Egypt 2057: The Alexandrian Storm
Date Friday, June 15, 2057 through Saturday, June 16, 2057
Arcadia
Primary Locations: Temple of Osiris at Abydos; the Honorarium; exterior ruins and battlefield at Abydos; the Veil
Numbered Chronological Scene Log
1. The Ley Line Flood
Location: Temple of Osiris, central entryway outside the Void Room.
Characters present: Tariq, Rana, David, Yusuf, Michael.
What happens: The session resumes immediately after Michael and David leave the treasure chamber. The party realizes the Void distorted time: it felt like only a few minutes inside, while roughly ten minutes passed outside. The ley lines saturating Abydos are now visibly and physically overwhelming. The group feels an enormous current of power moving through them, and they recognize that the Master has noticed the opportunity and is drawing heavily through their shared hero-pool connection while the ley line continually replenishes it. Everyone makes the required Will save and avoids being stunned.
Specific discoveries: The Master is not physically present, but can exploit the party's connection while they stand on a powerful ley-line nexus. Prolonged exposure may itself be dangerous.
What changes: The party begins treating the temple's ambient magic as an active environmental hazard, not merely a resource.
2. The Temple Without a Priest
Location: Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: Following the visible flow of ley-line energy, the party realizes the temple is not operating like the Temple of the Unseen Sun. Osiris's temple is ready, but lacks a priest or administrator to regulate its power. Broken architecture, missing pathways, and open sky interrupt routes that once had obvious ritual meaning.
Specific discoveries: The ley lines define ancient ritual pathways through the structure. The temple's systems appear incompletely activated because no priesthood is present to regulate them.
What changes: The party begins interpreting magical hazards as the result of uncontrolled sacred infrastructure rather than random malfunction.
3. Hidden Effects and Time Instability
Location: Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The GM has each player record four unmodified d20 results for hidden effects that may occur without warning. Michael reviews changes from reaching PL 11, including Evasion 2 and an expanded data link capable of entering cyberspace and interfacing more directly with nAIomi.
Specific discoveries: Time itself fluctuates inside the temple, speeding and slowing rather than moving at a constant rate.
What changes: The party knows some temple effects may occur without conscious awareness or the opportunity to reroll.
4. Michael Begins Attuning to the Soapstone Tablet
Location: Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Entire party, focus on Michael.
What happens: Michael continues the twenty-four-hour attunement begun when he recovered the soapstone tablet. The relic creates a strong emotional connection to his bloodline and a new responsibility to preserve and continue that lineage.
Specific discoveries: The tablet confirms ancient contact between West Africa and Egypt, foreign participation in Egyptian burial protections, and an ancient worldview in which divine powers were recognized across cultures under different names.
What changes: Michael's royal lineage becomes something he feels obligated to carry forward rather than merely a historical curiosity.
5. Time, Magic, and the Ancient Gateways
Location: Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The party studies the unstable flow of time. David explains why backward and forward fluctuations could devastate ritual magic, particularly True Name work, by repeating, skipping, or undoing required steps. He compares the temple to a house receiving enormous power without a breaker, transformer, or administrator. During the discussion, he realizes the ley-line nexus may have powered the ancient teleportation mirrors the group has encountered.
Specific discoveries: The powerful mirror disputed by the Russian and Saudi factions outside may belong to the same ancient transportation network.
What changes: The mirror conflict outside gains a possible connection to the party's growing theory of ancient portal infrastructure.
6. Signs of Other Worlds
Location: Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Tariq and party.
What happens: Tariq searches carvings for evidence of other planes. The temple's symbolism repeatedly depicts journeys into other realms, especially the Field of Reeds. With the new awareness of time fluctuation, images resembling modern vehicles become more suggestive of ancient visions of future eras or travel beyond normal reality.
Specific discoveries: Abydos contains extensive symbolism tied to journeys beyond Earthly life, and the temple may have provided access to time or other planes.
What changes: The party's theory expands from a burial complex to a site linking multiple realms and perhaps different eras.
7. The Chamber of Rana's Bloodline
Location: The Honorarium, Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The group follows the mapped route to the chamber where the survey drones recorded the white-haired priestess. When Rana enters, the carved ankh begins glowing with Ra's light. The relief clearly recognizes her. The image resembles Rana without being a literal portrait and is identified as a representation of her bloodline.
Specific discoveries: Rana descends from a line of priestesses of Ra who served as healers of the pharaohs. The white streak in the hair is associated with resurrection. The relief indicates that this bloodline restored a pharaoh to life.
What changes: Rana's connection to Ra becomes ancestral and institutional, not merely personal.
8. The Honorarium's Elemental and Royal Symbols
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The party studies surrounding imagery. The opposite pharaoh, plants, prosperity symbols, and a fountain-like elemental font expand the meaning of the chamber. The priestess is shown larger than the pharaoh, emphasizing her ritual role.
Specific discoveries: The chamber honors bloodlines whose members served or were recognized by the royal cult. Elemental fonts and symbols of prosperity are integrated into the ceremony.
What changes: The group realizes this chamber was used to formally honor living bloodlines tied to future burial at Abydos.
9. Rana Looks Back to Ramses the Great
Location: Honorarium, through postcognition.
Characters present: Rana; Michael shares the vision through the Staff of Ra; others remain present.
What happens: Michael uses the Staff of Ra to grant Rana postcognition. She looks back to the chamber's presentation. Three short, stout craftsmen who resemble dwarves stand near the finished relief wearing strange collars. A priest of the broader Egyptian pantheon presents the work to Pharaoh Ramses II and his retinue. Small magical effects animate parts of the wall. Ramses then calls forward a white-haired priestess of Ra and publicly honors her and her line. The presenting priest appears jealous.
Specific discoveries: The relief was presented during the reign of Ramses the Great. The craftsmen may have been a nonhuman or dwarven people in servitude. Magic in that era appears weaker or harder to use for ordinary priests, while Rana's bloodline retained exceptional divine healing and resurrection power.
What changes: Rana sees direct historical confirmation that her bloodline was formally honored by the pharaoh.
10. David's Dread and the Bloodline of Set
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party, focus on David.
What happens: As David studies the many honored traditions represented in the chamber, he encounters an image of Set and feels a profound personal dread. This connects to the previously established split within his family, including the branch tied to English nobility.
Specific discoveries: One branch of David's bloodline appears connected to Set, god of deserts, storms, disorder, violence, and foreign lands. The association with foreign lands may help explain the family's later movement into England.
What changes: David's Egyptian ancestry acquires a darker divine branch that may explain old family divisions.
11. Draconic Recognition in the Honorarium
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: David recognizes draconic writing integrated into the chamber. It does not invoke a specific Egyptian god. Instead, it honors a greater universal draconic power using neutral language.
Specific discoveries: Ancient Egyptians deliberately recognized draconic entities or forces alongside their own gods. The neutral pronoun suggests the entity was considered sexless or capable of multiple forms.
What changes: The temple demonstrates that ancient Egyptian religion could acknowledge powers outside its own pantheon.
12. Yusuf and Wadjet
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party, focus on Yusuf.
What happens: The party studies the rearing cobra beneath the falcon of Horus and identifies the symbolism of Wadjet, the cobra goddess and protector of Lower Egypt. Her role as protector of Horus and manifestation of the Eye of Ra resonates strongly with Yusuf.
Specific discoveries: Yusuf's bloodline has a distinctive connection to Wadjet not shared by the other bloodlines represented in the surviving material.
What changes: Yusuf chooses to rededicate his Eye of Thoth power to the Eye of Wadjet.
13. The First Attempt to Rededicate the Eye
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The party conducts a group ritual for Yusuf. Michael stands where Ramses stood in Rana's vision; Rana stands where her ancestral priestess stood. Tariq attempts to shield the group mentally. Time instability interferes with the ritual, and after what should have been an hour, the rite has not completed.
Specific discoveries: The temple's time distortion can directly break rituals even when the participants themselves remain unharmed.
What changes: The group must choose whether to repeat the ritual.
14. The Eye of Wadjet Opens a Door
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The group tries again. Michael uses protections associated with the soapstone tablet and the Chrono Charm to help resist the temple's temporal interference. The second ritual succeeds. The party feels the ceremony reach beyond Earth into the multiverse.
Specific discoveries: Yusuf has not abandoned Thoth. When using his eye power he may call upon either Thoth or Wadjet. More significantly, their ritual has opened a doorway for Wadjet's return in the same broad sense that previous rites have opened paths for other divine powers.
What changes: The party realizes that ritual practitioners around the world may simultaneously be calling beings, gods, or powers back into reality.
15. David Reaches Toward the Elemental Planes
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: During the successful ritual, David studies the elemental dimensions represented around him and experiments with how his ceremonial magic resonates with them.
Specific discoveries: Materials originating from other planes would make future rituals easier, and ancient offerings at Abydos may include objects brought from such realms.
What changes: David gains a new practical goal: identify and recover legitimate planar materials for magical work.
16. The Ambassador's Belt
Location: Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party, focus on Tariq.
What happens: Tariq spends ritual time studying the cracked brass belt David gave him. Postcognition reveals that it may predate the first pharaohs. It was given by an early ruler to an ambassador who traveled to a realm inhabited by beings roughly twelve to thirty-five feet tall. Upon arrival, the belt enlarged the ambassador so he could be received as an equal.
Specific discoveries: The belt is a transformative enlargement device tied to ancient diplomacy with a land of giants. The party informally names it the Ambassador's Belt. Tariq interprets the destination through the mythology of Olympus and the Titans.
What changes: Another Silo artifact awakens with a defined history and purpose.
17. Eight Hours Have Passed
Location: Leaving the Honorarium.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The party believes the rituals and study consumed about two hours. Hidden time effects reveal that nearly eight hours have actually passed. The sounds outside are quieter and no longer resemble an active battlefield.
Specific discoveries: Time dilation within the temple can multiply subjective time by several times without the party noticing.
What changes: Concern over prolonged exposure becomes urgent, and the party decides it needs to leave Abydos.
18. Tariq Surveys the Changed Battlefield
Location: Temple interior, through ESP over exterior Abydos.
Characters present: Entire party, focus on Tariq.
What happens: Before departing, Tariq uses ESP to check what changed outside. The Blob's previous position is now an approximately eight-foot-deep crater. Bodies lie scattered across the field. Engineering drones circle above. A glowing blue dome stands in the open terrain behind the temple. Two flying individuals hover above the site while drawing upon ley-line power. The Saudi dragon-men and Russians are no longer visible.
Specific discoveries: The coalition outside eventually concentrated enough force to destroy or remove the Blob. The wider battle has largely ended or dispersed.
What changes: The party emerges into an aftermath rather than the battle they originally entered.
19. nAIomi Reconstructs the Battle
Location: Temple threshold/exterior Abydos.
Characters present: Party.
What happens: Michael uses engineering-drone recordings to reconstruct events. A coordinated group repeatedly attacks the Blob until the crater is created. He also reviews footage of one injured figure near the ruins.
Specific discoveries: The crater resulted from deliberate combined attacks rather than the Blob's own power.
What changes: The party turns attention from the battlefield as a whole to the lone survivor.
20. Ashur Bareen
Location: Ruins outside the Temple of Osiris.
Characters present: Rana, David, Tariq at range, Yusuf/Deuce, Michael; Ashur Bareen.
What happens: David approaches invisibly and discovers the injured man has stony, altered skin reminiscent of other people overwhelmed by awakened bloodlines. He is regenerating slowly, accelerated by the ley lines. Tariq reads his mind and finds overwhelming pain and the belief that he is dying. Tariq calms him. Rana races out and heals him with Ra's power, restoring his normal Egyptian appearance.
Specific discoveries: The man is Ashur Bareen. His altered state resembles a troll or ogre bloodline manifestation.
What changes: Ashur survives and is able to explain why he came to Abydos.
21. The Hourglass That Called Him
Location: Ruins outside Abydos.
Characters present: Party and Ashur.
What happens: Ashur explains that since the Storm he has transformed into another form and often does not feel like himself while changed. That form compelled him toward Abydos. He produces a small hourglass-like relic containing unusual sand. He had seen the object in his mind before finding it. A dragon-man attacked him soon after he emerged from an unknown exit.
Specific discoveries: The hourglass is a bloodline relic connected specifically to Ashur. His family appears to have been one of the non-Egyptian lines that paid for burial and afterlife protection at Abydos.
What changes: The party recognizes Ashur as a confused Storm-touched person drawn by ancestry rather than a deliberate tomb robber.
22. Ashur Is Offered the Veil
Location: Abydos ruins.
Characters present: Party and Ashur.
What happens: Ashur admits he has avoided his family because he fears hurting them when transformed. The party explains that the Veil exists for people in exactly that situation: altered, frightened, isolated, and unsure how to control what they have become. Ashur accepts the offer.
Specific discoveries: Ashur has no stable support structure and does not fully understand his transformed state.
What changes: Ashur becomes a new resident or protected guest of the Veil.
23. Return to the Veil
Location: The Veil courtyard.
Characters present: Party, Ashur, Veil residents and neighbors.
What happens: The party arrives around 8:00 p.m. The courtyard is active with food, music, residents, and nearby neighbors who now regularly share the space. Michael drops the Nonso appearance. The party experiences the Veil as home rather than a command post.
Specific discoveries: The active temple beneath the Veil provides a gentler ley-line environment, easing the party down from the extreme saturation of Abydos rather than forcing them into abrupt magical withdrawal.
What changes: The expedition ends in a place of relative safety, and Ashur is introduced to a community that can help him.
24. The King of Moldova Speaks to the World
Location: The Veil, simultaneously worldwide.
Characters present: Party and virtually everyone on Earth capable of receiving the effect.
What happens: A subtle magical mental communication reaches the world. Some party members accept it; Yusuf and Rana resist. Everyone at the Veil appears to receive it. The message announces that a masked individual now rules Moldova and offers Storm-touched people residency and protection if they petition him. Within minutes, social media carries video of a cloaked figure wearing a theatrical happy/sad mask repeating the proclamation.
Specific discoveries: The self-declared King of Moldova can deliver a simultaneous telepathic message on a planetary scale. Moldova remains a UN member in campaign continuity.
What changes: A rival sanctuary for Storm-touched people publicly appears.
25. The Master's Countermove
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Party.
What happens: David connects the new proclamation to the Master's recent heavy expenditure of hero-pool energy at Abydos. He reasons that the Master has tacitly permitted or enabled an alternative refuge for Storm-touched people, one that lies outside Rana's and the Veil's influence while remaining available for control.
Specific discoveries: The Moldova initiative may be a strategic response to the Veil rather than an unrelated political development.
What changes: The party gains a potential geopolitical competitor or trap aimed at the Storm-touched population.
26. Osprey After the Interview Teaser
Location: The Veil courtyard.
Characters present: Rana and Osprey Toman, with other residents nearby.
What happens: Rana checks on Osprey. He has new clothes and is receiving free food and attention from local businesses because the network released a teaser from Rana's interview in which she names him. Osprey has spoken to his mother twice. She initially warned him again not to reveal his identity, then called back and told him he was now truly part of the family.
Specific discoveries: Public recognition has already changed Osprey's social standing before the full interview airs.
What changes: Osprey is becoming more comfortable at the Veil and with the people around him.
27. The Veil's Relationships Mature
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Party, residents, contacts.
What happens: Yusuf checks on the Veil guard whose cousin is among the Resurrected Five; no new contact has occurred, though the guard offers to reach out. Yusuf also finds several organizational emails from Vakmon Chou's people maintaining an exchange of information. Tariq checks on Elias, whose compulsive painting has calmed. Elias is working on a painting of Rana resurrecting the five soldiers at the Arbiter event.
Specific discoveries: Several relationships that began as transactions have become ongoing alliances or community ties.
What changes: The Veil functions increasingly as a stable social network rather than a temporary refuge.
28. Ley-Line Exposure Awakens the Party's Devices
Location: The Veil, night.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: The party prepares to rest and attune to newly awakened items. The GM awards each character five Power Points that may only be spent on devices, representing how prolonged exposure to Abydos's ley lines has charged, awakened, or strengthened their relics.
Specific discoveries: The Silo items can function at a minor level without investment, but can become full Mutants & Masterminds devices if the characters spend points on them.
What changes: Every character receives a concrete mechanical opportunity to develop one or more magical devices.
29. Saturday Morning: Mr. Obsidian
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Party; Tariq's sister by communication.
What happens: After morning rituals, Tariq's sister contacts him. She has been approached by the company's AI and asks whether it is legitimate. After Tariq confirms it, she forwards nAIomi's conclusion that the international crime lord Mr. Obsidian is behind attacks directed against her. nAIomi has produced three possible avenues for locating or pursuing him.
Specific discoveries: Mr. Obsidian is identified as the likely organizer behind the attacks on Tariq's sister.
What changes: A previously unresolved threat becomes a named investigation with actionable leads.
30. General Simbel Answers
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Entire party via message.
What happens: General Haziz Simbel finally responds. A formal staff message acknowledges the party's outreach. A second, clearly personal note is warm, grateful, and eager. Simbel asks that any meeting remain outside public attention and invites the entire group to his family estate for a meal on one of several weekends.
Specific discoveries: Simbel is personally anxious to meet the party and prefers a private family setting rather than a military venue.
What changes: The party accepts the earliest available invitation and plans to meet him Sunday evening.
31. Saturday Becomes a Maintenance Day
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Entire party.
What happens: Saturday passes in a blur of device work, research, messages, logistics, and relationship maintenance. The Artifact Oversight Office team develops proposals and flags world trouble spots that may involve relic activity. Tariq continues centralizing his personal collection.
Specific discoveries: The new Artifact Oversight Office is beginning to generate independent analysis rather than waiting for Tariq to assign every task.
What changes: Institutional support around the party becomes more capable and self-directed.
32. Rana Checks In with Marcus Blackstone
Location: The Veil / communications.
Characters present: Rana and Marcus Blackstone.
What happens: Rana contacts Marcus socially after disappearing into Abydos for the day. Marcus admits he experienced several minutes of fear during the global telepathic broadcast because he did not receive it and worried that the Master might have discovered his immunity or concealment. Once the message appeared online, he could plausibly behave as though he had heard it.
Specific discoveries: Marcus did not receive the Moldova telepathic transmission.
What changes: The party gains another data point suggesting the broadcast was resistible or did not reach everyone equally.
33. The Spaniard's Papers and the End of Session
Location: The Veil.
Characters present: Rana and Marcus; party generally.
What happens: Marcus confirms that the legal paperwork being prepared for the Spaniard is ready for final review and can then be delivered. The group discusses Sunday preparations, the promised Mr. Obsidian post, and the upcoming black-tie dinner with General Simbel. The session ends before Sunday morning play begins.
Specific discoveries: The Spaniard's legal status is close to being formalized.
What changes: The campaign is positioned for a private meeting with General Simbel and a possible investigation into Mr. Obsidian.
Session Overview
Session Thirty begins with the Alexandrian Storm still inside the Temple of Osiris, carrying the consequences of Session Twenty-Nine with them. Michael has recovered the unidentified soapstone tablet tied to his ancient royal lineage. David has crossed the Void beside him. The temple guardians have accepted the party's presence. What remains is the far less simple problem of standing inside one of the strongest ley-line nexuses they have ever encountered while the temple itself remains without the priesthood that once regulated it.
The result is a session dominated by inheritance. Michael's tablet confirms that ancient peoples outside Egypt negotiated for burial and protection at Abydos. Rana discovers that the white-haired priestess carved into the temple is not merely similar to her, but represents a line of Ra priestesses who healed and resurrected pharaohs. David discovers a branch of his own bloodline tied to Set. Yusuf finds Wadjet embedded in the symbolism of his protector lineage and rededicates his Eye accordingly. Tariq's battered brass belt reveals itself as an ambassador's relic once used to stand among giants.
Those revelations do not arrive safely. Time slips backward and forward inside the temple. Rituals fail because completed steps no longer remain completed. Two hours of subjective work become nearly eight hours outside the chamber. The ley lines pour through the party strongly enough for the Master to exploit their shared connection and strongly enough to awaken the devices they carry.
When the party finally leaves Abydos, they find the battle largely ended. The Blob is gone, leaving a crater behind. The dragon-men and Russians have disappeared. One badly wounded Storm-touched man remains. Ashur Bareen has been drawn to Abydos by an hourglass tied to his own bloodline and nearly killed before understanding why. Rana heals him, Tariq calms him, and the party brings him to the Veil.
The Veil provides no quiet ending. A masked ruler claiming dominion over Moldova broadcasts directly into minds across the planet and offers protection to Storm-touched people. Osprey's life is already changing because Rana named him in the interview teaser. nAIomi identifies Mr. Obsidian as the likely force behind attacks on Tariq's sister. General Haziz Simbel finally answers and invites the group to his estate.
Session Thirty begins with ancient history written into stone. It ends with the modern world beginning to reorganize itself around the people who can read it.
The Story So Far
Session Twenty-Nine brought the party to Abydos after nAIomi linked the site to the Resurrected Five, ancient royal bloodlines, and the unidentified soapstone tablet connected to Michael's research. Tariq's long-range ESP revealed a battlefield involving at least six factions, Saudi dragon-men, likely Russian operatives, artifact hunters, and powerful temple guardians.
Rather than teleporting blindly into the fighting, the party contacted a Pharaonic States archaeological survey team maintaining a regional blackout. The surveyors had watched people arrive at Abydos since early June as though called by the site. They also showed Rana an ancient image of a white-haired priestess of Ra deep within the temple.
Inside the Temple of Osiris, Michael was drawn beyond the Void Room. He and David crossed the reality-distorting chamber, resisted its power drain and planar voices, and opened a sealed treasury without breaking its protections. The soapstone tablet rose to Michael and confirmed that his family descended from an ancient royal line whose dead were granted burial and protection at Abydos.
Session Thirty begins immediately after Michael and David return from that chamber.
Major Events & Key Moments
1. The Temple Drinks Deeply from the Ley Lines
The party immediately feels the difference between simply standing on a ley line and being submerged in a nexus. The magical current is visible in the air like heat haze. Their powers resonate with it. More troublingly, they realize the Master has also recognized what is happening. He draws enormous power through the connection represented by the shared hero pool, while the nexus continually refills what he takes.
No one believes the Master is physically present. That makes the discovery worse rather than better. Distance does not prevent him from exploiting the connection.
Everyone resists the initial mental shock, but the party begins questioning how long they can safely remain. Abydos is not merely energized. It is overflowing.
2. A Temple Waiting for Its Priesthood
The flow of magic through the structure reveals paths that once carried ceremonial processions. Broken architecture interrupts them. Time has removed walls, roofs, and sections of ritual routes, but the ley lines still remember where the paths were supposed to go.
The comparison to the Temple of the Unseen Sun becomes unavoidable. That temple is active because its systems have leadership. Osiris's temple has power without administration.
David describes the situation in practical terms: an entire power line is entering a house with no transformer and no breaker. The energy is present. Nothing is regulating it.
3. Time Refuses to Behave
Michael's awareness of time and the group's repeated observations establish that the temple is not moving uniformly forward. Time speeds up and slows down. At moments it appears to slip slightly backward before correcting itself.
The fluctuations are not immediately catastrophic. No one suddenly ages decades. But David recognizes that they are devastating to ritual practice. A completed symbol can become uncompleted. A spoken phrase can be repeated when it must be spoken only once. Concentration effects can simply fail when time reverses across the action that created them.
True Name work inside this place would be exceptionally dangerous.
The group realizes that Abydos may have powered more than burial rites. The time distortion, ley-line nexus, and magical mirrors suggest that the ancient transportation network they have been discovering may have drawn power from sites like this one.
4. Michael's Inheritance Becomes Responsibility
The soapstone tablet continues attuning itself to Michael. Its effect is not a flood of genealogical names. It is more personal.
For the first time, Michael feels responsible for carrying his bloodline forward.
The tablet proves that ancient West African royalty maintained formal relationships with Egypt. It proves that non-Egyptian peoples could petition to have members of their lines buried at Abydos and protected in the afterlife. It also supports a religious worldview in which ancient peoples could recognize the same divine power through different cultural names rather than insisting that every foreign god must be false.
The Nigerian Prince was once a disguise Michael adopted.
Now the title comes with ancestors.
5. The Priestesses of Ra
The party reaches the chamber shown to them by the surveyors.
The moment Rana enters, the carved ankh in the ancient relief begins to glow.
The temple recognizes her.
The white-haired priestess does not reproduce Rana's face exactly. It represents a bloodline. The similarity is nevertheless unmistakable, including the white streak that appeared in Rana's own hair after resurrection entered her life.
The surrounding imagery reveals the role of that bloodline. These women served Ra and served the pharaohs. They were healers. At least one restored a pharaoh to life. Their importance is emphasized visually by the scale of the priestess relative to the royal figure she serves.
Rana has spent months trying to understand whether Ra chose her because of the person she became after the Storm.
Abydos suggests the relationship began much earlier.
6. Ramses the Great Remembers the Bloodline
Michael uses the Staff of Ra to place postcognition into Rana's hands.
Divine fire forms around her head and passes into her eyes. The chamber recedes. The newly finished relief appears before a gathering from the reign of Ramses II.
Three short, stout craftsmen stand near their work wearing unusual collars. Rana reads them as dwarven in appearance. A priest representing the broader Egyptian pantheon presents the completed chamber to Ramses and his entourage. Small magical effects animate the carvings, but those effects seem laborious compared with what the Storm-touched now accomplish casually.
Ramses calls forward a priestess of Ra with a streak of white in her hair and publicly honors her and her line.
The priest conducting the presentation is not pleased by the attention she receives.
The vision confirms that the carving was not abstract decoration. The pharaoh deliberately honored this bloodline in one of Egypt's most sacred complexes.
7. Set Waits in David's Family
Rana's connection to the chamber is affirming. David's is far less comfortable.
Among the many honored traditions carved into the Honorarium, he finds Set.
The recognition produces dread rather than curiosity. It also recontextualizes an old family division established much earlier in the campaign. One branch of the Hassan line appears connected to Set, the ancient god of desert, storm, disorder, violence, and foreign lands.
The last aspect is particularly suggestive. A divine association with foreign lands may have followed the bloodline long after Egypt and helped shape the branch that became connected to English nobility.
David came to Abydos expecting to be the member of the party without a bloodline written into this temple.
The temple disagrees.
8. A Place for Dragons
David's universal linguistic gifts reveal another surprise. Draconic script is embedded among the honors.
It does not simply name a dragon. The language recognizes a greater draconic force using a neutral pronoun, as though the Egyptians either considered the entity beyond sex or understood it as capable of appearing in multiple forms.
The inscription was clearly written by Egyptians, not dragons.
That distinction matters. Abydos was built to acknowledge realities outside Egypt's own religious system. Its builders expected foreign divine powers, strange bloodlines, and nonhuman visitors to understand that they too had been recognized.
9. Yusuf Finds Wadjet
 |
| Wadjet |
The rearing cobra beneath Horus becomes the next personal revelation.
The party identifies Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, protector of the Nile Delta, guardian of Horus, and one of the divine figures associated with the Eye of Ra.
Her symbolism appears uniquely connected to Yusuf's line.
The relationship fits the man the party already knows. Yusuf has consistently placed himself between danger and other people. His duplications multiply that protective presence. Long before he knew what the ancient symbol meant, he had been living the same role.
Yusuf decides that the Eye of Thoth should become the Eye of Wadjet.
10. A Ritual Reaches Beyond Earth
The group performs the rededication together.
Michael stands where Ramses stood in Rana's vision. Rana takes the place occupied by her ancestral priestess. Tariq wraps the group in psychic protection. The first attempt fails because the temple's time distortion disrupts the ritual.
They begin again.
This time Michael uses the new protections associated with his bloodline relic and the Chrono Charm. The ritual succeeds, but its consequence is larger than the name of a power on Yusuf's character sheet.
The group feels the rite extend beyond the boundaries of Earth.
Yusuf has not rejected Thoth. He can call upon either Thoth or Wadjet when invoking the power. More importantly, the group recognizes that they have opened a door for Wadjet in the same broad way previous events opened paths for other ancient beings.
Then comes the disturbing realization.
Other people are doing this too.
Aleister Crowley is performing rituals. Others around the world are calling to powers the Alexandrian Storm has never met.
Not every door being opened will lead somewhere benevolent.
11. The Ambassador Who Walked Among Giants
Tariq turns his attention to the cracked brass belt David gave him.
The relic answers with history.
It may predate the first pharaohs. An early ruler gave it to an ambassador sent somewhere beyond ordinary Earth. The people there were giants, roughly twelve to thirty-five feet tall.
When the ambassador arrived, the belt enlarged him so he could stand among them and be received with dignity.
The relic was not a weapon.
It was diplomatic technology.
The party names it the Ambassador's Belt. Tariq interprets the vision through the language available to him: Titans, Olympus, and an ancient journey into a realm humanity later remembered as myth.
12. Two Hours Become Eight
The temple finally demonstrates why David's warnings about time matter.
The party believes it has spent about two hours studying and performing rituals in the Honorarium.
Nearly eight hours have actually passed.
The battlefield outside sounds different. The constant violence has diminished. The realization ends any temptation to continue leisurely exploration.
Abydos is not a safe place to lose track of a day.
13. The Battle After the Battle
Tariq sends his vision outside.
The Blob is gone. In its place is a crater approximately eight feet deep. Bodies lie scattered across the site. Engineering drones circle overhead. A glowing blue dome stands in the field behind the temple. Two powered individuals hover above the ruins while drawing upon ley-line energy.
The dragon-men and Russians are nowhere to be seen.
Michael uses the drone recordings as technological postcognition and reconstructs what happened. Multiple combatants coordinated repeated strikes against the Blob until the final attack produced the crater.
Whatever the guardian was, somebody eventually decided that subtlety had failed.
14. Ashur Bareen
One body moves.
David approaches invisibly and finds a man whose skin has become cracked and stone-like. The resemblance is not to Luca himself, but to others whose bloodlines have overwhelmed their human appearance.
The man is regenerating, slowly by nature and much faster because of the ley lines. Tariq reaches into his thoughts and finds almost nothing except agony and the certainty that he is dying. Tariq calms him.
Rana arrives at speed.
Her healing restores him completely. The troll-like shape collapses back into an ordinary Egyptian man.
His name is Ashur Bareen.
15. Called by an Hourglass
Ashur does not understand what happened to him.
Since the Storm, he has periodically grown and changed form. When transformed, he does not feel entirely like himself. He fears what he might do and has withdrawn from his family rather than risk hurting them.
The transformed version of Ashur brought him to Abydos.
He produces a small hourglass containing unusual sand. He had been seeing the object in his mind before arriving. David confirms that the relic is connected to Ashur's bloodline.
Ashur did not come here to loot a tomb.
He came because something his ancestors left behind called him home.
16. A New Resident for the Veil
The party does not simply heal Ashur and leave him among the ruins.
They ask what waits for him elsewhere.
The answer is isolation.
Ashur has been hiding from his family. The people around him fear his transformations. He has no teacher, no community, and no understanding of what his bloodline has done to him.
That is precisely why the Veil exists.
The party offers him a place among others facing the same impossible transition. Ashur accepts.
17. The Veil Feels Like Home
The group returns to the Veil around eight in the evening.
The contrast with Abydos is immediate. The courtyard is alive with dinner, music, conversation, residents, and ordinary neighbors who have begun joining the community. Michael drops the Nonso appearance.
Tariq notices the difference most clearly. People respect him here, but they do not behave as subordinates. The party is not arriving for an inspection.
They are coming home.
Even the magic is kinder. The temple beneath the Veil rests on another powerful ley line, but its active structure moderates the force. Instead of magical withdrawal after Abydos, the party experiences a slow descent.
18. The King of Moldova
The calm lasts only until a voice enters the world.
The mental contact is subtle enough that several party members recognize it only after they have already resisted or accepted it. Rana and Yusuf reject the communication. Others listen.
The same message reaches nearly everyone around them.
A masked man announces that he now holds dominion over Moldova. Storm-touched people may petition him for residency, protection, and sanctuary.
Within minutes, the proclamation appears across social media. A cloaked figure wearing a theatrical happy-and-sad mask repeats the declaration publicly.
The scale is extraordinary. A single person has spoken directly into minds across the planet.
19. Sanctuary as Strategy
David is the first to connect the development to the Master.
Before the group entered its Abydos rituals, the Master was drawing heavily upon their hero-pool connection. Now a sovereign state has publicly offered an alternative haven for Storm-touched people.
The Veil is protected by relationships, secrecy, faith, and the party's direct influence.
Moldova offers a haven the Master may be able to tolerate, control, or exploit.
The party cannot prove that the new king serves the Master.
They can see why the arrangement would be useful.
20. Osprey Steps into the Light
Rana seeks out Osprey Toman.
He has changed visibly since the last time she spoke with him. Local tailors are offering clothing. Food arrives free after short conversations. He is still awkward with the attention, but no longer isolated at the edge of the community.
The cause is simple. THOTH Network released a teaser for Rana's upcoming interview, and the selected clip includes her naming Osprey as one of the people who most impressed her after the Storm.
His mother has also called twice. The first conversation repeats the old warning that he must not expose the family. The second is entirely different.
She tells him he is now truly part of the family.
 |
| Aaron Rodgers Starring As Osprey Toman |
Public recognition accomplished something private fear had prevented.
21. Saturday: nAIomi Names Mr. Obsidian
Saturday morning brings another answer.
Tariq's sister contacts him after receiving a message from the company's AI. Once Tariq confirms that the system is legitimate, she forwards its conclusion.
nAIomi believes the international crime lord Mr. Obsidian is behind the attacks directed against her.
More importantly, the AI has produced three possible avenues for pursuing him.
The threat is no longer faceless.
22. General Simbel Opens His Home
General Haziz Simbel finally responds as well.
The first message is formal, clearly written through staff. It acknowledges the party's outreach and conveys the general's good wishes.
The second message is personal.
Simbel is warm, grateful, and openly eager to speak with them. He asks that the meeting remain outside public attention for security reasons and invites the entire party to his family estate for a meal.
The group selects the earliest available date.
Sunday evening.
23. A Day Spent Maintaining a World
Saturday never becomes a dramatic adventure.
It becomes something more revealing.
The party works on awakened items, fields messages, maintains contacts, reviews research, and responds to the institutions now growing around them. The Artifact Oversight Office team begins sending Tariq proposals and identifying global trouble spots that may involve relic activity. Tariq continues consolidating his private collection.
Rana checks in with Marcus Blackstone. He admits that the Moldova broadcast terrified him for several minutes because he did not receive it and feared that the Master might realize something about him had changed. Once the message appeared online, he could safely pretend he had heard it.
Marcus also confirms that the Spaniard's legal paperwork is ready for final review.
The session ends not with a battle, but with an itinerary.
Sunday belongs to General Simbel.
Character Spotlights
Rana Al-Masri
Rana's strongest moment is not the healing of Ashur, although that action saves a life. It is the confrontation with her own history. The Honorarium shows that her role as healer and priestess did not begin with the Storm. A line of women before her served Ra, healed pharaohs, and possessed resurrection when ordinary priests struggled to animate stone.
That discovery destabilizes the way Rana understands choice. She has believed the Storm amplified what she already was: a nurse became a healer, a compassionate person gained powers that let her protect others. Abydos raises the possibility that even those choices were echoes of something older. Rana does not reject her path. She begins asking whether it was ever entirely hers.
Her actions with Ashur answer part of that question. Regardless of destiny, Rana still chooses compassion. She heals a stranger who would eventually regenerate because allowing him to remain in agony would be cruel, then helps offer him a community instead of abandonment.
Michael Adeyemi
Michael enters Session Thirty already changed by the soapstone tablet. The relic does not simply validate his Nigerian royal lineage; it creates an obligation to preserve that history and carry it forward.
He also becomes increasingly central to ritual work. The Staff of Ra lets him place postcognition into Rana's hands. The Chrono Charm helps the group overcome time distortion. His attunement and developing devices allow him to bridge technology, magic, and inherited history rather than treating them as separate systems.
At the Veil, Michael drops the Nonso disguise. The small action matters. After spending a day being told exactly who his ancestors were, he returns to the one place where he does not need another face.
Tariq Mansour
Tariq continues becoming the party's primary investigator of invisible structures. He reads ley lines, extends ESP across Abydos, identifies the consequences of the battle, calms Ashur's panic, and studies the Ambassador's Belt through postcognition.
The belt's history is particularly appropriate. It was not made to conquer giants. It was made so an ambassador could stand among them as an equal. That purpose aligns with Tariq's increasingly diplomatic relationship to power.
He also spends the session confronting the idea of cycles. Rather than describing destiny as a rigid script, Tariq frames the current age as another turn of patterns that existed before. The party may be repeating ancient roles, but they are doing so in a new era.
David Hassan
David arrives at the Honorarium believing the strongest bloodline connections belong to everyone else. The image of Set removes that distance immediately.
His family division, Egyptian ancestry, and English noble branch acquire a possible divine framework. Set's association with foreign lands makes the connection particularly uncomfortable and particularly plausible.
David also remains the person most sensitive to the technical consequences of the temple. He recognizes what time reversal would do to ritual magic, connects the ley-line nexus to the portal mirrors, explores the elemental planes, identifies Ashur's hourglass as bloodline-related, and turns ancient magic into practical questions about how it works.
Yusuf Khalid
Yusuf's revelation is quieter but unusually clean. Wadjet is protector of Horus, guardian of Lower Egypt, and a manifestation of the Eye of Ra. Her symbolism aligns almost perfectly with the role Yusuf has played since the campaign began.
He does not discard Thoth when rededicating the Eye. The successful ritual leaves him with a choice between the two divine auspices. The power becomes broader rather than narrower.
The ritual also makes Yusuf the catalyst for one of the session's most consequential realizations: divine doors are opening because people are calling through them.
Ashur Bareen
Ashur is introduced at his worst possible moment: gravely wounded, altered into a troll-like form, confused, and certain he is dying.
His story immediately distinguishes him from the organized artifact hunters at Abydos. He did not arrive with a team or a plan. A relic from his bloodline called him there, and a form he does not fully control followed the call.
By the end of his first scene, he has been healed, reassured, and offered a place at the Veil. His introduction demonstrates exactly why that institution matters.
GM Notes & World Narrative
Session Thirty is a bloodline session disguised as an archaeological session. The party does not simply discover that their ancestors existed. They learn that the powers they awakened after the Storm have precedents in those ancestral roles.
That creates the session's central question: does ancestry explain identity, or does it threaten free will? Rana voices the concern most directly. Her nursing career, healing powers, devotion to Ra, and white-haired resurrection mark all now resemble an ancient pattern. Michael tried to invent a Nigerian Prince and discovered that the title described his actual history. Yusuf became a protector before discovering the goddess tied to his line was herself a protector.
The transcript does not resolve the philosophical question, and the review should not pretend it does. David offers the most useful answer available at the table: destiny may be revealed through the pull of the heart, but the person still chooses whether to follow that pull.
Abydos also changes the scale of the supernatural setting. The temple acknowledges foreign cultures, draconic powers, elemental planes, and journeys beyond life. Its builders did not behave as though Egypt were the only civilization with access to the divine. They built a system capable of recognizing multiple cosmologies.
The time distortion is equally important. It turns the temple from a static magical ruin into an unstable machine. The ley lines remain active, but the institution that regulated them is gone. The party's eight-hour time slip is the clearest warning that sacred infrastructure can become dangerous even without hostile intent.
The worldwide Moldova broadcast then moves the same theme into modern politics. The Veil is one answer to the question of how Storm-touched people can live safely. A masked king now offers another. The difference is not merely geography. It is who controls the sanctuary and what that control costs.
Finally, the session shows the campaign's institutions maturing. The Artifact Oversight Office produces its own leads. Marcus Blackstone handles legal status and media consequences. The Veil absorbs another vulnerable Storm-touched person. nAIomi identifies a named enemy. General Simbel invites the party into a private political relationship. The heroes are no longer only responding to the world. They are building structures that respond with them.
Loot, Clues, & Reveals
Items Acquired
Yusuf's Eye is successfully rededicated so it may operate under the auspices of Wadjet or Thoth.
Tariq's cracked brass relic is identified as the Ambassador's Belt, an ancient enlargement device used by an ambassador traveling among giants.
Ashur Bareen possesses a bloodline-linked hourglass containing unusual sand.
Each player receives five Power Points restricted to device development because of prolonged ley-line exposure at Abydos.
Clues Found
The Master can draw enormous power through the party's hero-pool connection while they stand on a ley-line nexus.
The Temple of Osiris appears to be sacred infrastructure without an active priesthood to regulate it.
Time inside the temple fluctuates forward and backward and can disrupt rituals.
The ley-line nexus may have powered ancient teleportation mirrors.
Rana's bloodline served as priestesses of Ra, healers of the pharaohs, and practitioners capable of resurrection.
The Honorarium relief was formally presented during the reign of Ramses II.
David's family includes a branch associated with Set.
Ancient Egyptians recognized a greater draconic power within the Honorarium.
Yusuf's bloodline is specifically associated with Wadjet.
Successful rituals at Abydos can reach beyond Earth and may create pathways for returning divine beings.
Objects from elemental or other planes may survive among ancient offerings.
The Ambassador's Belt records ancient diplomatic travel to a realm of giants.
Mr. Obsidian is identified by nAIomi as the likely force behind attacks on Tariq's sister.
Marcus Blackstone did not receive the King of Moldova's global telepathic message.
Reveals or Twists
Two hours of perceived ritual time in the Honorarium become roughly eight hours outside it.
The Blob is destroyed or removed by coordinated attackers, leaving a large crater.
Ashur Bareen was drawn to Abydos by his bloodline relic rather than arriving as a conventional looter.
A masked ruler claiming Moldova offers sanctuary to Storm-touched people through a worldwide telepathic broadcast.
David interprets the Moldova sanctuary as a possible countermove to the Veil.
Osprey's public treatment changes immediately after Rana names him in an interview teaser.
General Haziz Simbel responds personally and invites the entire party to his family estate.
Active Plot Threads
The King of Moldova and the purpose behind his Storm-touched sanctuary.
The Master's relationship, if any, to the Moldova proclamation.
Mr. Obsidian and the attacks against Tariq's sister.
General Haziz Simbel's private Sunday dinner invitation.
Rana's ancestral priestess line and the meaning of resurrection in her family.
David's Set-linked family branch.
Yusuf's connection to Wadjet and the consequences of opening divine pathways.
Tariq's Ambassador's Belt and the ancient realm of giants.
Michael's continuing attunement to the soapstone tablet and responsibility to his royal line.
Ashur Bareen's transformations and hourglass relic.
The awakened Silo devices and how each character develops them.
The ancient teleportation mirrors and the theory that ley-line nexuses powered them.
The elemental planes and possible planar materials hidden among ancient offerings.
The remaining ruins and buried structures extending for miles beyond the known Temple of Osiris.
The Artifact Oversight Office's emerging investigations.
Osprey Toman's increasing public visibility.
The Resurrected Five and the Veil guard's family connection.
The Spaniard's pending legal paperwork.
Rana's upcoming full interview broadcast.
Next Session Preview
Sunday begins with more answers waiting than the party had on Friday morning.
nAIomi has named Mr. Obsidian and produced three possible paths toward him. General Haziz Simbel has invited the entire group to his family estate for a private meal. The King of Moldova has announced a competing sanctuary for Storm-touched people to the entire planet.
Behind those immediate concerns sits the larger question Abydos carved into stone.
If the heroes are walking paths their families walked before them, what happens when they choose to walk somewhere new?
Sunday evening, General Simbel opens his door.
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