Games Logs

Rampart lies on the common-room couch with an ice pack pressed above one tusk, the bruise beneath it already gone deep purple-black. Someone has draped a blanket over him that doesn't quite reach his feet. Alternate KFC finds him there. "Looks like somebody had an adventure," she says, and her tone tries for light and lands somewhere else entirely. "I didn't want to bother you, hon," Rampart says. "I tried sparring with Diro instead. It didn't work out." A beat. "It was two

The party is at the casino, where alternate KFC's and Rampart's wedding has apparently obligated the entire hex to serve as witnesses. Debbie sees the whole thing as a money-making opportunity. "But the House always wins!" alternate KFC points out. "Except when it doesn't," counters Debbie, and unspools her idea to the class valedictorian. Alternate KFC nods and settles into the chair beside her, hoping to play enough hands to guarantee a big win. The card-counting fails s

The Fire Jolt Café fills its last chairs as Debbie takes her final bow. The set has gone well — well enough that Quintelius corners her before she's finished packing up her gear and offers her a touring slot on the spot. A replacement spot until their regular guitar player can sort out his romantic entanglements. It is a convenient offer. This timeline's Debbie already owns the bus. There is a wedding coming between Rampart and this timeline's KFC. In the stretch of time

Dawn breaks over Strixhaven, and KFC is smuggling a twelve-foot shambling mound down five flights of spiral staircase underneath a carpet. This is, she will insist to anyone who asks, a school project. Quintilius asks. He is coming up the stairs after an all-night band practice, guitar case flattened against the wall, and he wants to know why the project smells like something decomposing. KFC explains that it is a project *about* how magical creatures decompose, which is the

The dungeon beneath Witherbloom Tower smells of damp stone and, now, brimstone. Orestes the horned devil has left his post — the room where he keeps this timeline's Hexmates — and is standing in the corridor. He was drawn there by the sound of Alistir murmuring to a shambling mound. This is his second student interloper of the evening, and somewhere behind a door that is almost certainly not thick enough, two nearly identical sets of Hexmates are listening to him fume.

In a vault-ceilinged room, the shambling mound shuffles toward the Hexmates beneath Witherbloom Tower, smelling of wet soil and rot. Massive, its vines and branches are held together with some sort of mucus, and they appear just at the edge of decay, suspended by magic rather than nature. Fungi grow in clusters along the upper ridge of what might be called its head and shoulders, some of them faintly luminescent, throwing pale light across the room in uneven patches. Gaping m

The party finds themselves, displaced and uncomfortable, in this alternate timeline — a version of Strixhaven where things are subtly, somet

The afternoon settles over Strixhaven with a particular heaviness. The day has already asked too much of everyone. Tomorrow’s assignments lo

The campus feels borrowed. The architecture is right — the Hex Tower doors swing open for them as they always have — but something in the

The office is close and warm. The soup on the long table has stopped steaming. Murgaxor sits behind it, watching the Hexmates with flat, unr

The cold iron key hangs on the wall like a wound, and Alister stands near it, close enough that the proximity registers as a low, persistent

The halls of Strixhaven echo with confusion and chaos as the hexmates find themselves scattered across campus, each dealing with their own b

Horse-Reyna’s hooves clatter on the marble pathway as she canters into Silverquill Quad. The elegant colonnade rises before her, its pristin

The battle ends. Reyna crouches halfway up the spiral staircase leading to the dormitory rooms while Rubina sits just above her, shaking her

The Crown sneers. “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. There would be no more trouble if you just kept us some of us magical

Victory still seems very distant. Even as Vex flings open the door to flee, it’s apparent the polymorphing waves remain in effect. The spell

All in the Common Room hold their breath. High above them, they can hear the pounding of Titania’s feet as they ascend the spiral staircase

The friends rise late on Sunday morning, having a lazy start to their day in the Hex. As they finish their Reyna-made pancakes and coffee, a

The hexmates gather in the common room of the Hex as evening shadows lengthen across campus. Excitement hums through the space as they

Dr. Magmus Rockbottom climbs the short ladder beside his podium, his ginger beard catching the orange glow from the ceiling-mounted braziers