After Action Report: :tropeR noitcA retfA

The entirety of this journal entry is written in Necril



And here I was beginning to think that this mission would never. So much confusion and mystery and yet I still don't feel like many of my questions have been answered. From the very beginning, this mission felt wrong. Alternate mirror dimensions, beasts not seen for 30 years twisted beyond imagining, a mysterious purple goop that acted as a biological weapon, clones made of that goop, and a secret society long thought defeated.

I had thought that the loaded deck had screened our missions well enough that we wouldn't be stuck with the crazy living god artifact stuff but here we are again. What started off as a normal beast hunting mission soon turned very weird basically five minutes after we got there. Soon after we began our investigations of the destroyed sites we ran into one of the leaders of the nearby city of Atrugate, Thea. Somehow this Thea had begun to hear a voice in her head, something about being either the voice of the world or the voice of nature? I never understood it and it was never really EVER brought up again. After that, the weirdly mutated wolves began to attack and Luna began to hear the voice as well. Eventually, our travels led to a cave where we had to do a bunch of really weird tasks to get to an altar where we discovered the body of another Atrugate leader and a knife that could create portals out of thin air. Oh, and then the bear attacked, I almost forgot that part. Anyways, eventually Atrugate was attacked and soon afterwards we met Luna's stepdad and he began to explain a bit about the bear. It had somehow managed to get half of an artifact lodged into its chest and it was somehow creating allowing it to become incredibly dangerous and powerful. Some point afterward, we went and confronted Senra. Sorry, I meant a CLONE of Senra. Oh, and the bear came back for that battle. Somehow the weirdest part of that mission was yet to come.

Sometime after that a divine beast decided to show up and attack Atrugate leading to a dreadnaught appearing to help deal with it and also the Lord Protector himself showing up. Eventually, someone decided that it would probably be a good idea to go hunt down the Senras hiding in the bunker in the main tower in Atrugate. Apparently, the Order had decided to hide a bunch of stuff down there, use the flipside version as a base, and add even more secret rooms, like a cloning facility! This is where we learned stuff like the fact that the Order had lured the divine beast into attacking Atrugate in order to sneak in more members, that one of the past lunas was used a template for the cloning stuff, Senra was excommunicado from the Order, oh and also the fact that we were had picked for this mission by the Order because we had a samsaran! Yeah, they really dropped the ball on the whole screening process idea. Anyways we killed the Senras and destroyed one of their cloning facilities. I said one because it turns out that THEY HAVE EVEN MORE. After that Tairn gave us the contract to kill every Senra that we run into, which was awkward when we ran into the one good Senra that Sef had somehow learned about after merging with his flipside version. This good Senra had luckily been in possession of the half of the artifact that wasn't lodged into the bear. Once that was dealt with we moved onto dealing with an ancient druidic temple that had been used for ancient samsarans to discover their purpose or something like that at least. During that time we ran into a puzzle that involved a pool of water that could bring anything thrown into it back to life, which is a great idea when Aahi is around. She decided to throw the head of Senkas into it and we had to end up killing him again. At least it wasn't the ashes of Dracula. We did end up using the energy from Senra's death to bring back Van Helsing, who disappeared less than 24 hours later. Oh, and Sef got a new dog out of it as well. We then moved onto Mt. Blue which turned out to be an ancient Burial site for Luna's past life the Saint. ONE THE OTHER SIDE WAS A MACHINE TO BRING BACK THE DEAD I THINK. We then killed Senra and moved onto the last few battles for this mission. It turns out that there was a flipside version of the Tesmeri dreadnaught that had members of the Order on it! Oh and apparently the Third Legion had shown up with their dreadnaught at some time and we ended up meeting a few of their captains and had lunch with the second captain and Tairn. Anyways, with the help of Tannic, we managed to board the dreadnaught, deal with a ton of people who were a lot weaker than I had imagined, and then killed the last of the evil Senras leaving only the good one left. Soon after we found out that Tannic had died and that Thea's brother was the one that killed him. The so-called 'kingslayer' had been the one that gave us the heart in the first place and set the reactors on the ship to have a meltdown. Luckily we managed to jump into realspace and escape through an escape pod before the dreadnaught crashed into the ocean and 'mysteriously' disappeared.

AS IF NONE OF THIS WAS CRAZY ENOUGH, THE EMPEROR HIMSELF DECIDED TO ACTUALLY LEAVE HIS PALACE FOR ONCE. Do I really need to recap this part? I think we all know what happened on this day. Someone tell me when they've got the actual figures for how many died and I'll be sure to include it in this part.