dropoffs | FREAKY JOURNAL

It’s a black leather bound journal, some of it still stitched into the binding but quite a bit of it is loose parchment shoved in at random in a chaotic assortment of languages. Most of it looks very old Some of it is a very archaic, difficult to understand language that mostly seems to be notating magical rituals, artifacts and locations around a city known as Aeor. Some of it is in Draconic, and is a personal journal that accounts the journey of a Mage who spends the first part mostly complaining about how he is constant competition with his peers and is journeying to Aeor to fund his academic research, hoping to find something of value in the Pre-Calamity ruins. He accounts how his small team navigated the ruins, running across a myriad of magical wonders and horrors, treasures and terrors. He had found this journal, and decided to combine it with his own papers to keep the useful information closer. He has discovered the notes of some of the group known as the Somnovem - a group of nine philosopher mages that lived in ancient Aeor before its destruction. He becomes obsessed with finding more of this information, as if learning about their existence has somehow begun haunting him. He describes being marked with the nine red eyes, and of eventually hearing their voices, talking to him, offering him gifts and power, all to the end of trying to return part of a city from the Astral Sea to the Material Plane.

A significant portion of the pages are torn out. As it nears the end of the narrative, strange drawings - a red eye, lurid and staring, drawn behind the words in red ink. A tall, elongated figure drawn in mad scribbling across multiple pages, inching closer. Crazed writing that overlaps itself over and over, as if the writer has forgotten where he was writing and recounts different events on the same page. It describes how the Somnovem had, in their time, discovered a way to turn dreams and imagination into real power. Power enough to shape the entire world - to change reality with a simple thought. Magic powerful enough to rival the gods. Magic powerful enough to even make someone a god.

It devolves into fragments, gibberish, rantings in impossible to understand languages, elaborate schematics for devices with no written purpose and sixteen straight pages with nothing but the word TRANSMUTE. It gives you a migraine to read this far. Why are you still reading? The parts that are legible are recounting how each member of the expedition has met more and more horrible ends. They all stop eating and sleeping, and their minds are linked by the eyes. It returns to sense after a while, detailing the location and workings of a device known as the Immensus Gate, which is portal to other planes of existence, and contains a detailed diagram for another spell - including all the necessary runes, focuses and gestures - that seems to be labeled for “Ascension.”

The journal of the mage ends with him being locked behind a wall in the depths of Aeor by one of his own companions, and left to starve to death in the dark with his journal.

Towards the back, in much newer looking, tight and neat handwriting: REMEMBER: TO VENTURE FORTH IS THE MANDATE OF THE SOUL. The rest that follows is relatively mundane notes on the weekly events and murder cases, the lyrics to a song about a sailor from Nicodranas, observations on the planets they’ve stopped at and the people here. It also contains quite a few (quite competent) drawings: a diagram of Dahut’s heart, Dion in an incredibly silly dragon costume, An unfamiliar blonde woman with a butterfly tattoo on her chest, Throné and Temenos whispering about something, Viktor sewing something, a diagram of a Norn, Rosamund examining a bow, a silver charm familiar to Sidon, the inside of the Church, Amalthea without her helmet - head tilted to one side and hand on her cheek, a dark-haired woman floating face down in water, a striped tabby-cat (in a slightly different style than the other drawings), a rat, and finally, Vash.

As they open the last pages a pressed four-leaf clover falls out.