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Cassandra is resting in her bed, being tended by her staff. Some man looked in, and she tried to follow him, but was not allowed to leave her bed.
Cassandra has reacquired language skills, and is no longer switching randomly and unconsciously between languages each day.
Her tutor enters her bedchamber, bows, asks "and how are you today?" They chat. The tutor tests Cassandra's language skills, and appears pleased at her progress.
Cassandra: "When am I going to be able
to get out of bed?"
tutor: "When your legs have grown back."
Cassandra flips back the blanket - she
has legs.
tutor: "Wow - get out of bed!"
Cassandra rotates and puts her feet on floor. It's cold. Using her hands, she manages to lever herself upright. Unfortunately, her legs cannot support her weight and her arms are about to give way. She sits back down, exhausted, and gets back into bed.
The tutor informs Cassandra's staff that none of them saw that. They agree.
Cassandra asks who that guy is that looked in on her earlier. The tutor refuses to answer, saying that she isn't to be worried with anything that is going on, so she can devote all of her attention to healing. Cassandra is annoyed by that. They chat.
Cassandra: "So, what do I do here
normally?"
He answers sarcastically, "You spout in strange languages, groan a lot,
..."
Cassandra: "When I'm not ill."
tutor: "Nothing. You just sit here and be well."
They spar verbally.
Cassandra is instructed to figure out her hand, without looking at it. It takes her the better part of a day to do so.
After succeeding, Cassandra tries to get out of bed again, but her staff doesn't let her get that close to the edge of the bed. Her tutor returns. Cassandra describes her hand to him, and he tells her how to focus on her hand, to make it stronger. They work on her other hand, down her arms and legs. About six months pass, but C has no time referents to focus. She's done with all of the muscle groups, including internal organs, and knows her body much better now. He gives her permission to stand up.
She swings her legs over the edge, no problem. She puts feet on floor, no problem. Standing up is a bit tricky, but she manages. Unfortunately, walking isn't there yet.
He throws a small round ball at her. She tries to catch it, and is surprised by her failure. He orders her back into bed. He sits her half-up in bed, hands her three balls, and proceeds to teach her how to juggle, starting with one ball. Three weeks later, she can keep five balls up in the air, but hasn't gotten out of bed again. After she can keep five balls in the air, he invites her out of bed to work on her legs. She stands up and starts juggling, at first staggering around the room, but quickly learning how to compensate. Soon she is walking around without a problem. Her tutor takes her into another room, and teaches her how to use a bathroom.
Cassandra asks when she will be told where she is; he won't tell her, that's up to the next instructor.
There's something about running water that bothers her. She washes and gets clean. Some of the fuzzies are standing next to the tub, handing her tutor things, "here, try this!", occasionally including bathroom tiles. He takes her out of the bath and into a wardrobe, and has her try on lots and lots of clothing. It all fits well, but none of it brings back memories, or seems more familiar than any of the others. He takes her into another room, containing a big rack with lots of round tubes in it. He opens one up and unrolls something. It's a book, and she remembers having read it before.
He points. "Bathroom. Library. Bedroom. Now you will heal your mind."
Her next tutor appears -- it's a librarian. The bird-like man, her old tutor, bows and leaves, along with all of the maids. She is alone with her librarian.
Stormy is very high up on a hill, standing on a balcony. He is accompanied by five other Stormies, one Illyana, one Jimmy, one Rain, one Fiona de la Mer, one Melchizedik, and thirty-four arch-mages.
The Stormy Collective -- resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
All of them are staring at two spheres - one containing Fiona, and another containing Bleys. They study them. They appear identical, in every way, shape, and form. There are massive amounts of energy being generated on the spot and then being used to keep something inside the sphere, and that something inside is resisting being kept inside. It's a truly massive force - if this were done to Stormy, he doesn't think he would survive it, unless he started out with a running head start and a pocketful, and even that is uncertain. If this force wasn't being resisted stongly, it would probably create a black hole on the spot.
Stormy grows until he is ten miles long and in dragon form, and coils around the top third of the mountain. He sets some of the other Stormies to creating magical sinks.
Bronwyn and Gerry are off trying to find the others.
He studies how the power in the spheres is being generated. It is being generated from the basic element of being, is being generated because it is what it is, and it seems fairly active - it may be aware of its surroundings.
Nothing is leaving the sphere that the collective can detect.
He's not certain if the magical signature is inherent in the globe as a living being, due to the creator of the being, or a result of what it is doing. It doesn't necessarily match a Clarissa signature.
Stormy asks Melk if Illyana can leave and re-enter easily whatever he has done here. She could leave more easily than she could return. What have you done? "I'm not sure if there's been a language invented quite yet to describe it - I'm working on it."
Illyana takes a sphere to her home, Limbo, which consists of a sweet apartment that is the sum total of her dimension. She returns -- you were right and wrong. It got stronger.
Could it be acting on the potential of what isn't here? Could be.
Stormy asks Fiona de la Mer to protect Illyana. He gives Illyana the Bleys-sphere again, asks her to go to a Chaos-sphere (the Sea of Chance), and gives her another set of protections that are tailored for Bleys. She returns almost the same time she left - it wasn't Chaos. It was a vast matrix of probabilities, but it's fixed. Melk? It seems to be a function of the stasis. He'd have to go there to change it. He takes Fiona de la Mer and the sphere, and returns the instant they left with both. Nope, he couldn't change the conditions there. That's how he gets around in the Sea of Chance normally.
Stormy asks Melk why what he is doing is helping? It allows the older looped Stormy to exist (the 10 mile long dragon), and allows his help and company to continue.
If the sphere isn't opened by the time he goes, both looped Stormies will go away. The sphere seems to have caused that, somehow. They seem to be hooked to him. Stormy tracks it down. It seems to be tied to his lack-of-being-influenced by time function.
Melk goes off to see when the hook first attached. It attached to Stormy's lack of timestream when he first touched it, or some time soon after that. He looks at Fiona, she looks at him. It's tied to her, too. It isn't tied to Illyana, Melk, Rain, or Jimmy. It is only tied to Fiona and the two looped Stormies.
Stormy tries to cut the link to himself, using Dagnir i Dagnir, a spell,... there are now four Stormies in the room. Still two spheres. The spheres are about twenty-five percent again their size in diameter. There was a clap of thunder from displaced air as the dragon disappeared, a Stormy appeared, and Melk disappeared.
Malachai, after being entertained in the monkey shadow, staggers back to his room. He wakes up. He's there, Serena is there, a couple of turtle-sized furry creatures are there, and there's a human shape huddled on the floor. The humanoid is looks solid, middle-aged, covered with soot, and thoroughly charred. He's well muscled, unarmed, and wearing clothing with low-tech fasteners. Malachai gets up, dresses, arms himself, stands between the guy and Serena, and wakes her up. He hands her her dress, which she takes under the covers and reappears dressed. Malachai nudges the guy, but he doesn't awaken. He's very solid - not up there with Gerard, but possibly a Random. Despite a few charred stubs of face-hair, his head-hair is mostly intact. His skin does not seem burned, and his clothing seems okay. "HELLO!" No response. He seems more unconscious than asleep, seems to be breathing, and has a strong and slow pulse. Malachai smells the residue from smoke, and it appears to have been generated by a man-made explosive.
The Wand of Not Yet is still saying not yet. The guy's breathing speeds up, so Malachai touches him with the wand. The explosion knocks the guy back into the wall and unconsciousness. Malachai puts the wand away.
Serena goes for breakfast. Malachai props the guy up, and a piece of paper falls out from his shirt. It's a receipt for his belt and pouch from the Thieves Guild. How very civilized of them...
Serena returns with breakfast, followed by some chittering monkeys.
The guy wakes up during breakfast, and starts doing system checks while faking being unconscious.
The dragon knocks on the wall and pokes its head up to the window. "Good morning! ... who's your guest?" "We don't know." The dragon discusses the penalties for freeloading off someone around here (being sentenced to the mines), and the guy stops faking it and opens his eyes. Malachai offers him a glass of water. He sips it, then quaffs the whole thing.
Malachai and the dragon chat, and the guy talks. "I shall explain. It began as a simple experiment..." - he tried to reverse time. He tells about precautions, and as he talks, the walls start to fade, Malachai asks him to stop it - "Oh, of course" They're in a lab.
The dragon is in chains in a corner of the room. Serena is in a piece of amber (the material, not the place) by the wall. There are what appear to be silver, poor quality chains around Malachai's wrists and ankles. He has Galantine by his side. "We're your prisoners?" "No... I need test subjects." "I refuse to be a test subject" The guy goes on about how lesser beings (like Malachai) are destined to be used by superior beings such as himself, until Malachai draws his sword, slamming the guy in the solar plexus with the hilt, the chains deforming around him. The guy drops to the ground, gasping for breath.
Malachai hears the sound of a pause over his left shoulder. There's a gentleman sitting there, looking sorcerous. The first guy was putting on airs, but this guy looks powerful.
"What's going on here?, Malachai asks the newcomer. "I was hoping to ask you the same thing. This guy started mucking with my realm then came here in an accident."
The dragon has already bent his way out of his confinements, being careful not to deform the chains too much.
"You, of course, are Prince Malachai of Amber." "I'm afraid that you have the better of me..." "I keep track of what's going on on that side of the world."
The stranger is keeping Serena out of time, since she can't breath in her current situation. It would be a shame for Malachai to lose the future mother of his heirs - Flora has been announcing their impending wedding for some time.
Malachai asks for the stranger's name and he declines, stating a preference to remain anonymous.
The guy currently gasping for breath was performing a forbidden experiment by the rules of existence, which attracted his attention. He was about to find himself in a state similar to that of his cousin in the garden... Connor? Yes...
"Where is this place? Somewhere in Shadow?" "Yes" - the stranger gives the coordinates of their present location. It's in the same general vicinity as where he started, definitely on the order side of Ygg.
It seems that this guy - the stranger, not the mage - hasn't settled on a shape, for shadowy like things flicker across his face.
He states that possibly he could use Connor to get back into the state where he once was.
Malachai: "Someone once told me that I shouldn't be there yet."
The GM is a liar. Melk is a liar, too.
They chat about turning time backwards - it would require leaving a Sphere of Continuity, such as entering the Sea of Chance.
The stranger thinks that Oberon is thinking about the problem in the short term. Malachai thinks that would imply that the stranger was long-lived, even by the terms of those he tends to associate with.
The dragon is very patiently sitting next to the coughing mage with one claw over him, waiting for him to awaken.
The stranger goes over to the mage's notes, and starts scribbling questions, notes, and corrections in the margins.
Malachai shatters the now-hardened amber, and Serena remains in mid-air. The stranger looks over at him, grins, then Serena falls. Malachai catches her.
They chat about the disposition of the mage.
The dragon takes a bite out of a lab bench. "How shoddy... it's just wood, painted to look like marble" The dragon stomps a hole in the floor, and then stomps the mage down into the hole.
They search the lab... lots of exploding things around here, lots of high-tech stuff. The guy's survival rate seems to be pretty high given the number of explosions that have left their mark in this laboratory, but his clue factor seems to be lacking. Malachai trashes the place.
Malachai asks the dragon if he would like to get them back, and the dragon decides that Malachai should get them back since he doesn't know of any paths around here. The dragon smashes a door into the wall, and they head out. The dragon smashes its tail into the wall three or four times then asks Serena to press on that corner of the house. She does so, and the house collapses in onto itself.
Malachai lights the dragon's pipe, Serena and he mount up, and they shadow-walk back. It's not a very long walk. Upon their return, Dapple comes running up and butts against the dragon briefly, who protests that his tough image would be harmed if anyone saw a cat nuzzling up against him. Serena dismounts and plays with Dapple briefly. There's no sign of Tazik or Bucephalus. Malachai goes up to a guard, who puts out word to look for Tazik and a horse, and recommends that they check with the local knackers.
Serena and Malachai go to a knacker's yard to look for Bucephalus - nothing. Malachai leaves Serena in this place to looks for the others, and trumps to Amber.
Malachai looks for Prospero and Sir Erik. The guards tell him that Sir Erik has been informed, and is on the way down. They also tell Malachai that he has been declared heir apparent, since Corwin is presumed dead, having been last seen in bad shape, but no body has been recovered, so he's only presumed dead. Malachai tries to trump Corwin and fails.
Sir Erik is talking into a wooden box. Malachai looks in - there's a pulsing crystal in the box. Sir Erik found it at the foot of his bed one day, and he's been talking to it since in the hopes that it will answer. He talks to everything, and they answer eventually. Even his donkey answered once, although only to tell him to shut up.
Sir Erik complains about people constantly asking him stupid questions when his second, Prospero, isn't around. Malachai tells him to tell people with stupid questions to bug his second.
Ingold came through two or three days ago, and killed a few people, including someone he claimed was scheming to kill him, one of the ambassadors, and someone who woke him up in the morning. He demanded to speak to Benedict, and was quite annoyed when told that he wasn't around.
Ingold is much better than Sir Erik with the sword, and has been for quite some time, since he's the one who taught him.
Corwin's presumed death is one of the bits of information that Ingold brought back. Ingold also said that Pearl didn't exist any more, something about a page being torn out of a book or something.
Any word from Oberon? That depends on how you define word... Dworkin gets stopped occasionally and when asked says that Oberon is fine and unconscious. When asked where Oberon is, he turned the questioner into a small dust bunny, then apologized for several hours, saying that it was the nature of the answer.
Fiona is missing, Bleys is investigating whatever Oberon sent him to investigate, Benedict is still missing, (smile), Corwin is missing/presumed dead, Julian is dead/presumed dead, Random sent word, says that he should be informed if Cathryn is seen - she missed a party in her honor, Zack - haven't heard from him in some time. Ditto Cassandra. Velaria wandered through the castle and locked herself in her studio a while ago. Caine? Maybe that's who that was... somebody emptied about half of the town, put them on boats, and sailed off. Gerard has gone off looking for his wife, saying something about a demon... I pretty much have the run of the place. Llewella? Hasn't been heard from since. Probably good...
"You wouldn't happen to have a trump of Darkstar, would you?" "Nope, but I know how to get ahold of him in a pinch. There's a message board, half-way down the wall that leads to the abyss, there's a cave, at the very back, there's a message board there for demons."
Malachai tries Bleys's trump - nothing. Stormy's trump - feels like stopped before hs started. Doesn't try Connor. Tries Zack, and it feels like he's out of range, maybe down Chaos-way or down in Faerie. Malachai tries Rhiannon - same response as Bleys. Tries Merlin - gets a hollow feeling of almost contact, then it's sheared off, as if some outside force broke it. He tries it again, with the help of Sir Erik.
He feels an alien contact on his mind...
"Sorry, sir... you screamed, he caught on fire then disappeared, so I shot the card out of your hand.", a guard says as Malachai regains awareness.
Malachai pulls the crossbow bolt out of his arm. The guard apologizes, and says that he will go to Prospero and surrender himself for having shot and wounded a member of the royal family with forethought... Malachai tells the guard that he did exactly right, asks him for his name, and makes a mental note to tell Prospero to give him a commendation.
Benedict - out of range.
Malachai sits down. There are people coming out to tend to him. Malachai's throat is raw, as well. People are looking at him oddly, including soldiers that he has known somewhat socially. Malachai chats with them and tries to put them at their ease. They congratulate him on his promotion, they say that they're trying to transfer to Arden so they can be under him, but Prospero wants to keep them. They express reservations about Sir Erik, and are uncertain about his trustworthiness in a pinch.
Malachai is physically solid, just mentally out of sorts. The soldiers help him find Prospero. He, too, expresses reservations about Sir Erik's competence, and Malachai tries to reassure him. Prospero reports in full, everything is well. Malachai is annoyed at having been left more or less in charge in Amber, and Prospero says that Ingold ordered them to go out, find him, and bring him back.
Prospero thinks Malachai should be formally crowned as regent - he's been signing paperwork with a scribble, and nobody has complained yet. Malachai agrees to let Prospero pass the buck to him, but won't take on any new or phony titles. Malachai advises Prospero to deal with the chief medical officer by saying that Oberon may be in need of healing. That might get her out of the way for a while... Malachai tells Prospero that that guard that shot him should be commended, not hung, despite the fact that he thinks he did something wrong. Malachai goes to his quarters, and Prospero agrees to not see him arrive until tomorrow.
Malachai trumps Serena - she's in the middle of a party.
Malachai: "Found Tazik?"
Serena: "Yes. Coming through?"
Malachai: "No."
Serena: "Something wrong?"
Malachai: "Something has come up."
Tazik wants to move on. Should they take her to Amber? She's laying low, got into an argument with a local metalsmith.
Apparently Bucephalus was entertaining at the royal court that night - a translator was acquired and Bucephalus was telling tales of a place called Tremere, and a very uppitty little girl.
Malachai breaks the contact, and tries again in two minutes. Two hours have passed there. Serena passes Tazik and Bucephalus through, then comes through herself.
Players converse about making trumps of Bucephalus, and about giving Bucephalus a trump for Malachai, to simplify matters.
There are now three pendants and one Stormy. Illyana confirms that they are still in the state that Melk left them in. Stormy asks Illyana to take them back a minute or so to watch and see what happened.
Between the beat of a gnat's wing... nothing in the sphere reacted, the piece that was attached to Stormy reacted, sucking him in. When he cut it, it snapped back home, taking Stormy back with it. At the moment it was cut, the hook in Stormy tried to sphere, failed, then dragged him into the sphere. Both Stormies went into the Fiona sphere, but both spheres enlarged, and they enlarged themselves before the Stormies were eaten. They both enlarged at the moment it tried to sphere Stormy and failed. Melk, at the moment he disappeared, had a very disgusted look on his face.
They go forward in time again to the present moment. The thirty-four arch-mages have decided that among them, they might be able to simulate that hook, and are wondering if they fasten it on Stormy, they might be able to pull them in. The hook is still present in Illyana.
A Stormy tries to summon Stormy out from the sphere, knowing his true name and so on. He sets up filters such that anything else coming out with him will precipitate out around the circle. It's a large effort, and it fails. He feels that if the sphere were in a lower energy state, it would have succeeded, but the piece that is filtering on Stormy can't filter on enough to do it cleanly.
He tries again, assigning another of the Stormies the filter. He manages to filter one them out, nobody new gets sphered, and nothing else strange happens. The older time-shifted Stormy is out. They let him out of the circle, and he feels like an over-filled balloon, supersaturated with power. Not a power that he normally generates or deals with. The point of view he had from within the sphere is that it was very painful. The inside of the sphere was very painful as a side effect, because whatever was at the center was at rest, but that posision was already filled. He couldn't act or observe, there was no real moment for it. He was the outer of the two Stormies in there, the inner Stormy was probably in the inside position.
The old-shifted Stormy will do the next summoning, and two Stormies will run the filter. They succeed. When they peel the younger Stormy out, both spheres grow again. All but one of the Stormies go into mind-meld, one of the ones that wasn't involved. They're trying to put together as good of an impression of the inside as they can, while the other makes a cage around one of the spheres, out of Silima. The sphere is a single sphere, a single dimension of it's own. A page inside another page inside a page. The outside of the sphere itself is a page, and the inside of the sphere is another page.
They try a simple summoning spell on Melk, more to offer him an excuse to return than to try to compel him. It doesn't work. However, they're still in the state in which he placed them.
He can't easily set up a spell catcher for the hook - it would take several years.
The shell of the sphere is not only a whole page, it could be an entire book.
They continue conversing.
Melk returns, with a statue. It looks like Connor. Melk asks Stormy to store that somewhere - he should return it when he's done. He says that he had sealed this off from outside influences so he could re-run it if he wanted to, so he had to use that as a route back in.
The GM and Melk are both liars.
They re-run the tape, and Melk breaks it down even farther, and the moment that the spheres swell, a shockwave spreads out from them. Why did it effect Melk, and not the others? For a brief moment, the shockwave caused two more archmages to be created and then de-created. Melk says that this bit was re-written, and he, as the most powerful thing in it, was written out, possibly as a defensive mechanism.
Stormy stashes the statue.
They huddle over what they did a long time ago, and try to do it again. Basically, they built a page. They want to make a page the size of a small box, wrapped around the spheres, that has the conditions they want, requiring that the method being used by the spheres to generate energy is not that same method. He wants them to work on magic, instead of whatever it uses. They want to build it wrapped around the spheres, rather than building it then wrappng it.
They try it on both spheres at once. They'll need more Stormies, so they make six more Stormies. It takes under a minute. Four watch, six are working. Only two of them are flesh, the looped ones, the others aren't. They go over the plan with everyone present - Melk and the council, and what they can do to prevent what might go wrong. Melk and Illyana are egging each other on with absurd suggestions. Jimmy is suggesting minor ways in which things can go wrong. Rain is lost. Fiona is working on some of the more obvious problems. The council are setting up some standard defenses.
Jimmy asks Melk if he can rewind a few seconds if something goes wrong. "Yup." Stormy: "What are you doing?" Jimmy: "I need to try this" Jimmy picks up the two spheres telekenetically and bangs them together with forty-eight tons of force...
No, Jimmy picks up the two spheres and Melk says "Don't do that!" Melk says that everything within his grasp was sucked into that sphere. He's not sure how Clarissa could do that to him...
They do it. They now have two white spheres. One of them is inside a cage, one of them is not. They're slightly larger than they were before. There doesn't seem to be a lot of magical power around at the moment. The spheres are currently operating under magical rules and constraints, but they seem to be sucking more and more magic out of everything. Stormy pushes certain magical things away from him dimensionally and the unfleshed Stormies flesh. There's lots of magical throughput. The spheres are shrinking, and they seem to be stabilizing at a smaller space. The Silima cage appears to have become taffy. It was stretched outward, but it appears to be Silima again. The sphere changed the rules around it somehow.
Stormy takes a look at one of the spheres with trump-sight. There has been a page added in there, so they presumably succeeded.
They set up with two Stormies for each page in each sphere to smack them.
Melk says, "If you don't hurry up, I'll have to rewind - we're running out of magic here. Several magic-based races have been dispelled and eaten... And there went the Pattern." The reflections in Amber, Tir, and Rebma are gone -- only the primal Pattern remains.
The first four hammer at the outer two shells, and they go down. The four Stormies who hit the next shell in disappear. The four who were aiming for the next shell in cause the shell that the last four were hitting to go down and the last four to reappear, but disappear themselves.
Left over: Melk, the arch-mages, Rain, Illyana. Jimmy, Fiona, four of the Stormies, and everything outside the balcony is gone. And two grey spheres that cannot be perceived are there. Actually, the they're the inverse of being there. Melk looks at the eight remaining Stormies, and says, "Rewind?"
And then Melk tells them not to do it. He asks for a glass of water before they try it again.
They try to get all of the shells simultaneously by reaching the inner shells with trump.
Melk says, "Well, that one doesn't work... you all disappeared. And they didn't open."
They try one more time, staggering it from the inside out. Stormy hits the inside, and the last thing he's aware of is Melk swearing.
He's sitting in a nice, green, wooded, pleasant place. Six Stormies are there. Nobody else. It's fairly static, as if these are props. He tests powers. Trump-sight works, to the extent of seeing to the edge of this shadow. It's reflected on the other side of this shadow. Everything is saturated with magic, his magic. Magic sight just makes everything white-noise out. They seem to be in the sphere that he created, and time is not passing. He's not sure how they're moving around and doing stuff. Everything that they do leaves them behind - there are worms of them trailing around everywhere. They were at the center of this. They can see other shadows within this sphere. They seem to be reflections, but don't contain the Stormy-worms.
The question of the night: Does Clarissa fish? If so, where, and what does she expect to catch?
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