Games Logs

Aurora waits by the door while KFC hands off Otto, and Dr MacDonald is effusive about it. "Well done," he says, studying the dog and then studying KFC a beat too long, like he's checking the math on something. Uncomfortably, KFC fills the silence. "He's still pretty smelly. I tried to wash him, but I didn't have any soap…" She spreads her wing to gesture at Otto. Beaming, MacDonald tells her, "I've heard things about you, and none of that's true. You're perfectly lovely

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 lecture hall smells of old parchment and the particular anxiety of students who have not slept enough. Morning light comes through the high windows at an angle that does nothing for anyone. The Hexmates are arranged, instead of their usual configuration, they are seated with their project partners. Only Quentillius and Alister sit with distance between them. Quentillius leans across the aisle toward Alister, his voice low and pointed, “Hey, Alister, have you finished you

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 librarian — cheerful, oblivious, and armed with an enormous key — locks the doors to the restricted section of the Biblioplex without a

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