Chapterish Sectionoid 2

Accompanying Sir Abram and Pidenski on their way back to the town of Trelvet, our heroids get some assistance in crossing the leaf-covered bottomless pit from Pidenski, as Levan seems too exhausted after the experiences in the Seraph Woods. The six walk peacefully back to town; Rammen inquires about a talking tree's comments about Abram and Pidenski, but Abram seems not to know what the tree meant. Reaching Trelvet, the group enters the Golden Crown Tavern & Inn, and Abram grants the players a free night in the Inn portion. Jay and Miles stay up to tell The Barman, Dr. Unk, about their adventures, but Levan goes to bed; during the night, she has a nightmare and wakes up with sleep paralysis, but her friends are there waiting for her, and she recovers. After standing around for a long time, they go downstairs, curious about a very brief hailstorm that passed over the bar. Miles seems oddly serious in response to this, and watches as the hailstorm appears to move into the Hacidian Plains.

The players visit the chef Cassima, and she cooks some delectable treats for them. They then peruse the marketplace once again, perhaps even more sleepily than the last time. After purchasing their fill of items, Miles hits the Save Block in front of the Grate Oracle's house. Upon loading the saved file, the party decides to consult the Oracle once more before heading into the Plains. Miles is up-front about the encounter, and Lewot returns this attitude, apparently having been awoken from a nap. He warns the party of the usual dangers and betrayals, and says that the Hacidian Plains will have "Something for everyone, except Rammen." He also names the area boss, a "giant marshmallow" called In Halen, and explains that three keys are required to enter the boss's castle. The players walk past several unimportant houses and cross a somewhat frightening but perfectly stable rope bridge into the Hacidian Plains.

The Plains are filled with waist-high dry grass, which immediately conceals two Killer Shrews and two Killer Tomatoes. The group disposes of these B-movie monsters with relative ease and then heads south, in the direction that Miles thinks the mysterious hailstorm went. After walking through the grass for a while, they meet an attractive woman. She seems mute, and leads them near the tree wall of the Seraph Woods until two more women appear from behind trees. Rammen attempts to get a psychic read on the silent seductresses, and they are revealed to be hostile, attacking with PK Fire. They turn out to be Psychicks, ugly green genderless monsters who generate a psychic illusion of a beautiful woman to ambush humans. They annoy our heroes with Status Problems and VimUp revivals, but eventually fall, dropping an odd item called a Schrödinger's Box.

Continuing their adventure, the players follow the hailstones on the ground to find a man holding a scythe and wearing a longcoat. He turns out to be Miles' brother, and a miniboss. At first proving a formidable foe, Jay shows his high Clever stat by dispatching him with a Bros. Flower. Milo Burgess flees the scene in a burst of hailstones, leaving behind a green key. After a brief glance at a Munchlesia (a plant that lures in prey with gold coins and sucks HP from them), the players proceed to In Halen's castle, use the green key to open one set of double doors (revealing another set of double doors), find some items on the roof (including some Winged Sandals to which Miles takes a fancy), and fight some Golbats. They enter what appears to be a secret entrance, but a wind tunnel blocks their progress, suggesting that the pathway is more of a secret exit. They return to the roof, from which vantage point they observe the Hacidian Plains. Levan notices a strange shadowy figure to the west, and the party flies over to investigate.

The shadowy figure seems able to disappear and pop up in a new position, and as the players arrive in its vicinity, it is revealed that it teleports in a manner visually reminiscent of film skipping. Its limbs and head seem to randomly skip short distances around the torso, which can then skip the whole mass around greater distances. The shadow doesn't seem to talk, but it engages the protagonoids in battle; Rammen can't find it in the book, but estimates some of its stats. Its offense and defense seem to fluctuate, and its skipping allows it to dodge many of the attacks thrown at it. Lacking a Milo-like quick resolution, the players slowly defeat the shadow, and the game temporarily glitches out, with the narration making little sense and the voices of characters from the past, future, other RPGs, and other settings entirely being randomly audible. After a moment, things return to normal, and the players receive the Purple Castle Key, a piece of VOLCANO BAKEMEAT, and a Fright mask; Jay finds an extra chunk of BAKEMEAT in his inventory, and Rammen has no memory of the battle, but there seems to be no permanent harm. The players fly back to the Save Block behind In Halen's Castle and hit it.

After a 34-day break, the players load their file again and insert the Purple Key into its lock. The second set of doors opens, revealing a wind tunnel blowing outward, preventing them from entering the castle. They look around, notice some dark smoke rising from a spot to the north, and decide to investigate. They fight off some spell-casting birds from which Levan acquires a Witch's Hat, purely for decoration, when suddenly Miles is stricken by a mysterious condition theorized by Rammen to be the disease known as deest. With a largely nonresponsive Miles tagging along, the other three inspect what increasingly looks to be a burnt-down village, and eventually find an elderly hyena beneath the ruins of one hut. Jay speaks to him in monster language and learns that he, Jay, was born in that very village, and is now the last of its inhabitants to survive, because the rest were killed by some kind of intruders whom the steppenhyänen were unable to see, hear, or smell coming, all so that their blood could be used to create the Blood Orbs. Jay attempts to snap Miles out of his zombie-like state and get him to heal the old hyena, but even after Miles casts Dia, the steppenhyäne does not recover. Rammen and Levan be awkward for a while, not having understood the monster-language conversation, but eventually Jay digs a grave for his elder and buries him, learning the name of their species from one of the burnt boards under which he had been found. The scene fades out semi-dramatically as the players Quicksave.

After loading, Miles gets his bearings and the party wonders where to look for the last key. They spot some figures to the southwest and fly out to meet them; they turn out to be Fire Emblem enemies, but the players manage diplomacy and get a couple of gifts from them instead of a fight. After conversing for a while, they part ways, the players heading toward the northwest corner of the map, which turns out to be an elephant graveyard. Though the place has a creepy atmosphere, they spend a good deal of time exploring without incident, finding several items. They regroup and attempt to move a large rock, and from under this they are attacked by three iDeads—shadows of zombies wearing iPods. A Seti also joins the battle. The players take 32 days to defeat them and then speak briefly with a Thwomp guarding the entrance to a bamboo maze behind the elephant graveyard. As the Thwomp says that the third key isn't in there, they decide to look elsewhere. They find a star-shaped crater and meet up with Abram and Pidenski, and Abram says that the crater is supposedly where In Halen fell from the heavens. Deciding to change direction and let the two knights tackle the southwest corner of the Plains, our heroes head for the northeast, where they find a handy swirly vine plant and some holes in the ground in the shape of the number 42. In one of these holes they fight three Fissile Dragons for the Orange Castle Key, and they return to the castle and hit the Save Block.

The Orange Key reverses the direction of the wind tunnel so that it pulls the party into In Halen's Castle. The castle first offers another puzzle based on weight-sensitive switches, but one is on the ceiling, requiring the players to do some tricky thinking to get enough Strength airborne to press it while the two on the ground are weighed down. This opens three doors; the players take the one to the left, press another ceiling switch, and are ambushed by three Sand Witches. They take a beating but destroy these goons, acquiring a Jelly Sandwich. Up the stairs they find another wind tunnel blocking their way, and return to the entryway to look for a means of removing it. In the right doorway they find a human skeleton clutching a bottle of Whiskey; Jay takes the latter and Miles begins to have a panic attack. Through the remaining door some fans under the floor produce an upward wind current beneath a spiky ceiling, but Jay is heavy enough to walk through this without being pushed into the spikes. On the other side, he breaks down some wooden doors and takes care of some kamikaze music notes called Dischords, with a little long-distance battle help from the others. There's a switch and some stairs and a piano, but Miles goes into the throes of a full breakdown, and nobody is quite sure what to do. Rammen slowly prepares to play the piano and Abram and Pidenski arrive, but one of many tremors apparently coming from the third floor sends a chandelier crashing into the piano, destroying it and creating another Dischord. Rammen is annoyed but he and Miles eventually come around and, after Abram and Pidenski step on a switch, the players return to where they had already explored to find the obstructing wind tunnel gone. They venture forth and find a secret treasure room, looting it like any good video game hero should. They swing back through all the rooms once more and follow Abram and Pidenski up some other stairs in a bit of a rush, and past another wind tunnel see a steppenhyäne skeleton.

After the longest break between sessions in a long ol' time, it's the perfect time for a trivia quiz show. The players and the Arbiter struggle to remember anything about anything as Whomp bombards the player characters with questions about their adventures. Miles, quick at the buzzer, rakes in the most points, but the whole party, including Sir Abram and Pidenski, use Levan's powers to trick the living piece of wall into taking them all through to the next room. They climb the stairs to find Heal and Save Blocks, and prepare for a hopefully epic boss battle.

Continuing after another long break, the players step on some buttons, and the battle unfolds. In Halen is revealed to be a member of Kirby's species bonded to a Venom symbiote, and although he hits hard, the players use some powerful items and show themselves to be no pushovers even with an early loss of Abram and Pidenski's assistance. Real-world fatigue starts to slow them down, though, and by the time they join Abram and Pidenski in In Halen's belly, things are just plain crazy. The Blood Orb, defended by four puns on the nitrogenous bases in DNA, puts up a fight, but again without help from the partner units, our protagonoids are victorious. In Halen coughs up the Blood Orb and the symbiote detaches and explodes, and the players promptly heal, save, and nap, exhausted from a ferocious and confusing but ultimately satisfying battle.

Returning to play, the heroids revive the Kirby half of In Halen as well as Abram and Pidenski. Miles takes the Blood Orb and Abram suggests using a Spell Card called Antithesis to attempt to reverse the Orb's evil effects. Upon casting the spell, the Blood Orb creates a forcefield around the players and flies into Abram's hand. Abram reveals his true identity: he and Pidenski are really Pinky and the Brain! They traveled back to the past as part of a nightly scheme, but the players became more popular than them, ruining this plan. It seems Brain has them trapped for good, but Rammen uses his psychic abilities to make Pinky have a tantrum and blow up their time machine. The players return to the strange red realm that gave them their first permanent stat increases and get their second. When they exit, Pinky and the Brain blast off with the Blood Orb, so the players still don't have one to keep. But they have found a new ally in the Kirby alien, named Jack in Halen.

Jay decides that he needs to continue his journey alone, so he bids the rest of the group farewell and walks off into the sunset. (Jared has decided to drop out of the game.) Saddened and confused by recent events, the party blearily returns to Trelvet, sleeps for the night, cooks some items, and buys some more. The marketplace is oddly sparse, and they learn that most of Trelvet's population has moved up to On-Ede. What adventures will this big city have in store for the team?