Heaven's Gate Academy: An Interodelic Adventure

Followup to Into Interodelia: A Probiotic Drug Cocktail Adventure [Campaign Setup]. If you see something with a *, it's a reference to the first post.

Thanks to Dan of Lacrimis Draconis for proofreading and moral support.

Heaven's Gate Academy
Everyone knows that life is suffering and the world is broken. It's just that you're a little more broken than the rest of the world. Or, that's what the world is telling you. The mission statement is that they're going to fix you, but nobody really maintains the pretense on the inside.

Bad things happen inside the Academy, seriously. Violence, dehumanization, indoctrination, forced biochemical and body mutilation. It's some real dark shit. You've been warned.

Even so, some people are actually happy here, or better off at the very least. I don't know what to tell you, you'll just have to roll with the messiness of it all. At least it's campy too. Just wait until you see Mr. Doctor Priest's Enochian Cyber-Cock.


The Academics of Movement
You are always being monitored inside the Academy, except when you're not. During the day you will have two supervisors, and at night just one, and you can only go where they let you go. You'll spend most of the time in The Dorms.

Fortunately, space and time are relative, and therefore so is movement. You can always escape inside yourself in the Positive Plane*, or dissociate into your own holographic rainbow shadow, the Negative Plane*.

Where there is uncertainty or contradiction, you may find respite. But you have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of the unknown, like balancing on a bench of arrowheads.


The Teleology of Interodelia
Remember, this is all magic. Which is to say, a drug trip of misremembered memories. And only some of those memories are your own.

The goal is to escape, and this is agreed upon, including by Heaven's Gate Academy, although they won't just let you do it, what would be the point in that?

But anyway, when the trip ends and the magic's gone, you will escape. You were always going to escape. It's really more in how you do it.


The Dorms
In addition to yourselves, other dormmates include Carolina*, Del*, and Rabid Dog. Jakky* will come and go as he pleases. There are other dorms as well, but this one is yours.

The Dorm is a small nondescript living room, a couch and tv, a narrow hallway, and a few rooms of bunk beds, each with their own bathroom. They're not so bad, but there's only so much to say about them. Which is unfortunate, because you'll be spending a lot of time here.

The PCs' and NPCs' room assignments should all be mixed. I know that might seem inconvenient, but sometimes that's just how it goes.


If you room with Del, keep in mind, he's generally a decent guy, but sometimes he can be mean, or want to roughhouse, sometimes a little too rough. Del isn't violent by nature, no more so than anyone else, that's just what the trauma did to him. And once Del gets riled up, then Jakky follows shortly afterwards, and then it's a real problem because Jakky's a fucking ghost tiger who thinks he's people.


If you room with Carolina, she really is kind and sharing. You can see how the world would chew her up. It's not that she can't defend herself, she's actually tougher than you'd think physically, you'll find out for yourself if she ever gets her hands on any drugs, it's more a personality thing. She's also smarter than people think. People treat her like she's stupid but she's not, she just doesn't show it the way other people do.

There is one and only one true fail state in this game, and that is if you help Carolina escape. Incidental* will remind you of this fact in case you forget, or get any ideas. Worse, even just helping her, or showing her true kindness, could cause a Calamity*. You were a bad friend, and even in this magically misremembered memory, this failure must be relived.


Not long after you arrive comes Rabid Dog. Never before have you seen such eyes. They’re too-human eyes, full of cold intelligent violence, modern and primal. And should you ever find yourselves unsupervised in the Dorms, and should it seem that a physical altercation might ensue between yourselves and another, then Rabid Dog will intervene to break up the fight, and you will see those hyper-human eyes differently, because then you will see a love purer than you could have imagined, and you will feel joyous enlightenment, and also something like the shame of post-nut clarity, and you won't want to fight anymore, you won't even understand why you wanted to fight in the first place, you might even want to cry. Please, if you would resent a game telling you what your character should feel, just listen to your character, that's all I ask.


If Rabid Dog is ever in The Stables and the only supervisor is Zombie, he will grab a wooden 2x4 and he will bludgeon Zombie until his skull fractures and his spinal cord snaps and then Rabid Dog will run, and he will be captured, and taken somewhere else, somewhere worse, and you will never see him again. But you'll remember his hyper-human eyes.


One of the daytime supervisors is Jesus. He's more rotund than the usual White Jesus, and he's a ginger. Frankly, he's as broken as any of the students are purported to be, and has problematic views towards women, I mean really he's a misogynist, and he's deep into conspiracy theories. I know this all makes him sound unlikeable, but he leaves an impression, he's intelligent and convincing in his own way. He'd start a death cult of his own if he could but he doesn't quite have the charisma for it. But every once in a while he hooks a student into his madness, and even though he has the best of intentions, it doesn't usually end well for them.


The other daytime supervisor is Markov. He's small, wiry, a little past middle aged, bald and goateed, with rough skin, and he always wears sunglasses. He doesn't look that tough, but the students know that if you fuck with him, he will fuck with you back, and you just know you're not gonna win that fight, even if you think you can take him. But usually that's not a problem, because the students love him, he's the Cool Dad who lets you break some of the rules if it means you won't break the important ones. If Corporate ever had a clue they'd have fired him a long time ago, and that would be a shame, but that doesn't happen until after the drug trip ends, so you don't have to worry about it. He'll take a smoke break and mock you when you're jonesing, but it's all in good fun and when he comes back he'll let you sniff the nicotine off his fingers.


The nighttime supervisor is Mountain Dew. He's chill, nondescript. No ambitions, but not too bothered by it. He got his name because he drinks a lot of Mountain Dew and plays videogames all night, or reads comics, or watches hentai. Obviously none of this is allowed, but he does it anyway, and sometimes lets the students join him. If the drug trip would be coming to an end during the night shift, he'll give you drugs and a real fucked up indie comic book, and then you get to have one more wild adventure, recursing through both trips and eventually back up into what we erroneously call the real world.


The Stables
Do you ever wonder if they're called Stables because they provide stability? I don't want to look it up, it's better to wonder.


The Stables hold Majestic Beasts, and you get to take care of them, and learn to ride them. The Majestic Beasts are all large, at least as large as horses, and strong, because if they were small, or weak, someone would abuse them, they'd find a way, so you don't get to have something like a dog, even though that would be nice. I wonder if the Academy learned this the hard way.

The primary supervisor of The Stables is Zombie. He was supposed to go to Heaven, but due to bureaucratic error he's stuck in this broken world a little longer, and they didn't know what to do with him, so he's here. He is intellectually divergent and is legally not culpable for his actions, he has a legal guardian, but anyway they let him supervise The Stables, and he can do that just fine. He comes from a red state and has some regressive beliefs, but if he finds out that one of the students is "a queer" and he otherwise likes them, he'll find a way to rationalize it to himself.

Fat Tony is a student from another dorm, and he has the most experience of the students in running The Stables, and is often allowed to assist Zombie. He's a bully, a huge asshole, and remarkably ugly in an understated way, like he's actually uncomfortable to look at, but it's not from a disfiguring scar or deformity or anything, I mean he does have a disfiguring scar, but that's not what this is about, that's just a coincidence. He just exudes ugliness. Or maybe it's more like extrudes, because it's greasy. If you're the forgiving type you might indulge the question of how such a person came to work The Stables.


The Corrections Facility
At Heaven's Gate Academy sex is forbidden, because sex is life, which means sex is also suffering, and violence.

Every student at Heaven's Gate Academy is forced to take medications that halt their sex drive. And there's a three strike rule; if you get caught engaging in even the most innocent and playful of flirtations, that's a strike, and after three strikes, they use chemicals and instruments to tame you, and then there's no coming back from that.

But you know what? As monstrous as that sounds, some of the students really like it. No longer to be made an object of, no longer to fear that kind of violence, or the implication of it. And likewise, to be free from those urges, to no longer feel enslaved by them, or want to enslave others by them.


The Corrections Facility is managed by Mr. Doctor Priest, who prefers to go by Dr. Priest. He has an Enochian Cyber-Cock that he's really proud of, and always finds "subtle" ways to bring it up or wave it around. What Mr. Doctor Priest doesn't know about his Enochian Cyber-Cock, is that it's very easy to hack with a SQL Injection, because he doesn't actually know how to code Enochian, or really how to code in general, he just kind of muddles his way through it, like many do with life. Even though he's not a licensed therapist, they let him run the mandatory therapy sessions. Many students who would have benefited from real therapy will never get it, because he gave them the wrong idea of what it's about and so they'll wash their hands of it forever, and that's a real shame.


The Dining Hall
The food comes in plastic containers or bins of things made from powder and water, everything wet and greasy and white. There is a notable lack of scent, flavor, and nutrition. It’s filling and makes you tired and accomplishes very little else, but The Lunchlady really does care, and somehow that makes it worse, because you’ll hurt her feelings if you complain about it.

Occasionally The CEO will eat at The Dining Hall (and on those days the food is notably improved), and he’ll talk with the students. It's always a one on one conversation, and he's a very good listener, curious, and thoughtful. He has a clean and unthreatening handsomeness, like a diet Mitt Romney.


The Glassed Desert
Heaven's Gate Academy is located in the middle of a Glassed Desert, Shevet* knows where. The Nuclear God Shevet detonated here long ago, and it's never really been the same since. There's a tragic beauty in this desert in the middle of nowhere, mountains off in the distance. Serene and empty. You misremember it once being quite naturally beautiful, without all the weird baggage and feelings. Now it's all glass and charred vantablack trees, cauterized branch-collars like eyes that see into 無, the contradictory negative space contained within the cycle of being and becoming of existence, and maybe if the circumstances were different, there'd be a beauty in that too. You realize you too can stare into 無 if you follow the line of their sight.

There are also monsters in this Glassed Desert, but it's the people you really need to watch out for. They used to be a family, but after the war, after everything they did and everything they didn't do, there's not much left of them except their failed humanity laid bare, and even still they cling to it, they've learned nothing, and will continue to learn nothing, and that nothingness radiates and destroys everything it touches.


The Threats We Face
Whether on the run or sleepwalking through the day, we face obstacles in our path, inevitable conflicts, and lurking threats.

The Victims: No, they are not survivors, although maybe one day they will be. These are the victims of circumstance. Those circumstances can be anything; sometimes it's a demon in the head. It's not that they don't deserve sympathy or help, it's often the lack of either that got them here, but all the same, they've lost their fucking minds and so you don't know at any time whether or not they will hurt you, or hurt anything weaker than themselves, because that's all they have left to do.

The Inmates Who Run the Asylum: The supervisors are not so different from the students they manage, but they have the power and the students don't, and so even the weakest and stupidest of them is a threat.

Monsters: Because of course there are monsters.

The Outside: The system is designed to keep you inside. Whether on a supervised excursion into town, or escaping into The Glassed Desert, everything is out to get you. The failed humanity of The Glassed Desert despise you the way they despise everything that is not themselves (and also themselves in a different way), the people in town fear you, or they fear what would happen to their town if The Academy fails, or they think nothing of you, just that you aren't supposed to be here and that's enough.

Time: Time is not on your side. The longer you stay in The Academy, the more likely it is that they break you further, or fix you, which may be even worse. The part of you that is a student of The Academy becomes a greater part of your identity, it defines you until you are nothing but a student in this place. Time distorts your personal reality from the inside out like a microwave, like sickness and neurochemical imbalances in the Positive Plane, and rumination spirals and distorted perceptions in the Negative Plane.

Yourself: You are, perhaps, your own greatest threat, whether you can admit it or not.

Wrote the original draft as early as March 2024 (maybe earlier?), made a lot of progress on it for a month or so, then fell off. I had originally intended to gamify it up a bit more, maybe I'll finally do that in some hypothetical future third post.

I was very worried if this post was a little "much", again thank you Dan for advice and encouragement!

A Carnival World of no Prisons

This was drafted as far back as February, but I recently watched the original Wicker Man and it was really good and reminded me of this post. Also spiritually connected to The Apologists. It's another thought experiment / worldbuilding thing, just exploring ideas.

A world where the prison system has largely been replaced by a practice of public shaming and light corporal punishment.

Except where shame would not be effective, removal of bodily autonomy is kept to a minimum after the completion of the mandatory Carnival.

While some question the cruelty of the shaming and humiliation, or the stigma offenders carry well past the end of their sentencing, it is efficacious and minimally disruptive to both society and the individuals.

Periods of sociopolitical polarity or apathy threaten the efficacy of this system.

Carnivals usually involve some kind of poetic punishment, up to a certain physical and psychological threshold. Systemic bias and corruption are sometimes reflected in the nature and degrees of the events. For the most powerful, the events may even take on an heir of celebration, an effective soft power attack against the state, making a joke of the whole affair.

Some of the Roles in this new system (Jobs has become a loaded term) include:

• Master of Ceremonies
• Carnival King
• May Queen
• Fool (aka Punch)

The Carnival King in Yellow of the city-state of Gorgonesia is a notable example of how this system can catastrophically fail.

Not actually no prisons but it makes for a better title.

Grotesque Gains

Treasure table of grotesque items

#7 and #8 were written by Beneath Foreign Planets

1. An Unkindly Face: The face of an orc warrior tanned into a mask. The face is pensive and still; it is silent only because it is on the hunt. One's eyes turn red, and red is what one sees. The Unkindly Face provokes fear and evokes an inner power, a will to violence.
   
   
2. Spell Golem: Spells are alive, and to cast a spell is to summon the spell for a mere moment. By carving a sigil into a fresh corpse, the spell may come alive for a longer duration, fueled by the body. The spell consumes the soul, metabolizing it to mutate the body into a shape, still vaguely human, suiting its purposes.
   
   
3. Fairy Cell: An innocuous rectangular handheld device of cold iron, glowing and beeping. Inside are fairies, bound in place, the cold iron tortuously funneling their magical energies through miniscule apparati of logic gates.
   
   
4. Vampire Bloodwine: The ancients learned to alchemically transmute vampire blood and holy water into a potent concoction, but the means of its creation are now long lost. Humans who drink the bloodwine temporarily gain the powers of the source vampire magnified, and without any of the weaknesses. The Bloodwine only works if the vampire is still (un)alive, and for the duration of the effect, the vampire will be able to sense the location of the imbiber.
   
   
5. Acupuncture of the Dark Meridians: Acupuncture needles carved from undead bones, their power proportional to that of the undead creature, and its freshness. Piercing these needles through one's flesh, and especially into the bones, into the marrow, unblocks energy through the Dark Meridians, unleashing great power at a terrible Karmic cost.
   
   
6. Trough of the Were-Hog: A filthy thing covered in excrement and rotten corpses. A unique living stench that blasts its way into the limbic system, into memory, a singularity of self and were-hog. Leave the trough out for some time unattended, and consume whatever finds its way inside without remediation. The duration and strength of the were-hog transformation is proportional to the time left unattended, the quantity of edible materials, and the degree of repulsion.
   
   
7. The Cloak of Control: A voluminous mass of yellow and fleshy segmented strings that sprout from the shoulders and drags across the floor. This 'cloak' is made of overgrown and swollen nerve endings. To wear the cloak is extremely painful but it allows the wearer to interface and control the corpses of giant beasts and meat-mechs of their own design.
   
   
8. The Third-Eye Syringe: Made of blackened hihi'irokane, this wicked and wide tipped syringe is designed for the theft and reinsertion of human pineal glands. Those that use the syringe overstuff their hideously swollen cranium with dozens of ill-gotten and semi-calcified pineal glands in a weird bid to boost their psychic powers.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: A Two Party Competitive Game

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a competitive game played between two parties, managed by a single GM.

One team are The Heroes, and the other team are The Outlaws.

The Heroes overthrew the previous corrupt regime, and seek to create a better world. They'll have to contend with the corruption, incompetence, and sheer magnitude and complexity of the problems within, and also,

The Outlaws are a more heterogeneous bunch. Some are idealists who simply have no faith in the system as-is. Others' lived experience suggests to them that they must look out for themselves and theirs, and live day to day.

For each of their game sessions, The Heroes speak with their advisors, speak with the people, mitigate conflicts, legislate, and supervise. As they attempt to solve problems, it will be increasingly obvious all the ways they are being undermined every step of the way, both by corrupt factions and criminal NPCs, and also,

The Outlaws play more like a standard TTRPG, as opposed to the Domain-play of The Heroes; whether that be picaresque adventure, or something grander. All the same, they will frequently find themselves at odds with the policies and agents of The Heroes.

This game would benefit from tables and such; suggestions for "Unintended Consequences", various issues Heroes or Outlaws may confront. Maybe I'll write those later if people are actually interested in the idea.

Forgotten Gods

There are so many gods, it's inevitable that some get forgotten. We can forget gods, but let's not forget the people who made them. Contributors will be listed in parentheses.

1. Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise: Like the ability of babies to learn the statistical properties of language through mere exposure that persists to this day, there was once a god in the linguistic dark ages when language first evolved with no fossil record to show for it. This god granted humans the ability to cry and laugh and scream, and to create distinct sounds for different kinds of predators. This god was borrowed from nature, it was not originally a god for humans, and when eventually they found (or created) their own gods, they had no more need for Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise, which is why today humans struggle to understand probabilities and large numbers.
2. Shore-Striver (Wasitlikely): God of those nameless organisms that dedicated their lives to crawling incrementally further onto solid ground, especially those who made it so far they died on the returning stretch.
3. Nameless Mother (Sheepandsorcery): In a cavern, on a mountain, where the dawn just pokes a single rosy finger into the stony crevice, there is a crack along a back wall, smoothed by a long dead creek into a yonic shape, in front of which have been rolled two smooth round stones, one on top of another, small on top, larger on the bottom. The top stone is vaguely rough for in the first age of man hands carved a face into this stone. This is the first god, the first goddess ever invented by mankind and the mother of all the gods, yet she has been forgotten. Time has worn away her identity and this is not even the first time. The one who carved these stones was not making an idol, only something by which he might remember his mother. Now she is forgotten. Now she is remembered forever.
4. Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming (Archonsmarchon): Back when stars could lie and crows could laugh, people knew how to wrap themselves in their own sagging skins to be remade in the prime of their youth. The god who guided this process was called Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming, at least to some.
   In this time humanity was abundant, filling every corner of the Earth, yet this abundance was not to our strength - it made us the favoured prey of horrors: the hunting marrowflame, morph-again locusts, and Gib the Goreful being the few that remain to today.
   Humanity rejected their living rebirth, and cried out for Death. Death answered, and was so flattered by our self-offering it evangelized unto our enemies as well, inflicting mortal weaknesses or slaying them outright. It has been favoured ever since.
5. World-Eater (Stygianseas): Bones aren't alive. The cells threaded through them are, and they heal due to being re-engineered, but bones are a mineral. World-Eater is the ancient protist-god of... something, of which biomineralization is a subcomponent. Its a god of structure but not determination. Its form is bulbous shells and tests, frustules and skeletons (both exo and endo) blooming off of each other asymmetrically and irregularly.
   World-Eater has been valued on earth since the first cells began to build biomineralized shells. Those few who remembered it in the first days of the Hominids understood that each flint tool or carved den was also sacred to it.
   All worlds with biomineralization or tool use are in its (un)awareness, but it is at the end of the day a very ancient sort of being.
6. The Antecedent of Falsehoods (Glassziggurat): Who leapt into the mind of the first being that ever slept. It had so much fun there that it lost track of time and vanished when the creature woke.
7. The God of Truth: Many Gods claim to be the God of Truth, but Truth was forgotten long ago. Or really it's more like we turned our backs on it, because it's ugly, and inconvenient. It looks diseased but it's not, that's just the germs inside all of us, even the good ones. Those maggots in its eyes, you have those too, they're eating the skin around your eyelashes right now. It has a dusty, flaky aura, like marine snow, but it's just illuminating that which our consciousness attenuates, all the meaningless murk, the detritus life leaves in its wake. Perhaps it's for the best, good riddance, c'est la vie.

Weird Eggs

1. Platypus species that evolved "electrostatic missile eggs".
2. Spiral shark eggs drill into the abyss. It is not known where they go, or towards what ends.
3. Wonton chaos egg that unbirths and rebirths itself orthogonally to time.
4. Synthegg: All encompassing virtual reality environment; an existential escape pod.
   
   
   
   
5. Gatcha eggs: Like hard plastic-y single use pokeballs with monster and reality altering phenomenon pre-loaded. The probability tables are publicly available but it's basically random.
6. Fractal Egg: The fractalness is in the roughness of the shell. An infinitely deep surface, cosmic patterns etched to the infinitesimal limit, worlds and lives stepped along the sharp edges. Beyond maximum recursion depth, what might grow within?
7. Dragon eggshells litter the ionosphere hosting aetheric ecosystems like ants crawling along a translucent magnetic desert.

Into Interodelia: A Probiotic Drug Cocktail Adventure [Campaign Setup]

There are no contraindications to Into Interodelia: A Probiotic Drug Cocktail Adventure (it’s system and setting agnostic), but it pairs well with:

• Maximum Recursion Depth Vol. 3, or Everybody Wins if We're Having Fun: The Animapunk RPG
• Freaky Fractals of the Mycelium Matrix
• The Positive and Negative Planes

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

In this adventure, your body has been reduced to a state between life and death, and your mind downloaded into the consciousness of a drug-induced microbiotic gut bloom. Your vagus nerve has been torn from spacetime as you know it, uncomfortably bundled to fit within the confines of the curled dimensions, and yours and all the other's stitched together like string puppets pulled by the GM's trigeminal nerve somewhere past the fourth wall. The entire world as you perceive it is disseminated through the pain of the GM as immunopathological signals.

Too much information squeezed through coiled wires like electrons, the only release existing outside the body, outside the mind, the magnetic field in this too tightly stretched analogy.

A low resolution low-fi virtual reality, a sub-conscious cloud of pain-protecting signals. When consciousness is compressed into computational clouds, real and virtual become an arbitrary distinction.

“I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”

― J. S. Mbiti on Ubuntuism

Fools as you are, you cling to a semblance of self, even as inevitably you bleed into one another and all of existence, which as far as you can tell has reduced to your interior body outside of spacetime and a handful of very vividly misremembered memories that are probably some of yours.

Nothing but yourselves and each other, and the bare nakedness inside you, all the bile and mucus and piss and shit and blood; and metabolic warmth and white noise whooshing bodily fluids. Simple comforts cramped inside your body and the paradoxical ease of an embodied reality.

It was drugs that got you here, and you consented to it, and the rest is Incidental. All the same, you've got a few hours to make some magic.

Who am I?

You are the most reduced, prototypical version of yourself, whatever that means to you.

Where did we go?

Within the computational space of the gut bloom, signals of consciousness are reduced into a binary perspective. The Positive Plane, material reality as we understand it; and the Negative Plane, like multi-dimensional shadows, holographic reconstructions full of impossible colors, the metaphysical things. You navigate your own insides, spindles and fibers and gristle of the positive plane, and holographic rainbow shadows of your memories in the negative plane. But, they all kind of bleed into each other, it's all dream-like.

Each player should supply a list of misremembered memories for the GM, and you can roll them up as needed.

And mixed up all in it are also Pain, Sickness, and Ennui.

What can I bring with me?

• You may bring the experience of a single album of your choosing, but the songs must be played in order, and each song may only be played once.
• You may bring the symbolic representation of one piece of technology or equivalent, and consider how it extends your body, offloads your consciousness, or expands your senses.

That's it?

As you go through this Interodelic Adventure, you'll find that it's really much more useful to think about what you don't have than what you do.

“To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And Slade: when the "inner voices" tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to "love" and "hate," despite our best instincts... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads?”

― Grant Morrison, The Filth

Into Interodelia

Each player starts in the negative plane, in one of their own misremembered memories (you share the memory with the party).

If the memory was of a physical act like a sports achievement, you might connect with the party in the positive plane via a muscle. If it was a concert you attended, it might be the banging of the tympanic drum, or sweating skin, or strobe-addled eyes. And so on.

You didn't come here to defeat evil, collect treasure, or gain XP. Here we are our most reduced selves, before space and time and causality. Those are just means to justify the ends, but magic is in the journey itself.

It's only a few hours, all you have to do is explore, and survive.

...the rest is Incidental.

Or so it feels in Interodelia, but then we still have to go to work tomorrow, don't we?

Unless you're like Del, the shared delusion destined to die, a sacrifice to The Nuclear God Shevet. Crazy, snarky, cynical Del, who was secretly a bit of a dork as well. Lost in Interodilia for Shevet-knows how long.

And besides, you'll need to clean Jakhodo's litter box. Jakky can be a real homicidal maniac if he doesn't get his way. Jakky doesn't believe he's a tiger, he was conned into thinking he's a human. Jakky is also dead, but he doesn't believe he's mortal either. He's made a home for himself in the memory buffer of grief, and like any cat, he will not be told where he can and cannot go.

And then there's Carolina. Oh, Carolina, did you forget about her? Everyone else has, but really you of all people... Sweet Carolina only wanted to please, but all she ever received in turn was scorn, or nothing, nothing at all. Wouldn't it be easier if you forgot about her again? Because, we all know, whatever happened can't have been good. She really looked up to you too.

But that's all Incidental. Or so we keep saying. But Incidental has a way of making incidents out of accidents and Shevet help you if Incident insights a cohort of colluding co-incidents and then you have a Calamity on your hands. All I'm saying is keep an eye out for Incidental, no matter how innocuous it seems.

Pain

Some would have you believe that happiness cannot exist without suffering, and to that I say, go fuck yourself. Have you ever experienced Pain? It fucking hurts! If you really think Pain is necessary for Pleasure, then come on over because I've got a five-finger treat for you. Oh, you're a masochist you say? Well fuck me, that's another matter entirely… Anyway, Pain and Pleasure may or may not necessarily go together, but they certainly both exist in Interodelia. 

In this reduced reality, the spectrum of Pain and Pleasure is the one and only signal of embodied experience. The spirits, anima, ki, djinn, daemons, however you want to think of it.

Sickness

I want to say something about Fire, and Being and Non-Being and Becoming, and Prometheus and Dveikut, and Oxidation and Inflammation, and Pathogens, and Anxiety and Depression, and Hangovers. I want to say these things, but I'm just so tired. There is no space for thoughts inside me, my head is full of explosions. My skin burns. I can’t keep a single thought straight, it dissipates from me like light and heat.

There is a fire inside me, a controlled burn that firewalls me from the rest of existence. This raging flame allows me to be strong, but I don’t feel very strong right now. I recede inside myself, my cells, a cell. The divine light and warmth of my existence, all of existence, illuminates and enlightens the universe like stars. But all I feel of it is like a candle dripping away to nothing. A pool of sticky spent wax, and crusty white ash.

The Sickness mutates my DNA and sets my body and mind on fire with inflammation. As I flicker away impotently providing neither light nor warmth, as my most notable quality becomes my conspicuous absence, I remind myself, we are Phoenix.

In Interodelia, Sickness is paradoxically the source of both strength and weakness. It is an ongoing process, like the relationship between fire and fuel.

Ennui

Because “boredom” is a boring concept. A lazy, unexamined, flattening of a maddening sensation. The cyclical pattern of learned helplessness and cortisol angst towards that which is beyond your control. The illiminal spacetime of a late train that cannot be compelled to arrive. The psychopathic rage of being surrounded by a bunch of ignorant fucks without a clue, and you without the faintest idea of what to do about it all. Knowing it’s all wrong, and it’s all outside your control, and therefore it’s all pointless. A lazy, unexamined, flattening of a maddening sensation.

Ennui manifests in the physical plane as a kind of anemic, unaroused, seething frustration. But in the negative plane, it is imagination and creation.

The man who said I was a joke and my life was a joke—he may not have been there in my final moments, witnessing my final breath, but what I realized was: he foretold my death. He could only have foretold it by seeing me to my core—by having been my soul’s witness. When he said those awful words, he witnessed me into the future, a future he knew I would meet. During our fight, I tried to convince him that he was wrong. “I’m not a joke!” I cried. “You’re the joke! You’re the joke!”

― Sheila Heti, My Life is a Joke

And then we find ourselves at Heaven’s Gate Academy…

Which is neither in Heaven nor an academy.

(And if you feel you've been railroaded, truly you are more lost than was intended.)

I came up with the majority of this adventure / micro-setting in Fall 2023 and never quite finished it but even in its current form I thought it worth posting. It's supposed to be a whole adventure. If I follow up, I'll elaborate more on how the songs work and maybe more concretely how Pain, Sickness, and Ennui work mechanically, and also maybe write the Heaven's Gate Academy adventure.