Recaps

The Paradox Sea, Titaria

[Missing full recap.]

Plot Events:

• Party snuck onto a Korotek Cargo Ship

• Party snuck into the Korkotek Idea Farm

• Party took over said idea farm w/ the help of Lillian Sparkh and a celestial by the name of Ayun.

Aurelia, Great Sakuria

[Missing full recap.]

Plot Events:

• Party enjoyed their stay at a local hotel in Aurelia, Great Sakuria.

• Johnathun provided the party with coordinates, stating he has found a potential entrance to the Apocra Science Subterrainean Complex, where Infen may possible be.

• Upon reaching the coordinates via Taxi, the party heard an emergency alert warning of Temporal Radiation in Goldsoul County, which happened to be exactly where they were.

• The party found a keycard to a shed under a pile of old ruins. The shed had an elevator that lead to the complex.

• The first sector of the complex had several corpses, killed by exposure to intense Temporal Radiation.

• The party found a room with an unlocked control panel, and disabled power flow to the Chronosync Experiment as well as inadvertently rebooted the Mainframe for Apocra Research Central Intelligence (MARCI), which offered some guidance as to what to do next.

• The party made their way to the Chronosync Experiment chamber, where they encountered a few Temporal Remnants, otherwise nicknamed "Time Ghosts."

• The party defeated the Temporal Remnants and destroyed the Chronoshard in the center of the room, causing a wave of temporal energy to transform the surrounding room. The party was mostly unaffected thanks to Xaros' anchoring spell which he had learned from Mirai.

• The party then made their way to the lower levels of the complex, as instructed by MARCI. There, they found the Secondary Power Reserves and disabled them. That unlocked the powered doors to the Central Power Generator. 

• The Central Power Generator was surrounded by bloodied corpses, metal scraps, and spellform remnants. Standing in the center was Infen, who was attempting to contain yet another Outer Rift which had broken out.

• After an intense fight with Doxacorp drones pouring out of the Outer Rift, Infen managed to seal the rift with the help of the party.

• The party was then asked to come with Infen to her home, where she would discuss as much as she could with them.

• Infen told the party that much of what she knows she either isn't allowed to tell the party. She claims that she knows some knowledge so dangerous it could kill someone just by telling them.

• Infen agreed to fund the party, provide them with shelter, and continue keeping in touch with them so long as they agreed to help her with a few tasks.

• The party voted to travel to the Korotek Idea Farm in the Paradox Sea, of which Infen needed to overthrow in order to set up a base of operations. 

• Infen temporarily disabled Achilles in order to perform research on him.

Ionia, Iceburrgh

[Written by Dave Bowman]

Hello! In addition to my standard notes, I have decided to keep logs of our journey as well. It is Trini the 22nd (fourth day with this group), we started today with a trip to a convenience store that was part of a chain called thingamaton where we picked up some supplies and weapons and talked a bit to the clerk. The clerk, Tom, apparently worked at the nearby Apocra Science Center, where their research into miniaturizing spaces led to some sort of electromagnetic pulse being released. We made the science center our next stop, which was primarily empty outside of a device at the back of the room which led into some sort of pocket dimension. Inside the pocket dimension, it seemed one of the locals got trapped inside, luckily we managed to free ourselves and him. We headed to the nearby tempest guild which one of the members of the group, Xaros Voidrisel seems to be part of. We were told by Mirai Lucinadottir that to find this "Infen" person from the other universe, we would need to find our current universes infen which has been missing for quite a while. 

That concludes this entry.

The Redline, Verstössen-Tal, Khaorift

(Missing full recap.)

Plot Events:

• Party boarded a Korotek Redline train, part of of the Stormpiercer Line.

• Party encountered Johnathun's second cousin, Barrin Nightwood.

• Party encounted Mirai Lucinadottir, a high-ranking tempest guild member.

• Party was given Temporal Readings by Mirai, of which failed when attempting to read Achilles'.

• While in the Arcade area of the train, a Outer Rift opened, eventually tearing the train in half, causing it to derail and crash.

• Barrin then cast a Darkmind on Achilles, attempting to trap the party in Khaorift and steal Achilles.

• The party fought Barrin, knocking him unconscious and breaking the Darkmind. However, Barrin was put into a coma and Achilles was not responding.

• The party used a Waymarker that Barrin had, opening a portal to Barrin's home in Ionia.

• The party was greeted by Barrin's wife, Minara, who promptly took Barrin to a vault in their basement and connected him, Achilles, and the party to a Bytespace.

• While in the Bytespace, Achilles revealed that he was fighting back his supressed / glitched memories, and that they needed to find someone known as "Infen", but not the Infen from "this reality". 

• Barrin's conscious mind was found, and after witnessing parts of Achilles' memories, decided that he would sacrifice his own life to save Achilles.

• Barrin sacrificed himself, and the party broke the news to his wife and Johnathun.

• The party then left and headed for a hotel.

New Kyori, Zxenopolis, Eternia

Blorp eventually greeted us with some reheated burritos from a run-down restaurant on the surface, and as we ate, the party all sort of bonded together. Ash Davies got the rest of us by name, and Encode did too, though Encode and Achilles may have bonded faster thanks to their shared artificial nature.

Nightwood didn't let the burritos digest before he had us moving. Out on Sarael Road, parked flush against the sewer exit like it had always belonged there, sat the Burrglith-3. State-of-the-art dragonmetal armor, Nightwood Industries stamp, the kind of truck that turns a checkpoint into a formality. We piled in, all of us. Nightwood, Achilles, Ash, Niklas, Encode, Xaros, and Dave. Then Nightwood started up the truck and headed for the Research Center.

After about a 25 minute drive full of chatter and arguing over the music, we arrived. The front gate wanted an ID. Nightwood gave it his, and the gate opened seemingly without suspicion. We parked outside the Visitor Center's entrance, and that was where Johnathun finally spelled out the shape of the thing. Get an elevator keycard and take the elevator to the basement. He had a waymarker on him, good for exactly one portal, one direction, one time, and told us to activate it once we were in the basement so that he and Achilles could sneak in.

Inside, the receptionist never looked up from their EternoSlate. They handed over an elevator keycard like they were passing us a napkin, not one question in them. We had our way up and our way down, no fuss. So naturally we heard the word "pizza" and went the "wrong" direction first.

Floor two. A pizza party, of all things, humming along while a heist walked through the middle of it. Nightwood was practically vibrating with urgency and we were loading slices into our hands. We ate, we grabbed a few for the road, and we left once the looks started lasting a bit too long. We just had to make sure we weren't about to raid a Bytespace on an empty stomach if we could.

Down in the basement, the servers stood in their cold rows, and this was where the real work started. We used the waymarker, opening a portal for Nightwood and Achilles to step through. Almost immediately, Nightwood hooked Achilles straight into the racks, and then Encode leeched onto Achilles, opening a road for Dave to dive down into the machine's mind. Nightwood then used a special spell scroll he had made and pushed us all through Achilles' mind and into the Auratachi Bytespace.

We all awoke in the Bytespace, which promptly demanded we solve a puzzle before anything else. Blocks and shapes, shoved and turned until the pattern agreed with itself, and the first barrier was opened.

The second region served as yet another defense mechanism keeping us from reaching the primary Bytespace. Five Anticogni, Auratachi's own guard-minds, came for us. We put them down, but not before one of them got its fingers into Encode's thoughts and read the whole plan off him like a receipt. That was the moment the job stopped being quiet. Somewhere up in the waking world, guards were being told exactly what and where we were and exactly what we'd come to take.

In the third region, we were greeted by the sound of radio static, and Johnathun Nightwood's voice cutting out saying something about an elevator and guards, before quickly ending with a loud gunshot sound. We were lucky this region didn't want a fight. It wanted six buttons pressed in the same instant, and there were only five of us. Xaros solved what shouldn't have been solvable, blinking through a sliver of time to be in two moments at once, and the last barrier gave way.

Beyond it was a wide, quiet room with a brain made of light projected in the middle of it, and it spoke to us like a clerk who'd been expecting the appointment. It introduced itself to us as Tachara, an AI developed by Auratachi Corporation designed to store and process vast amount of data collected by the Research Division.

So we started asking questions. Nightwood had given us the words to say, and one by one Tachara opened its drawers.

On Shadowsphere, it told us Auratachi was investigating an outer rift in the Xanoira Region of the Umbral Skies, working hand-in-hand with SENTRI, the locals' own research institute, who'd helped them slip past the Antiemergence Field the Shadow God had nailed over that whole realm. So the footage Ekks bled for was real, and worse, it was sanctioned.

On the pod, it named the thing Rift Anomaly #0134, seen near an Auratachi hovercraft in Unnerem, and said plainly it had come out of the rift itself. Whatever the pod carried, the record had it locked behind encryption, and then had it destroyed shortly after by something the report could only call an Alephegarrian.

On Achilles, it got stranger. Auratachi claimed no record of anyone by that name, only an Eternian bounty, five thousand Aurumbit, out for a "Beat Up Cognibyte, Red Frame." No KDNA behind the bounty, no Khryonic Signature, nothing to say who wanted him and why. We pushed again, and the second answer landed heavier than the first. Achilles was Rift Anomaly #0114. In Auratachi's own words, extremely dangerous, and to be destroyed on sight. Then it offered, ever so helpfully, to scan our memories and take everything we knew for itself. We did not take it up on that.

On the rifts, it gave us the word the researchers had started using when "rift" stopped being frightening enough. Boundary Failures. Spacetime going soft in patches, torn open by a flood of antikhryons pouring out of one enormous wound near the Chronobridge. The Great Boundary Failure. The Mother Rift. Every small tear in the world was just runoff from that one.

And on the lockdown, it told us the lie and then the truth beneath it. Eternia had sealed its borders and told everyone a plague was crawling in from the neighbors. There is no plague. What there is, is a planet dying from the inside, Eraea's core coming apart, and a government quietly starving its own economy to shovel the money into a Core Stabilization Taskforce that most people will never be allowed to know exists.

We had our answers, so we promptly pulled out of the Bytespace and awaited the horrors of the real world.

We woke to find our bodies dragged into a corner and stacked like cargo, and Nightwood on his knees with an Auratachi Task Force Leader's weapon at his head. Niklas didn't debate it. He put the man down where he stood. Around us lay a handful of EternoTech security drones, already dead, and Achilles claimed one of the husks for itself, tucking it away to help build Encode a better shell sometime later down the line.

Nightwood had the exit barricaded, and for a long moment that felt like the end of the story. Cornered in a basement, the whole Center waking up around us, no way out that anyone could see. Then Achilles, who had been quietly chewing on everything it pulled out of those servers, went still, and said, "Oh. I see now. I understand my purpose."

What followed was the most Achilles sentence any of us had heard yet. Good news, it could open a rift. Bad news, a rift like that runs on a human sacrifice. Good news again, there happened to be a fresh body lying right over there.

So it spent the Task Force Leader's soul on a doorway. The rift tore open into a place that resembled none of the realms we knew, an in-between with two more rifts already hanging in it and a piece of technology sitting nearby, seemingly related to the pod that had carried Achilles into our lives in the first place. One rift looked back the way we came, onto Nightwood's truck, now most likely considered evidence and thick with guards. The other opened onto a strange, empty road in Khaorift. It wasn't much of a choice.

We jumped into the rift.

Khaorift took us in on the Kandkenden Outskirts of Verstössen-Tal, a wasteland with nothing in it for miles in any direction. Thought, we didn't need to stay for long. A dragon found us, calling itself Narah. It offered us a lift to a nearby Stormpiercer Station, and named its price, a sliver of Ash's soul and her apprenticeship on top of it.

We were tired, we were stranded, and the horizon was empty, so we accepted the deal, and Narah allowed us to ride on its back. We soon checked into a local hotel, which luckily accepted Aurumbits as currency, something Nightwood was not short on. We finally rested.

New Kyori Sewers, Zxenopolis, Eternia

We slept in the sewers that night. You get used to the place faster than you'd think, especially with Blorp's shockingly effective air fresheners. By the time we had all woken up, we'd stopped feeling entirely like strangers. Blorp and Nightwood has cooked us up a surprisingly decent meal and had setup a small little area with a portable screen to watch the news on. It seems we got lucky, as the authorities weren't looking for us specifically, just whatever robot came out of the pod that had crashed. 

Morning had also brought us some new faces. Someone by the name of Ash Davies, human, seemed to be somewhat untrusting of technology. A fair viewpoint to have nowadays, so we didn't judge. 

But it was Nightwood who got things moving again. He'd noticed the datashard Niklas carrioed, the little black-market sliver, and asked to scan it (though it wasn't much of an ask). Niklas let him, and they found a rogue AI on the shard. Something that predated most AIs nowadays, likely pre-Emergence. The AI was titled "Dr. Feeelgood" and ran on a KSEXE entitled "Encode". 

Nightwood told us he had something. A mechanical skeleton, probably some salvage from a previos mission, sitting in storage with no mind to run it. He figured the AI on the shard could host it and give the voice a body. We watched him work, and watched the entity on the shard pour itself into the frame, stand up, and look around like it had been waiting for a very, very long time. It called itself by its own KSEXE identifier, Encode.

After that, Nightwood didn't waste any time. He'd been scratching his head and blueprinting the purpose we could serve for him since the moment he saw us dragging a scorched robot behind us, and now, with the crew rested and a new voice given a body, he finally laid it out. 

He started by introducing us formally to Ekks. The shadowmorph hadn't said much since we arrived, just watched the robot with a curious look. Now, he gathered us around an EternoSlate and inserted a datashard into it. It displayed a recording, a recording of Shadowsphere, evidenced by the way the lighting behaved unnaturally. Rifts were tearing open, wider than anything we'd seen on the EternoScape feeds before, the footage shaky and jarring before it cut to a static screen of a single frame. A vast, pulsating rift shattered open in the Umbral Skies. An Auratachi hovercraft hovering beside it. And next to that, a scorched pod, the same kind of pod we'd seen just yesterday.

Nightwood shortly began explaining that he'd sent a crew into Shadowsphere a while back. Good people, strong mercs, the kind you send when you need a job done right. Ekks was the only one who walked back out, and that shard was most of what he had to show for the whole journey. Getting into Shadowsphere was hard enough given their anti-emergent curse, and getting back out was even harder. But the footage proved Auratachi had managed to not only get their way into Shadowsphere, but that they'd also been furthering their research and experimentation on the rifts, and that they were somehow involved in whatever Achilles crawled out of. Both Ekks Omux and Johnathun Nightwood III wanted and deserved answers. But you'd only find such answers in Auratachi's own systems, deep in their EternoScape networks. 

So that was the job. Get to the local Auratachi Research Center, enter their localized Bytescape, and pull two things. Whatever Auratachi knew about those rifts and how they're involved with Shadowsphere, and anything at all on the record about Achilles, the pods, or where they came from. The reason he wanted us specifically was because of the very robot we're seeking information about. Apparently, Achilles has some sort of unique technology that can bypass a majority of the entry barriers most corporations put in place on their Bytescape access.

He warned us of the dangers. The whole of the New Kyori Enforcement Alliance and possibly even SEEKERA (Sakurian-Eternian Emergent Knowledge and Energy Research Alliance) were probably looking for Achilles. Our way in was also a target on our backs. Getting into the Auratachi Research Center was even harder, but Nightwood had something almost nobody else in this city had; contacts. Burrgian ones, government ones. He told us that he could give us a ride on his Nightwood Industries Burrglith-3, a state-of-the-art armored truck which, with his status, could get us into the visitor's lobby of the Research Center. All we had to do was actually get to a dataport, not be spotted by anyone, and steal the information without being noticed. Easy, right?

Nightwood told us that if we succeed, he can grant us an exit out of Eternia to almost anywhere else in Eraea. He also said he'd pay us more than we could ever imagine should we succeed.

New Kyori Outskirts, Zxenopolis, Eternia

It's been exactly one-hundred and fifty years since Aerdak was destroyed. One-hundred and fifty years since the Emergence began to reshape our world into something none of us could have ever imagined.

Those who are cursed with long life tell it to us like it's some kind of fairy tale or mystical event, and honestly, they're probably not too far from the truth. A lot has happened in the last 150 years, but the short of it is this:

For longer than anyone kept count, the world was a small, mostly quiet place up until the day the Chordosians attacked Cherinia -- an event known as the Chordosian Zero Day. Little did we know that one event in history would cause a butterfly effect that would permanetly alter the way we view the concept of an era in time. For a short few years, the world was in chaos, both literally and metaphorically, until one day, a group of heroes decided to step up and fight back. After what we can only imagine to be a nearly impossible journey, they managed to defeat Chordos and return the world to peace. That was until they discovered Aerdak.

Aerdak hoarded every scrap of real knowledge and every piece of true technology the rest of us were never meant to touch. KAE, they called it. Forbidden knowledge locked away so the world would stay slow, quiet, and submissive. Then, a hundred and fifty years ago, the same heroes that once saved the world decided to put Aerdak in the ground, and the gates were opened.

It all came out at once. Hundreds, if not thousands of years of progress crammed into a century and a half. We went from oil lamps to Delta-Gamma Energy Cells, from horse carriages to the Eternian Hypertrak, from slow rumors to the EternoScape, faster than any world was ever meant to grow. Cities across the world shot up from the dirt overnight, transforming brick and stone to chrome and neon and an ever-growing debt. Half of us walk around with more metal than meat, and the other half can't afford to eat. Every nation that got its hands on the most powerful Emergent Technology wanted to keep it that way, so they capitalized on the Paradox Sea and ensured nobody else could grow to their level of power. Great Sakuria, The Republic of Iceburrgh, Eternia, United Stellaria, S.R. Sgamora... all sitting on their tech with their teeth bared, none of them brave enough to shoot first, all of them waiting. 

The part they don't mention in the fairy tale? Aerdak wasn't only hoarding knowledge, no, they were keeping something together. Once they were gone, it almost seemed like reality itself had lost a piece of its own memory. That's what we think the rifts are; tears in the world where reality forgets how to be itself. They've been opening up all over for years now, most of them only for a few seconds before scabbing over and closing, lest some poor bastard get too curious and approach one.

We were enjoying ourselves in a small Scraper's Bar in the outskirts of New Kyori, drinking, eating, and looking for gigs, the only reliable source of income in this world unless you're a corporate sell-out or lucky enough to have been born in a part of this world that's smart enough to avoid Emergent Tech entirely or actually care for their citizens.

Suddenly, we all heard it, a crack, a loud explosion, similar to what we've been hearing in the various datastream clips on EternoScape. We decided to check it out, since to be honest, seeing one of those rifts in person sounded cool, and who knows, maybe we could've gotten treasure.

But, it wasn't a rift. It was a capsule. Some kind of pod, made of a deep red metal, scorched black and half-buried in the crater it had dug in the streets. There were some 'forcers scattered around it, four or five of them, already dead. Down in the wreck, folded up and twitching, was a single mechanical figure which at the time resembled a crumpled up piece of scrap from Hellspace itself. But alas, it was still moving, still trying, and still scanning. It called itself "Achilles."

We didn't get long to look. The bodies started moving, pale things crawling up out of their bodies. Slick and grey and hungry, "nihilslime" as one of our PDL's mentioned. We fought our way clear, stuffed those slimes into a cop car, threw a makeshift fire-bomb into it, and ran for the sewers after the slimy fellows decided to turn into some horrid fire elemental monstrosity. We grabbed the robot, yanked open the grate on the sidewalk, and jumped down.

We made it down into the dark, smelly, and uncomfortably warm waters of the underground sewers. That's where we met Pot, a Xenocryptia; jittery, fast-talking, and living in a pile of gods know what. It told us we couldn't stay out in the open carrying a fancy clanker around, and gave us the location of a nearby criminal hideout. We followed the instructions until we arrived at a small hideout, the kind of place people end up when the real world has no room left for them.

The closest thing the place had to a leader or boss was a Burrgian called "Big Blorp", though there was nothing big about him. He was small, even for a Burrgian. He looked over his friends and allies the way most people would look after a stray cat. Blorp explained how he had taken care of abandoned children and took them in as his own, raising them to fight against the systems that had hurt them. 

There was a plasmoid drifting near the back of the place, shifting colors and trying to blend in despite the new faces. Hyrae, from the Dark Sea. Used to run cargo through the shipyards until the lockdown sealed Eternia shut and left every dockhand in the city with nothing to move and nowhere to move it. 

Then there was Glummy. It took us a second to figure out what exactly we were looking at, because a Xenocrawl Walker (or as the Burrgians call them, "glumbugs") is usually the kind of thing you're supposed to run from. Flesh-eating, mindless monsters that even the most joyous of Burrgians fear. Except this one said hello. Apparently, somebody - likely Pot - had put an intelligence chip in him, and now there was a person behind the layers of flesh. Gross, but interesting to say the least.

Off in the corner, not talking to anybody, was a shadowmorph named Ekks Omux. He worked for a man named Johnathun Nightwood, and you could tell just by looking at him that he'd seen something he hadn't quite finished comprehending yet. He didn't introduce himself. He just watched the robot we'd dragged in and never broke line of sight.

We met Nightwood himself soon enough. Nightwood is a family name almost all of Eraea recognizes at this point. His ancestor, Jimmy Nightwoof, was once of the old heroes, a president of Iceburrgh during the start of the Emergence, and a savior of sorts to his people. Johnathun's blood buys him doors most of us will never get near, government insiders, special deals, reputation. He carried himself like an average person, which in a way probably made him more similar to his ancestor than any of his other well-off relatives. Every so often he'd take a dose of something Blorp had cooked for him. He explained that he was exposed to some pretty potent chemicals and strong radiation as a part of his old job working for Auratachi's research division, and Blorp's the only one who can keep it from killing him outright. Maybe that's why a name as powerful as Nightwood is keeping company with criminals.