Aunty Dearest and the Musical Ego

Session Summary: 03/10/2024

Ahhhh, the FAMILY that shaped the monster! Gregor's Aunty materialized in the dreamscape as a figure of towering disapproval and absolute certainty, assembled from every moment of family authority that had taught young Gregor that the world was a hierarchy and that his position within it depended on performing correctly for those above him. She was enormous in the way that authority figures become enormous in childhood memory, her disappointment a physical force, her approval a resource as precious and carefully controlled as any material commodity.

They defeated her with a combination of direct confrontation and the specific satisfaction of watching someone who has used the language of family expectation to control people finally LOSE a fight. Charles found her particularly aggravating in ways he chose not to examine too closely during the combat. Kiren found her entirely familiar in ways she examined with cold precision and used against her. Mutu found her confusing and dealt with the confusion by being extremely straightforward about what needed to happen next.

The puzzle of the second oubliette opened with her fall: another of Gregor's sealed memories tumbled out, revealing more of the specific experiences that had shaped his capacity for cruelty and his taste for control. The heroes moved carefully through this material, understanding that they were not merely fighting their way through a dungeon but disassembling a human psychology that had been catastrophically malformed, and that the malformation had not occurred in a vacuum.

Gregor's Musical Ego was the final major manifestation of this layer: the grand self-image he had constructed around his artistic gift, the story he told himself about why his genius justified everything he had done. It fought with absolute conviction and the particular fervor of a self-narrative that has been maintained against all evidence for thirty years. Every note it struck was both a weapon and a testimony. The heroes endured and overcame it, and with its fall, the deepest layers of the dreamscape cracked open and the CORE became visible for the first time!