We have done this before. That is perhaps the most unsettling part: the familiarity of waking up in chains, of feeling something cold and deliberate press itself behind the eyes, of knowing that the tadpole is not merely a passenger. We have walked this road. And yet here we are again, five souls aboard a stolen vessel in a sky that should not exist, bound for somewhere that will ask things of us we have not decided to give.
Nero was the first to get free. Of course he was. He moved through the dark with that particular confidence of someone who has made shadow into a companion rather than an enemy. The rest of us followed. Sogong said nothing at first, which meant he was already calculating. Anaik assessed the structural integrity of the nearest wall with his fist. Traxex found a window, looked out at the burning sky, and said only: "Again."
Nanang said nothing at all. He was present: he moved when we moved, turned when we turned, oriented himself toward whatever required orienting toward. He simply produced no words. Whether this was a choice, an affliction, some state of internal processing that had temporarily suspended the part of him responsible for speech, or whether he was testing something and had decided silence was the correct variable to introduce, no one asked directly. He followed along. We recorded it and moved on.
I. The Githyanki, the Armor, and the Precise Location of Nero's Principles
We encountered a Githyanki aboard the vessel and reached, with the pragmatic speed of people who have learned that allies cost less than enemies, a temporary agreement. She would travel with us. She would assist. The arrangement was mutual and professional and lasted approximately until we had finished negotiating it.
The first thing the party did was take her armor.
This was Traxex. Traxex looked at the Githyanki, assessed what the Githyanki was wearing, and arrived at the conclusion that the Githyanki no longer needed it. The Githyanki was left standing in considerably less than she had arrived in. Nero, to his full and vocal credit, was immediately and specifically displeased. He said so. He said exactly what he thought about taking the armor from someone who had just agreed to help us. He made his position clear and on the record.
It should also be noted, for the record, that some time later we encountered Shadowheart. Shadowheart was also wearing armor. Nero looked at Shadowheart's armor for a moment, and then, in a movement that the chronicle is obliged to describe as quiet and very fast, Shadowheart's armor was no longer on Shadowheart. Nero departed the encounter wearing it. He said nothing on the subject. The party said nothing on the subject either, which is the only way the party knew how to handle the situation with any dignity. Shadowheart was left behind shortly after, still without her armor. Whether the two events are related is left as an exercise for the reader.
II. The Red Sword, the Transponder, and Nanang's Arrangement with the Boar
There was a general. He held a sword. The sword was red and burning and the kind of object that announces itself loudly to anyone in the room. Anaik was in the room. Anaik saw the sword, and something in the blood of Birch registered it before the rest of him had completed a thought.
His position on the transponder became simple and immediate: "Fuck the transponder. Kill him. I need the sword."
Nero was against this. Nero was specifically and tactically against this on the grounds that the general was attached to the sword, that the general appeared to be a significant obstacle, and that the transponder was the only way off the vessel. Sogong did not voice an opinion, which was Sogong's way of listening to all available information before deciding whether his input was necessary. Both positions, the tactical objection and the strategic silence, were overtaken by events.
The events were as follows: Nanang, who had been quiet throughout this exchange, had at some point during the debate moved away from the main group. He was discovered, separately, near the boar. He had applied Grease to the floor. The Grease had gone beneath himself and the boar in equal measure. Nanang was on the ground. The boar was also, to some degree, on the ground. Nanang was hitting the boar with his staff.
He is a sorcerer. The staff was a choice he made. The boar had not done anything notable to deserve this. Neither circumstance appeared to enter his calculations. He was hitting the boar on a greased floor, having put himself there as well, with the focused application of someone who has found a task and committed to it entirely.
Traxex activated the transponder. We escaped. The sword remained with the general. Anaik watched it go with an expression the chronicle does not have adequate language for, but which involved the particular stillness of someone who has made a note.
III. The Landing, the Mind Flayer, and Anaik's Wisdom Score
We fell from the sky in the way that people fall from sky vessels: all at once, without coordination, and into different places. The company assembled itself in pieces. All pieces eventually arrived except Traxex, who was located after some searching in a location that the map does not account for. She had apparently occupied a room that should not have been reachable by conventional navigation. She was retrieved from it. She offered no explanation of how she had arrived there. The chronicle records only that she was there, then she was not, and the gap between those two facts is Traxex's to keep.
A mind flayer was encountered. This went, on the whole, adequately. The notable exception was Anaik, who was separated from the rest of the party at a critical moment and made contact with a creature capable of charm effects. The creature deployed one. Anaik, whose wisdom is not a statistic the party has ever pointed to with confidence, failed the check decisively. He was subsequently charmed, then defeated, then technically dead for a brief interval.
The party laughed. This is recorded without judgment: it was funny. He was revived. He appeared to hold no grievance about the laughing, which may itself be the most alarming data point about Anaik's inner life the first session produced. The encounter was concluded. We moved on. Shadowheart, who had been with us until this point, was left where she stood. The party made this decision collectively and with the clean efficiency of people who had already taken her armor.
IV. The Town Under Siege, and the Question of Where Traxex Was
Sogong found the town first. The town was under siege, which is the kind of situation that a self-proclaimed evil man processes differently from the rest of the company. He processed it by going to the front gate and looking at the problem directly. This is what Sogong does: he goes to where the problem is and stands between it and the people it intends to reach. He has not explained why. He does not appear to feel it requires explaining.
The question was immediately raised: where is Traxex?
The answer, which should surprise no one, was: in the ruins. Specifically, in the ruins on the other side of the town from where the party was. More specifically: she had already started a fight there. With bandits. Alone. Without mentioning to anyone that she was going, or that there were bandits, or that she had identified the ruins as a destination, or that any of this was going to happen.
There were now two battles. The party was in one of them. Traxex was in the other one. Both were ongoing simultaneously, which is not a tactical situation any reasonable commander would have designed, but Traxex was not a reasonable commander. She was a ranger in a ruin who had found trouble and walked directly into it, and the mathematics of the situation were now everyone's problem.
Sogong held the gate. Anaik charged something. Nero identified a shadow and moved into it. Nanang stood behind the group for a moment, then raised his hands, then a Fog Cloud occupied the battlefield.
The Fog Cloud occupied the entire battlefield. All of it. Every corner. Every combatant. Every ally, every enemy, and an indeterminate number of people nearby who had not been involved in any of this and were now standing in fog for reasons they had not agreed to.
The party cursed at him. He said: "Shut up. This is a tactic."
He did not explain the tactic. It is possible there was one. It is possible the tactic was something that runs at the level of his intellect that has not yet developed a way down into language. What can be confirmed is that the fog was comprehensive, the visibility was gone, and the party fought through it in the way that people fight through problems they did not design: by moving forward and making contact with whatever they found.
They were nearly through it. One enemy remained. The fog was still thick. The situation was almost resolved.
Traxex arrived. She brought the bandits with her. All of them. The entire company of bandits from the ruins, who had been her problem, were now running directly into the fog behind her, joining the goblins who were already in the fog, creating a single large combined engagement where there had been two separate manageable ones. Everyone yelled at her. She was moving too fast to hear it clearly.
V. The Cat, the Longsword Backstab, and the Moment Anaik Learned Something
The second fight was larger and louder than the first. Anaik went forward because that is the only direction Anaik goes. Nero identified a flank and moved into it with the unhurried precision of someone who knows exactly how far away he can get before the exit closes, which is to say: he disengaged and then did not leave. He withdrew to his chosen angle and remained there, invisible and present, waiting for the geometry to be correct.
Nanang, in this same window, deployed a Mage Hand. The Mage Hand shoved an enemy. This was intentional and successful, and the party registered it as an uncomplicated positive development. Then Nanang cast Minor Illusion.
The Minor Illusion was a cat.
It appeared in the middle of the battlefield. A cat. Not a terrifying apparition, not a tactical decoy designed to misdirect enemy formations, not something the situation had called for in any obvious way. A cat, placed with the quiet confidence of someone executing an intended action, in the center of an ongoing combat involving swords and at least one dragonborn.
Everyone stopped. Ally and enemy alike. Every person in the engagement looked at the cat for a moment, which was the moment Traxex needed. She was on higher ground by then, the way she always finds higher ground when the room resets, and she used the pause to do what she does cleanly and without hesitation. Whether the cat was the plan is a question the chronicle cannot answer. The plan worked. We are moving on.
The remaining moment of the fight belongs to Anaik. He had been watching Nero work: the disengage, the withdrawal to an angle, the patient waiting, the reappearance from exactly the direction the enemy was not watching. He had watched Nero do this with the focused attention of someone observing a technique he finds applicable.
Anaik is a Fighter. He carries a longsword. The longsword is not, by any conventional measure, a backstabbing weapon. It is a large weapon designed for direct engagement, not for the kind of shadow-work that Nero practices with a blade built for the purpose.
Anaik disengaged. He found an angle. He came back from it and delivered a longsword backstab that connected with the full commitment of a man who understood the principle and declined to let the specifics of his equipment stand between him and the execution. The enemy did not survive the application of this philosophy. The fight concluded. Sogong walked through the gate into the city.
VI. The Crypt, the Fireball, and the View from the Shadows
We rested. This was Sogong's doing, partly: he had spent the siege negotiating with two different sets of people inside the city walls, and the rest of the party had fought two simultaneous battles in a fog and needed to sit down. The rest was brief. It ended when Traxex found the crypt.
She did not announce that she had found it. She announced that there was a fight in it. The distinction matters, because finding a crypt is neutral information, whereas starting a fight in a crypt is the kind of initiative that explains why the party cannot leave Traxex unattended near anything with a door. Anaik, Nero, and Nanang moved toward the sound. Anaik and Nanang went directly into the hole. Nero, as he does, found a different way in.
The crypt contained something substantial: a barbarian of the kind that does not negotiate and does not slow. The party was doing poorly. The space was tight, the exits were unfavorable, and the enemy was cutting through the party in the systematic way of something that has done this before.
Traxex found a fire barrel.
She used it. A Fireball, or the equivalent of one, filled the crypt with the thoroughness that Nanang's Fog Cloud had filled the battlefield. The barbarian and most of the remaining enemies were destroyed by it. So, for a moment, were most of the party members who had descended into the crypt with them. The fire did not make distinctions. The fire was very thorough.
Nero had not gone into the hole. He had entered by a different route and positioned himself somewhere the fire could not reach, which is the particular dividend of never going through the obvious entrance. When the light settled and the smoke cleared, he emerged from the shadows at the edges of the crypt and finished what remained. Cleanly. Without announcement. From exactly the angle of his choosing.
The surviving party members were collected. The crypt had one more thing to offer: further down, in a chamber the fight had opened access to, something very old and very patient had been sitting in the dark for a very long time. The party looked at it. They made a collective decision that this was a problem for after they had slept. They went to rest.
Sogong's Account: Rendered Separately, as It Must Be
What follows is recorded apart from the main account because it took place, largely, in a different register. While the rest of the company was managing fog and bandits and fire barrels, Sogong was doing something else entirely.
The tiefling refugees were inside the city walls. They had come from somewhere worse and arrived somewhere uncertain, and the city's tolerance for their presence was, by all observable measures, thin and conditional. Sogong spoke with them. This is the first thing to record: that he went to them, listened, and was present with them in a way that did not rush toward a transaction.
He found Kagha. Kagha was in the process of something the party would later understand more fully. He confronted her. The details of what was said are Sogong's to carry; what the chronicle records is that he stood in front of her and made his position clear, which is a thing Sogong does rarely and with precision.
A child was killed by a snake during the confrontation. Sogong did not intervene. This is written plainly because Sogong would want it written plainly: he was there, he did not act, and afterward he went to the parents and told them what had happened. He did not soften it. He did not explain himself to anyone who asked. Whether he could have stopped it, whether the calculation he made in that moment was the correct one, whether there is a correct one, is not something this record will decide. He was there. He did not intervene. He told the parents. He moved on.
He spoke with Zevlor. The goblin problem was named, outlined, and assigned. The party was to clear the goblin encampment. This was the task Sogong brought with him when the others came through the gate: a direction, a purpose, a clear next thing. He had spent the entire siege not fighting and had returned from it with the session's only concrete objective.
The party gathered at the Emerald Grove as night fell. The crypt was behind them, the lich below them, the goblin encampment ahead of them. Sogong looked out at the Grove with the particular expression of someone who has made a quiet accounting and is not satisfied with all of the entries but has accepted the ledger as it stands.
He said nothing. He rarely does, at the end of things. He was already preparing for the next one.