This session was played on 2025-11-08. Clark, Gaia and Maelle are back in Zwosta and managing to adapt to the changing political landscape that is the enforced stop of the Rigasia/Kesizma War, and then an Umichooan delegation comes to town…

It has been more than a month since the end of Arc 2 and the main party has been adapting to life in the changed Zwosta.

Maelle and Yumiko have moved from the hotel providing housing to Green Bell personnel to a new house in the outskirts of the town and even bought a dog they called Milo. Maelle decided to throw their lot with the Valtshoran resistance, right behind Yumiko, and quite a bit of their time has been spent trying to do counter espionage on Rigasian collaborateurs.

Gaia is now living in the Hunter Guildhouse full time, and decided to put a lot of effort into helping Ariyadna settling down, and completing the tasks that AMANDA set up for her. She and Pyotr built a huge doghouse for Derek outside the Guildhouse too.

As for Clark, now going by Claire, they have taken back their hunter mantle with gusto, especially now that the amount of people free to clear the borders of the Zone is a lot smaller, and has been partnering with Derek to do so. And they have been taking advantage of the Kesizman presence in Zwosta to actually talk to some of them about their condition.

The story begins moving in earnest when news reach the Guild that the Umichooans have decided to send a diplomatic contingent to Valtshora to do… something with the Zone, and that they will arrive at Zwosta in one day's time. The Kesizman Word Bearer (Sozaya) hosts a meeting between a number of interested parties (including Iorena Sevel, Andrei Budny and others) to explain the situation and prepare them for the event,

The next day, a select group is waiting in a square around the middle of Zwosta, waiting for the sun to be on its zenith, and there, they are witness to a whole-ass floating island surrounded by rainbows appearing over them with the most musical version of The Sound that they have ever heard.

And then several umichooans float down from it to meet the locals: a dark-skinned (but still straight-haired and almond-eyed) man dressed in inmaculate white named Oi-See Gauda, four faceless servant puppets that look made of paper…

And a very baby faced and young Riung.

Before anyone can even exchange greetings, Mariette Navia appears next to Riung in a burst of something that looks like TV static and guts her with her sword to confusion, consternation and horror of everyone involved, before vanishing again in a second burst of static.

Weirdly enough, the situation does not actually explode. Sozaya actually seems to identify Mariette as something called a Chronomancer and Oi-See is of course bothered by the situation, but brushes it off in the most condescending way because “he expected no better from them”. The umichooan party retires back to the floating island, that now remains flying over Zwosta and the locals are left to try to understand what happened and fix it.

Maelle points that they do know Mariette and might have an inkling of where to find her but they need to go home to grab her notes for the right address, so Iorena pulls them, alongside with Gaia and Claire and tells Gaia to drive them to the Kurimoto residence and to start explaining all that they know about Riung.

The Riung explanation does not prove particularly useful. The only thing that they can conclude is that “chronomancers” might have an issue with Riung crossing time to appear so far into the past.

The visit to the Kurimotos' new house ends being a bit of a humorous mess because Maelle keeps insisting on being a good host and serving people some decent tea, but they are on a time crunch and Gaia is still scared of the needle-wielding doctor Yumiko Kurimoto, but they find the right address and move on swiftly.

Mariette's shop happens to be a hole-in-the wall for a bigger building with a big fenestrated window working as wares display. Maelle manages to pick the lock and they enter to find themselves inmersed in a lot of “health” supplies with a subtle but strange smell.

Gaia decides to hide behind the counter and finds there some very small glass bottles that look suspiciously familiar from her meeting with Mariette earlier that year, so she takes them.

In the meanwhile, Claire and Maelle go down into a small basement following a very faint noise and find themselves in a very strange laboratory. Among the usual chemical equipment, Maelle identifies a lot of very high-end stuff that would be at home in a very prestigious university, if it didn't look cobbled together at home. They also find lots of strange writing that looks two-dimensional and a very elaborate contraption the size of a bathtub that Maelle is very sure has something to do with portals.

As Maelle goes to touch the contraption, a very scared and disheveled Mariette throws a bona-fide invisibility cloak off herself and shouts at them to stop as she points some very weird gun at them.

The situation devolves into mexican stand-off with Mariette pointing at Maelle and Claire pointing at Mariette, but then things get confusing because Mariette has no idea of why they are here for her: she has been hiding in the lab since she learned that Riung, who apparently terrifies her, was close.

And then the portal machine starts up and a second Mariette appears there, with a blood-soaked sword.

Everyone in the basement starts arguing with each other but they don't manage to do anything but confirm that the Mariette with the sword did gut Riung with it, and also that she did something to prevent the wound from healing.

The shouts reach Gaia, who decides to come down, sees the situation and tries to shoot the portal contraption. This makes both Mariettes panic and they somehow slow down the bullet so it does not reach the machine, shouting to Gaia to stop trying to kill them. Then the Sword Mariette vanishes again into static.

They take the remaining Mariette back to the car and try to explain the situation to Iorena, but at that point, Iorena mentions chronomancers and this causes Mariette to have either a revelation or a panic attack and she passes out.

Claire tries to perform first aid on Mariette, and at the beginning they're very scared because her vital signs seem to be haywire, but slowly starts realizing that those might be the “right” signs for whatever she actually is, and after a brief but heated discussion they decide to bring her to the hospital.

In the hospital they find themselves trying to convince the doctors that yea, this person as apparently not standard human and requires… something. But they are not even sure what the baseline for her is.

As they wait for news, Maelle goes fetch Milo and they have a walk, and Claire and Iorena have a talk about the insanity of their lives and what even means to be a human being. Gaia decides to go for broke and just “knock” on the door of the Umichooan Island, so she walks under it, where a lot of passers-by are gawking and concentrates very hard on the idea of knocking on an invisible door.

And it works.

Gaia finds herself portalled to the surface of the island that is set up as an immaculate garden with gently bubbling water streams, and beautiful and delicate bridges and small buildings spread around it, with the faceless paper puppets continuously cleaning and caring for the garden without touching it.

There she briefly talks with Oi-See Gauda, who seems more amused by her presence than anything else, and explains that yes, they have already noticed that there are at least five versions of Mariette running around. He also seems condescendingly amused by Gaia's worry about guns and allows her to shoot at him point-blank to prove that Umichooans don't care about such things.

And then he just teleports Gaia to the hospital with the rest of the party to the further confusion of everyone involved.

• Clark Dubois
• Gaia Dynko
• Maelle Kurimoto
• Mariette Navia
• Amanda
• Derek
• Iorena Sevel
• Sozaya
• Ariyadna
• Ferret
• Yumiko Kurimoto
• Andrei Budny
• Oi-See Gauda
• Riung

• Claire: I'm scared that you know how to pick locks, don't tell me you used to rob people.
• Maelle: I'm a spy.
• Gaia: She's (sic) a spy.

• Claire: Doesn't every lab look like that?
• Maelle: Fuck, no. Most are pretty uniform but… did she build these herself?

• Maelle: What the fuck. She—Cla—Claire, Gaia. She has portal tech.

• Mariette: Don't touch that! We'll all die!
• Claire: Shoot and you'll die regardless!
• Mariette: What are you doing here?
• Maelle: You stabbed an Umichooan official!
• Mariette: I did what? No! I've been hiding here! From Her!

• Claire: Looks like we have an Ariyadna situation again.

• Mariette: I stabbed her and pinned her in time, good luck getting her up from that.
• Claire: Pinned her in time?
• Mariette: Umichooans are basically puppeteering their bodies from their “subtle machines”, so to kill them you have to get very creative.

• Mariette: (the one with the sword, to Gaia) You think you can shoot me? Bring it on, bitch.

• Both Mariettes have their hands raised to the bullet but the sword one is the one that drops it to the ground. The other looks at Gaia and says: “Kid, you almost killed everyone here, do not do that!”

• Maelle: “Bring it on” is not an invitation to shoot, it's a taunt!

• Mariette: Fucckkkk I hit my funny bone; why did we give ourselves funny bones?

• Maelle: Is Umichoo still here?
• Iorena: (pointing at the fucking island lazily drifting over Zwosta) You tell me.

• [Claire is] getting weirded out because with a heart beating this fast this should be a problem but [Mariette] seems otherwise… stable?
• Except she's also warmer than a normal person, which you didn't originally notice because you are colder than a normal person. And she's breathing very slowly. Everything is subtly wrong but not… unstable.

• Claire: Eye not getting any better?
• Iorena: It itches sometimes, but there's nothing there so I can't actually scratch it.

• Iorena: The Umichooans are not particularly angry with us, but in the most condescending way possible; as in, they expected that things would go wrong in such a savage land and complaining to us about it doesn't even occur to them.

• Iorena: it's possible that [Mariette's] vital signs are not exactly human because apparently that's not her natural body. No one know what shape they are supposed to be.
• Claire: So, you believe Mariette is one of those?
• Iorena: I'm keeping my options open.
• Maelle: Mariette is not human, then?
• Iorena: At this point the idea of 'human' is getting so diluted I'm not sure if it makes sense anymore.
• Claire: Well, welcome to the club, I suppose. I think the notion of humanity has been getting blurrier for a while for me.

• Gaia: We usually meet to discuss important things in designated places because open space is often not safe for that.
• Oi-See: That might make sense for your primitive war weapons, but for us, walls are never an obstacle, so the point is moot.

• Oi-See: (brushing off a bullet) We have warred with many peoples across many millennia. We solved this problem a long time ago.

• Gaia: I visited the Umichoo tower; it's very pretty.
• Iorena: How?
• Claire: You what?
• Maelle: You fucking what? How and why?

• Gaia: I met [Oi-See] and explained to him we usually meet in meeting rooms. Also they identified five Mariettes in here and will only be looking for the bloody one.
• Claire: Well, good news for that one. How do we recognize her once she clean up though?

• Maelle: I missed you a lot while in that other timeline.
• Yumiko: I might have gone a bit mad when you disappeared. Started conspiring with Miss. Sevel to start a rebellion against the Rigasians because it seemed to be the only way to actually get you back.

• Gaia: [Oi-See] asked me to shoot, it wasn't me being mean or anything!!

• Sozaya: You know how your people build roads, and sewers, and telephone cables, and power lines? So inside a room a flip of a switch will turn the lights on or off. For umichooans, every single thing they can do, they do because they have built vast, invisible machines that do it when they signal them by wanting it.

• Sozaya: You entered what building?
• Gaia: The umichoi (sic) island
• Sozaya: How?!
• Gaia: I thought really hard about it

O Rose, Rose, wherefore art thou, Rose?

Ariyadna seems to be being adopted by a quite complex network of family units, which is both heartwarming and a celebration of nonstandard families.

Since the Rigasian forces have been pushed off the Zone, the Valtshoran/Kesizman policy for it has been a lot more open, since they only need to care about safety, not keep people from ever getting their hands on aberrant material.

Also, the Leiphof Paper has seen quite the revival, thanks to Kesizman and Zhongguan influence, which has Maelle very happy indeed.

Iorena forced Maelle to get Gaia and Claire to actually write down a decent report about their experiences in Mali, which was pretty grating for everyone involved.

Umichooans are still incredibly condescending towards everyone, but specially Chronomancers, if Oi-See is considered a valid metric, since he talks about them as non-human and things.

Also they do not touch the ground when walking. Apparently it's too dirty for their shoes.

Apparently Mariette uses Riung's name as a swearword which is… interesting?

Gaia almost caused a TPK by shooting the portal machinery in Mariette's basement, which is probably a first for this campaign.

Sozaya earned the right to use the Umichooan Subtle Machine by providing a service to the Empire: he killed a rogue Umichooan that had set up himself as a god in a remote timeline.