As the Circle continues to investigate the theft, the people around them start behaving more and more strangely.
“Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.”
— Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
Start Date: 4 Descending Air
Continuing their investigation of the theft of the Magog Locus, now with the assistance of Tonanti and Develan, the Solars continue to run into frustrating dead ends and lack of evidence. Meanwhile, the people in the shool are behaving more weirdly by the moment. Develan stumbles across the headmaster's wife and a student in the throes of passion. In addition to Lamidan's superhuman powers of nervousness, another student named Hamashk turns up with a rather depressed demeanor, and Loramendi flatly insults Tonanti's training before proceeding to drink himself into a stupor. This is after encountering an EXTREMELY touchy Librarian at another scholarly academy while continuing their research (but not before they uncovered and stole a fragment of a heretical text known as the Blossom of Ages…)
Then the circle hears alarm bells ringing down the street. They go outside to investigate, but before they get off the porch, a cart pulls up at the gates bearing a load of flowers. Tremaen (who was previously thought to be out on the town) sees this and runs down to the gate, gesticulating surrepetitiously. After a frantic whispered conversation, the cart pulls off, and Tremaen comes back, explaining it was the “wrong address”. As the alarm is still ringing down the street, the solars shrug and go that way. They see a squadron of water elementals rush down the street, where it turns out that a fire is burning. Somebody with unusual hair bursts out of the burning building and goes flying into the building across the street, followed quickly by some elemental.
Somebody in the gathering crowd throws a rock at the water elementals … who drop what they are doing and dive for the attacker in the crowd, producing a brawl.
It develops that the populace — humans, spirits, god-blooded, and elementals alike —are rapidly losing control of themselves … the smoke of other fires across the city is spotted. A building crashes to the ground next to the Solars. Develan spots gangs in silver, white, or yellow — apparently each representing one of the three spirits that rule the city — engage in roam and destroy assaults among themselves. The many Temples begin launching catapult attacks across the city at each other. Albrecht's crew, Tremaen, and presumably Jiulan are all affected, as are the people in the school. The city's rulers activate a large yellow dome shield around the city, preventing escape in the Schnellvogel.
Eventually, inspired by a memory of research with her father's team, Xylanthe realizes that they DO have a means to look into motive … Loramendi's notes. Perhaps they will see something that he missed or forgot. This quickly leads them to the temple of a priest named Burrabi Todon, whose daughter Kutari died in an accident during an academy sponsored research mission, and who swore revenge on the school. After minimal resistance, they drive off the lackeys of the priest, and corner him at the altar bearing a crystal orb mtching the description of the Magog Locus. Even as the city begins to return to normal, the priest is wracked with sobs, unable to respond to questions. Then he looks surprised … and falls over dead. The orb is returned to the academy, leaving only one mystery unsolved … just who is this Lord Anthant mentioned in the priest's journal? Did he tell the priest about the artifact, and teach him to use it. Was he the one that expanded the attack to include the entire city instead of just the school? Was he responsible for the priest's death?
A few days later, a much more even-tempered Loramendi tells Xylanthe and the others that the owner of the artifact has arrived. The young woman knocks on the door, looks around, spots Xylanthe, narrows her eyes, and exclaims “You!”
End Date: 8 Descending Air
I have a problem occasionally where I present a situation that looks like the characters should be doing one thing, when they really should be doing something else. Partly this is because I have no sense whatsoever for when clues are too easy, or too hard, nor for when people are intrigued by a puzzle or simply annoyed by it. This session suffered from it, which caused the players to get frustrated when their lines of inquiry failed to turn up anything (of course, the lines they were pursuing had already been covered weeks before by experts, so turning up not much useful on those very cold trails probably shouldn't have been surprising).
Still, despite the frustration (of both the mystery, and of having our food's arrival delayed for two and a half hours) and the anticlimactic feeling of the resolution (given how tired we all were by the time we got to it), there were some amusing and/or nice character bits. I managed to put Ourna in a situation where she'll have to face Tremaen's feelings (and her own), developed Albrecht's crew a little through their responses, and startle Stacy with Rani singling her out…
I'm going to have to nip the “almost everyone arriving at the game late” problem in the bud soon, as it is getting out of hand. I have been unable to deal with the Abyssal set up stuff now for two games running because I don't want to stop the game once I've finally managed to get it started, and lateness is also pushing our game times further and further back — which I'm sure my roommates or neighbors will get annoyed with sooner or later, and which invariably makes the end of the games really weak, since everybody is too tired at 2:30am to do anything but get the session over with. Not to mention, the last time I was actively chomping at the bit to play characterization to the hilt, that mood was completely destroyed by this sort of thing.
Converted from old log.