Imaginary Friends and the Tortured Tutor

Session Summary: 01/21/2024

Ahhhh, the CHILDHOOD of a monster! Descending into the deeper strata of Gregor's dreamscape, the heroes found themselves moving backward through time as well as inward through architecture. The chambers here were SMALLER in emotional scale, though no less dangerous for that, reflecting memories from earlier in Gregor's life when the foundations of his future were still being laid. The dreamscape was telling the story of how Gregor Pendergrast had become Gregor Pendergrast, and the story was not a comfortable one.

A tortured tutor manifested first: an educator from Gregor's childhood warped by the boy's perception of him into a figure of imposing cruelty and absolute authority. The real man, whatever he had actually been, was unrecoverable from this; the dreamscape-version was assembled from Gregor's emotional response to being corrected, challenged, and found wanting, amplified by years of resentment into something genuinely monstrous. They fought it and destroyed it, and the chamber it had occupied became quieter and somehow smaller after its removal.

Then came the imaginary friends. Three of them, and in the physical world they would have been harmless: the inner companions that lonely or imaginative children create when reality fails to provide adequate companionship. But in Gregor's dreamscape, shaped by the specific darkness of his particular psychology, they were MONSTROUS reflections of what those childhood companions had meant to him. Not playmates but POSSESSIONS, not companions but captive audiences for the performance of being Gregor Pendergrast, and their forms in the dreamscape reflected thirty years of being used rather than loved.

The heroes destroyed all three and felt the ethical weight of doing so, because even twisted things that were never treated properly deserve acknowledgment. Charles said a brief prayer over the fading remnants, which Kiren said was excessive and which she would clearly have felt worse about skipping. The heroes moved deeper into Gregor's past, following the thread backward toward the moment that had made all the other moments possible!