out. So they set up in the half-light and shuffle 100 feet closer every hour for two hours, emerging around 11 AM into heavy, merciful overcast, everyone squinting under hoods and goggles.
The staging camp on the mountain's back. The scientists' year-old base camp at ground zero of their dig: felled trees (the stumps of the carts seen inside the mine), a refuelling station of empty powdered crystal fuel barrels, tents — some standing, some torn open by wildlife, and some reduced to tent-shaped gaps in the grass where a passer-by simply took one — crates of boots, headlamps and hundreds of mining picks, most dulled, a few still in fresh wrapping.
Oldham, burned. Across the plains sit the scorched, burned-out ruins of a town called Oldham. Some fifteen miles off, a second great wood, briefly mistaken for the one they came from until someone with an eye for the map spots the gap between them.
The safe road, and the one they didn't take. Lambert's Crossing is the short way, and Knucklebones's mounted warband owns that ground; with two non-combatant civilians in tow — Polos at level 2, and a doctor the GM will not even roll initiative for — the party goes the long way through woods they know, arriving at the mine's outskirts on about the 26th. Two days at two hexes, two undisturbed long rests, moon visible on the nights of the 25th and 26th — four days short of the full moon on the 30th, which takes Lash's moon-guard to its new maximum of 7 stacks.
Forty crossbows, still waiting. The GM's parting cinematic: up at the tin mine, forty guards remain barricaded around the elevator shaft with crossbows trained on it. "They gotta come back up sometime." They will eventually conclude the party ran out of food, or turned on each other, and go back to business as usual — the boss fight the party walked away from, still standing to attention.
Rations, honestly declared. Lash flags that she can feed one extra mouth, not two; Thalia doesn't need to eat while the moon is up. Exactly enough food, and the GM thanks her for the honesty.

Combat & Encounters

The Morkid — killed, having hit nothing. The tenant the GM promised would move into an abandoned 60-mile tunnel drops on the party the instant the door opens.
- What it is. Mostly furry, semi-bipedal in a gorilla's stance, half beast and half plant; its mouth opens side to side on hundreds of Venus-flytrap feeler-fangs, with digestive acid bubbling up as it gets hungry. The table christens it a "furry gorilla flytrap"; the GM's name is a joke about an orchid with a big mouth — Morkid.
- Foundry objects. A pop-up warns the GM that the CR is off and it does not recommend running this combat; he tells it to mind its business. It also flags Polos and Salamandine as enemies, which nobody fixes.
- It never lands a blow. Its opening multiattack on Fenric misses eight consecutive rolls. Silithane Shields one punch off. Every subsequent attack misses, including a spiteful swipe at Salamandine on its way past. The GM, near the end: "I'm like so close to the point where I just lie and say that it hits people. It's so close, but I'm resisting." Confirmed afterwards: nobody took a single point of damage.
- The bat that Helped. Silithane's re-summoned bat familiar walks across the floor to Fenric on its little legs, wings out for balance, and the GM grants advantage on the strength of the image alone: "you're the only thing standing between this little guy and that horrible thing."
- The new longsword, opened properly. Silithane tries the +1 silvered longsword with Green-Flame Blade — called at the table as Booming Blade, but resolved with its splash — and Sneak Attack, and crits — 38 damage, then max damage on the crit sneak for 50. Immediately afterward he draws the Dragon-Slaying Short Sword and it refuses to leave the scabbard: "this isn't a dragon."
- Polos, in the hat. The level-2 scientist crowd-crushes Lash against the door, swaps places with her, drops prone and fails to hide on a 6. Thalia then simply puts him in the hat — established here as costing one of her two attacks for a willing medium-or-smaller ally, with unwilling creatures requiring a contested check. He comes out later reporting "there's no air in there," having been screaming the whole way in.
- The ant scepter. Out of spell slots and reactions on its last turn, it takes the Use an Item action with a little scepter that plainly belonged to a wizard once — points it at the rock wall, then at Jex, and sprays a cone of rat-sized, blue-glowing ants. Not conjured and not magical themselves: real ants beguiled out of the stone, Pied Piper style, which is why they don't vanish when it dies. Five swarm attacks on Jex; every one misses.
- A jar of lanterns. Thalia reads the back of her ant spray ("one use repels one ant"), throws it at the swarm anyway, and then out-grapples the ants on an Athletics 16 against their 5 to fill a jar with glowing ones — a light source, and a present for Tony, who is back in the village. "Tony is learning that there are no ants in the village, and now you've learned the reason why." She lets them go afterwards; they stay in the cave, glowing.
- Magra kills it. Take Aim, 24 to hit, 23 damage — the last bolt needed. It drops, its mouth-tendrils writhing, and digestive acid pours out of its lolled tongue and sizzles into the dirt. The ants immediately stop attacking. The GM's verdict on the encounter: "this thing seems like it would have been really scary if you guys were level 6 instead of 8."
Nothing else. Two days' overland travel to the Menagoles passes unmolested and unattacked; the two ethereal spiders and the mining camp above are both left behind for good. No level-up — the Morkid wasn't worth a pip.

NPCs & Factions

Anita (new — the session's centre) — the facility's gnomish chief gemologist, first named in Session 52 and finally met properly. Professional, kind, and reckless in exactly the way a specialist is: she takes an unknown invisible rock, drills, saws, samples and hydraulic-presses it inside two hours, then designs one more experiment to touch a god-slaying shard to it from thirty feet away. Her finished work is enchanted gemstones — the party has seen one that picks up mining rocks and hurls them, and one that is simply explosive, which is why the entire staff clears out the moment she starts an experiment. She is the one who works out that something is in it, sometimes. And she is the one left holding a locket of a beach with nobody on it, at a workshop with two desks and two chairs, grieving a wife the world no longer contains. She gives the party her shard on an oath, and warns them the Autarch's agents can simply ask for it back.
Long Tim (named, and given a scene) — the facility's seven-foot-seven doctor of the physical body, who introduces himself as Timothy Leisten and holds that the mind is an organ "all in there in the grooves." Delivers the session's real lore — over 100 sentient humanoid species, the word "humanoid" politically radioactive since the Human Empire, and slimes/goos/jellies as distinct clades — then buries it under a diagnostic report scoring Jex a 4 out of 7 with two invented conditions attached. Utterly incurious about non-sentient species: "My focus is on fixing the organs inside of people. Of which you have none, unfortunately."
Tink (clarified) — not a scientist at all. The half-raccoon, half-fox handyman and engineer the science team hired because they needed one, and who they refuse to count as a colleague ("unless you consider engineering a science, which none of them do"). Builds a soundproof four-chamber testing enclosure in an hour, then knocks it down; builds 32-foot telescoping caliper handles on a stranger's request without asking why; offers Jex grapes out of his pocket like feeding a deer in a park. Still, sincerely, most impressed by the Ancients' plumbing.
Minimika (the tablet) — spends her morning re-shelving ten thousand books a tremor knocked onto the floor, then cracks two more digits of The Deciphering Tablet in under two minutes of handling, and asks for ten more to write down every option on every face. Her method is a librarian's: she knows where one thing goes at each end of the shelf and hasn't worked out how to alphabetise a language she can't read. Wants a clay copy to keep working on, and now has a two-way Sending line to the party.
Dr. Xiao Li (travelling) — brings the party breakfast, confirms the route, and is honest that something has almost certainly moved into her team's abandoned tunnel. Afterwards she is calm about it: "There were no creatures like this when we arrived, because we dug the cave — but it has been an empty cave for maybe a year or two now. I think things like to hole up in caves." Not consulted about the void stone experiment, and out of the room for it.
Polos (escorted) — level 2, no weapons, and honest about it. Gets crushed against a door by his own panic, swaps places with Lash, fails to hide, and spends the rest of the fight inside a hat. Reacts to Thalia's mail with a hand over his mouth until she clarifies that it is undelivered, and therefore legal.
Rosa (the doorkeeper) — the sun-watcher's control window sits beside the facility's main exit, so it is Rosa who opens the north door and lets the party out. Lash knows where it is because she spent five hours with her.
Marge (revisited) — the water specialist declines to be in the room for the shard-and-void-stone experiment and walks out. Consistent, and probably correct.
The Autarch (lore) — restated plainly by the GM: the shard is not the Autarch's own substance but "a resource of the Ancients that the Autarch has learned to process or weaponise," since she post-dates the facility that makes it. And a new rumour attaches to owning one: she or her agents can demand it back, and you give it to them.

Locations

The Foredweller Research Facility (departed) — the party's last morning in the lab: breakfast on the upper floor, the library floor deep in fallen books, Anita's workshop behind its curtain (a garage of table saws, vices, anchoring points and wall-mounted swing-arms, and two of everything), and Tink's bench. The exit is the north door beside Rosa's control window, past the sun lever — distinct from the deep door that "leads like 30 miles to nowhere." Seventeen scientists — a count that should have been eighteen, and that nobody in the facility can know is wrong.
The north tunnel (travelled) — the scientists' own bored entry passage, cut a year ago and unused since. Roughly two hexes long, a constant slight-to-moderate incline all the way up out of the earth, and 15–20 hours of walking with no restable ground. Fairly direct, bending only around a couple of harder rocks. Its one recorded tenant, the Morkid, is now dead.
The staging camp (the mountain's north base) — where the dig began: felled trees, an empty crystal-fuel refuelling station, half-collapsed tents, crates of mining supplies and hundreds of picks. Abandoned in place a year ago in case the scientists needed it on the way out, and quietly looted by passers-by since.
Oldham (seen) — a town across the plains from the mine's north face, standing in burned-out, scorched ruins. Named but not approached.
Lambert's Crossing (declined) — the shorter road back to the Menagoles, and Knucklebones's patrol ground. Passed over because the party is escorting civilians.
The Menagoles Mines (behind them) — the party reaches the mine's outskirts overland from the far side. The forty guards massed around the elevator shaft on the south face are still waiting for a party that will never come up it.

Loot, Items & Rewards

A shard of the Autarch (new — the party's first) — Anita's own shard, given on a sworn oath to use it only against void-things. Razor-edged on every face and will cut clean through a gripping hand; otherwise safe to handle. Stored in the galley wagon as a shared tool, nominally for the four who swore (Thalia, Magra, Silithane, Fenric). Proven this session to annihilate a void entity outright. Caveat attached: the Autarch or her agents can demand it, and refusing is not really an option.
+1 silvered longsword (upgraded — Silithane) — Lash's overnight reforge of the silvered short sword she has been improving since Session 06, now a longsword balanced to be wielded like a short sword. Crit for 50 on its first swing. The old short sword is deleted from the sheet.
Gravek Claw Tips (new — Fenric) — ten bone-looking claw tips cut from the Gravek's harvested claws, with ten metal retaining bands and soft gum caps. +1 to hit and +1d6 poison, and they still retract into his sheaths.
The ant scepter (new — Silithane) — the Morkid's magic item, plainly a wizard's once. Point it at a surface and then at a target, and a cone of rat-sized glowing ants pours out of the stone and attacks. Not a spell (it survived a Counterspell threat on the grounds that it is an item, not a casting) and the ants are real, not conjured — they remain after the wielder stops. The party's immediate plan is to clear ants out of buildings with it and feed Tony.
A Morkid tongue (new — Lash, ~5 lbs) — harvested on a Survival check where the flesh of the gorilla meets the plant. Still moving after death, reaching out to grab and drag things toward a mouth that is no longer there. "This is like plant business." Can be grafted to a weapon (feasibility depends entirely on what she attaches it to), or — if she ever lets a jar open — onto a shoulder.
A jar of glowing ants (new — Thalia) — rat-sized, blue-glowing abdomens, wrestled into a jar mid-combat. Released back into the cave afterwards.
The Deciphering Tablet (advanced) — two more numbers from Minimika, taking it from unsolvable to solvable; 30 days of study now formally on the books; the artifact confirmed sturdy enough to be spun freely; and a clay copy left with a translator who may send more clues by Sending.
Left behind: the Void Stone, destroyed and unrecoverable — its fragments crumbled to shadow and then nothing under Thalia's fingers. Also the Morkid's hoard of polearms, glaives, halberds and plain sticks, all acid-chewed past salvage.
No level. "It was not needed against the plant thing." Still level 8.

Decisions & Open Threads

The party destroyed a person by experiment. Not a fight, not a trap — a controlled test Anita proposed, the party agreed to, Thalia talked into contact, and all of them stood in the room for. Anita's wife is gone from existence and only an absence-shaped set of evidence remains: a locket, two desks, two chairs, two of everything but the shared tools. Nobody has raised what the party owes her.
The void, and the count of stars. The vault's clearest statement yet: the void is not one of the schools, it has no scrolls or teachers, and it is the domain closest to Fenric's own anti-magic. Both void things the party has met came from space. Roughly five stars remain where records imply many more, and light-lag means those went out long ago. The GM's framing — that this planet and its sentient sun may be all the life left — is now on the table as a campaign-scale stake.
Two symbiotes are still alive, and the party is split. Four members voted to destroy them with the shard; Lash refused and keeps them in her pack. Against her: the GM's own note that they "doesn't not resemble" the void entity — same colours, textures, number of eyes, "the same brand of family" — and that the jarred one shrank away from the green crystal. For her: they have travelled with the party for months without incident, and Gray Veil was Caressa's doing. Unresolved, and now a live fault line inside the group.
The oath, and who isn't bound by it. Thalia, Magra, Silithane and Fenric have sworn a Rivalonian oath to use the shard only against void-things — binding in a country where broken oaths rot a person's honour. Jex declined and was barred from touching it; Lash was out of the room and never swore. The shard sits in the galley wagon, technically usable by anyone.
The Autarch can ask for it back. The rumour Anita passes on: confronted by the Autarch or one of her agents, a holder "really doesn't have much of a choice but to give it to them." If true, the party is carrying a loan, not a prize — and possibly a beacon.
The Deciphering Tablet is solvable. Three digits in, and the GM has confirmed a sufficiently determined player can now finish it — with more clues purchasable in study days, and Minimika working a clay duplicate on the other end of a Sending line. Fully solved, it reads the Foredweller tongue.
Jex still doesn't know what they are. The best expert available concluded gelatinous, not slime and not goo; that colonies exist under rocks without speech or self; and that Jex may or may not be the first of their kind to wake up, on a sample size of one. Silithane's standing offer to cast Identify on them remains untaken.
Two civilians to deliver. Dr. Xiao Li and Polos get as far as the outskirts of the Menagoles; the meeting with Eldrich the Elder — who still has not been given the report on the mine disaster that was the actual job — is next session's opening. Nobody has told the scientists what the plan for the green room is, because there still isn't one.
The mining camp is a fight that never happened. Forty crossbows, a barricade, and a Queensguard, all pointed at an elevator the party is never riding again. Worth a pip, permanently declined.
Lash's crafting queue is open. Two commissions delivered this session; the next magic item is three sleeps out for whoever names what they want. Also unfinished: silvering or blading Salamandine's tail, and the Morkid tongue waiting for a weapon to be grafted to.
Carryover: the report owed to Eldrich the Elder; the strike on Knucklebones at Lambert's Crossing; the mine's underwater city and the Long Walk; the captive alchemist Snuffles and the sleeping angelborn; the fifty-plus waiting dead; Thalia's undelivered druid tomes and the facility's wheelbarrow of post; the Grey Man; the held soul candles, cursed mask and two symbiotes; Lash's unforged crystal-golem core; Jex's legal non-existence; the imprisoned Caressa; the captive artisan who fuses duplicate items; and the eventual siege of Cathalon.
Roster. Full table: Fenric (Fantom), Thalia (Cara), Lash (Kadie), Jex (Nat), Magra (Mia) and Silithane (Johan), with Salamandine and the bat. Neko has no active PC (Valmora left in Session 44); Ashlyn's player and Draak remain away. Still level 8.

Memorable Moments

"How do you grieve the memory of somebody you don't know existed? But they had to have." Anita with the locket open, working out from two chairs and a painted beach that she was married, to someone the world has no room for any more.
The diagnosis. "They suffer from a condition known as dromomania… I would categorise them as a 4 on the 7 spectrum of sentience… and they attempted to enter my body orally, so they are considered an invasive oral species predator." Torn, folded three times, stamped, and handed to whoever was standing closest.
"A bold conclusion to draw with a sample size of one." Long Tim refusing to let Jex be the first thinking jelly in the world on the strength of one scientist never having met another.
"It's a Likert scale." Lash yelling the answer down the stairs at a conversation she is not part of, to a table that has no idea what she is saying.
Five stars. The moment Fenric puts together a blipping star, two things from space, and the speed of light, and drops to his knees on a lab floor.
"I don't even kill plants anymore. We eat berries." Lash, alone against the whole party, refusing to execute two things that have never done anything to her.
The bat that walked. Silithane's familiar declining to fly, crossing the cave floor on its little legs with its wings out for balance, and being granted mechanical advantage on the basis of sheer moral support.
Eight misses in a row. A gorilla-flytrap dropping out of the ceiling for an ambush and failing to touch a single person all fight, while its GM audibly considers cheating.
"I must have been in the Void." Hours after the party has finished checking itself for holes, Silithane has no memory of Fenric being fitted with the claw tips that morning — a fifteen-minute scene everyone else was standing in — and the table decides the Void ate it.
A hundred feet an hour. A party who have been underground for a hundred hours straight sitting in the dark at the mouth of a tunnel, edging toward the light in stages so the sun doesn't blind them.
Forty crossbows, aimed at nothing. "They gotta come back up sometime."

SUMMARY: A last morning in the lab — Lash delivers Fenric's Gravek claw tips and Silithane's +1 silvered longsword, Minimika cracks two more digits of the Deciphering Tablet, and Long Tim scores Jex a 4/7 on sentience with a diagnosis of dromomania and invasive oral predation — before Anita touches her shard of the Autarch to Thalia's void stone, killing the entity inside and revealing that the stone had erased her own wife from existence; Fenric works out the void comes from space and only five stars remain, the party votes to destroy its jarred symbiotes (Lash refuses), four members swear an oath and are given the shard, and they fight their way out through a Morkid that never lands a blow, emerging on the 24th of New Summer and reaching the outskirts of the Menagoles two days later. Still level 8.