Worst Case Scenario

Player Characters

Kamare, Rielle, Regan, Freya, Larkin

DM Characters

Lucky, Landon, Ratatoskr, Keeper, Calamity

Section 1

Session 1

Opening: Terrible Dream

Opening Track:The Requiem by Linkin Park

You all have the same dream. It is much less of a dream and more like a feeling that something is very wrong somewhere. The sound of something cracking and breaking, muffled screams that sound like they could be an SOS from a vessel of some kind. Luminous bands of blue spread out like spider legs that are so terrible they nearly shake you awake. “The space port! Hurry!” They are the only clear words you hear, and you can see where they come from. A massive being of light with vast wings floating across the dreamscape. You have all seen Bertha and Trouble’s dream forms, and it is now, in the early hours of the morning, that Bertha is making a desperate attempt to summon aid.

• Rielle, Kamare, and Regan all woke in the early morning hours before sunrise and arrived at the spaceport shortly after
• Regan was left with the extra dread of feeling something had happened to Ratatoskr
• Trouble had already taken off with Nate's ghost piloting
• Bertha needed a crew to take off as she can assist a crew but can't run herself
  • Kamare took weapons control should it be needed
  • Regan took the comms position
  • Rielle served as the ship's pilot
• Once manned, the bomber took off at full speed, several times greater than what its specifications would indicate

Sighting Lucky

Lucinda Gabrielle earned the name Lucky for her steady diet of negative randons which causeds there to be a higher percentage of positive randons around her that made others nearby lucky. The negative randons were stored in her long wing blades much like a poison dart frog concentrates toxins in its skin. As you catch up with Trouble, you can see Lucky’s ethereal wing blades, something that should not appear outside of the dream realms. They appear to have been cut off close to the base, and the loose fragments are bleeding negative randons everywhere. The luck is so bad that it is acting like an acid eating through metal, and like a drop of acid blood in the Alien movie eating through deck after deck, the bleeding wings are causing the annihilation of the borders between dimensions resulting in a breach. Even worse, this breach is directly in the path of Spindizzy.

The Ragnarok, the ship Lucky lives on along with Landon, has lost lost its wings and two engines as if they had been sliced off. It is venting drive plasma and atmosphere from cracks in the hull. Their communications system may also be damaged. To complicate the situation further, there is a massive, somewhat squid like entity with its tentacles wrapped around the ship and the severed wing fragments. It is not clear what it is doing, but Bertha can quickly identify it as some kind of darkness.

A damaged ship, a crew in danger, an unidentified creature, and a fracture in spacetime. All in a day’s work for you all.

Rough sketch the scenario:

• Approach Track: Dark Ages by Two Steps From Hell
• Encounter Track: The Radiance by Linkin Park

• Not sure if they should be ready to open fire, Kamare had the weapons at the ready which caused the squid creature to move in between Bertha and the Ragnarok in a defensive position. Disabling weapons caused it to stay where it was.
• Regan tried to get communications through.
  • Transmissions of a mayday signal were coming from the Ragnarok, but massive interference from the rift they were causing made them hard to hear or reply to
  • The squid responded to light flashes and radio. It returned signals in the microwave range around the same frequency of the cosmic background radiation but at much higher power. Unfortunately, no one knew how to read the signal

Given the potential of a non-hostile darkness entity, the group changed up positions to try other routes of contact

• Kamare took over piloting and helped knock Regan out so she could try the dream approach

• Rielle discorporated in order to approach the space squid directly and try communication by light flashes. It responded to her with some sort of telepathy like ability
  • THe squid is intelligent. However, it appears to have about the same wisdom as a child of five or six years.
  • The squid was trying to put Lucky's severed wings back on, but they wouldn't attach. It was unable to comprehend anything beyond that, and it just kept trying.
  • The squid indicated that 'The Older Ones' were the ones that did this, and she had stolen what she could of the ship to save Lucky from them.

• Regan approached the problem from the dreamscape
  • The squid and the ship appeared in roughly the same place in dreamspace
  • Regan was able to see into the ship. Landon was critically injured. Lucky's wings were cut off. Ratatoskr was not directly visible because a Darkness, Keeper, one of the beings that created Ratatoskr's species, was protecting her from further harm. Keeper was also badly injured, but it was able to speak with Regan.
  • Keeper revealed that a dreamcatcher had been deployed to attack the ship. There was no warning for the ship, and both espers and Landon suffered extensive injuries form the impact that sheared the wings and two engines clean off as well as causing stress damage to the hull.
  • Keeper relayed that the remains of the ship needed to get back to Spindizzy soon before conditions got any worse.
  • Keeper identified the squid as Calida, or Calamity, depending on who you asked. She is a young and unique Darkness distorted by contact with Lucky.

• While the cargo and bomb bays on the bombers is not large enough to get the ship remains in, Bertha noted the bombers have tractor beams.
• The remains of the Ragnarok are needed to carry Lucky to safety.

Session 2

Continued chats between Wanderer and Regan

• Newer Darkness that have some light aspect have been showing up in the last week or so, about the same time when the Ragnarok game back in pieces
• Current Darkness around Wanderer are friendly and may even look like they are seeking shelter or kindred spirits

• Keeper's Book
  • Keepers don't normally have books. Instead they are the book
  • The data density in the book is so great that it could feasibly contain all the quantum data or huge sections of the universe
  • Only certain folk can read the books
    • Darkness
    • The Night Soldiers who are all extinct now aside from Fibi
    • A Darkness Muse of which only one exists: Abigail Normal
  • If you can erase or destroy a book, you destroy the record of the past and bring it into uncertainty. In other words, if you erase the book, you erase history and anything in it from existsing

• Migrant Darkness
  • Wanderer implies that some of the Dasrkness are massive but also passive and laying low. This could include what physics things of as Dark Matter or Dark Energy.
  • Veil is the only survivor of the trio that made the Keeth, and it has been around as well as others
  • It sounds like Calamity made passing run as well

• Esper Legends
  • Wanderer admits that both he and Ratatoskr are incredibly young as espers, so they don't know a lot despite their relative power
  • Two legendary Espers do exist according to what Wanderer has learned.
    • Star is older than anyone knows, and she is the only one that can exist in the land of the dead
    • Lucky is the legendary pathfinder that can gain access to almost any location in the universe
      • Lucky losing her wings means she can't use her power.
      • Lucky's power is to gain access to any location or at least know the way
      • Darkness has settled down now that Lucky lost her wings as if something is now safe from her getting to it. Lucky has gone missing.

Section 2

Away in a Coffee Shop

Having met Landon and his kin at the hospital, the group eventually gets Landon checked out and meets up at a local waffle house to get something to eat. Their service is a bit more than most would expect out of such a place as a pale blue skinned humanoid brings their orders even before they are put in.

Pete

Pete has many names including the Wanderer, The Traveler, Pilot, and a number of derogatory names depending on who he has meddled with. He is a Delsin, the last remaining of his kind, and he has a tendency to wander through time on a very large ship that bears no name. Pete is a meddler and a general pain in the side that Darkness as not been able to stomp out. He hails from several iterations of the universe ago back when his people used to attack and harvest lesser Darkness to use for ship hulls and other devices. Its not much of a wonder who erased them in the end.

Arrival in the coffee shop

Candied Coffee has never been a normal coffee shop. If one knew how to use them, its doorways bridge location spread far across space including Spindizzy, modern London, and even a path into Thomas's wonderland, Cheshire, itself. The main target of this meeting is Abigail Normal, a leftover muse from the beginning of time. However, fate has deemed fit to send a number of other souls to aid in a now emerging quest.

Abby's read of the book

The Book

The book itself is a simple black tome with no visible markings and difficult to discern pages. It is made up entirely of a from of dark matter, and the data density in it is so vast that it contain nearly all the historical data of seventeen full cycles of the universe. The book can only be read by beings of darkness or at least partial darkness which limits it to Abigail, Fibi, and some Keeth. What Abigail finds is disturbing

The Book as it relates to Abigail

• Abby discovered that there were more of her kind, that is to say darkness writing muses. Like pages from a book, they have been torn out and erased until now only she remains.
• Abigail is the only one able to fully read the book. Because of this, and having the book in her hands, Darkness will no doubt make a move to attack
• Abigail knows how to get to a place even Darkness will not readily follow and where she and the book may be safe: The Core of Light otherwise known as The Fracture or The home of chaos
  • Abigail will be safe among the Lord and Lady of Chaos

The Book's Data on the Espers

While there is a decent bit of data on Dreamworld beings including espers, the most pertinent sections surround a single esper that re-occurs each iteration after the 4th universe: Lucinda Gabriel aka Lucky

• Lucky first appears as a lesser spirit during the 4th universe where Light begins to cause a rampant spread of new, creative life. This includes the creation of a whimsy after Darkness attempts to crush the muses that are just beginning to emerge. By the time the universe is crushed and expanded again, Lucky has gain a mysterious set of wings that begin consuming ill fortune. It is this ill fortune that keeps her appearing in later versions of the universe despite efforts to erase her.

• Lucky has four sets of wings at present. Their ratios are 4:9:13:17 which are not innocent numbers. Though interpretations vary across the universe, the general ratios and pattern holding true as their tones played across quantum strings are sure to bring what all fear: death, death, extreme misfortune, and death respectively.
  • Lucky is a form of Doomsday Clock. The more Darkness destroys, the more of the ill fortune that comes with it gets concentrated in her. No one is sure how much more she can handle.
  • Lucky's wings, when cut, bled out enough misfortune in maybe an hour to cause a hole through multiple realities including dream, hell, heaven, and a few unnamed places as well. No one knows how much bad lucky she has in the core of her being.

• DARKNESS FEARS LUCKY
  • Darkness fears the chaos, but more importantly, it fears Lucky because she is the master pathfinder of the espers
  • Pathfinders find ways to places and things. Lucky is the oldest living Pathfinder, and she can find routes to almost any object across both space and time without using anything more than her sense of direction
    • So far, Lucky found the way to the Heart of Darkness and allowed Landon and Ratatoskr to penetrate it.
    • Darkess was trying to kill Lucky so she couldn't find something

The Book's Data on Whimsies

The muses have always been a problem for Darkness because they spur creativity and, through the power of chaos, these imagined things gain life and infest their universe. Attacking muses is risky, but over time Darkness learned how to hunt muses and destroy them. For a few blessed generations, the universe fell back to something controlled, bland, and predictable. Then, on the fourth generation, something changed.

Having used the usual Nothings to eat completely the soul of creativity, there had been no muse to date that could survive being trapped by one of these monsters. Then, in the fourth iteration, a coyote was in the wrong place at the right time, and she stole ;a muse from a Nothing before it could be destroyed. The good fortune surrounded said coyote was enough to keep the muse alive in a somewhat broken state that eventually manifested in something new: a whimsy.

Whimsies

Whimsies are what happen when a muse survives a engagement with a Nothing or other creativity killing being. The muse always emerges from this somehow broken. They may have lost hearing or sight, their personality is almost always scrambled, but they always emerge with one important thing broken: the rules. Muses have rules. They exist to record their art in all forms, and they exist to pass down their art to others. In this way, all things a muse does is to inspire someone else. Through their magic, they can create things from nothing, but it must always be for someone else's inspiration. Whimsies ignore this last rules, and they can make for themselves however they like. That can turn a painter into a soldier of the sort Darkness dreads.

Darkness has a way of killing whimsies: they must trap the whimsy in the material of its origin and then bleed the energy from that object until they can erase it.

The whimsy of this universe they are so desperate to kill is the Spindizzy's painting muse: Candice

The Battle Plans

Group One: Bookwork

Abby will meet up with some allies including a dream called Reverie and two spirits, Mira and Luma aboard the White Raven to make it to the core of light. They will eventually meet up with Virgil Murphy, a young male seya and THE source of Murphy's Law, and Aina 13 Zoey, Lady Luck, with her gun that is always a lucky shot. They should be safe in the highest chaos region known with masses of wonderlands and dreams to keep them safe and the book out of hands until Abigail can do something sinister: make a copy.

Group Two: Whimsy Rescue

• Pete will provide transportation to the End of All Time Plus Five Minutes. He knows Lucky is hiding there to heal her wounds
• Pete will also have liberated the L-13 Liberator, a special ship that Landon has been designing that would be made on Spindizzy and St. Martin as a massive collaborative contract.Be sure to invest in aerospace in the next couple years.
  • The GLF FX-13AR L-13 Liberator is a special ship engineered with an esper in mind. It also has countermeasures against some Darkness tricks that have come to pass.
• Once the group has Lucky, they can pick the destination.

Beyond the Time's Reach

The expedition has finally begin in full beginning with Landon getting a shuttle craft to fly out to Pete's X-88, a massive, ancient ship built in part from the corpse of a Darkness from a time and even universe long past. The spidery black mass has the marks of what used to be massive weapon hard points that were used to decimate whole planets. Now they carry home brewed time travel equipment.

GLF FX-13AR L-13 Liberator Class Heavy Assault Craft

Sure enough, Pete managed to get to the right place in time to pick up the ship Landon designed. Of course, that did mean some folks had some fun messing with minor time loops to tweak the design by getting the ideas stuck in Landon's head. Two things are certain about this ship: she's military in style and has some serious teeth.

The Liberator, which is the first in its class, has the named L-13 in honor of Lucky. When Landon is at his best, he could fly it with just himself and Lucky. However, after the attack that put him in the hospital, he is down to piloting and some gunnery on his own, and so the ship needs a whole crew. The main bridge has all of these stations available from piloting, navigation, engineering, communications, sensors, and gunner's positions. The bunks are utilitarian but comfortable, and the ship could probably operate on two shifts at times. Landon will have to teach everyone how to fly it later.

The Liberator's multi-use bays that normally carry missile like systems have been replaced by a special device that will help the ship act as a key to unlock a gate that leads into the domain Candice is being held in. Unfortunately, the LIberator can't generate enough power for the key to activate, so Pete has plans to tell everyone how to manage that when the time is closer to being at hand. He did imply it involves getting someone angry enough for them to fire a high powered weapon ar the ship.

Destination: The end of all time +5 minutes

Pete getting the X-88 in motion is like watching a mad clown dance around the massive bridge that probably held over 30 positions worth of people that he has not jury rigged into an intimidating mess that would have had its engineers crying and screaming. He also forgets to mention that the time travel system and the artificial gravity don't really jive well, so everyone gets some zero g training during a trip that takes about 20 minutes relative time.

The end of all time plus five minutes. No stars. No planets. No galaxies. Darkness has won and all that once was has been consumed and all light has been contained or purged. Darkness hides in its home peacefully, and without it to control the aspects of physics, the universe once again fades into something timeless, shapeless, and without definition where all physics is finally back to one uniform item. All but one place.

Apparently needing about five minutes external time to form, there is one massive white star left behind. Orbiting this star is a single super Earth like planet made up of all kinds of other realms patched together from other worlds like something out of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or perhaps Ratchet and Clank. Somewhere down there in the recreation of the Badlands of South Dakota among the painted canyons is the place Lucky goes when she is wounded physically or in spirit. She is not along though.

The massive bulk of Wanderer and the untold numbers of Keeth that call it home is in high orbit over the planet. In fact, there is one Keeth out front and center that those who know her have picked up on right away. The star is none other than Ratatoskr who has created and is sustaining Light using her power to mangle reality and meld it with Dream, and it is by this that she has created a safe pocked that is refuge to espers, dreams, and even nightmares that have humbly come to coexist with their dream kin in this one place where they are still safe.