The Pentagram, the Tattoos, and New Sight

Session Summary: 08/06/2023

Ahhhh, the PATTERN emerges! Working with Dr. Ritalsin and the maps of Lepidstadt spread across his study floor, the heroes began connecting the locations they had uncovered. The Toymaker's workshop. The Baumgartner house. The Bethlen laboratory. Pendergrast Manor. When these four points were connected by straight lines across the city map, the shape that emerged was unmistakable: the beginning of a PENTAGRAM, drawn in misery and abduction across the body of Lepidstadt itself. A fifth point completed the figure. That point led to Flustern Schatte, the Cairn of Whispering Shadows, a location at the city's edge that none of the heroes had yet visited.

Dr. Ritalsin absorbed this information with the practiced calm of a man who has learned not to visibly panic in front of the people he has hired to prevent the panic-inducing things from happening. He suggested they rest before pursuing the fifth point and use the dream-protection ritual they had learned from Gunther's notes to guard their sleep.

They used it. It didn't fully work, or rather it worked but the black sand they had been exposed to over weeks of investigation had already done something to the way their minds connected to the Dreamlands. They woke to find new tattoos on their skin: a third gritty black-line mark, and their first tattoo had evolved, grown more complex, its design refined into a more complete portion of whatever formula was being written on them.

But the strangest gift was the sight that came with it. Without the hagstone that had previously been required to perceive gossamer, the heroes could now see it directly. The dream-substance of sleeping citizens drifted in visible streams, rising from dreams and flowing toward collection points that the heroes now recognized from their research. And worse: some of the people they passed on the waking streets were ALSO trailing gossamer, chaotic disturbed filaments being drawn away from them rather than pooling in their own dream-bubbles. The city was being drained while everyone was wide awake and had no idea their vitality was LEAVING them!