Lost in the Feywild: Episode 04

The party enters the 27th Room, loses its way through shifting chambers and false paths, and learns from Kallipseis the gardener that the house is a moving prison.

Audio Highlights

Learning Words, Becoming Houses:

Timeline

• Oct 05, 1740 DR, evening still: The party enters the 27th Room and loses its way through shifting numbered doors, including an iron-window listening station, a mortuary, and a storeroom before resting in the chapel to the Mos Numena.
• Oct 06, 1740 DR, evening still: The party continues exploring the shifting rooms, finds Kallipseis’s fungal greenhouse, and questions her about the nature of the 27th Room.

Narrative

The party begins at the Feywild door to the 27th Room, after reviewing how Hulda’s commission, Dandelion House, Lord Endless Ending, and Arithrimos Lamperum brought them here.

Hulda wants them to break the agreement Lord Endless Ending made to send mortals to wander through the House of the 27th Room.

Lord Endless Ending wants the party to bring him or to destroy the glass key locking the central room in the house.

The Arithrimos Lamperum, a Drankorian society dedicated to safeguarding the porous places between planes of existence, presumably wants their 1000+ year old prison to remain locked.

The party remains unsure about who to help, and how.

Before entering, the party takes stock. Txarro is wary and wants home, Edric is uneasy but ready for a problem he can hit, Tarek and Kaito face the uncertainty in their own ways, and Ayveen stays in information-gathering mode. Menestheus, still shocked by the 700-year jump and resigned to his mission, opens the door and steps through with the party following.

Inside the house, the first room is a wrecked mechanical chamber with smashed furnishings, a broken occupant counter, a torn tapestry, humming machinery, and four exits that unlock only when the whole group passes through together. The party chooses one and enters an old Drankorian chapel with recognizable Mos Numena alcoves and one deliberately carved, nauseating empty niche.

Edric takes comfort at the still-consecrated Night Queen altar. Tarek sticks his hand into the empty niche and instinctively yanks it back. The group notes that the chapel has been respected while the entry room was damaged in panic or aggression. When they try to go back up, the door does not return them to the room they came from.

The failed backtrack leads to a machinery-filled room with pipes, tanks, catwalks, and a two-foot iron window set into the wall. Beside it, the party finds a chair, a desk, and a dated journal of transcriptions.

The journal records a strange voice speaking only in the present tense in a series of entries that span months and years. One transcriber has labeled the speaker “The Child.”

Kaito sits at the desk and briefly hears whispers while writing fragments. Menestheus recognizes some of the transcribers as members of Arithrimos Lamperum.

The party continues their journey through the house but it does not connect to itself in consistent, expected ways. Every doorway seems to lead to a room at random. Txarro grows increasingly frustrated as repeated room numbers fail to behave like reversible passages.

The group passes through: a kitchen and dining hall; a mortuary with dissected bodies, an ossuary, an incinerator, and one corpse covered in white mold-like fibers; then through sleeping quarters; a meeting room; a calm solarium; baths; and a storeroom of lumber, soil, tools, and supplies.

After concluding that chasing every door may be less useful than either finding new rooms or refusing the maze’s premise, Ayveen suggests sitting still. The party returns to the chapel, where Menestheus works through the numbers while they take a long rest under the chapel niche’s spreading sense of hollowness and despair.

At the end of the long rest, Menestheus concludes that the rooms behind the party move when doors are used, making the pattern look random because the group keeps choosing different exits. He thinks he may be able to guide them, so the party continues through the shifting maze.

They step into a second mechanical room with a similar window facing a rune-covered iron wall, and a similar listening station to what they had seen before, with a similar notebook. A transcriber has labeled this speaker “The Dreamer.”

Menestheus connects the phrase to his book, The Shape of Possibility, about mathematically modeling all possible futures. When Menestheus hears the whisper recognize his listening, he records a new current-date entry and notices that the previous entry was from the morning he and the order went to Lord Endless Ending’s party. The party begins to suspect that Thalestria may have intentionally changed the house’s function when she made the bargain.

Continuing through the maze, the party enters a fungal greenhouse and laboratory filled with terraria, strange helpers, and a partly built fungal golem under construction. There they meet Kallipseis, an ancient dwarven gardener who claims to have become head of Arithrimos Lamperum after Thalestria’s disappearance or death.

Kallipseis explains that “the 27th Room” is the name for a massive mechanical-magical structure built around a single locked prison room at the center (the eponymous 27th Room). The prisoner inside the center room can somehow grow through the walls to freedom if it stays in one place and time. So the structure around it is like an enormous cube able to spin in three dimensions – to give a latitude, longitude, and a year. Each time someone steps through a door, they are moving the time or place the central room exists in.

She says other rooms became infected, that white fibers colonize flesh and can eventually produce aggressive bodies with mouths in their chests, and that she is building a fungal golem body so she can leave safely and rebuild the order.

She also says listeners claimed there is another door inside the 27th Room, the prisoner may be a child kept from growing up or dying, and the glass key can unlock every locked door in the house, including the front door.

Cast of Characters

• Kallipseis (she/her, Drankorian dwarf): ancient, possibly insane, dwarven wizard, gardener, fungal researcher, and self-described head of Arithrimos Lamperum after the death of Thalestria. Met while in the process of fashioning a fungal golem – she planned to transfer her soul into it and wear it like a suit. “All progress involves sacrifice.”.
• The Dreamer: voice in the second listener notebook, associated with wanting and the shape of possibility.
• The Child: voice recorded in the first listener journal, possibly connected to the prisoner or house-being.
• The Prisoner: being locked inside the central 27th Room, described by listeners as possibly a child kept from growing up or dying.
• Menestheus (he/him, Drankorian human): displaced Drankorian mathematician and mapmaker from Arithrimos Lamperum.
• Lord Endless Ending (they/them, fae): fey lord tied to the bargain that sends mortal guests toward the 27th Room.
• Hulda (he/him, Sembaran human): original employer whose commission brought the party to Dandelion House.
• Thalestria (she/her, Drankorian human): former head of Arithrimos Lamperum, linked to the bargain and the house’s altered purpose.
• Rakshasa (he/him, tiger-headed mortal): tiger-headed party guest who previously explained the bargain.

Places

• Feywild promontory: rocky overlook reached from Lord Endless Ending’s road, with the door into the 27th Room standing at its end. Session context includes: road from Lord Endless Ending’s gate; western promontory; door to the 27th Room.
• 27th Room (manor in the Twilight Kingdom, the Feywild): Drankorian prison-house built around a locked central room, with rotating numbered chambers, listening stations, machinery, and infected or fungus-filled workrooms. Session context includes: entry room; chapel 22; mechanical rooms 17 and 15; kitchen 16; mortuary 7; sleeping quarters 20; meeting room 25; solarium 19; bathhouse 24; storeroom 27; room 18 fungal greenhouse.
• Dandelion House (mentioned): old Drankorian manor whose basement door led the party into the Feywild.
• Lord Endless Ending’s manor (mentioned): fey manor where Lord Endless Ending sends mortal guests toward the 27th Room when the clock strikes zero.