Knowledge is power, power is money, money is pizza

Sora and Nahk bring Casimir and Livius up to speed on what’s been happening. As the story ends, Livius glares at KB as he incinerates a pile of shredded paper.

“Next time you eat a book, I’m gonna eat your fingers off.”

“Don’t worry,” KB says, “all the answers are right on this.” A floppy disk ejects out of KB’s mouth and smashes on the ground

Everyone starts blowing into KB’s mouth to, I guess, clean the dust out, not knowing that their saliva will gradually corrode the pins.

KB-180: “Am I into this?”

Casimir Flüf: “Roll for arousal.” Whatever that means.

KB-180: “Livius, what are you up to later?”

Livius: “No good, mosht likely.”

The heroes delve deeper into the caverns, ignoring several opportunities to take a short rest after two very violent battles left them battered. They find themselves at the very bottom of the island, and Nahk approaches slowly, his glaive beginning to glow, the Binder of the Dead just getting mad thirsty.

At the entrance to the space, the heroes see this:

In great battle did Ulstred, first-king, destroy the legions dreadful and demonic, with his companions who were so named: Almsbrood his son and Phia who was made Duchess over the Yagra Plain, and those who perished, Froeder, Istel, Taram, Yzek, Frem, and their small folk who are buried with them. Bound by his own name was the demon Charagat and the smallfolk necromancer did bind him in spells and the Master Mason Fulston bound him in stone. Here the demon is sealed eternally and none may pass.

References: King Almsbrood, Master Mason Fulston, Duchess Phia, Chagarat, King Ulstred

A glowing purple film covers the hole to what the heroes assume is the demon they must destroy. Steel guardians appear, alongside the ghosts of the enslaved humans who helped construct this hellish cage that holds the demon.

Don’t wake Daddy

The fight gets wild, the steel guardians letting out a deafening roar, which stuns most of the heroes and causes them to take severe damage. Sora, with her poor constitution, goes down with very little left in her. Nahk stands alone, his friends collapsed under the intensity of the mechanical beast’s roar.

The others struggle to their feet, but even as KB and Hobbes do, the other steel guardian makes its presence known, sending the two down to the ground once more. Casimir soon snaps out of it and says in unison with Nahk, “This time it’s fursonal,” as the Furboyz lay into the steel guardians.

KB gets up too, but keeps getting knocked around. A few of his swings go wide. “I missed, but it knows I’m gunning for it!”

Nature is amazing

Hobbes gets to his feet now. The opportunistic predator Livius does some math, and within seconds of getting up, Livius, knowing how poorly constituted Sora is, decides, I guess to get some health from her and leeches the last of her lifeblood. She goes unconscious.

Nahk’s glaive keeps sucking up the wraiths, and Casimir, with his resonance blade in hand, cuts one of the steel guardian to ribbons, much like WarGreymon did to Machinedramon in the Dark Masters arc of Digimon Adventure. Rho blows up the other steel guardian, and Hobbes slowly snaps out of his stun.

“Psst, Livius, are you up?”

Rho pops her head into the hole and finds a black room, dimly illuminated by her light spell. A voice begins growling and a red glow emerges and by this Rho can see. A creature in the center of the sphere begins moving against the walls, its body contorted and folded in on itself, its face horrid and gaunt.

Elsewhere, Sora and KB find evidence to suggest that Hespero, in one of his guises over the centuries, was the necromancer smallfolk who bound Chagarat, the demon. Meanwhile, Casimir finds and brings to Livius a rune, which Livius affixes to Goremond and now Livius is going full Gandalf. Except for the necromancy. And also the blade whispers to while you rest unless you soak it blood overnight, which isn’t very Gandalf.

Rho speaks to the demon under the island, suspended in a black sphere and trapped. Sora peeks in and, by the red light of the demon, reads the following etched on the walls of the sphere:

Curse cut in blood and stone

Demon by true name is bound

Curse cut in flesh and bone

Lifted skyward is the ground

Basically, you discover various things and come to various conclusions and have various open questions. You also decide to sleep on it while I summarize for you everything you discussed and may have reasonably discussed during an eight hour rest and we will resume at whatever point in that long rest you so desire:

From the Mixed-Up Laserdiscs of KB-180

Based on your research and KB’s physics modules,

What if the island hits the ocean?

• You calculate that at freefall, the island would hit the ocean within 60 seconds, with very generous wind resistance.
• You calculate that, while the impact would not cause tsunamis, the rim waves could be up to 300 meters and hit coastal settlements. Water vaporization would not happen because there’s not as much kinetic energy / heat as compared to, say, a very fast asteroid traveling through the atmosphere and breaking up. About 25 km/s is the velocity of an asteroid versus the freefall speed of 9.80665 m/s.
• But you also realize that is not to say that the impact would less severe because of the low velocity. The water tension of the ocean and the amount of mass of the island would play a bigger role.
• You determine the consequences of impact at freefall:
  • The island itself would break upon impact
  • Structures will likely be destroyed and even dirigibles since the docked ones are likely not actively flying
  • Aside from just the kinetic energy that would be absorbed by the people on the island and the potential liquidation of muscles (rhabdomyolosis), the other causes of death and injury would include
    • Falling rubble from the structures on the island
    • People getting sucked under the island by the waves if they are closer to the edge of the island
  • You determine that the people most likely to die are enslaved humanoids kidnapped by the giants
  • You recall that the giants can cast fly and featherfall, but that a lot of them may still die or get seriously injured if they are
    • asleep
    • inside a building or underground
    • caught unawares since the reaction time would be quite short
  • You estimate the chance of surviving this catastrophe, supposing Nistora is at freefall, to be around 1% for any non-magic users–basically anyone that is lucky.

Table of Consequences

Relevant links: Duchess Serena, [[ Kodama ]]

Known unknowns

You still don’t know

• Whether the island would fall at freefall or whether the demon’s power would linger long enough for an escape time window longer than a minute to be possible
• Whether the demon is telling the truth about being used to power the flying island, but it’s possible because
  • he would’ve told a different lie otherwise since causing the island to fall would rightly give you pause, which it has
  • you don’t have another ready explanation for how the island is flying
• Whether the Duchess would know the consequences of killing the demon, if it means that the island falls, and why she would be OK with it if she knows the consequences

But how do we get out of here?

Your escape route options amount to

• Word of recall back to the ship with one person left to use Sora’s broom
• Tell Abraham to have Barty pilot the PS Admirable Effort to evacuate from underneath the island

It is late night on day 37, going into day 38, since the Battle of Aurochs Island, the first engagement in the Argoti-Mineosi War.

The Argotnauts are outside the demon-prison in the depths of Nistora

One island left: Nistora.

All three keys have been retrieved.

Malory Whisperbottom is on the material plane with Hespero.

Abraham Washington is on the flagship with the dogs.

You have four solid cubes with keyholes and a ring of seven keys:

• KB has one of the pine wood cubes
• Livius has the cube made of bone found in Iskos Valley Village’s elders’ hut
• The Alchemist has one of the pine wood cubes, the obsidian cube found at Natalya’s tomb, and the ring of seven keys

You are on a demiplane, and Zulon has been on the material plane for six full days.

• Previous episode: tastes like clues
• Next episode: the real jet fuel was the friends we betrayed along the way