GAME TWO:  IT'S A SMALL WORLD BUT I WOULDN'T WANT TO PAINT IT

Thank you Steven Wright. Now it’s time for the recappening of Mark’s game from the Saturday game fest. It’s making for some interesting game days: All the bashy-bashy pain-bringing in the early and the smooth and creamy virtually fightless stuff in the late.

Last time we had ¾ of our souls. Time to find the other ¼. Additionally, we need to set up some resources and decide what to do after that. It helps that we’ve all been having the same dreams. We dream of a black cube. The internet tells us of such an enormous black stone in the middle east. It’s an object of worship of Muslims the world over, who pilgrimage (Hajj) to get there for an annual holy day. Said holy day is in November, and it’s October, so the characters don’t have much time. Not mention valid identities, passports, or any tie to the Muslim faith (which is a requirement to get in to the site of the black rock). So we have to lay some ground work.

Working for us is our ability to understand and speak all languages. Working against us is our inability to read all languages. I could bore you with details but let’s jump to the good stuff.

We cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, across the desert, joining a group of other Hajjis. Maiko sets up a duplication of reservations so that when we show up we can try to force the hotel into coming up with a room for us. The owner buys a story we have about bringing our terminally ill friend (Kasper) there for the Hajj and gets us a place to stay overnight.

When we make it to the Hajj site it’s the definitive mob scene, filled with people trying to circle and get as close to this holy rock as they can. We have to “push” to get close and finally end up making contact with the stone, which KO’s each one of us. Around the stone are a number of people whom our “second sight” tells us are not normal, but those guys ignored us right up until we touched it and went down. Now they are interested. They make their way toward us as we awaken and recover. We start pushing to get out of there ASAP, which we do.

Techno-boy uses his device to set up watches on internet traffic, looking for flash traffic about us. There’s plenty. Seems the CIA and some mid-east folks are looking.

That’s when we hit upon the idea of wiping out all knowledge of us. But some of us want to keep our families and others have nothing they need to keep. So the idea becomes about removing all knowledge and evidence of us between two days before we woke up in that alley and the current day. We throw in our efforts and whoosh. Or maybe shloof. What’s the sound of something being wiped away? I’ll go with Wika-wika-wika….

I failed to mention our peers. While traveling through NY we came across a street where a homeless man is holding up a sign. It’s not an end-of-the-world message. Well, maybe it is, we don’t know. But the message is obviously directed at us as it incorporates our domains into a nonsensical sentence. We’re sure it’s for us. The guy says he was paid to put up the sign. He directs us to a guy at the local coffee shop. We go in and say hello to a pudgy fellow. Second-sight reveals that he is covered in writing. Seems he is the minion of the Lord of Book, and he has been sent to give us a gift (a book) and to remind us that we are required to visit the domain of the lord of entropy. This, it seems, is our domain. We’re not in “the real world”. That, apparently, exists beyond a gate that is at ground zero. There is indeed a strange shadowy gate there that we did not go through; we want to save that for now.

Here’s what we know about us…