What’s better than one swarm? LOTS of swarms!

But let’s just get the first one out of the way. Combat with the Psychic Parasites!

Round 1

Horus firebolts them. They appear to take normal damage from that.

The Captain shoots them with an arrow. They appear to be resistant to the piercing damage, but vulnerable to the subsequent thunder damage.

Rusty hits them with lightning - they appear to be resistant. Minion pops up out of his shoulder cubby hole on Rusty’s armour and hits them with Shatter. Feel the Thunder!

The Parasite swarm does a legendary action to blanket the party with psychic interference. Horus, Louie and Raymond fail their saves - Vilgax casts silvery barbs to give Louie and Raymond another go, this time Raymond succeeds. Rusty and The Captain are immune because of their psychic invisibility.

Raymond holds his action until the swarm comes within range.

The swarm obligingly closes the range on its turn, and Raymond clobbers them with his held action. The swarm hit The Captain and Rusty for pretty solid damage (apparently they don’t like people ignoring their psychic babbles).

Louie finally gets to pull out his Abjure the Extraplanar and turns them. Rather than let them run away for one minute and then come back, Ethan gives everyone one free hit. Dennis bites, Rusty and Minion both shatter, The Captain does a sneak attack, Louie Thunderous Smites and Raymond hits them with Blackrazor. Not sure what Horus did, but we messed them up pretty bad. We have them on the ropes now!

Dennis steps up to the plate with a flurry of blows and beats the crap out of the remaining swarm members.

The swarm gets off one dying legendary action and does 13d10 psychic damage to anyone who failed their save (Dennis, for one). Ouch. Ethan rolled 83, which is 11.5 over the average. Nice rolling.

The Captain gets another sneak attack, and kills the last remaining 3 parasites with a single arrow. Nice one, Legolas!

End Combat

Rusty notices that the veil is underlined with glyphs, that spell his own psychic signature. Huh. Weird.

Horus finds a whispering shard. It says a number of things - “Sailor for the Raven whilst wearing a black hand.” “How could you do that to Selune? How could you allow the slaughter of all those Weresharks?” “Stupid floating architect. Turning on us. Builds this, then turns on us.” Horus drops the shard into a jar, and gets a Commune Jar. It allows him to cast Commune once per day.

To Vilgax’s vast relief, the party finally takes a long rest inside Rusty’s mansion. Before we rest, Dr Alaris asks us all to come to dinner, where we eat and stare at each other uncomfortably. I mean, we work together, but we don’t socialize with one another. Everyone gets the effects of a Heroes Feast.

Dreams

We go to our own rooms for a nap. Everyone gets to decorate their room to their own preferences - I don’t know who decided that, Rusty sure as hell doesn’t think his guests should be comfortable. Anyway, we all get inspiration for describing our rooms.

The Captain dreams of sailing on the high seas on his beloved Dreadnaught.

Horus dreams of an idyllic landscape.

Raymond dreams of swarms, which was either: a memory of the fight just gone; highly prophetic; or just wish fulfillment regarding insects. When he wakes there is an insect in his room, which he eats.

Rusty dreams of artificer projects, done, still unfinished, and ones yet to be planned. When he wakes, he has a Secret Chest, which stores things in the Ethereal Plane. Basically a Leomunds Secret Chest. Cool.

Dennis dreams of being surrounded by defeated foes, a vast plain of dead enemies. When he wakes, he finds he is under the effects of Death Ward.

Louie dreams of infinitely regressing watchers. That answers the age old question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” He wakes to find himself in a ruined city in Mordent, but when he blinks, he’s back in his room in the mansion.

After all that, we reconvene and the party sees that Rusty has modified his armour. It is now smaller and sleeker, with less obvious space inside, and armoured tentacles extrude from the back. Plus it looks a bit like a cat, so people will be fooled into thinking he is a Tabaxi Paladin or something.

Horus has no chill

We exit the Mansion, and find ourselves in total darkness, despite everyone except The Captain having Darkvision. In the distance there is a square of light. Ignoring centuries of advice given by well meaning relatives, we go towards the light. Nearing it, we see it is square, and seems to be a window to another place. In the other place there is an altar. Upon the altar lies a bone dagger, and a phial holding an Illythid tadpole. Beside the altar stands a Thrall.

There are carvings on the walls around the altar showing Thralls willingly offering up their minds for ceremorph implantation. This seems like very obvious self-serving propaganda to me, but what do I know?

The Captain touches the screen. The Thrall in the image walks to the location on the screen that The Captain touched. The Captain touches the dagger and an option dialog appears - “Pick up”, “Throw”, “Attack”. The Captain nopes out of there and leaves it to anybody other than him, so Horus steps up to the plate.

It is around this time that we notice that the walls around the party have started to close in. This adds a soucon of urgency. Horus starts playing in earnest, while Rusty prepares to Plane Shift everyone out of there, if needed. Horus, determining that this screen thing is obviously a game and not real, decides that there are no moral consequences and forces the Thrall to cut the top of his own head off and shove the tadpole inside. No idea why cutting the skull off was necessary, but it’s a game, right? The moment the Thrall is fully implanted, the walls stop.

While this was happening, Dennis was hearing Sinned’s voice. Only Dennis, initially, until Ethan was reminded that Rusty can eavesdrop on telepathic conversations that happen within 30’. Suddenly, Rusty could hear too.

Once the walls stop, a dark version of Dennis appears on the screen and starts calling the party out for having no morals. What a wanker. If you force someone, literally under pain of death, to do something, the moral weight lies not upon them, but upon you for forcing them into that situation. The people running this show are ethical cretins.

At this point, the roof falls in. Most of the party manage to avoid the falling rubble, with the exception of Rusty and Raymond. The party immediately starts to furiously dig them out. Rusty plane shifts to the ethereal, takes a close look at where Raymond is, exits the rubble mound, plane shifts back in, digs until he finds a place where he can stretch a tentacle in to touch Raymond, and plane shifts both of them to the Ethereal.

Into the Veil

We enter the veil. Rusty has a vision of himself, surrounded by Mind Flayers, constructing a door. He shakes off the vision, but can still see the door. The door has a riddle on it. Rusty immediately knows the answer is Maanzecorian. The door opens. Beyond it lies a throbbing passageway, lined with indestructible pods containing the Revallians.

If they could make indestructible pods, why not put the growing Mind Flayers and Intellect Devourers - that we have been killing in job lots - inside them? Why only the relatively worthless Revallians?

Apparently we have to move through the complex until we can find the control panel that can open these pods. We move through the complex, until suddenly we are in a room filled with Mind Flayers. I think there were 36. Initiative!

Horus gets 37. What the hell, Horus. Raymond only gets 20-something, but it was with a natural 20, so that puts him up there just behind Horus. Rusty gets 33, The Captain gets 29, Dennis gets 27 and Louie gets 19.

The mind flayers, for bullshit reasons, don’t even roll - they just get to go between each of us, in batches of 6. So this means that 30 of them will get to act on a higher initiative than it is possible for them to actually roll. Anyway.

Horus decides that actually doing damage is for losers, and casts a flurry of completely useless spells. Arcane Abeyance wrapping up a Shadow Blade, then Summon Fey summoning a Fuming Fey, then the Fuming Fey uses its action to immediately break the Arcane Abeyance and get a shadow blade. Not only did all of this do nothing, it burned Louie’s reaction and Counterspell stopping the Mind Flayers from Counterspelling it.

The Mind Flayers then beat on us for a bit.

Raymond hits a Mind Flayer with Blackrazor twice.

The Mind Flayers beat on us a bit more, and one of them tries to dominate the Fuming Fey, but it makes its save with room to spare. The Fuming Fey uses its reaction to being hit to hit back, but misses.

Rusty casts a subtle Fireball (he learned from the Counterspells flying about) and nukes half the Mind Flayers, breaking their concentration on something. Minion pops up from his armour shoulder mount, fires Shatter at another bunch, and ducks back inside.

The Mind Flayers have another go at us.

The Captain stabs a Mind Flayer and disengages, but fails to hide. What? How?

The Mind Flayers have another go, and one of them summons 86 snakes to bite The Captain. It’s not as effective as you would expect.

Dennis starts swinging, and rolls a blinder. He stuns the first one, instakills the second with a critical hit with the Astral Whip, paralyzes two, then instakills the last one with another critical.

The Mind Flayers beat on us again, and Raymond fails his save vs Mind Whip and is stunned.

Louie hits one of the paralyzed Mind Flayers for an automatic critical and does 64 points of damage.

At this point, we hear a rising whine. Something like that, anyway - Ethan’s special effects were fighting with his noise reduction algorithm, and only about 40% was getting through. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was meant to be reminiscent of the sound of a falling atomic bomb, because that’s pretty much what happened. There is a blinding light, lots of noise, a blast in our faces, and when the dust cleared, no more Mind Flayers. That’s disappointing - we were just getting a roll on! I’m almost certain Horus would have contributed some damage this round!

Standing in the centre of the resulting crater is a Marut. It’s apparently upset with Horus. We couldn’t hear most of what it said, nominally because the blast blew out our eardrums, but actually because Ethan was still having audio issues. We find out later exactly what it said:

Temporal anomaly detected. Unauthorized manipulation of causality. Such chaos cannot be tolerated.

By order of Primus, you are to be corrected from this timeline. You will come with me in order to be purged. Compliance is mandatory.

End scene.