The Nameless Report

The report which will be handed in to a party which shall remain nameless, by another party, concerning the activities of the Parov Detective Agency during the course of their special royal assignment.

=[Season 1]=

Initial Impetus
On instructions from above, I maneuvered into the Parov Agency. This proved more useful than expected, since shortly afterward, Parov and the other detectives were called to investigate the crime of the millennium; Barron Ganth, the Maker of Man, was dead, reduced to dust, and could not be scryed. Initial attempts to contact or return his soul did nothing, with methods up to and beyond wish being attempted. Recent contact attempts have given strange murmurs instead of silence. Being kept very hushed, this was told in confidence to the detectives of the city.

There had been a hollow obsidian dagger's blade embedded in Ganth; five are part of the crown jewels of the Strand of Orc, and five others are known to exist. Prince Edward believes that each member of the royal family has a dagger embedded in them; he does, his uncle does, and he believes that his mother and sister in South Goneril each have one. Reconnecting the blade with the hilt restores the person to the state they were in when its blade was broken off inside their body. This was tried, to no effect, and the dagger was placed under the care of a guard. Less than a day later, the guard and dagger disappeared; the guard's body was found in the river in District 20 a week later.

The dagger itself was found by Malachi Parov prior to his learning of the death of Ganth, broken into hilt and blade when he found it. He reattached it moments later and kept it in the most secure storage available since hearing of Ganth's death.

Shortly afterward, after some assurances I established separately with Malachi Parov and the party for whom I write this report, I received the initial stages of the usual advanced training in exchange for a promise of this report, delivered as a retrospective. I began compiling it as a single document at that time, suitably encoded.

Situations suspected to have some connection to Ganth's death
These were the primary suspects according to the royal officials: The local merfolk are perpetually rebellious and were planning a revolt. The Elderfey Wild might be a problem if it was planning expansion. Some secret organization has been creating undead and constructs (exclusively these) and releasing them in the capital.

On the night of Ganth's death, Prince Edward had a dream of being in a burning carriage. On this same night, everyone who later became part of the Parov Detective Agency had a shared dream which began with all the known dreamers in a pit of humanoids being fed to Shadows, and proceeded to a confrontation with Derro and Pseudonatural creatures. The derro were sacrificing wolves in a strange ritual which killed the wolves and the derro and released pseudonatural creatures from the corpse. An obsidian dagger remarkably similar to the one recovered by Parov was involved.

Royal Assignment
The Parov Agency was distinguished soon thereafter by a special meeting with the Heir Apparent, Prince Edward. As a low-profile but well-regarded detective, Parov and his agency were ideal for the critical task of rediscovering and resecuring the artifact infrastructure which protected Goneril. Edward mentioned it as being necessary to the safety of the entire nation, not just the crown or the king himself. Many secrets are left which were known to Ganth alone; many artifacts' functions were only known by him, and it was not even considered that he might die. The reliance on a single point of failure was not considered a serious problem, since Ganth was presumed immortal. As the adage goes, the difference between something which is unlikely to go wrong and something which cannot possibly go wrong is that when the second happens, it will be extremely difficult to fix.

Prince Edward wanted an independent investigation squad because there was some political conflict between himself and his uncle, head of the military of the Strand of Orc and now acting as king. His exact words were "We need to claim the power of the crown. My uncle wishes to do this also." Ganth has left him some secrets and he wishes to use this to take the power of the crown. He suspects his uncle among others, at least as a possibility. Unless one or both dies before this report is delivered - potentially because one was behind the assassination of Ganth - this could be useful to exploit in the future, even if Ganth is restored.

We were first given access to some internal Palace artifact storage, whose existence was known but whose secrets were unexplained. [timeskip due to DM never getting this done during the semester] Some days after this was resolved, the Prince told us that he required a kidnapping attempt to be faked; he needed to get out of the castle for some time without being missed or sought after, to give him time to recover some other parts of the defense network without the oversight of his uncle and the castle guards.

Using the cover story of a kidnapping by the owner of the sigil burned onto the shoulder of Samoyev, our desert druid, (sigil image attached; be warned, some entity has responded to divination on the owner of this sigil with immediate disintegration cast through the scrying) we drugged the laundresses and had the prince carried out in his laundry basket and from near the laundry to the sewers. A fire trap and a drawing of the sigil and a variant summoning circle gave the false impression of powerful summoning magic used to steal the prince from his bedroom and created an hour or so of high-grade chaos, which was more than sufficient.

A Kidnapping Expedition
We left the city sewers and entered a forest which was unseasonably cold. As we went further into the forest, it became more difficult to maneuver and the temperature rose; by the time we reached our destination it was as warm as a hot summer day, if not a Nyasan summer. Additionally, the trees were all the same height, evenly and closely spaced (about three feet apart), as though intelligently planted.

This destination was a clearing. On entering it, there was an magical calm, and two stones, one larger than a person, and a smaller one with a rod-sized hole, well-fitted for the shadow-spell artifact the prince possessed. It created illusionary imitations of the effect of whatever rod was placed within it. The shadow-spelling rod made the larger stone fade inward slightly and display a message:


 * Greetings, Wayward Voyager,


 * Beyond this rock lies a trial of madness. If you do not
 * possess a mind already shattered, then know that I am no
 * one, nor ever was, and that beyond this twisted maze lies
 * nothing. Avail yourself of your transport and leave.
 * Enjoy this world of peace and do not upset the order.

Pushed slightly higher than the other letters was highlighted the message "beware the trees". The meaning of this message may be connected to the events of the broken seal I will describe slightly later, or the deity responsible for the ciphers. However, its message proved basically irrelevant to our progress through the maze, so I have no further insight at this time.

Our desert druid, Samoyev, immediately waked through the illusory message. The rest followed; there was a mental push - like a mental spell - but we, following his advice, did not resist, and passed through. This advice was later borne out; in order to leave the maze, we needed merely to exert a new effort against the spell, which was easily beaten; pushing back the spell banished us each from the maze.

I cannot provide details of the geometry of the maze, as we did not traverse it in ordinary fashion, and I have some reason to think it was tailored to our group specifically. In the first room, a stone snake hung from the ceiling, with sharp stone fangs. Inspecting it internally (through useful x-ray gloves) revealed a complex mechanical working at the end of the stone snake's gullet.

We proceeded into the next room and found a statue bearing a plaque, which bore a simple cipher (the recognition cipher of Shard's god) encoding the message "Feed the serpent traitor's blood". This was not put into effect until after the detour through a far-off plane.



The demon lord of the seal (possibly deity). He claimed no name, and when I suggested that single initials were somewhat traditional accepted the title "K". Three servants/portions met us when we were pulled to his realm; a pale bald human with tattoos ("Primus, because I came first"), a large golem-like being ("Secundus, because I walked behind"), and an incubus with fiery hair, who looked otherwise very similar to the first ("Tertius"). The fourth was referred to as Quartus, but abosorbed the other three into himself and then claimed to have no name. Some form of power over creation magic; created a body and powerful gear for "Puck", which function as natural living flesh. Used the strange time-tensing characteristic of Qualith-speakers.

The Fae "Puck" used to have a different (more-correct?) name (one known to 'K'), and has forgotten many things, including about herself. She considers herself superior to the demon lord of the seal, and that demon bowed to her (Tertius, Quartus, and the whole all did so; the rest present, barring Samoyev, were treated as minor accessories). She is still bound to the desert vermin druid Samoyev, who I am bound not to tell that he has two spirits (he will die if he is so told). I request that you not inform him of this, because if you do I will probably invoke the geas backfire of a minor-deity-level being.

The maze is somehow connected to Shard's mysterious god. One of their holy phrases: "Better to reign in heaven than serve in hell" (or with reign/serve swapped). A simple cipher which takes abcdefghij... to BTRIHACDEF... is used as an identifier for their faith. Several more complex ciphers exist. Key phrases, found in this maze and of possible importance: "The King Is Not What He Seems" and "Call the Scepter Aerose"; this was a strange construction badly translated from Qualith, where "call" can mean "cause to be"; "aerose" is an archaic form of "brassy" in a literal sense. Henceforth I will refer to Shard's deity as the "Qualith God" unless and until I find a true name at a later time.

The maze's cipher, also probably related to the Qualith deity, came in two varieties, with similar uses. The key to the first was a five-by-five grid, lettered with all but 'J' of the 26 letters of Common. The imaginary grid was numbered 1-5 along each axis, and a letter of plaintext was a pair of these numbers. (Example plaintext, key, and ciphertext attached.) The string of letters from left to right is replaced by a string of number pairs, written row above column. To derive ciphertext, these two rows of numbers were read off by pairs along the lines, reading out an entire line before proceeding to the next. The second variant used a three-by-three-by-three cubical grid, and triples of numbers rather than pairs. (An example of this is also attached.)

After deciphered the second letter-grid cipher, the Prince and each of our party resisted the illusion spell we had deliberately given in to when entering the maze, and were immediately ejected from the maze by doing so. The scepter was covered in brass, and became able to shadow-copy spells with perfect fidelity and full effect.

[End of Season 1]

=[Season 2]=

Malachai Parov and the Half-Mad Prince
Revised assessment of the scepter: It cannot copy spells, but can create arbitrary non-magical objects which don't detect as magical. There may be some kind of size limit or time limit, but none was in evidence.

Additionally: At some point while within the illusory dungeon, or when picking up the scepter (the brassy rod) shortly afterward, Prince Edward changed his speaking style markedly, speaking eloquently and in a manner similar to the speaking of prophecy. For the next day, he spoke mostly in quotations and paraphrase. A relevant sampling:


 * Edward said he had "lost something of himself, but gained knowledge of his destiny."


 * "I know who killed the king. One among us has held the blade, but all our hands are red. For this is but a distraction from a far subtler crime."


 * This was spoken in the presence of Parov, who clearly 'had held the blade'. The Dream and Edward's dream of flames happened on the night of Ganth's death, which may be related to our 'hands are red.'
 * "I have seen it all, but could retain very little. I will tell you this: I remember a color, and it is many."


 * He directed us north to find "a well placed deep within the sky", where "My knight awaits me at my rook."

When we left the dungeon and had coated the rod in brass, he took the scepter and conducted |some ritual: His hair grew and practically glowed blonde, growing spiky. His clothing turned bright colors. The scepter grew into a staff, and he acquired glasses. Shortly after this was when we first noticed the odd speech pattern.

The prince summoned a chariot, which we boarded, and then attached rockets to it. It traveled at great speed, but did not appear to be magical. Our party had difficulty holding on, but managed. We returned to the capital.

Outside the walls, the guard on the walls was extremely high, and the prince summoned a very small siege tower, with a smiling face on the front of it. I attempted to instruct the prince on the proper procedures to establish that he was himself, but instead the sky rained my blood and I mistakenly recalled address for a different Prince. Which he delivered without question.

The guards claimed that the prince's body was found in his bedroom killed by demons. Prince Shiny tried to parley but was called a demonic impostor, so he walked away slowly as the air and the field in front of the walls were filled with nonmagical exploding fire arrows. Which disappeared when they tried to enter a 10-foot radius around the prince.

He then summoned a hot air balloon, coated in lead or some other hard metal, with a wooden pagoda on the top and an anvil hanging from below. This began to rise slowly once we had boarded, then faster when he dropped into the balloon through a trapdoor, made the trapdoor disappear, then cut the anvil loose.

And then he attached rockets to it. This was when I realized that he could only summon nonmagical objects, not duplicate any spells. It got us what was apparently half the distance to what was called the Black Tower, far to the north-northwest near the pole. Samoyev, who was formerly a druid but now appeared to be a shadowsmith, had some knowledge of this, as did Mal. After some difficulty staying attached to this transportation, I floated from a smaller hot air balloon above, which had been transfigured from my belt pouch. The prince popped the balloon and everyone fell, but were cushioned by a 30-foot-deep pillow. We made our camp, Mal examined some of the blood which fell from the sky (it was mine, as I discovered when he attempted to divine knowledge from it magically), and we started again the next morning.

On the second day, the prince kept his strange appearance but had not kept the prophet-like speech patterns or any memories after when he walked into the illusory dungeon. He made an enormous drill and we traveled through the earth. It also had rockets. While in this drill, a servant from the castle attempted to scry us. At this time, the prince switched the direction of the drill and decided to pierce the heavens. By which I mean, "exit directly through a semi-active volcano".

We reached the broken Dark Tower, where Edward set about making a castle with the tower anchoring one corner of the walls. At some point in this, Mal asked Shard whether her hand was reacting to something, in a way that implied that would be significant; I suspect this is tied to the Qualith God.

The Dark Tower was guarded by a blind archer, guarding a necromantic obsidian altar. He asserted that he was extremely bored, and could see us all without issue, including while on the opposite side of a stone floor, with the trapdoor closed. He warned us that magic was amplified nearby, though not because of the altar. Shard's telepathy was enhanced to a great degree, and my masking power caused everyone to forget about my existence, including myself. The vial of my blood Mal possessed from the rain disappeared, or appeared to disappear. I hope that this ends in time for me to write this report.

Shard then focused her telepathy on the prince, and found that his mind was "full of evil hivemind nothingness fractals".