04/29/2026: Where Everyone Is

Where everyone is

At the moment in question, where everyone is in the Cave of Lost Things takes some explaining. The party is distributed across its tunnels in a way that suggests it might be either a tactical decision or a catastrophic loss of group cohesion. It is the second of these choices. 

⚔

In the main tunnel, the cloaker is dead. Freda, a ranger, views this as an opportunity, and draws a dagger from her belt. 

She crouches over its vast body with purpose, her foot claws holding the creature still, and gets to work. The cloaker is large — larger than it looked while alive and trying to envelop them. Harvesting it is not a delicate operation. It is loud and wet and thankfully goes rapidly.

But Freda knows what she is doing, more or less, and when she is finished she has the cloaker’s teeth, a quantity of meat that will keep for some time in the infernal cold, and the creature’s skin that, if she rolls it correctly and packs it well, might one day become a supple and tough jacket.

She packs it all of these items into her rucksack, then slots the fanglike teeth into her beak.

Freda adjusts the teeth like ill-fitting dentures. She snaps her jaws closed a few times then swivels her head to look at Lynx, and unable to not smile. The teeth do not allow her to close her beak.

The smile is alarming in a way that suits the teeth. Freda seems to know this, and is fine with it. Lynx steps back, and watches her from a a safe distance, saying nothing. After all, what can he say? 

Dog Glumbo also observes all of this from a cautious distance, unable to comment. He is cleaning up what is left of the cloaker in big gulping bites.

⚔

The old woman is approximately Newt's height. She has a nose that is remarkably long and bent. Her skin is the gray of old ash, her hair straw-colored and stiff, and she smells musty, incredibly old.

She gave Newt a frying pan. In exchange for Newt’s signature on a contract. The contract, as Newt understood it, established that if the pan's original owner came to reclaim it, they would receive compensation. 

However, this was not quite what the contract said. 

What the contract said — buried under clauses, formatted in the peculiar way that infernal legal documents are formatted— was that the signer would provide their name, gifting it to the old woman.

Their name.

The hag turns to Newt and smiles with too many teeth for a face her size, and something that looks like fairy dust gathers at her fingertips. She points to herself and says:

"Now, my name is Newt."

The dust falls, catching Newt across the face, fine and cold, like frozen breath. For one vertiginous second, Newt blinks and thinks: wait — what is my name?

And then, from somewhere underneath the confusion, like a hand reaching up through cold water: I'm Newt. No, lady — my name is Newt.

The old woman's expression curdles. She almost had it, erasing the knight’s memory. Her spell very nearly took his name, wiping clean from his memory.

The newly named hag called Newt turns to the knight and repeats: "My name is Newt. What's yours?"

Before the knight-formerly-known-as-Newt can form an outraged response, Krasnyy darts into the room and grabs the contract from the hag's grasp.

"Hey!" screeches the hag-currently-known-as-Newt. "Give that back! It is the property of Newt!"

Krasnyy unrolls it in the hallway and begins to read, keeping one eye on the furious hag, now called Newt.

⚔

The room Tick is being held in is not dramatic. That is part of its particular horror. There is a table. There is sand. There are two gnomes with pointy hats, sitting very close together.

They have been counting the sand. They have been counting the sand for as long as Tick has been in this room, and for considerably longer before that. They are counting, they explain, because they need to know how many grains there are. This is their job. For each grain of sand counted, they earn one soul coin, which they will eventually use to pay off their debt to Stygia, at which point they will be free to leave.

There are a very large number of grains of sand.

“How much are you owed?” Tick asks.

The gnomes look at each other. “We are,” one of them says carefully, “in serious debt. We need you to tell us which number we have come to is correct. We have counted the sand grains several times, but never get the same number. You can count and tell us which number is correct.”

The Command spell is technically perfect, but Tick’s stronger will reasserts itself — there is a moment of resistance, like pulling a boot out of cold mud, and then it releases. The gnomes look up.

“Get back to counting,” says the one on the left. “This needs counting.”

Tick considers this a moment. Then Tick dumps the sand on the floor.

The gnomes scream in outrage as sand goes everywhere. It is in their shirts. It is in their socks. They turn to Tick with exasperation, one demanding, “Look what you’ve done!”

“You’re so mean!” says the other.

Tick is watching, distressed. “I didn’t want to be mean! I just wanted to not count!”

From the doorway, Lynx catches sight of the chaos with the gnomes and their scattered sand, and he decides to improve matters. Lynx points at one gnome, then at the other gnome’s hat, and says one word. The Command spell again.

“Eat!”

The first gnome stops complaining. Something in his face reorganizes itself. He looks at the hat on his colleague’s head. He leaps across the table, grabs the hat, and stuffs it into his mouth.

The second gnome’s response to this is to drop all of his remaining sand and say, wailing again, “Look what you’ve made me do.”

Lynx smiles a satisfied smile.  But the gnomes are too busy chewing and screeching to notice.

⚔

Murlack is in the archive room, surrounded by ten thousand contracts. The cave feels dusty in an old library sort if way. The smells of disintegrating paper and damp nearly cover the stink brought by the mountain of socks blocking an entire passage to the south.

The archive room is approximately ten feet by ten feet and it contains approximately ten thousand contracts, Murlack estimates.

They are stacked, sorted, folded, rolled, stamped, and otherwise organized according to the type of contracts. Marriage contracts. Divorce decrees. Real estate contracts. Rental agreements. Sales leases. IOUs. Labor settlements.

None of these interest Murlack, who is seeking the Going-to-hell contracts, though currently he cannot find them. He is sure, wedged among the piles of contracts, are Cornelius Mallard’s contracts that tricked Murlack and his seven companions into Hell. Those contracts are here, somewhere. Those are the ones he came for. Murlack looks. He looks again. And the warlock owns that, on further reflection, there may in fact be more than ten thousand contracts stuffed into this room. It does seem somewhat larger right now to him.

Murlack needs to clear some space so he can see things.

He casts the spell Scorching Ray. Three rays of fire travel through the archive in distinct, purposeful lines. The labor contracts catch first — they go up with a kind of relief, the ink curling off the parchment in long, dark spirals. The real estate contracts follow, releasing the ownership of property for owners that probably no longer exists, who may even be somewhere nearby in the underworld. The IOUs go third, and with them the accumulated weight of a thousand small, promised debts that were never going to be paid, anyway.

Murlack watches the fire move through the stacks. Watches contracts flare and crumble. Flames reaches the fourth pile— Murlack expects marriage agreements, or maybe divorce decrees — and instead watches the tattoo on his wrist fade to absolutely nothing.

It simply disappears. The ink that has sat in Murlack’s skin recording his debt in scrip since Tantlin, since the processing office, since Sergeant Ironbrand’s filing desk — it is gone. The bond is gone. “I hope,” Murlack thinks wistfully, “that the others are free of the debt, as well.”

The rest of the archive burns. The room fills with smoke. Murlack is still in it.

This will be a problem shortly.

⚔

Tall Glumbo moves through the halls of the Cave of Lost Things. The door he finds is closed. Behind it, something snarls.

Glumbo opens it anyway.

Inside is only a dresser. Four drawers, floor to chest height, dark wood that is slightly too dark to be actual wood. 

He decides to knock on the third drawer from the top.

A muffled voice, annoyed, self-important. “What do you want? We’re not home. We’re busy.”

Tall Glumbo moves to the top drawer and knocks. Silence. Then — movement.

The drawer opens.

Glumbo has time to think, “Oh no!” He is not able to jump clear. The drawer unfolds into something that is more like a mouth. A large mouth. It closes around Tall Glumbo’s head and shoulders and begins swallowing.

Glumbo — waist-deep in the mimic, legs still technically on the floor — takes a moment to assess the situation. The mimic is pulling him in. He discovers that he is not strong enough to pull himself free. But he possesses teeth. 

He bites down as hard as he is able. Nothing happens.

“I’m going to eat it from the inside,” he announces, to Cornelius, to the cave, to anyone listening. But Cornelius cannot hear Tall Glumbo’s voice, muffled as it is by the mimic.

A few feet away from Cornelius, Glumbo makes a sound that is trying to be words but is mostly echo.

“Um, are you okay in there?” Cornelius says.

“CORNELIUS,” says the echo that is Glumbo. “KILL THE MIMIC. NOW.”

But Cornelius is unable to understand any of what Tall Glumbo is directing him to do. Instead, the coachman sidles over to the open door, and calls, “Er, can we have a little help in here, please?”

But Tall Glumbo is not sure he is understood. In fact, he finds this vastly irritating. That is the last thought he has before he loses consciousness and begins to smother.

⚔

The left branch of the cave has three doors. Freda, cloaker teeth snapping to keep them from sliding out of her beak, chooses the middle door. Behind it: heavy breathing. Something alive, which is notable.

She opens the door slowly and stealthily, keeping low, trying to stay quiet. She enters unnoticed.

What she finds, in the corner, is a devil.

It is sitting with its knees up and its face down, and it is weeping — shoulders shaking, loud groans of what sounds like genuine sorrow. Freda has the sense that the devil’s crying has been going on for a while.

The fiend does not hear her. It does not look up.

Despite being in Hell, knowing what she knows about devils, Freda is moved: a fellow creature having a very bad time in a very grim cave.

Frida stands in the doorway and watches. The devil keeps crying.

⚔

Krasnyy is in the hall with Newt’s contract. Hag Newt calls for it. Krasnyy has, helpfully, already scratched out the name-swap clause — but the original signature is still there, Newt’s initials sitting at the bottom of the page like a small fact that refuses to go away.

The old woman is delighted. She points it out to the knight-formerly-known as-Newt.

“Your name is on the contract. You signed it away.”

“I’ll always be a wizard,” Newt says.

“You can be a wizard all you want,” the old woman says. “But you gave me your name in exchange for a pan that you can’t cook with.”

The knight-formerly-known as-Newt looks at the battered flying pan. The pan is, apparently, non-functional as a cooking implement. This is deeply annoying: a steep price for a useless item.

But then, old woman lunges for the pan. Fast — faster than the knight-formerly-known as-Newt would think she could move — but is half a step behind. The pan changes hands. The old woman holds it and says, with great satisfaction: “I can’t wait to use Newt’s pan.”

There is a pause.

“No trade backs,” she adds, possibly as an afterthought.

The knight-formerly-known as-Newt takes a breath and begins, aloud, to unravel the logic of this difficulty: 

If the old woman holds the name Newt, then she holds everything attached to the name Newt. Debt, in Stygia, follows the name. The old woman, newly Newt-ed, owns a pan that is technically hers anyway, and has also just inherited several hundred soul coins of debt she did not have before.

The currently nameless knight, once known as Newt, is technically, in the eyes of infernal record-keeping — owes nothing. There is no name associated with the knight-formerly-known as-Newt.

Hag-Newt blinks, working this out slowly. It takes a moment. 

Then Krasnyy, is from outside in the hall, calls loudly, “So she has all Newt’s debt?” The knight-formerly-known as-Newt nods.

Hag-Newt still has not fully processed this reasoning yet. She is still holding the pan.

“Yes,” Krasnyy confirms. “So she has all your debt.”

The knight-formerly-known as-Newt digs into their pocket, putting ten scrip tokens on the table. He states, “I’ll buy Newt’s pan back.”

Hag-Newt considers this. “Ten script for a pan is a reasonable transaction,” she mutters. Then she passes over Newt’s pan. The moment it leaves her hand, a tattoo appears on her forearm, bearing a glowing red number: Negative ten. The hag squawks, pulls her sleeve down, and starts doing the kind of arithmetic that people do when they have just made a medium-sized mistake that is about to become a large one.

And Newt, now holding the pan again, says: “If I have Newt’s pan then I am Newt — so I hold Newt’s name, with all Newt’s stuff — then I am Newt. And if I am Newt the debt as well as the payment follows.” When Newt buys his own name back, the debt comes back too, but so does everything that was paid to Hag-Newt—it cancels itself out.

“That was freaking awesome,” Krasnyy marvels.

The old woman who is no longer Newt is baffled. She is no longer tattooed, no longer in possession of the flying pan. 

She watches them leave with an unreadable expression. The door closes behind the newly relabeled Newt — name intact, pan in hand, debt zeroed out — and the old woman is alone again and no one to steal anything from.

Krasnyy follows Newt out. They do not look back.

⚔

Two hallways over, Murlack hears Cornelius say something that, at this distance, sounds like a question. 

Murlack moves to dash, but is stopped by the fire. The one he set.

⚔

Lynx tarries after Tick leaves the sand room. One of the two gnomes, the one with a partially eaten hat it is stuffing into its mouth seems to be choking. Lynx recognizes that what might be required in this situation is to remove the obstruction. The obstruction needs to come out. The obstruction is the hat. The hat is in the gnome. 

The cleric reaches into the gnome’s mouth.

The gnome protests. The hat comes free. The gnome takes a huge, whooping breath and begins to turn gnome-colored again, coughing and alive, but his jaw hangs at an unusual angle. Its eyes water, but it seems extraordinarily grateful.

“Thank you,” he grimaces at Lynx through clenched teeth.

“You’re welcome,” Lynx replies, and follows Tick out the door.

But Tick, having heard Cornelius cry out for help, has dashed that way to see if they can assist.

Somewhere behind her, the archive is still burning. Somewhere further back, Newt has regained her name, Glumbo smothers and Tick races.