Inbetweeners 40- Xalatra Questline Part 1- Hunt for Tock Tock
The players had received their marching orders from the Lady of Pain— find Xalatra of the Bleeding Glyph so she can find a remedy for their inability to travel linearly outside of Sigil.
There were a few hanging plot threads here that increased the players motivation to resolve this quicky:
1) Zariel's ressurection ability has been corrupted in the absence of the Interloper. More on that later.
2)The Lost Titan has threated to destroy them and Arkanos Villa if they can't find him a suitable challenge.
3)The Interloper is currently imprisoned by Mechanus
4)While relatively safe in Sigil, the players are still wanted by Mechanus.
What the players were told about Xalatra was that in trying to map the boundaries between the multiverse and the Far Realm, she lost her mind. She began hyper focusing on magical glyphs, believing the right combination of glyphs could unlock secrets to the multiverse. She began etching some of these unstable glyphs across Sigil, and they would detonate violently and wreak havoc across the city. The Dabus responded and drove Xalatra underneath the city. Her current location is unknown but believed to be somewhere deep in the city. Xalatra corrupted a Dabus (something that should not have been possible). The rogue Dabus has been nicknamed Tock-Tock by the locals. Locating Tock-Tock is the players main lead on Xalatra.
Before we progress, I should reveal a little bit more about the Dabus.
The Dabus are servants of the Lady of Pain and manage the day to day operations around Sigil. They are capable of repairing and rearranging the material in the city itself. An individual Dabus is not much of a threat, with a CR of 2. However, harming one will alert more, and resisting them will draw the Lady of Pain's attention. They are humanoid in shape, have goat horns, wispy white hair, and do not speak. They instead etch visual symbols or glyphs to communicate.
So, let's say someone set off an explosion in the streets that damaged some masonry. So long as the explosion was relatively minor, the perpetrator wouldn't face consequences from the Lady of Pain or Sigil directly. However, third parties might take issue with it and handle accordingly. Instead, Dabus would be dispatched who would simply fix the foundation and any damage to nearby structures that are done. They can do this relatively effortlessly, and the greater the damage, the more Dabus that will be deployed. If the person who set off the explosion tried to stop the Dabus from finishing, they would attack. They would start with simply throwing bricks or small psionic attacks, but if they attacker persisted, the Dabus could swarm and these swarms would be considerably more dangerous. If that didn't solve things, the Lady of Pain might show up directly and dispatch the trouble maker. However, residents of the city don't want to see the Lady of Pain deployed so frequently they will stop someone who is disrupting things specifically to avoid Dabus swarms and Lady of Pain influence. She could just decide to erase that part of the city, after all.
On the note of erasing part of the city—Sigil is also constantly changing. So perhaps a city block of factories is going to be leveled and replaced with a park. A swarm of thousands of Dabus could simply cover the area and in moments transform it, erasing what was there before. No one knows how big Sigil truly is, except for the Lady of Pain. by the same token, no one knows how many Dabus their are. The truth is that there are as many Dabus as the Lady wills at a given time. She can create more with a mere thought. They are not only on the surface of the city either. The majority are actually underneath the city, managing all of the different processes that keep the city running.
If a Dabus were to malfunction for some reason- perhaps it is heavily damaged, corrupted by a spell, or simply too old- it is recycled. Broken down to its constituent parts and reformed as a fresh new Dabus. This was done with Tock-Tock... many times. However, he keeps reappearing. It basically follows the same pattern, Tock-Tock arrives, starts drawing glyphs somewhere in the city, is seized and dissamebled by the Dabus and then reappears again elsewhere. Some sort of bizarre side-effect of Xalatra's far realm corruption interacting with the city itself. Tock-Tock isn't enough of a threat for the Lady to direct her attention to, so he continues to be a curiosity of the denizens of the city. Some even brag when they manage to catch a glimpse of Tock-Tock.
The players had a few options for how to track down Tock-Tock. They could head to a memory dealer, one who extracts memories and uses them as currency. This exiled Githzerai essentially operated in a black market for memories, and would have traded a memory about Xalatra for one of the players memories. Another option was to do research in the Hall of Echoes, sifting through memories to find one that is helpful. The third option, which the players chose, was to simply ask around. The Nameless One made them some introductions that helped.
The Nameless One summoned the players a boat that operated in the street by having water elementals under it. This method of travel let the boat bring the “water” with it, so you could travel by boat overland. While incredibly cool, this method of travel was very expensive, and the Nameless One left the players with the tab. Ironically, they took this fancy ride to a dive bar, but it certainly made an impression. The Nameless One figured since the players were celebrities, they should travel like celebrities. The dive bar was called the Gilded Gutter. On the outside it appears to just be an office, but inside it is speakeasy for mercenaries.
There were many patrons for the players to interact with. You can check the source document in the previous post if you are curious. But the important one is Velka Viral. She approaches the players after they talked to the Kenku about Tock-Tock, before discovering the Kenku could only repeat what it had previously seen so couldn't give them a new location. Velka runs several criminal enterprises in the surrounding area, and while she is very capable in a fight she prefers to work behind the scenes. She basically offers the players a deal, they help her evict some squatters in an industrial building she wants to develop, and she will give them a line on Tock-Tock. She is dismissive about the “squatters”, saying they are little more than religious zealots.
The Truth: A fire-elemental Illithid on the run from a party of Githyanki hunting them has taken up residence in the abandon foundry that Velka wants to redevelop. The Mind Flayer-Fire Elemental, Ignithar, has started a cult called the Everflame cult. He gathers creatures related to the elemental plane of fire to worship a fire elemental. His purposes are two-fold. He uses these zealots as free labor to smelt down precious metals to build up a nest egg. Secondly, he is building an army to protect himself when the Githyanki inevitably catch up to him.
The party of Githyanki actually approached the players before they entered the Gilded Gutter. They initially look down on the group considering their relative species, but Uzo is able to square up with one and they show a modicum of difference and offer a reward for any information about a Mind Flayer in the area.
The players decided to have Uzo pose as an initiate to infiltrate the foundry. Uzo then killed the cults “Everflame”, a fire elemental, which causes Ignithar to show himself and attack. Uzo was about to die when the rest of the group came down from the smoke stack, attacking Ignithar, causing him and his Efreeti partner to flee to the Elemental Plane of Fire. They then convince the remainder of the cult to join the Harmonium, so some Azers, fire mephitis, etc, make their way to Arkanos manor to join up. The players also netted a nice sum of precious metals (36000 gold worth) from the operation that they then keep. Essentially Ignithar had been sending cult members out to scrap anything precious they could. The Githyanki were very unhappy with this outcome, that Ignithar had escaped and they would have to follow them. They grab two of the former cultists to “interrogate” and then leave. However, Velka was very pleased with the eviction and set the players up with Rojurr, a gnome-plant hybrid potentially?
Rojurr is sold as a leading expert on the inner-workings of Sigil. The truth is that he does study the Dabus obsessively, but he is a degenerate drug addict. He nods off several times while speaking to the players, at one point snorting some substance and going unconscious, needed to be revived. The players struggle but eventually get him to stay on task long enough to give them the information they need. Since there is no apparent pattern to when or where Tock-Tock seems to appear next, and he appears for such a short time, Rojurr has been working on a non-deterministic, time independent, chaotic algorithm that can predict where he will appear next. It hasn't worked yet, but since the players are not tethered by causality, they are able to add the missing piece. Basically, they have an algorithm that will alert them when Tock-Tock is going to appear, but only right as its happening. They then must race to find him before the other Dabus disassemble him. After providing that information, Rojurr then continues to snort his mysterious substance and returns to a coma-like state.
The Inbetweeners were alerted that Tock-Tock appeared next to a clock tower in the town square where he was etching glyphs. The players then defend Tock-Tock from Dabus that come to disassemble him. The Dabus synergize with one another, so they can cast magic missile that is boosted the more that are around, along with many other abilities. Eventually, after the players defeat a few, they start to swarm. The Dabus swarms are far more dangerous, acting as a CR 10 creature with the ability to cast a barrage of magic missiles, collapse in on a target, or sacrifice itself to unleash additional missiles. Eventually several swarms start to converge, but when the players defeat one that escalates things enough to get the attention of the Lady of Pain, who sends the others away to let the players continue unimpeded. Essentially, the players needed to cause enough of a ruckus to draw the Lady's attention so she could intervene, the exact outcome most would do everything they could to avoid—but the players are working for the Lady of Pain.
From here, the players communicated with Tock-Tock, who unlike the other Dabus actually tries to vocalize but isnt quite able to. Tock-Tock uses symbols and glyphs to bring the players to the entrance of the Gutworks, the inner workings of Sigil.
And we will pause there. Next post, I'll delve into the Gutworks.
But yeah, kill fire elemental mind flayer, evict cult, save tock tock. That was the order of events.