System Agnostic/Episode Three: System Error

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The final episode of chapter 3 opens once again on the Paraska manor in CR, as the tour group comes to the end of the tour. The frazzled tour guide fields questions from two brothers named Brendan Lee Mulligan and Brendan C Mulligan before turning and leaving. The group disperses, including a little girl who’s still staring at the manor and the man with the holy symbol.

The camera focuses on the symbol and we see Citizen Doctor Eloise Merhermbler. She’s been waiting from inside the symbol since she passed, and after what seems like eternity, a hooded figure approaches and tells her, “She will speak with you now.”

The cracked land turns to desert as they walk, and Eloise suddenly finds herself on a dais that’s miles in the sky. A dark-skinned woman with dark braided hair sits atop it and addresses the paladin, wondering what she’s supposed to with her. She admits Eloise was used, and that she accepts a degree of responsibility for it. The paladin’s party unleashed a Titan that flattened the world in a culmination of events that started long before Eloise was born.

The woman summons Aranwe, Sae and Indomitus from beyond death to the dais. Aranwe asks where Vilya is, but the woman assures him the dryad is fine. She introduces herself as Amunet and apologizes to the party for everything they went through. She is the goddess of magic, and one of the Five who created the world.

She goes on to enigmatically thank the party for doing something that made “an interesting entity” aware of a threat enough to pursue it, hopefully to their own undoing. Sae asks if Rian knew of this, but Amunet says it was unlikely. Aranwe asks if Ronan is okay, and Amunet sends her cloaked servant to fetch the bird. She offers everyone the chance to witness events unfold before going back to rest; Sae asks how visiting a temple could have possibly had such long-reaching consequences, and Amunet responds that those actions were mimicked “to an unfortunate result—hopefully.”

Sae, Indomitus and Aranwe agree to stay and watch, as does Eloise. Amunet waves her hand and seats appear for the lot of them. Vilya also appears next to Aranwe. Everyone peers through a ripple in the air to see our current party.

Touse is running for his life. He grabs a knife as he bolts back to the study with the intention to dive into the hole he explored earlier. The others turn to see the chef enter the room just as the monster chasing him reaches out and envelops his head with melting flesh.

Disenna and Artok scream at the sight, the latter of whom is trying to push past everyone to hide is the hole behind the bookcase. Eyelean, formally known as Nuria, understands the monster’s hand grasping Touse isn’t real—but no one else knows this, so to them, its attacks are lethal. Arlow tries to find a way out of the room.

Touse tries to stab the monster, but misses and stabs himself in the shoulder instead. Eyelean passes her hand through the arm of the creature, to find it is indeed partially an illusion—but something is definitely there.

Sir Syva manages to pull Touse free, and Eyelean tries to slam the door on the creature’s arm, only managing to keep it in the doorway at the moment.

Arlow throws back the other door leading out  and runs. Disenna ties her scarf around Touse’s bleeding arm and pulls him out of the room, with Sir Syva and Lady Myra following behind.

The monster crashes through the door and turns to the hole. Eyelean hears Artok’s muffled screaming as the monster tries to slither inside. Eyelean throws a knife at it, and it turns to attack her.

She tries to manifest a weapon that will kill the creature using her mind. It feels like the entire world is fighting against her, but she manages to summon a sword. She slices a chunk of the monster off, but now both pieces are on the offensive against her and Artok. Eyelean tries to transform the sword into a hammer, but the creature attacks and she feels like she’s been engulfed in acid.

The others run, and they realize the hallway they’re in is unnaturally long and seems to be stretching. A single door opens; however, the door each person sees open is different. They each escape through their own door. Everyone is hit with a blast of cold air as they do, but Arlow is affected the strongest.

The hunter finds himself in his sister’s shop, but all the animals are different—and some are alive. Arlow does his best to stay still, but the package in his arms is also moving. He unwraps it, but instead of the taxidermy statue of a red-tailed hawk he was expecting to see, the black cat from earlier emerges. He tries speaking    to it, telling it to be careful. Other misshapen animals start to close in on the hunter.

The cat regards Arlow with a mixture of contempt and pleading. A name appears in Arlow’s mind: Iraga. He asks how to get out of the room, and the cat headbutts a door leading out.

Disenna leaps through her door. It’s pitch black at first, but slowly several fungi begin glowing, leading her down a tunnel. It turns into a labyrinth that’s familiar yet not, with the echo of scuffing shoes that sound just out of reach. She follows the sound and reaches what appears to be the end of the tunnel: a room with a canvas screen stretched out on one wall, flanked by metal carriages.

Touse runs through his own door. He’s suddenly outside, where he sees a massive manor—yet it’s not the one he was just inside. He decides to sit in front of the house until nightfall…only to realize there’s no stars or any form of light out here. He tries calling out to the people within the house, and is invited in. He finds himself face to face with someone behind a podium who says “Welcome to Stuckey’s!”

Touse sits down at a table and introduces himself, but the person behind the podium simply responds that he’s not Touse.  The chef feels glass hit the back of his head, and collapses at the table.

Eyelean manages to shift the sword into a hammer. She attacks the monster in front of her, but it only eats the hammer. She sits down in the puddle she finds herself in, to test a theory. She is injured further and starts to lose consciousness.

The cat leads Arlow back to the manor’s foyer, where the fairy statue has radically changed: the wings have disappeared, the hair appears to be on fire—and it’s sitting down, arms folded. It looks at Arlow and mouths something, but the hunter can’t make out the words. He asks Iraga if they know why the statue is, but the cat shakes their head. He tries holding a conversation with the statue, the latter of which tries to briefly possess Iraga to speak through before the cat fights it off.

Arlow puts the cat down and the statue manages to have it scratch into the earth: “Do you want to know the truth?” Arlow says he does, and Iraga spells out: “Surrender.” The statue extends a hand and the hunter grasps it; all at once Arlow’s mind is invaded, and he comes to the sudden realization he’s not Arlow.

Disenna watches the screen in front of her flare to life, followed by the words: “Xentalia presents: The Truth of How You Are Currently Living.” Via slide presentation, it asks her several questions that make her question the validity of her “reality” and goes on to offer her the choice of living in ignorance, or waking up. She chooses the latter, and just like Arlow, comes to understand she is not Disenna.

Touse finds himself back in the study, but the other party members are missing, there’s no signs of the scuffle with the monster, and the bookshelf is no longer knocked over. He sits next to the fire, but is freezing. A voice keeps calling after him, but he stubbornly sits without moving. A finger traces down his back; he thinks it’s a ghost and greets it as such. He suggests they can be friends, to which the disembodied voice calls his attention to bust portraits of the missing party guests and says “Friends kill for friends.”

The chef tries to leave. A meat cleaver embeds itself in the table next to him, which he picks up. On his way out the door from the study, he finds “Nuria” passed out on the floor, but steps over her and keeps walking. He enters the foyer and tries to open the front door, but gets buried in snow. He backs away as hands emerge from the snow, and tries to walk away calmly. Voices and cold breezes follow him down the hall to the wine cellar, which now houses a bed instead.

Touse looks for monsters under the bed, but is addressed by something in the bed entreating him to “sleep it off.” He leaves and tries to go for higher ground, finding Lady Myra along the way but brushing past her. He climbs to the attic and tries to bust the attic window in an attempt to leave the house. Suddenly “Nuria” and Lady Myra are on either side of him, with several mannequins directly in front of him.

“Nuria”/Eyelean sees past the facades now, and recognizes that Touse is not Touse—although she can’t remember his name. She remembers that Lady Myra is actually Meghan, a girl she hid with before in another place. She witnesses everything shifting around her, as something is desperately trying to keep its hold on “Touse”.

Touse sees a handprint form on the outside of the window and chooses to turn and attack the mannequins. Eyelean walks up to “Myra”/Meghan and asks if she remembers anything happening. Meghan says she remembers being pierced with a metal spike, then suddenly she was living in a cave and later being stabbed at the same moment someone else stabbed themselves with an axe.

Meghan’s concerned for “Touse”, but Eyelean is piecing things together. She concludes nothing around them is real, but that Touse thinks it is—therefore, because he believes it exists, the supposed house still exists. Eyelean asks Meghan to drag Touse down into the foyer while she concentrates on distracting whatever being has trapped them, hoping to break the illusion that way.

The others meet in the foyer, and a genasi woman stands where the statue once was: Xen, the same woman Arlow remembers fighting alongside in the battle for Karavox.

Xen tells them she’s been awake longer than they have, which is why she tried to get through to them in previous simulations. She said someone in the house is still fighting, and the others need to wake them up to further weaken the simulation’s hold.

Eyelean is struggling against the house’s power. Meghan tackles “Touse” and sends him through the floor into the foyer below. Meghan, “Sir Syra”/Syd and “Artok”/Arnold also arrive at that moment and fling the door shut to the hallway behind them as a monster slams against it.

The others try to convince Touse to wake up, but he refuses. Arlow and Disenna take an arm on either side and Xen asks if he wants stay as Touse or wake up. The chef insists he’s never been anyone else, but agrees to wake up if it avoids violence with the others. He immediately suffers a splitting headache and comes to understand that he, too, is not who he thought he was.

The ultimate truth comes to light: everyone living in these simulations came from Ravendean when monsters attacked. They had all fled to the Screen Nest drive-in for safety, but it didn’t work; although they avoided the reptilian creatures, they couldn’t avoid the massive woman formed from lava, wood and stone who crashed into the theater—followed by a metal sphere that sent spikes out to impale and capture survivors. Ever since then, all of the people trapped inside have been stuck in several simulations to keep them distracted while the sphere enacts its still-secret plan.

Back in CR, the man with the holy symbol climbs the staircase to approach Karavox’s case. He knows he’s likely not alone, as someone else has always been ahead of him in his quest—the one who killed the librarian Celeste before he even knew the axe existed.

He arrives to the find the little girl from the tour group enveloping Karavox within herself. The simulation can’t kill the people trapped within it outright, but Karavox will allow them to do so via their simulated avatars.