Event Two

The Backer Ball

Ostensibly, the purpose of the ball was to celebrate our financial backers, shake hands, and make them feel important. In the background we had two important goals:

The JAAs were upset with all the secrecy and wanted to learn more about the internal structure of Lacuna. Who was pulling the strings? What were their motivations.

We also wanted to learn who stole FABRILIS. We knew it was most likely someone at the party. We thought going in that it was likely connected to Danny Ocean and that it was some manner of inside job.

The Backers:

Lewis Hargrave: Was threatening, shady, eyeing Isabella's mask. Isabella Marx: Wanted to lead Lacuna into a new age, thought it was falling apart. Marlin Agrees. Annette Bowton: Had brought a powerful fox mask to lure the thief. Eric McCarthy: Family man, wanted to bring people together. Aaron Bowen: Wanted to look at a haunting in person badly, had heard we had arranged for tours.

EJ Royce was there too, and he's answering a lot of our questions with things that are definitively not answers.

When we first arrived we got to eat fancy food while mingling. We were served by butlers. Marlin had us begin leading tours into the KNOT for the backers to view a fairly docile haunting. We were cautioned not to blow our artifacts solving it yet, we wanted to let the tours go through and see it to get an idea of what we do.

While the tour groups were doing their thing, the rest of us rifled through the backers' stuff to see if they had any incriminating evidence. At this point we discovered Hargraves static emitter and realized he was the one who broke into the LAIR and stole FABRILIS.

Unfortunately at that point Hargrave was in the knot investigating the haunting. Realizing he'd been had, he used FABRILIS to seal half the room off with the haunting behind it and escpaed, leaving the JAAs to deal with the haunting, which was now aggravated and aggressive. Hargrave returned to the Hylean world in a fake panic and convinced Langston to call on all hands to enter the KNOT to stage a rescue.

The Haunting The haunting was playing out the accidental murder of a friend. It jumped between attacking in a rage and extreme guilt, alternating dealing damage and healing injured JAAs. Damaging the haunting had no effect.

On the other side of the wall, the JAAs were faced with a disordered pile of pages from various sources, sigils on the walls created by FABRILIS, and an empty rune circle. To get the wall to dissolve we needed to place the correct sigils onto the circle to remind the wall of what it once was. In order to do this we needed to figure out which symbols to use by re-assembling book segments from the scraps of paper in order to find key words that indicate which symbols we need in each section. Some of the scraps of paper were on the other side of the wall, so the other JAAs trapped there needed to find them and radio back information from the other side of the wall. Once the sigils were in place the wall dematerialized and we were able to reunite the haunting with its murder weapon so we could begin the fight in earnest. At this point destroying the haunting in the usual violent way caused it to resolve and we were able to leave the KNOT.

The Ambush

When we left the knot we found that Hargrave was holding the place up with the Butlers who were secretly working for him. Marx handed over the fox mask, at which point the Followers showed up to cut off his escape. Langston calls for us to enter the KNOT to fight back against them.

The fight was hard - only piercing weapons had any impact whatsoever on the followers. By the time we returned to the Hylean world, Hargrave was gone.

At this point we had no idea who the Followers were, or why they were there. Many of us assumed they were part of Hargrave's plan.

We were wrong.