Rather than giving you all the entire play-by-play of everything that happened to us after the insanity in Cincinnati, I’d rather speed things up and take us to where we are currently. Oh sure, I can already hear critics saying, why did you spend so long giving us so much detail until now? And well, the answers are simple:

For starters, I had a little more time for writing once we got underway to Washington, D.C. And secondly, we got here and now I have to speed things up.

After what Lars told me to do, and gave me the phrase necessary to call out for help to the Guardians, I got right to work writing as much as I could. We needed to drop by a store to get me a laptop and cable to write while on the go in a car. We also used that time to pick up some news. There was nothing to be heard. That night, Naomi, Trick, and I used the nail again to try and pick up some information. Nothing.

We did manage to smooth things over with the people of the Iron District. I went with Naomi to get ingredients for a portal that she had designed to take us to another world, while Trick lay a false trail for the Blue Raven, and also got more information to hand over to the officials to further weaken them. He had told me that there was something big happening in the city, but he would not tell me, because according to him it was too long to tell.

I have found out from these two that when players get heavily invested in their characters’ backstories, things can take some of the oddest turns in terms of how a campaign or quest play out. It is almost tempting enough for me to actually consider playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Almost.

Naomi, or I guess in this case it was Ru-lah an I, went through the city to strange apothecaries and got what we needed for the portal. We slapped everything together and soon had a spinning pool of goop that took all three of us to another world when Trick caught up. With that, we found ourselves in another place full of pirates. A kind of floating island with a city built on top of and bored into a bunch of ancient, towering ruins.

After some awkward questions and conversations, we met this really cool fox guy, kinda like an anime character, who shed a little more light on the subject: What we had experienced was a Grey Bubble, and that was what took away all recollection or evidence that crazy stuff was going down. And this is where things get a little tricky to explain, so I’ll do my best with limited time, just so you don’t feel lost.

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There are two universes, our Reality, where we live on Earth in a solar system at the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the second are the Realms of Imagination, where everyone’s thoughts across seven-plus billion pool into one universe, creating untold numbers of worlds unique to them and what they can imagine, or the lack thereof. Whew, that’s a lot, but there’s more! See, there is an in-between world that filters things to an extent, and makes sure that these two universes don’t collide in a display of collateral damage. This is called the Grey World.

But recently, there have been people out there who have been seeking to merge our two universes. The means by which they have done this are through Grey Bubbles, pushing the Grey World to a certain extent into our Reality. When this is done, they open the filters a little more and can pull Imagination right here on to Earth. But when the Bubble is gone, because they can only be maintained for so long, everything that was done with Imagination is undone. The only exceptions are what happens to those who can cross over to Imagination naturally in their sleep. Or, those who are caught up in the story of the events that lead to the Grey Bubble.

I’ll admit, that last part did not make much sense…. We’re all still trying to process what we’ve learned since then. I’m condensing a major info dump! But that is basically why Trick and Naomi, along with the agents have been able to have all of these crazy adventures and remember them while the rest of the world has forgotten them. We’re pretty sure that the only records of these events to have survived the Grey Bubbles are my own writings (for whatever reasons), and what Conturbatio and Miles wrote up. And we believe that all of those records and their copies were confiscated by the Syndicate. Naomi’s mom is working on that particular front.

We finally woke up later, heads buzzing with a ton of information. And we continued on our way to D.C., in an extremely round about way, which is why I was able to write as much as I could! Naomi was not too pleased with me once she figured out what I had been doing. So, everything that follows as a result will be a little more short, and, erm… Not as finely detailed.

Yeah, I know that really sucks!

In the end, this has all been nothing more than an intermediary chapter, whose only purpose was to set everything else up and try to provide a little more understanding of what is going on. How Lars knew what to tell me, and if it will even work remains to be seen. But it is the only direct lead we have to contact the Guardians. That or wait for them to respond to our other message, which could very well lead to us eventually getting caught and killed!

So, here’s to hoping for the best! Man… This feels really weird to write! It is so nerve wracking to write a story out before you know the end! This could end badly for us, but I am hoping against all hope that we somehow win.