Team 7 began their adventure in year 346, two years after the damnation of the [[Elders]]. ### Adventure Intro In the continent Pangolune, an eighty-year period of only casual border skirmishes here and there between the great houses had given way to an unpredictable bubbling of real, try-hard, field-salting warfare in the north of the continent. [[Ilnam]], where team 7’s adventure began, had nowhere left to rent for housing, let alone buy, because of war refugees flooding south from [[Oslon]], [[Awast]], and [[Paleon]] far faster than construction can erect new residences. Ilnam maintained order in spite of this population explosion by two means: 1. By the institution of martial law, enforced by borrowed imperial troopers. 2. By the institution of deathmatch. 100 people enter the arena, only one leaves. This winner receives the opportunity to lease an apartment at full cost, but with a waived security deposit. Our adventure began with three stadium sweepers. Sweepers' job was to sift the bodies out of the arena sand as combatants die, and carry them to the cooling box as fast as possible in case they still had any valuable organs to sell in [[Outpost B]]. These three sweepers, in the course of their work, came across a secret, a grand opportunity. No weapons in Pangolune compare to the [[mushroom]]. The mushroom is necessary for the [[Red Priest]]s, who oversee teleportation across the continent via [[obelisk]]s for commerce and warfare. The mushroom is necessary for the Empire to empower imperial troopers. It is a matter of controversy whether the mushroom is necessary in the arts, but many say so. Pangolune's new period of war erupted when a new kind of mushroom, created by the imperial mycologist known as [[Old Man]] for the military sciences academy of [[3rd Winter]], ended the Empire's monopoly on the mushroom flow. Old Man never delivered the mushroom to 3rd Winter, instead absconding with it into a life of mushroom-enhanced sexual debauchery with the late Mayor Steve of Springville. But Old Man left disciples, just as degenerate as him, scattered across the continent. Two of these, the nationless bounty hunters [[Yuzu]] and [[Eithan]], fed this new mushroom to rabbits in the western forest and created through this ungodly act the [[Front - Rabbit Guard]], a force of speaking bipedal rabbits now breeding and conquering across [[Palestan]], warring with [[Awast]] at the border of [[Cascadia]]. Another disciple, less destructive politically, but nonetheless sentenced to deathmatch for depraved behavior, was so large, seven times the size of a normal man, that when he perished in the arena it took all three of our sweepers to lift him out of the sand. All paths in Pangolune open wide to the mushroom eater. Whether one wished to save humankind from the Rabbit Guard or [[Siren]] armies in the northwest and restore peace, or whether one wanted to usurp the Emperor, or whether one wanted to build a fortune of wealth and influence, the mushroom opens all roads. So when the three stadium sweepers rolled the large man into the extra large cooling box and noticed that his post-mortem bowel movement had released a stash of luminescent elementary class mushrooms, they had a decision to make together. This dead disciple of Old Man devoted all his time to practicing the enlargement of body parts, on himself, always overshooting the proportions just a little, one arm heavier than the other, one eyebrow too big, and so on, and trying to catch up the rest of his body to fix it, in a never-ending cycle of body-builder dysphoria. But these three sweepers could use the powers in these mushrooms, which were protected from rectal contact with the deceased disciple by a big glass bottle he'd shoved into himself whole (his size permitted this), to any end of their choosing. These sweepers all knew, as everyone knew, that a person may eat, in their life, only one elementary mushroom to any effect. A choice among them was permanent. But they did not have much time to ponder their choice. The sweepers stood around the wheeled cooler box they'd pushed out of the stadium and through the halls, into the small room where their task was to load the onto the rail cart and push it downhill into the dark tunnel at the room's northern mouth. Who knows where the rail cart went after that. Likely into the labyrinth of the witch doctors who harvested the organs and shipped them to Outpost B. Behind them, in the direction of the southern mouth of the room, more sweepers hurried toward, the wheels of their own cooler boxes rattling on the rough stone floor. Should these others catch sight of the mushrooms the choice would no longer belong to our three sweepers alone—these others might want them mushrooms to themselves, or, if they are entirely self-abandoning and conformant bootlickers, want to report and deliver the mushrooms to their manager. Finally there was the fireplace, where bodies sweepers were certain had no good organs left were meant to be dumped and incinerated. Above this a chimney stretched high above the stadium, a long narrow column that could fit maybe one person and a raccoon through at a time. Who were our three sweepers? How did they respond to the call of destiny? ### Sessions * [[team 7's path 1]] * [[team 7's path 2]]