45: A Village in the Void

🎧 Podcast coming soon • March 6, 2026

Something Is Happening Inside the Box

Breakfast at the Twilight Company brownstone begins with Scarlet bursting through the door, wide-eyed, clipboard clutched to her chest and covered in equations. She's been up all night.

The pocket village prototype is no longer behaving like a prototype. Overnight, without any additional calibration, the interdimensional space has begun generating its own internal environment: hills, streams, weather, terrain—all of it appearing without prompting. The sky inside feels too close, she says. She can't explain why.

Scarlet: "It's beyond any of the calibrations I should be able to do in the lab. It's very odd. It's very odd."

She wants Victor's lab. His measurement equipment is the only thing in Greyport precise enough to help her tune the resonance and stabilize the space.

Silas points out—with considerable feeling—that wanting Victor's help with anything is possibly the most ill-conceived idea he's ever heard. Victor has something they want, and Silas would sooner pickpocket it than ask the man a direct question. However, the party was already planning to retrieve the sending stone from Victor today. Two birds, one very irritating stone.

Silas: "We got a pretty robust itinerary for his zoo schedule. Like, what time does he get there again?"

Hot dogs, they eventually recall, are at lunch.

Scarlet also raises a secondary concern—with some delicacy—that her instruments at the workshop have been behaving strangely whenever Silas is nearby. Something she has never seen before happens whenever he is around, and she has been tracking it in her notes. She would like to measure it properly with Victor's equipment. She would also, diplomatically, like to note that Silas is "intelligent in different ways" than the kind of person who would understand her charts.

Silas: "I liked you better when you were just in the van all the time."

Rooftop Surveillance

The brownstone's roof garden turns out to be well-suited for intelligence work. Under a pergola draped with hanging jasmine, the party spreads out across picnic tables with a direct sightline to the zoo's main gate and the bench in front of the chimera enclosure. It is a beautiful spring morning. Leliana settles in with tea. Bru insists on a fire pit. Silas, Leliana, and Olivia begin brainstorming the Iro romance novel—and Leliana's Luna concerts—in earnest. The working title remains in flux. The consensus about what the cover should look like does not.

Bru and Elspeth announce they need to go shopping—fireworks components, racing parts, and the materials Scarlet needs for the pocket village. Elspeth elects to attempt a disguise: a British accent.

Bru: "I feel like it's not helpful to have a disguise halfway through being in the place." Elspeth: "I just thought of it. I'm also not changing my appearance. It's just the voice."

The logic is airtight. They leave.

Silas rolls to establish a psychic link with the party. Maximum result: eight hours of open communication. He settles in on the rooftop with a clear view of the zoo gate and begins the watch.

Victor Arrives

At roughly 10:30 AM, Silas's Perception (a 16, boosted to 22 with a psychic die) earns him exactly what he's looking for: a figure in a trench coat and fedora with a very distinctive gait picks up a ticket at the front gate, barely exchanges a word with the attendant, and enters the zoo. Security guard Travis—their old contact from the zoo's office—falls in right behind him.

Silas relays this over the psychic link. Leliana and Olivia begin heading down toward the zoo.

Victor proceeds immediately to the food court. He is carrying a large suitcase. He pays the hot dog vendor and shovels an extraordinary number of hot dogs into the suitcase, then hands one to Travis, who gives him a thankful nod. They find a picnic table and sit down. Victor begins eating at his customary pace. Travis follows suit.

From the rooftop, Silas watches Travis start crying and Victor reach over to touch his hand supportively. Later Victor moves seats right next to him and gives him a pat on the back; they hug.

The Zoo Line

The Greyport Zoo on a beautiful spring day is an event. The line at the ticket booth is long and heavily populated with strollers and wagons packed with children in the grip of a serious candy situation, and there are birthday parties everywhere. Leliana considers a fib about Olivia's age to skip ahead, but Olivia's roll for the wait (3d20) comes up 25 minutes. No need for a fib about elderly relatives.

Meanwhile, Bru and Elspeth complete their shopping montage with impressive efficiency: fireworks components, racing parts, the ingredients for the pocket village, party supplies, and—given that it's a beautiful day and they have the Bank of Bugatti behind them—fancy new outerwear, including top hats for both. Bru weaves his hat of disguise into his top hat. The trip takes about 10 minutes. The shopkeepers are a little thrown by Elspeth's accent, but nobody questions it.

Back at the brownstone, they strike a Team Rocket pose for Silas, Bru disguised as Jessie. Silas's Insight (28) sees straight through it—"Only Bru would care about brown"—and the three of them head for the zoo.

Belspeth Booper

In the ticket line, a shriek rises from the crowd, and someone points:

Fan: "Oh my god—is that Belspeth Booper? I knew she'd be here. She put that classified ad—said she'd be at the zoo right after lunchtime!"

Elspeth freezes.

"Belspeth Booper" is an alias she invented only recently. She has not posted any classified ad announcing herself. She has not told anyone in Greyport she would be here. And yet, a zoo employee declares her a VIP, ushers the party past the line through velvet ropes, and begins arranging luxury meal deals.

Elspeth: (pulling her hat down even further over her face) "How is my fake alias more famous than my real one?"

The VIP area is a back section of the food court with misting fans, free iced water, and trays of chili, an apple, and a glass of milk—Victor has cleaned out the regular hot dogs. The fast passes cost a silver each, but the party doesn't end up paying for them. They are in the zoo.

The zoo staff are now all up in their grill, so Bru provides a distraction.

Bru: "Kevin, it's time. It's time for the upturn maneuver."

Kevin—Bru's mechanical companion—flips everything in the VIP food court that can be flipped, announcing "Hi, I'm Kevin" with every table. Chili flies. Milk goes everywhere. Apples roll. In the chaos, nobody misses the party as they slip out.

Victor's Lunch, Travis's Crisis

Earlier, Leliana and Olivia come through the main gate near the packed food court, where a small child is inconsolable as his balloon floats away into the sky. Leliana conjures a swirl of puppies (Performance 19). They swarm the child, jumping on him and licking his face, and he finally cracks a smile. His mother thanks her with visible relief—he hasn't had a nap yet.

Then, with Silas calling directions over the psychic link, they catch sight of Victor (Leliana's Perception 21) leaving the food court and heading toward the chimera exhibit. Fufu Cuddly Pants is mid-performance—a tap dance routine drawing a large appreciative crowd.

Olivia goes for Athletics (22) while Leliana tries to be stealthy (12). Leliana ends up draped upside down over Olivia's shoulder as Olivia barges through the crowd and catches up to Victor at the bench.

Victor, seated on the bench, greets Leliana—still draped over a dwarf paladin's shoulder—with a cheerful "Hello, hello." He offers them a hot dog. There are extras.

Leliana: "How's your day?" Victor: "Just the usual lunch break."

He opens up readily enough about Travis. Being zoo security is tough, Victor explains—not a lot of upward mobility, and people take Travis for granted. Travis thought Victor was going to be a big nut to crack; instead, they've been getting close over these lunches. Victor is trying to find him another position, but not in the Twilight Company. Travis is very severe, and the moral ambiguity of the Twilight Company would be tough for someone like that. He'd be eaten alive.

Victor: "I'm going to try to find him something. The Navy, maybe. He's very severe. I think that would be good for him."

Silas arrives mid-sentence and walks directly up to Victor.

Silas: "Shut up. Give me the orb. Sorry—give me the sending stone."

Leliana makes a valiant attempt at "please." Silas makes no such attempt. Victor, after a beat of resigned recognition, hands it over.

Silas: "Okay, see you."

Leliana, still draped over Olivia's shoulder, taps her on the back a couple of times to move out—but Olivia remembers: Scarlet needs the lab.

Leliana: "Hang on, Victor. You've been so helpful for us today. But if you could do us one more solid and just let us use your lab a little bit. Oh, and one of our friends, too. She's helping out with something. You might know her." Victor: "I can help you with whatever you need. Usually I time it for Fufu Cuddly Pants—they do a really special thing, and everyone's looking."

He pulls a small lever hidden in one of the bench's braces. It releases, shoots him down a chute, and snaps back up. The party follows one at a time. Through the sewers, through the back passages, and into the lab beneath the zoo.

The Lab

Victor's underground space is as they left it: instrumentation everywhere, tracking boards, the familiar smell of active reagents. But there's something new on the main panel—a large geospatial display covered in signal traces.

Victor: "I've been tracking signals from the Eldoran space station. Triangulating their locations, figuring out where they're teleporting supplies. I have most of their bands now. Using it to put together some attack plans."

He taps a dial. Frowns. Looks at the party.

Victor: "Does anyone have a dimensional disrupting device on them?"

The needle follows Silas around the room. He hands his backpack to Bru. The needle follows the backpack.

Silas: "I think it's probably the dragon orb."

The Faraday cage around the dragon orb has been doing its job—mostly. Victor's instrumentation is specifically tuned to dimensional frequencies, which is why the interference gets through. Very interesting, he says. He begins packaging up the calibration instruments. The bag of holding swallows equipment that appears to be physically impossible to fit anywhere else. He has no blast chamber, but Scarlet explains that Iro's workshop has a catalytic chamber—and Victor has heard great things about Iro.

Olivia lingers by the tracking panel and asks Victor directly: has he been opening portals?

Victor: "Not yet. I mostly use it to measure. But those dimensional rifts are the big project—I'm hoping to find them before they rip into our world so we can address them faster. And I've been able to track Eldoran teleportation sites in space, which has been... interesting."

He finishes packing. They head out toward the harbor.

The Other Belspeth Booper

Before heading to the workshop, Elspeth wants to find out who is behind the "Belspeth Booper" sighting. Someone made a classified ad for her alias. The party pops back by the zoo entrance.

Standing at the back of the ticket queue, immaculately dressed in fine leathers, surrounded by a small goblin who appears to be her manager and a halfling scribbling on a notepad, is a dwarf woman. She is very loudly, very passive-aggressively informing the people around her that she cannot believe she has to wait in line with all of them. Does anyone know who she is? She is Belspeth Booper.

Elspeth: "What is happening? I just invented her an hour ago."

Racers are apparently required to post a classified ad announcing their presence in a local area—a convention Elspeth did not follow, since she didn't want anyone to know she was here. Someone filed one for her alias anyway, listing a specific time at the zoo that Elspeth did not herself know in advance.

Silas: "It could be a coincidence on top of a coincidence. Maybe there's someone trying to swoop in, steal your thunder."

Elspeth clocks the woman's entourage with the flat-eyed appraisal of someone who has dealt with rivals before. She wants to ruin someone's reputation, not their body—at least for now.

Silas: "Real talk, we're buds now. So I feel like we help each other out with our revenge-driven motivations."

It would be quicker to just stab them, Silas notes, but it's her revenge plot, and he'll follow her lead. He also reminds everyone that plenty of Iron Claws in this city still need taking down.

The Pocket Village

At Iro's workshop, the welcome from Iro himself is easy and warm—though he does accept Scarlet's arrival with characteristic understatement. She moves immediately to the catalytic chamber and begins hooking up Victor's calibration instruments around it. Silas's backpack is warm to the touch—the dragon orb radiating like a space heater—and Bru catches the smell of ozone coming off it. An acquired smell.

Scarlet and Victor work with the focus of two people who have not previously met but immediately recognize a kindred obsession. The instruments go up. The sensors ring the chamber. Scarlet runs through calibrations. And then:

Scarlet: "That's it. That's it. A little more—yes. Right there. It's happening. Everyone gather around."

Through the chamber's small window, the party watches. From a spinning blue void, something dark and organic emerges—wooden roots, spreading through the dimensional space, wrapping around the portal's edges like fingers finding purchase. A shape forms. Heavy hardwood. A door, knotted and ancient-looking, settling into existence with a low, resonant hum.

The blast door opens with a submarine-style wheel-turn and a hiss of pressure.

Scarlet: "Bru, Elspeth—would you like to do the honors? I know you've spent so much time on this."

Elspeth's Arcana (22) makes sense of it: the space draws on elements of other planes—like the Feywild, where the land adapts to the people in it—to create a multi-dimensional space that conforms to whatever the mind puts to it.

Elspeth steps through first.

What Everyone Sees

The pocket village responds to the imagination of each person who enters. What you picture, it builds.

Elspeth first sees what Scarlet described—mountains, hills, a river. Then she thinks of a hamlet, an actual village with a little town square. It appears: a small village along the creek, off to the side of the mountains, with people milling about.

Bru follows. The village shifts. Aluminum sheeting appears along the walls. The grass dies back, giving way to dust and grit. The villagers' clothing changes. Neon flickers somewhere. The hamlet begins to look like the world Bru sees when he pictures possibility—scrappy, improvised, charged with electric potential.

Olivia steps in and looks around at the cyberpunk hamlet for approximately one second before imagining a beach. The earth at the edge of the village falls away into sand. Blue water spreads out to the horizon. A surf shack materializes with lawn chairs fanned out in front of it, and behind the bar, someone very handsome is serving coconut drinks. Olivia does not remark on any resemblance to anyone she knows.

Silas enters and thinks of the Lotus Casino—the gold, the glow, the sense of infinite possibility. A fountain erupts in the village square, but instead of water it spews coins. Gold arcs through the air and splashes down into a Scrooge McDuck pool of shining metal. In one corner of the space, a door appears that glows with exactly the same warm light as the Lotus portal.

Leliana imagines spring—trees in bloom, birds, everyone smiling and getting along. The village stays cyberpunk, but the change is emotional rather than visual: joyful camaraderie, children playing. Festival banners string themselves across the village center. Laughter fills the air. Somewhere near the beach, someone has a guitar, and a circle of people has formed around a campfire to listen.

The sky is close—unsettlingly close, like a ceiling painted blue—but everything beneath it is warm and present and alive.

Happy Birthday

Silas rolls a 16 on Perception and hears something that doesn't fit: distant singing. Growing louder. A crowd of voices.

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Silas...

Olivia produces a card and opens the door in the fountain—the glowing door that looks like the portal to the Lotus Casino. Out of it steps Naomi, holding a cake lit with candles, walking toward him through the gold-scattered light.

Tables appear. Balloons—Bru and Elspeth did not forget the party supplies. Pizza. Chicken tenders. The works.

Elspeth presents a gift from all of them, crudely wrapped because they've been busy: a wand of webs, so Silas can cast Web of his own.

Leliana gives him a hug and a hand drum engraved with daggers and an S.

Leliana: "I hope we can bring out your latent artist. No pressure—but in case you want to try your hand at it."

Silas picks up the drum and gives it a beat. The musicians near the campfire are already playing. It fits.

Then Bru and Kevin step outside and the fireworks start.

They are not ordinary fireworks. Each burst in the close sky opens into a scene—images drawn in fire and light that linger as they fall: moments from Silas's life, good ones, strung together into a montage that hangs overhead as Silas cozies up with Naomi and the baby and watches the sky remember him.

---

Olivia stands at the edge of the party, watching. The beach is beautiful. The campfire is warm. The laughter is real. And then she looks up at the sky—the too-close sky, the ceiling of this place—and sees them.

Black holes. Several of them. Moving.

Growing.

The session ends.

---

Key Information Learned

The Pocket Village:

• The interdimensional space has stabilized and is now open and inhabitable
• The interior environment responds directly to the imagination of whoever enters—each party member's vision literally reshapes the space
• The sky inside feels unnaturally close; this has been noted since Scarlet first raised the alarm
• Black holes were observed moving through the interior sky at session's end—their origin and intent are unknown

Victor and the Sending Stone:

• The party now holds Victor's sending stone—the key to communicating with Luna at her crash site
• Victor has been tracking Eldoran space station resupply teleportation sites and developing attack plans from his underground lab
• He is also monitoring dimensional rifts in the hope of intercepting them before they breach the material plane
• The dragon orb in Silas's pack interferes with Victor's dimensional frequency instruments even through the Faraday cage

Travis:

• Victor has taken the zoo security guard under his wing; their hot-dog lunches have apparently become genuinely meaningful to Travis
• Victor's assessment: Travis is too morally rigid for the Twilight Company, but his severity would serve him well in the Navy
• Victor is actively trying to help him find a path forward

Belspeth Booper:

• Someone is using Elspeth's freshly invented alias and posted a classified ad announcing her arrival at the zoo at a specific time she hadn't yet determined herself
• A dwarf woman with an entourage is publicly claiming this identity in the ticket line
• The source of the alias leak and the impersonator's motive are unknown

Character Moments

Silas: The sending stone retrieval is textbook Silas—zero pleasantries, maximum efficiency, and out the door before Victor can make it uncomfortable. The birthday party, however, gets past his defenses entirely. He plays the drum. He watches the fireworks with Naomi. He is, briefly, just happy. The black holes haven't reached him yet.

Leliana: Stops mid-mission to conjure a ring of puppies for a crying child. Spends the zoo stakeout drafting the Iro romance novel and concert propaganda strategy simultaneously. Gifts Silas a drum and the sincere hope that there's a musician somewhere in him. The pocket village, in her hands, becomes a spring festival.

Olivia: Runs through an entire crowded zoo at full speed with Leliana over her shoulder, beheads no one, and still has the presence of mind to summon a beach. The look on her face when she imagines the barman behind the surf shack is noted by the record but not further elaborated. She also notices the black holes first. This is, after all, what detectives do.

Elspeth: The British accent works exactly as well as it should—which is to say, it works far better than it deserves to. The "Belspeth Booper" identity theft is the session's unresolved mystery and she takes it personally, which is fair. The wand of webs gift is practical, thoughtful, and wrapped like someone who was also buying fireworks and racing parts this morning.

Bru: The Kevin Upturn Maneuver is executed with the crisp professionalism of someone who has been waiting for permission. The fireworks—each burst a scene from Silas's life—are not something anyone would have predicted from the goblin artificer who spent the morning comparing firework components at a shop, but here we are.

Unresolved Threads

• The black holes in the pocket village's sky: what are they, where do they come from, and what happens if they reach the ground?
• The sending stone is now in the party's hands—when do they use it to contact Luna, and what will she say?
• The "Belspeth Booper" impersonator: who leaked the alias, who is this woman, and what is her connection to Elspeth?
• The Iron Claw remnants still operating in Greyport remain unaddressed
• Victor's Eldoran space station tracking data: what are the attack plans he's developing, and will the party be involved?
• Leliana's concerts to funnel worship to Luna are in the planning stages—time is pressing with Luna's projected decline date in May
• Travis's future: will Victor find him a place in the Navy, and what does that do to the zoo's security posture?

Notable Quotes

Scarlet: "It's beyond any of the calibrations I should be able to do in the lab. Hills are forming. Streams are appearing. It's very odd."

Silas: "I liked you better when you were just in the van all the time."

Silas: "Give me the sending stone."

Victor: "I think the moral ambiguity of the Twilight Company can be tough for people like that. He'd be eaten alive."

Leliana: "I hope we can bring out your latent artist. No pressure—but in case you want to try your hand at it."

Olivia: (imagining the pocket village) (a beach, and behind the bar, someone very handsome serving coconut drinks)

The session ends with a pocket dimension full of campfires, gold fountains, and birthday cake—and a sky full of black holes that no one has explained yet. The sending stone is in hand. Luna is waiting. Whatever is moving through the void above the village is moving closer.