Notes:
-I spend time with Lucille
-Joseph spent time w/ the person he saved during the first dream of the last session. They’re part of the Cult of the Elders, a lower ranking priest, pious and helping people focused. Since being saved, they’ve focused on self-awareness and meditation. Their gift is being multi-armed (4 arms) and dexterous.
-We notice among the eerie silence in the scrubs, Sudo has been focusing on maintaining and repairing the Clock Tower. It will randomly accelerate slightly at times for some reason.
-Nightmare Stag shows up outside of town every so often, just watching, clearly seeing us despite the cloaking device.
-There’s also strange humanoid shapes out in the scrubs singing the Nowhere King song. They don’t appear overtly hostile, but there’s a sense of beckoning from them.
- Vance has been becoming increasingly paranoid and suspicious.
-Rose has been putting together a task force to investigate the weird stuff in the scrubs.
-She mentions that Moreau’s notes talk about recursions, translation on the human body and mind.
-Discussion of his lab is reminiscent of the descriptions we’ve heard of “South Village”, a research lab to the Southeast of the village.
-Rose’s motives are genuinely altruistic when Vance tries to insight check her.
-The two captured cult members were exiled out of town by the Council.
-I talk to Dr. Allard and she tells us that all of the other villages were lies, and that all the other villages were actually depots and research stations. (We kind of knew this already)
-Camp Legendary is where the main OSR Gate to Truetopia is (was?) and was where Major McNealy was last seen.
-She tells us Moreau has ADHD and is very brilliant, his research is based around trying to survive in this recursion (Truetopia). He’s unhinged and unorthodox/unethical in his research, specifically non-conventional is the phrase she uses.
-Rosebud offers to grant us equipment and an NPC to come with us.
-We ask Jenkins and she assigns 3 OSR grants to come with us (Richard, Samantha, and Gregor).
-I make an active effort to refer to Jenkins and her OSR troops as West Villagers, which she seems pleased by.
-Hans went to talk to Deyadria. When asking how he can save his friends, she says “Should Hans leave his friends alone, they may become lost in a sea of violet. Like a shade of uncertainty more than a flower.”
-Hans goes to talk to the humanoid singing shapes in the scrub. As he leaves the gate, the lullaby lowers in volume.
-We rush out the gate with Hans. One of the figures becomes clearer to Hans, like a naked mole rat looking man in a loincloth made of scrub brush.
-The timid man says “you actually came. I felt compelled to come here. I think I’m supposed to bring you to him. The King.”
-Tells us the King has horns, but a very magnanimous and kind visage. (Was the Nightmare Stag some kind of King back where it came from originally?)
-Joseph describes the pre-flesh ripped off Nightmare Stag to him, and the mole rat man has some degree of recognition.
-Hans mentions a clock, and several of the figures scatter at the word. (Why don’t they like the clock? Previous contact with OSR, maybe?)
-The mole rat man says “we must go now” before heading off with the rest of the weird humanoid animal people. They’re not dissimilar to what we’d expect from other West Villagers in appearance, actually.
-Everything goes black after and when we come to we’re in a lab? Similar to the one from my dream where Dr. Moreau tore open the gate and brought the Nightmare Stag in. The Stag is here with us in one airlock trying to get us to let it in, and Dr. Moreau is in another trying to get us to let him in. There’s a large rift in reality in front of us, with a swirling mass of purple and violet dark energies mixed in with sifting, grotesque shapes. We can choose to let Moreau in, The Stag in, or neither, going into the portal on our own.
-After a group vote (above table as Squiggly and I are stunned cause of the Stag), we go with Moreau. The Stag says “I forgive you child. I apologize for what will happen.”
-We’re swallowed by the vortex.
-VHP took notes while I was blacked out, revealing that we were led here by the animal people, but beyond that the rest of the notes say “Let me in” on repeat for several pages.
-As we come to, it feels like we’re in a void and falling. Dr. Moreau says “Oh, you’re finally awake! Quick, grab hands!” as we’re falling through a star filled void.
-We see a pink sphere in the distance that we inherently know is Truetopia. We see another that’s verdant green, which Squiggly, Joseph, and I know is where the Stag originally came from.
-Dr. Moreau tries to get us to think about the green sphere, but says focusing on a nearby purple crystal first might help.
-This process we’re doing is called translating, he tells us (recursion jumping?)
-We drift toward the purple crystal and find ourselves stable there.
-Hans tries to think very hard about hugging all of the floating other people around us rather than the green sphere, and manages to grab 14 of them as his arms stretch and expand quite horrifically.
-Moreau scolds him, saying “Focus on yourself, if you get lost out here you’re lost forever.”
-He gives us weird flesh pus pods (*vomit*) to eat and they help us
-We touch the edge of the green sphere and are pulled inside. When we awake, we all have taken on distinct features. Squiggly gets bright feathers and a reddish appearance. Vance gets white feathering and beakish features. Joseph gets horns and bullish features. Amati loses his head (literally) and his skin grays. Hans has a massive beard and gets a bright, fluffy cap and coat. Moreau has pallid skin and stitches across his face, but looks like the idioms (mythological creatures) that applied to each of us did not fully apply to him.
-Gregor is an Ent, Samantha is a siren, and Richard is a satyr.
-Moreau explains that the “forgetting and loneliness” is called alienation. We’re not meant to be in the space between like that, or here in this place even, and our beings are rejecting it.
-His job was originally to research the recursion (Truetopia I think) and stabilize travel between recursions, until his failed experiment with the Nightmare Stag.
-He explains our recursion is on the brink of collapse, and that the space between recursions is like the scrub, full of danger, and the recursions themselves are like villages, all in a semi-condescending way.
-People, when entering a recursion that isn’t their native one, are forcibly conformed to the laws and rules of that recursion, hence our appearances (unless you use a gate like OSR had).
-This is what happened to the Stag, and he used what happened to it to learn how to make a mutation (the pustule thing he gave us) to mitigate travel between recursions, without a Gate.
-It’s something like narrative bleed, where if you believe something in a story hard enough, its like it becomes reality. This is especially so in the Chaos Sphere (the place between recursions?), where Hans was able to stretch his arms out for the big hug.
-In this respect, Moreau himself abides by the laws of “mad science” when he enters a recursion, and is thus able to maybe impose that fact on any recursion (does this subvert the physical need to assimilate to that recursion’s laws?)
-Truetopia was created by OSR with the intent of making people “true believers”, which is why most people there are puppet-like (important GM note: this is Moreau’s thoughts, and are thus biased as such. This is not fully true, just his vision of things).
-Only those who are awake (have a soul/are sparked as Moreau says) can translate between recursions at all.
-Last time OSR tried to spark a group of people, the entire research team that attempted it (in another recursion, not Truetopia) were killed by the people there who branded them as liars.
-The creatures Hans brought with us are natively from the recursion we’re in.
-Moreau was trying to stabilize Truetopia at first, but has since stopped.
-Because only sparked people can exist outside of recursions, if Truetopia collapses, everyone who isn’t sparked will disappear.
-The Clock Tower speeds up time to produce more Chosen faster, and is causing the instability (I called it).
-The Cult of the Broken Clockwork is an orchestrated phenomenon by someone from OSR to collapse the recursion in order to get all the awakened OSR (presumably all of them) out of there (this is maybe Major McNeily doing this). Despite his research being the antithesis of this, Moreau is helping them because seeing the recursion collapse would be valuable data to him, just like seeing it stabilized would be valuable (maybe if we can find a way to stabilize it we can sway him to our side?)
-OSR had a Truetopian whose power was to maintain gates between recursions who is now home (maybe dead, Moreau has presumed as much)
-OSR made Truetopia using a Reality Seed, but Moreau doesn’t know much about it as it's outside his area of expertise.
-While the Clock Tower is causing the collapse, Moreau doesn’t know why.
-The longer we stay in this foreign recursion, the more hostile it becomes. The Stag is here, but still wrong for some reason.
-According to Moreau, the Stag was bleeding into Truetopia on its own. The tears from Truetopia to this recursion (which is a hodgepodge of European and northern African mythological creatures) sucks things from here to Truetopia like a vacuum.
-We start moving towards the giant tree in the center of the recursion to first recover my head before finding a portal and getting out of here.
-We brave some vines possessed by the Nightmare Stag as Hans blows them up.
-As we reach the tree, Joseph climbs it, bringing along Moreau and Vance. They spot the bird carrying my head and a portal to exit from in the far distance past a mountain.
-We climb down and start heading to intercept the bird which looks like it's going to drop my head to crack it open like a crab or clam (talk about a headache)
-I try to slow the Stag down by negotiating with it, asking it to not kill Moreau until he can help find a way to stabilize Truetopia. It responds “Only the flesh of the one who crushed me can undo what’s been done to me. I’m sorry child, but I cannot stop doing what I must.”
-Richard saves me while we’re climbing the mountain and I lose my footing, dislocating his arm in the process (I owe him a drink.)
-As we get to the top of the mountain, the bird carrying my head flies over and I bite its foot, causing it to drop my head, and after almost fumbling, Squiggly catches it using Mr. Fluffybear.
-As we’re descending the mountain towards the portal, Joseph causes an avalanche to slow the Stag and its band of monsters and Vance embraces his griffon nature and summons little hawk shields to protect us.
-I fully embrace being a Dullahan, summoning a nightmare with my burner phone cypher and grabbing Moreau before diving off a cliff into the portal alongside Hans, Joseph, and Squiggly.
-Vance stays behind to hold the Nightmare Stag off, and makes a deal with it, communing with it and allowing himself to serve as its conduit. He gets a cypher for it called the Amulet of the Stag.
-Once we’re back in the Chaos Sphere, Squiggly uses her safety capsule cypher that Rose gave her and she fixed to get us through safely without taking any further alienation.
-Those of us who embraced the idioms more than once remain a part of them. I have to get back to Spencer on my stuff since I committed to the bit too hard. -Moreau gives us each a pustule, called a Skill Pod, that for one session gives us the skill Fractal Surfing and one skill relevant to the scene we eat it in until the end of the session.