Enjir

Journal
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My head really hurts, but I'm going to write as much as I can just to keep it all in order in my brain. This is too much to take in right now, so I'll take it in later.

We'd made it to the city center, snuck past the main line, reached the arcanists quarters. Managed to take down the few dwarves left in there, and set about securing the place for the heavy infantry to take over. At this point it's just me, Vindir and Akri left.

Found the plans for the Ark Project. Found the claims that it was done and ready to go. Found the proof they weren't just bragging. It was hard to make sense of, but I think we all got the gist of what we were looking at.

It sinks in. We're walking into a trap.

Run back towards camp, try to get word out that if the capital falls and the dwarves think it's over, they'll activate the biggest, most spiteful, empire-destroying cataclysm of a failsafe I can imagine. Memory blanks out on the way there. Wake up on the islands. Everyone's gone.

I don't think it's truly sunk in for any of us yet.

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We've been swept up. I know, Vindir knows, Akri knows. Nobody else is going to know, at least not the whole story yet. I have no idea what things look like outside now, but I can imagine it isn't good. If people figure that out, motivation to escape is going to drop fast. And no matter how bad it is outside, it's got to be better than staying here.

At some point, we're going to have to at least partially break the news to some of the most magically inclined here. They're probably our only hope of finding a way out of this. For now, we've got time to figure out how to best drop that bombshell.

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Efforts to make do with our new environment are going well. We're surviving, and on the road to thriving. Kind of. I mean, it's shitty, but nobody's going to starve yet.

From the looks of it, we're the only ones on the ocean. If we understand how this works right, we're going to stay the only ones on the ocean. That's really good news, actually. I imagine that a lot of this 'vessel' is going to be Dwarven in nature, so the fewer neighbors we end up having, the better.

That said, we're still going to be getting to work fortifying this place. If it's possible for us to get visitors, I'd rather they stayed well away.

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Saw a ship on the ocean today. More specifically, saw a ship that didn't belong to us on the ocean today. There's others out there.

Hostile? Dwarven? Elven? Human? Impossible to say right now.

I'm personally less focused on the who and more on the how. Because….how…?

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Breakthrough. Vindir and I found a little spot on the ocean where it seems like space is a little offset from everything else. Arcanists did some studies, cast some spells, did….other stuff. Turns out we've got ourselves a spot where other areas in the vessel overlap a little bit with here. Whatever's on the other side might be able to get here by just walking on in, then find themselves stranded here. Because, for some reason, none of these overlapping areas bridge across from this side. Faelyn's described it as a planal pit. I think she just made that term up, but it kinda makes sense when you put it like that.

Either way, it explains why we're seeing other creatures on the ocean. Poor bastards just wandered on in, and now they're just as stuck as we are. Maybe we'll try making contact later. Or maybe they'll just all die.

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A month since Vindir left. Without his expertise in fabricating displacement cores, we can't power any of the gates we made at the displacement points. Things have slowed to a halt.

Worse, we've encountered our first openly hostile creatures on the ocean since then. Skeletal Pirates, manning ships of their own and attacking anyone they meet that isn't undead. They sank a couple of our ships, killing some decent folk, before we realized what was happening and started preparing to fight back.

Really wish Vindir was here now. We need him now more than ever.

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The Pirates talk. The pirates talk a lot, actually. Like, way too much. We captured one, hoping to interrogate it, but it just wouldn't stop talking until we threw it overboard. Nothing useful, either. Just gave us a bunch of nonsense when we asked about why they don't die, where they came from, other questions.

Still, it was more unsettling than it was annoying. Somehow. It knew my name. It knew a lot of our names. How? Nobody here is talking to the pirates or letting them hang out in our commune. They're dangerous. We need to get rid of them.

And we need to get back to our research. How long before another hostile force shows up?

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They have leaders. They're….strong. Really, really strong. The losses we're facing against them are really bad. We've decided the best course of action right now is close up shop. Nobody goes in or out of the commune except warships, and even then only to patrol the nearby waters. We focus on defending ourselves above everything else.

We underestimated them, and now we're getting fucked for it.

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The pirates keep coming right for the islands. They know we're here! I'm certain of it. But how?

Moreover, how do they know so much about us? Pirates we capture name the names of people who have never even left the commune, and they talk about things that have happened in there that nobody but us should know of. One of them even knew about that time with me and Akri, and nobody but me, her and Vindir know about that. I know Akri would never betray us, and she knows I would never either. And Vindir's been dead since

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I swear to every god known to man that I will personally mount Vindir Gaelira's unholy head on a stake.

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We've failed. Imdi tells me that a massive fleet of the pirates are approaching, and we're out of warships or men. Vindir knows how to get past the towers. He designed the damn things. They'll crush this shell of earth, flood our halls with water and bone, and bring about its inescapable end.

We've loaded as many of our kind as we can onto one of our last seaworthy ships - a tiny thing, one Ines designed as a stealth cruiser. They'll be our final voyage - our last attempt to continue our lineage and escape from this place. The mountain to the northwest seems as apt a choice as any to take refuge.

Akri will be on it. She's protested, of course. Threatened all of us, screamed, cast spells, intimidated as many people as she can, but it's the one thing I insist on. I guess it's my last order as our "leader."

It's not just because it's her that I need her on that ship. It's also because someone who saw the plans for the Ark has to survive. It feels pretty good to be able to throw that one out -- even she can't deny that.

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They attacked so much faster than we imagined. As of writing this, I'm seated in the Horizon Tower Lab, and the door has sealed shut behind me. Somebody tripped the alarm outside, and now I'm in the safest room in the commune. Nothing will get in here -- or out. At least they won't get the schematics.

I can't hear or see what's going on out there. For all I know, we're holding them off like champs.

Probably not.

Eventually, I think I'm going to run out of air in here. It might be the hilariously massive amounts of abject failure and loss in my life, but I'm kind of looking forward to it.

If anyone ever finds this, I'm sorry. Not because I failed you. I can't make up for that. I'm sorry because it means you didn't find a way out of here, and you didn't get the easy way out I get now.