It really wasn’t all that difficult for the Scooby Gang to figure out “where” Morgan’s alter ego had set up residence. Morgan had been experimented on during his time with the military, and so to the military base they went!

The base (in Morgan’s mind anyway) was surrounded on three sides by water, making it easy for the soldiers inside to guard the land access. There were cannons and ballistas, of course,  but the Mages had come packing some mystical heat of their own. Damien managed to convince the guards on the nearest wall that the guards on the wall across the courtyard were impostors and needed to be taken out. Apparently he caught on to how much fun it is to use the members of the opposing force against each other. Arrow triggered their fear responses against each other, and hilarity ensued.

Once past the guards on the walls, Aenaiyah cast some Fate magic so that the group would be ‘unlikely’ to run into any patrols. They did run into somebody (I had beefed up security due to certain decisions made by the gang in other sessions) , but managed to subdue him quietly. With very little stumbling about (blasted Fate magic) the Mages make their way to Command and Control.

Successful  stealth rolls all around make it impossible for me to ignore the players endlessly telling me that they are quietly creeping toward the room. This is what they see when they arrive:

The room is filled with heavily armed guards – there are 6 guards easily visible from the door. Two of these are standing at a table in the center of the room. You can’t see the top of the table very well due to its height and distance into the room, but you can see what look like flags sticking up from its surface.  What do you do?

Well, the first thing they do is roll initiative, and who winds up going first but that blasted Acanthus Mage! She uses her Five Dots in Time to stop time in the room for three rounds – and applies her more than 2 dots of Fate to exempt her Cabal Mates from the spell. That means it’s Coup de Grace time. The boys start running around slitting throats and gathering weapons, all easily accomplished in less than three rounds. This might seem un-hero-like, but the fact is that it has been well established that the soldiers here are mere projections and not actual people.

At the front of the room in a swiveling command chair sits a man who looks quite a bit like the Morgan that they are travelling with, only a bit younger-looking and far more physically fit with a more self-assured posture.  Clearly this is the Feaux-Morgan who has been put in charge, and he must be stopped! And so the Mages attempt to attack him! Sadly they had already told the head of the Seers that the man was starting to lose control, and so dutifully the Seers encased him in a transparent ‘control booth’ with access to all the necessary functions and none of that pesky vulnerability the Mages so cleverly warned folks about!

Well played Mages. Well played.

While the Mages with abilities that can (try to) smash the shielding try to get to Feaux-Morgan, Aenaiyah takes a look at the table. It’s clearly some kind of battle map, and she would like to get a closer look at it.

The tabletop is a brain scan. What else would it be? Stuck into the table are flag pins, each with a stylized eye on it. Naturally enough, the Eye Flags represent the presence of the Seers of Panopticon in Morgan’s brain. Aenaiyah then takes the first action that pops into her own brain – she starts removing the flags from the battle map! This is, actually, an excellent idea and one that I had thought of. In so doing, Aenaiyah makes it far less likely that reinforcements will be able to arrive when time starts again.

Meanwhile, back at the transparent control room – the attack oriented Mages are trying all they can to get rid of this nuisance barrier. There are attempts at dispelling it, there are attempts at altering the substance of the “matter”, and there are attempts to portal through it – so far all without success. And then somebody has a success on their WITS+COMP roll and realizes that the water side of this fort has stone gargoyles stationed at intervals, and they (being outside of the room and thus not subject to the stoppage of time) are reacting to the thus-far futile attempts to break through the barrier and get rid of Feaux-Morgan. The Gargoyles come screaming through the air! They break through the windows!! They promptly UTTERLY FAIL their rolls to avoid the effects of the time spell. (Awwwwwwwwww…)

As this happens Aenaiyah goes with the next stray thought that pops into her brain – and I can’t imagine where it came from having certainly not thought about it myself. She decides to start sticking the flag pins into each other “in a stack… pointy pin bottom into flag top”.

Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?

And so, since Aenaiyah pulled the pins OUTSIDE of the brain map, and started sticking them into each other, Seer Brahms (AKA; Dr Blair, AKA: the Head of the Seers) Started forcing an Astral Mage-ipede into their space! And THIS time he didn’t blow his rolls, which means that the Mage-ipede was moving to attack!

What I described to the players (those with enough WITS+COMPOSURE to see it anyway) was a shimmering in the air a little ways above the map table, and a multi-armed and multi-legged creature forcing its way in. It took them a second or two to correlate what was happening with the map pins.

I laughed.

Several things happened at once. The Time Spell wore off, though there were no guards left alive in the room to care about it. Feaux-Morgan started getting rounds, and mostly used them to punch True Morgan in the brain as hard as he could, because his main mission is to prevent True Morgan from regaining control. The Mages split themselves between trying to get to Feaux-Morgan and dealing with the Mage-ipede. The gargoyles broke through the glass windows and started ripping people’s faces off.

Fun was had! I won’t go into a roll-by-roll reenactment (my memory is only so good) but there was much fighting, and there was much damage dished out and taken (on all sides), but eventually Feaux-Morgan was deposed, his body ripped from the command seat, and True Morgan was back in charge. True Morgan’s first act was to release any and all oaths that had been sworn to him which freed Narsil among others, and his last act that the Mages know of was to boot them safely out of his brain so that they wouldn’t wind up trapped there.

Off Screen: Reenie, knowing what the Mages are up to, and where Narsil is, has been scanning his Fate Aura so that she will know if her Mage friends are successful. As soon as they are she gives Glamdring the word. Glamdring, already in position, then grabs Narsil’s sister and runs. Glamdring knew Narsil before his Awakening, which is how she was able to figure out who his sister is, and where she was at the time. This will be followed by much rejoicing (and much long-awaited snogging) and much need for the GM to start working on the next story in the campaign.

And that is the state of the campaign at the moment. Now maybe I should think about getting the next part out of my brain and into my plan book.

:::Insert Laugh of Evil GM Glee Here:::