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Mail & Mayors

Last week, the party decided to go do some testing in Prax's Labyrinth to see if they could cheese it. Ayala tried talking to the walls inside Gregory's bubble, and was disappointed to find that the wall couldn't tell them the entire layout of the maze. The effective perception of the spirit of the wall that Ayala talked to stopped outside of Gregory's bubble, where the enchantment scrambled the corridors. However, it did say that it had been told to scramble by someone or something named Prax some time before a large weight appeared over its head, and that it could try to help Ayala study the nature of the scrambling magic to reverse it. The party took this revelation in stride and decided not to follow up on it at all. Instead, they decided to go investigate Lilian Smith, who had taken over Praxis after the assassination of the previous mayor.

Back in Praxis, Ayala performed a ritual to telepathically link everyone to each other so they could talk more easily. Then, Diplo snuck into the mayor's house, accompanied by Ayala's arcane eye spell. Thanks to Mikolash's knowledge about the mayor's house, Diplo was able to find Lilian's work room. Ayala's arcane eye distracted one of the guards, and after some awkward sticky trickery, Diplo knocked the other guard unconscious and dragged him off into a corner. While Diplo was hiding the guard, Lilian stepped out from her room at the noise and asked the empty air if it was there to kill her. This was somewhat surprising to both the party and the remaining guard, but she told the guard not to worry about anything. While Lilian had the door open, Ayala sent her arcane eye into the mayor's room to investigate. There, she found some boring work papers, as well as a tantalizingly hidden paper that seemed to have been shoved rapidly into a drawer. Ayala and Diplo observed how they could get access to the paper easily if they only had a distraction.

That was Millie's time to shine. She immediately set fire to the trees and bushes just outside of the mayor's study. The sudden fire startled Lilian out of the room, and she quickly grabbed the paper to stuff it into her pocket. As soon as she left the room, Diplo sprinted towards her, snatched the paper out of her hand, and sprinted out of the house. Ayala then emerged from outside the house to rain on the fire to stop it from actually burning down the mayor's house, and the party got away with the paper. Once the party escaped the mayor's house, they stopped to read the paper. It was an incomplete resignation form, with the following content for the reason:

Citizens of Praxis: I apologize to all of you. I have misled you, and in so doing I fear that I have brought ruin on our dear city of Praxis. I did what I thought was best for our people - to preserve our future. But I was wrong. Mammon...

Based on the note, the party decided that Lilian had the potential to be an ally, or at least a useful resource. With this in mind, Ayala and Gregory returned to the mayor's house to try diplomacy. Gregory flexed his new Void Paragon title, and Ayala mentioned that she had helped put out the fire earlier, and they were quickly allowed to meet with the mayor. In person, Lilian seemed tired and defeated. She guessed that Ayala and Gregory had been involved with the theft of her note, and acknowledged that she had been working for Mammon. Like Dorcas, the leader of the Circle of the Black Sun, she had been persuaded by Mammon of the dangers of magic and believed she was acting for the greater good when she helped Mammon with her schemes. Unlike Dorcas, she had no interest in philosophical debates with the party, and acknowledged that the events in Praxis had been worse than she feared and that she was questioning whether she had taken the right path. She said that the party's destruction of the rituals surrounding Praxis had fundamentally sabotaged Mammon's original plan, and instead of having a captive audience to abolish magic, Mammon had only succeeded in terrifying Praxis and scattering it across the land.

Based on the failure of Mammon's plan, and Lilian's complicity in the death of Praxis as a city, Lilian was deciding whether to resign - and if she did, whether Mammon would simply replace her with Mammon's agent in the city. The party was extremely interested in that last thing about the agent in the city, and Lilian agreed to set up a meeting with Mammon's agent so the party could maybe use the agent's knowledge somehow to gain access to Prax's Labyrinth. However, she asked for a favor in exchange. After the party saved Praxis, she asked them to let her live, to let her contemplate her decisions and possibly make different choices in the future. Ayala readily agreed. Lilian also told the party that the Ritual of Severance was currently being controlled and administered by the Landowners' Association. Mammon had mentioned the possibility of applying it to unwilling targets, but it was supposed to take much longer than applying it to a willing target, and to her knowledge it had never been done. Gregory and Ayala thanked Lilian for her help and left to reconvene with the party, and they agreed to wait for the meeting with the agent.

That night, a city guard came up to the party with a sealed message from Lilian. It gave them a time and a place on the outskirts of Praxis, near the shield dome. Lilian said that she expected that the reason the agent agreed to the meeting was so that it could kill and replace her, and that she was trusting the party to keep her safe. The party went to the location of the meeting and waited to meet Mammon's agent...

Join us this week to probably have a fight for the first time in many sessions, and also maybe finally enter Prax's Labyrinth!

Stupid Awards

Millie: Ayala: nothing on the sheet? possible options: Diplo: Mikolash:
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