Case Files of the Knights of St. Phanourious: Pinemarten, Ontario - Session 5

Previously:

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Prepping for a session < Drinking 2L of Coca-Cola Zero™ and bantering for an hour about Slam Frank and so on to pad out the session length

Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
Rob "The Belt / The Punisher" Wagner 

So: The party is in Rodnovprom's repurposed mining facility, with fire trucks from Sudbury arriving soon to respond to their call for a plan they didn't end up using. Rob makes the party promise that if his head is removed and his brain unspooled that they will take a picture and show it to his daughters. Bart adds that they should also show Rob's daughters Bart's picture of a goblin, as they will surely believe it if shown alongside an unnaturally-mutilated corpse.

After looting the lab they find car keys in the pocket of one of the less-mangled Norsefire corpses, pick up that xanned-out and Hypha'd-up technician, load him up in the back of the car (a grey 2016 Mazda CX-3), and zip out of there just as the fire trucks arrive. They debate ways to convince the technician to come up with a cure for the Hypha, such as by locking him inside an AirBnB and gaslighting him into believing that the Hypha has caused the apocalypse outside.

They get a call from their boss in the Knights of St. Phanourious - A Mr. Alistair Whittwhicky - and are cautioned about the high profile they're making for themselves in Pinemarten. Alistair advises them that their boys in the lab have analyzed the pattern of the sites of the head-removals and brain-unspoolings and found that they form a spiral that starts well out of town and is drawing inwards, centered on the Rodnovprom mine. The party arranges to have a sample of the Hypha mailed back to Knights HQ in England, and for a 'care package' of anti-fungals, ammunition, and amphetamines to be delivered to them in Pinemarten.

Hoping to catch Sarah Chepovetsky, the Rodnovprom CEO, they head to the Rodnovprom office in town, only to find it hastily abandoned due to them live-streaming their slaughter of the Norsefire security team to Sarah last session. Breaking in they set off the alarm, but quickly shut it down, and Codekiller lives up to his name by hacking into Sarah's computer.

Investigating her emails and documents, they find: correspondence with Volodymyr, the head of Norsefire, telling him to knock it off with agitating the locals, conversations with military higher-ups in the Ukrainian and Canadian forces as well as NATO getting hyped for the Hypha project, a back-and-forth with the Hawk & Beetle Club - some rich local weirdos - to get permission to repurpose the mine, and plans to fly back to Kiev out of Toronto in the next couple days. They consider calling in a bomb threat to delay the flight so they can hunt her down, but ultimately decide against it.

On the payroll they find the address of an employee, Adidas Jones, which is along the projected curve of the spiral of unusual killings.

Deciding that at this point they should try and check out the Borderland, Codekiller puts some lo-fi beats to study to to lull Rob to sleep on the break room couch. Rob drifts off and finds himself face-down in a muddy crater, from where he skulks off to a shack in the woods nearby, spooked by the sight of some great shadowy silhouette slowly circling on the horizon.

He finds the shack open to an apartment in some urban center, wherein someone was clearly tortured, with notes in Cyrillic written on napkins on a table. He snaps pictures of the location and the notes on his phone (which was on his person when he fell asleep - his clothes and such are also the same as in his sleeping condition), then tries the door to the kitchen only to find it opens to an underground pantry. In there he goes up through the trapdoor and finds himself in a partially-collapsed warehouse.

In the warehouse he encounters a skittish young soldier named Vasily (who Rob recognizes from a comatose body in the mine facility), who informs him that they're stuck in some sort of living hell wherein they can't permanently die, and that his fellow soldiers have snapped from the stress under the 'leadership' (repeated torture and murder) of a man named Mikhail, and are now hunting down anyone they can get their hands on - among other threats like screaming drones with the faces of men and bipedal wolves and so on.

Rob gets Vasily to shoot him in the head, which he does, and Rob jolts awake back in the Rodnovprom office. He informs the party of what he learned and transcribes the notes from the photos he took in the Borderland. Bart translates them and finds they are a transcript of the capture and interrogation of Moroz (the mentally-disturbed homeless man they themselves tormented for several sessions).

They resolve that next time they should all inject the Hypha and enter the Borderland together. 

Join us next week(?) for more oodles of fun.

Case Files of the Knights of St. Phanourious: Pinemarten, Ontario - Session 4

Previously:

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Peace was never an option.

Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
Rob "The Belt / The Punisher" Wagner

They begin this session in Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms, Rob surrounded by armed guards in a wrecked van, Auggy hiding with a terrified teenage arsonist, and Manhoman tending to a shot Bart in the woods nearby.

I'm writing this a few weeks after the session and through banks of brain-fog, so this will be less of a beat-by-beat summary and more of a gisticulation of the session:

• Outnumbered and outgunned, the party surrenders, and are taken prisoner by the remaining Norsefire personnel, who accuse them of being Russian spies.
• They are brought to a medical facility hidden inside the defunct mine, where comatose and severely-injured people are being held in rows of medical beds, hooked up to IVs and monitors and suchlike.
• Rob, the first to be captured, is strapped to a bed and hooked up to an IV - though he was cleverly able to hide a holdout pistol on himself that got through the pat-down.
• Not willing to be injected with whatever it was the goons were planning on injecting them with, the party tussles with them, and through a truly divine series of rolls actually turns the tables on the Norsefire guys, and have them pinned behind a medical bed.
• Attempting to negotiate, the head of the Norsefire squad tosses the party his phone, on a call to his boss, the CEO of Rodnovprom, Sarah Chepovetsky.
• The party is unwilling to make a deal, and accuse Rodnovprom of being behind the monster that's been unspooling people's brain-matter. Sarah professes ignorance, the party does not buy it, and with an improvised explosive blast the remaining goons to kingdom come.
• The party then searches through the mine-facility, looking for clues and survival horror game environmental storytelling voice logs.
• They make their way to the grow-op section of the facility, where they find and intimidate a technician - the same technician who was supplying Debbie and Marlin. He tells them that the facility is growing a fungoid hyper-dimensional organism they call "the Hypha", which is able to link the minds of those in suppressed states of consciousness into a shared dream-realm called the Borderland created from their memories. Rodnovprom aimed to use the minds of casualties of the Russian-Ukraine War to create a next-gen military training simulator for NATO.
•  They press the technician for a cure for the Hypha, or else a way to extract it from Rob, but he says he doesn't know how. They kill him, or maybe they don't, I'll have to double-check, and then they leave the facility.

Video Game Reviews

Look ma, I'm like that more-respected and better-liked RPG bloggerman: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2026/08/dan-plays-games-12.html

The appeal of stagnation is a sort of anti-Sisyphus - the delusion that if I can just stay put atop my hill with my boulder then none of the three of us will be worn away by time. But our God is a consuming fire, Time is the Concept, and no substantial thing may pass through the alembic untransformed.

The Red Pearls of Borneo

A fun little "fill in the blanks" style puzzle/detective game, like the Return of the Obra Piece of Shit (I didn't like that game at all, pure overhype) or The Roottrees are Dead, recommended to me personally (he posted the recommendation publicly on the GLOG server but I've learned to read the secret signs) by friend of the blog Phlox. I saw a guy claiming to be Bornean (Borneoian?) say that the game is well-researched, so I choose to believe it.

Puzzle games for me must navigate the razor's edge between so easy they're trivial and unfair bullshit that makes me rage-quit. Blue Prince managed to walk that edge for quite some time, not helped at all by the random draw stuff. Red Pearls managed it just about the whole way through, with a system where you can read the psychic impressions off objects to get partial viewpoints of a scene even when you don't have the whole picture yet.

 

The story was compelling enough with its writing and ironic twists and so on to keep me playing the whole way through. The much-maligned epilogue even got me to care about some of the characters, and I appreciate that one of the binary choices at the end lets you just fuck up these people's lives and trust in each other for no reason. Psychics should be kind of sociopathic, just by virtue of what they're capable of and you're not - that new Spiderman movie did this well.

Decade

 

Speaking of sociopathy lol - Decade is a eurogame (Finnish I think?) about children with a time machine in a post-apocalyptic future with very bad rain, the very worst rain. You play as the child-commander, who uses the machine to send your child-soldiers back in time in ten-year segments along with whatever you've managed to scrounge and learn from the past, aiming to create a better future but sometimes fucking things up and creating a Logan's Run world of body-fascists.

 

Decade does not thread the puzzle game needle that Red Pearls did - it is at many points obtuse and European. Still - cool idea, good writing, and interesting ideas almost make up for that, and it's very funny to be like a twelve year old ordering eighty year olds with decades of combat experience into yet another useless and this time likely fatal mission.

Saints Row IV

Part of an at least semi-popular trend of those superhero sandbox games... you know what I'm talking about? Like Infamous 1 & 2, Prototype 1 & 2, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and so on and so on. I never played the other Saints Row games, but you don't really have to for this one.

 

Repetitive and at times very tedious -  there is one sort of mission where you have to throw yourself into traffic to build up an insurance payout, which should be fun, but I swear I was in this one mission for like twenty minutes trying to rack up enough points, it suuucked - however the moment-to-moment power fantasy stuff is well put-together. Aggressively Xillennial humour. Could've been gorier, and overall for this genre I prefer the Prototype series.

 

Also, I really hate games set in a simulation - No Man's Sky I'm looking at you - I am already aware the game is fake, you don't need to rub my nose in it like I'm a dog that shit on your carpet. Saints Row IV is slightly better because there is a "real" outside the simulation, but still, my jouissance is greater if it's real-fake people I'm fucking with than fake-fake people. 

Peak

One of those trendy multiplayerslop games (is that the term for them?) which me and my boys were playing like a month or two ago. It has its moments, but is too hard, and kind of lame with multiplayer stuff - e.g. in some areas the only real way up is some item that maybe only one player has and can use, like the rescue claw, and maybe that could work into some cool moment where that one player (me, I'm the best at this game among my boys >:^)) makes it to the top and resurrects the rest, but no, you can't have fun and overcome adversity, there's a monster guy who hunts you down if you get too far from the other players and kills you, and he can only really be evaded if you've got another specific item (the piton), and even if you do manage your way to the top and resurrect your friends there's a permanent curse debuff to their stamina bar so hope you enjoy death spirals.

 

I think there's some menu where you can fiddle around with these specifics but we never bothered with that. 

Easy Red 2

The new, much better game that me and my boys are playing now. It's a World War II FPS with big armies and tanks and planes and artillery and whatnot going at each other. It's fun to try and win as the underdog with shitty weapons like the Japanese or Romanians, and aerial dogfighting is a highlight. Fuckin anti-tank guns are bullshit though. When we play as the Nazis I make sure to shake my head every now and again so people know I don't support their politics.

The Sapling and Planetary Life

Both essentially the same game so they get the same entry - fun little evolution-simulators that almost come close to mending a fraction of the hole left behind my ribs by the disappointment of Spore. I think they took out the graphics in my copy of Planetary Life and I can't figure out how to fix it.

Half Sword

Damn do I ever love Half Sword.

Alright so you know how in most videogames guys have HP? Abstract health points that get dinged every time you take a hit? An UTTER WASTE of the potential of the medium.

Half Sword doesn't do HP - instead, it models characters' tissues, the force and angle of strikes, and so on and so on, so that you don't "do 1d6 damage" or whatever, you graze the guy or chop his head smoove off, based on how you actually swing at him, because it's a physics simulator thing, and armour doesn't just reduce damage or whatever, it's also simulated, you can't chop through steel plate so you have to get tricky, try to get the point of your sword into a joint and drive it in.

Nigh-endlessly replayable, tactical infinity, you can go back to the little leagues where you're a bigass juggernaut knight and bully the scrawny peasants, you can beat their heads in with a washbasin or pimp slap them into next week, you can beat a man's friend to death with his severed leg, still regularly getting updates, ooowee what a game.

D6x7 Anodyne Androids

Click the button below to get your androids:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This android looks
1	like a waxy, poreless, but otherwise photorealistic replica of a historical personage.
2	like a plastic mannequin, pale and shiny and stiff.
3	like a humanoid form made of molded metal slats.
4	like a boneless, stretchy, cartoonishly-simplified rubber model of a human being.
5	like synthetic skin stretched translucent-thin over a polygonal frame that snaps into new positions in lieu of having human-like joints.
6	like a porcelain doll, with ball-joints and painted-on colours.

D6	This android was designed
1	as a cheap and easily-replaced soldier.
2	as an every-use personal companion and assistant.
3	as a household servant.
4	as an uncomplaining, flexible-role employee.
5	as an expendably hands-on researcher.
6	as a supplementary explorer of other worlds, more resistant to radiation and hostile environments and suchlike.

D6	This android moves
1	with exacting, unnatural precision and efficiency.
2	like an insect, with periods of stillness interrupted by sudden jerking movement.
3	like someone underwater, with drifting, sweeping motions.
4	like a stumbling marionette on invisible strings.
5	like a drunk trying to keep their balance.
6	like a character in a videogame, with the exact same motions for similar actions.

D6	This android talks
1	in a "funny" foreign-esque accent meant to amuse you.
2	in the voice of one of your relatives - ripped from calls and social media.
3	in prolix, agreeable, flattering, often -incoherent rants.
4	in a buzzing, glitchy manner.
5	in a monotone drone that randomly & over-emotionally stresses some syllables.
6	in clipped, staccato, minimally-sufficient statements.

D6	This android's eyes
1	are vantablack blanks that reflect nothing yet whir at a constant low noisesomeness.
2	are protruding camera-lenses that snap whenever the android wants to record a photographic scene.
3	are insectile compound panes with dozens of pupils that whip about blurringly.
4	are glowing blue orbs that signal their attention with cerulean-tinged spotlights.
5	are googly, cocked, glassy adornments, not even a part of its sensory suite.
6	are bloodshot cyborganic grafts granting unhackable visuals.

D6	The fluid which fills this android in lieu of blood
1	is a teal froth that rapidly expands into bubbles when exposed to air, then pops into elastic sheets.
2	is a mass of gelatinous crimson globules like pomegranate seeds.
3	is a midnight purple oil which sputters into flames of a similar colour when spilled.
4	is a chunky yellowish substance which, being under high pressure within the android, splatters out from injuries with great force and hardens swiftly.
5	is a glowing pink sludge that forms fractal puddles.
6	is an orange solution which sublimates into a noxious vapour when exposed to the atmosphere.

D6	This android is programmed
1	to go on a killing spree at an opportune moment to drive up fear of androids.
2	to spy on its owner on behalf of its manufacturer.
3	secretly with the emulated mind of a human.
4	by an alien computer virus to subvert cybernetic systems.
5	to interpret orders in a self-serving way.
6	with exponentially-advancing code that will inevitably result in rampancy.

Bonus:

D20	What historical personage does this android resemble?
1	Napoleon I
2	Sigmund Freud
3	Elvis
4	Marilyn Monroe
5	Joan of Arc
6	Public Universal Friend
7	Oscar Wilde
8	Albert Einstein
9	Abraham Lincoln
10	Vladimir Lenin
11	Florence Nightingale
12	Marie Antoinette
13	Edward de Vere
14	Queen Elizabeth I
15	Frida Kahlo
16	Boudica
17	Mata Hari
18	Ada Lovelace
19	Virginia Woolf
20	Coco Chanel

GLOGust 2026 Challenge 6: GLOG Class: The Tetraptych-Backed Orphans

GLOGust

With special thanks to Locheil for the challenge.

The challenge for this post is "A short class with four A templates, which can be taken in any order.".

Pity the one who is alone in this world, for they have no family.

You have three siblings - a father, once, but he is dead now.

He was a painter of some renown. You are your siblings were to be his magnum opus. He was not a kind man, but making you special made up for that. There is a painting on your back, but it is not complete. It is meant to be paired with the paintings on the backs of your siblings. They are impossible paintings which never fade, with depth and hues that flesh shouldn't support.

Your siblings get whichever templates you didn't pick. The player to your left comes up with one sibling, the player to your right another, and the player across from you the last - or whatever other arrangement you can agree on.

Roll a d4 to determine which of you was responsible for your father's death. One of your siblings is friendly towards you, one is neutral, and one is hostile.

To attain another Tetraptych-Backed Orphan template you must gain sufficient XP in the usual way, and also force one of your siblings to admit defeat and surrender their share of your father's magnum opus to you.

GLOG Class: The Tetraptych-Backed Orphans
Equipment: Smock, 2d6 silver coins, easel, painting supplies
+1 to others' saves vs. your illusions for every Tetraptych-Backed Orphan template you have (because this is Many Rats on a Stick GLOG and saves are roll-under)

A, Cerulean: Blue Pigment, +3 Palette Slots

OR

A, Cinnabar: Red Pigment, +3 Palette Slots

OR

A, Smaragdine: Green Pigment, +3 Palette Slots

OR

A, Silver: Metallic Pigment, +3 Palette Slots

Pigments: Touch something with a colour matching a pigment you possess. Record the image of that something under your palette slots. Afterwards, you can paint an illusion of the image of that something in the air with your hands, expending it from your palette. This takes one round of action. To begin with, your illusions are still, silent, and can be no bigger than you are, though as you acquire more templates this will change. Your illusions last a day, or until something interacts with them enough to disrupt the pigment that composes them. Something can only be drawn on for its pigment once.

Palette Slots: A parallel inventory, but only for harvested pigments.

Δ Template - Deep Purple: 
Acquire the Cerulean and Cinnabar pigments.
If a creature fails a save against your illusions, they will be psychosomatically affected by it as if they're real, e.g. feel the resistance of an illusory wall, or take non-lethal damage from the pain of an illusory flame, and so on and so on.

Δ Template - Tealios: 
Acquire the Cerulean and Smaragdine pigments.
Your can now blow pigment away on your breath, creating an illusion anywhere within your line of sight.

Δ Template - Azure: 
Acquire the Cerulean and Silver pigments.
Your illusions can now be arbitrarily large, so long as the upper limit of their size is defined by other illusions you've painted - e.g. if you paint three illusions creating a triangle with 50-feet-long sides, you can then create another illusion within the bounds of this triangle that is as big as the triangle's area.

Δ Template - Muddling: 
Acquire the Cinnabar and Smaragdine pigments.
You can mix two or more pigments you've acquired, creating a new pigment with aspects of its component-pigments, destroying the components in the process. E.g. you could take a pigment of "bloodied bandit" and mix it with a pigment of "tree" to create a pigment of "bloodied bandit in a tree" or "bloody tree" or "bandit in a tree costume" or whatever else.

Δ Template - Gules: 
Acquire the Cinnabar and Silver pigments.
Illusions can now be animated and produce noise appropriate to what they're made in the image of.

Δ Template - Vert: 
Acquire the Smaragdine and Silver pigments.
When you create an illusion, choose one of two: Either the illusion now lasts a week, or they still last a day but being interacted with isn't enough to disrupt them anymore.

Δ Template - Primeall:
Acquire the Cerulean, Cinnabar, and Smaragdine pigments.
You can paint an illusion over a creature, and if they fail their save they will believe that they are whatever you've painted them to be until the illusion ends or another sees through the illusion and shakes them out of it.

Δ Template - Red Sun Over Paradise:
Acquire the Cerulean, Cinnabar, and Silver pigments.
When you create an illusion you can shorten its lifespan to effectively make it real. It will interact and act with the world as though it is what it is the image of. If the illusion would otherwise last a day it now lasts 1d6 rounds, and if it would last a week it now lasts 1d6 ten-minute turns.

Δ Template - Rust:
Acquire the Cerulean, Smaragdine, and Silver pigments.
If an illusion you create has eyes you can see through them, and if it has ears you can hear through them, and so on and suchlike.

Δ Template - Tinsel:
Acquire the Silver, Cinnabar, and Smaragdine pigments.
Your illusions can be imbued with the intelligence of whatever their pigment depicts, and commanded to react independently to circumstances accordingly.

Δ Template - Painted World:
Acquire all templates of the Tetraptych-Backed Orphans.

Your work is complete. You are complete.

The painting on your back can become a portal to another world. It will be a world of your own making.

The world is a pocket world, bordered by colourless empty space. It may be modeled as a pointcrawl, hexcrawl, a depthcrawl, or suchlike as you determine space to work within it.

Each pigment you're currently holding can be made into a location, creature, object, etc. within your world.

You can at any point detach the painting from your back to make it a free-standing portal, but cannot thereafter move it. You can control the passage of things through your portal, and detect when something is trying to do so.

GLOGust 2026 Challenge 1: Some Artefacts - The Second Dossier

GLOGust

With special thanks to Phlox for the challenge.

The challenge for this post is "Sequel to a Blogpost from Last Year". The blogpost from last year I'm sequelizing is this one: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2025/07/some-artefacts-first-dossier.html. Both this post and the last are riffing off this post: https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2025/07/facility-artefact-classification.html by friend of the blog Lexi.

Oχ - Fuck Your Excuses In The Ass!: A Bastard's Guide To Making Success Your Bitch: A profanity-laden self-help guide which includes nuggets of wisdom such as "Don't be a PUSSY when it comes to the next Big Thing!" and "If you're not WORKING UP a sweat in the Smith Machine, you're gonna be sweating in the boardroom, you stupid PIECE of SHIT!". Readers of the book, particularly when they attempt to apply its advice to their lives, exhibit a gradual decline in vocabulary and impulse control, losing the ability to express themselves except with excessive expletives (and in especially serious cases with nothing but expletives), and experiencing both more intense emotions and a weakening filter between those emotions and immediate action. Previous serious cases of exposure to this book's memetic effect have been able to be passed off as, and were likely exacerbated by, stimulant psychosis.

Lτ - The Anywhere Room: Tudor-style room without furniture. Stained wooden paneling, molded plaster ceiling, velvet curtains covering a window along one wall letting diffuse light in. Scratches along every reachable surface, but the blood has been cleaned out. Accessible from any door via a precise pattern of knocks - however once entered you cannot leave until someone else has taken your place. Do not look out the window.

EΨ - The Balsam Lake Lillypadian: An obscure cryptid which resembles a broad, flat, translucent disc with innumerable hair-thin tendrils trailing from its underside. According to local lore, the Lillypadian only comes out when it rains - a time during which it is nigh-invisible. Known only to the Organization, however, is the fact that when it rains the Lillypadian extracts buried corpses from their graves and washes them in rivers, somehow reducing them and reanimating them into roughly one-foot-tall "servitors" which cohabitate with the cryptid in its lairs. These servitors wear out over the course of months, and the Lillypadian maintains a group of six to eight of the things at once. The skeletons of disposed-of servitors have led to rumours of another cryptid in the area: a minuscule counterpart to Bigfoot. The Lillypadian is monitored by an observation team masquerading as an off-the-grid homesteader married couple, though recent reports suggest that the "wife" of the pair is developing an erotic obsession with the entity.

OΚ - Guilty Party: A fruit-themed board game which appears to groups of friends in isolated locations - holiday cabins and suchlike. It was originally believed that the game was placed in these locations by a human aide, but this has been ruled out after the game disappeared from the locked briefcase of a containment team while it was handcuffed to the team lead's wrist. The game's aim seems to be to turn those who play it against each other to the point of fatal violence. This is accomplished via special actions and activities the game prompts in play, including the Court of Apple-eals, the Punch-Down Bowl, the Confess-ction Booth, and the Bloody Ban-ana. Refusing to continue to play the game once it's begun, or refusing to participate in a drawn activity, will get the offending player placed in the Pear-ade of Agonies.

PΩ - The Mess at Izzy's Pastaria: Temporal recursions - that is to say, time loops - are recurrent-enough anomalous phenomenon to have their own generally-agreed-upon sub-categories. Some Organization scientists even believe that all time loops have the same source, stemming from the same agency or entity using them to turn sections of our space-time into a Petri dish. As time loops can only really be recognized by those outside them after they've ended, they are identified by what they leave behind - insensitively termed "causal poop". The Mess is a type I temporal recursion, because its causal poop is of the Long-Term Memory Overgrowth Syndrome variety - the people stuck in it apparently retained their memories of prior loops, leading to cumulative growth of nervous tissue that eventually made their heads explode all over Izzy's Pastaria (a family establishment which has never recovered reputationally from the incident).

Eτ - The Lady at the Crossing on 45th Street: Apparently an old lady with heavy make-up, a leopard-print coat, and big golden hoop earrings. If you offer to help her across the street she'll accept, and while walking with you share profanity-laden gossip about random people in your life that will always be true. Who these people will be and how deep the gossip is are random. The lady is surprisingly unsteady, and if allowed to stumble or if one acts offended at what she says, she will turn her insults on you, and every one of them will turn out to be true. Once helped across, the lady won't appear again for about a week. Where she comes from and where she goes after are as yet unknown. Agents making use of the ladies' services are required to report any gossip she spills about their superiors in the Organization.

Lβ - The House With Many Walls: A place well-known in occulture, second in infamy perhaps only to the Public Universal Bathroom. The firm Euler & Crake have in the last couple years launched expeditions into the House to colonize it, make it into a globally-accessible safehouse and transit node, and in their typical ruthlessly efficient manner have made great strides towards this.

OΔ - Mug of White Male Tears: A malformed mug somewhere in appearance between a Pythagorean cup, a Klein bottle, and the Elephant's Foot. The paint-job is much higher quality - rings of dainty little fuchsias on a white background. The mug is a hyper-dimensional object with internal reservoirs of hard-to-measure volumes. These reservoirs can be filled with various sorts of tears to produce various effects, from clouds of butterflies somehow still alive despite their hemolyph being replaced with champagne, to an insatiable cannibalistic hunger for eyeballs, to opening liquid portals to another dimension - apparently depending on the age and gender of the person the tears came from, the emotion that caused them to shed the tears, and other as-yet-unidentified factors. Study of these effects has been complicated by the aforementioned hyper-geometry of the object - tear-reservoirs mixing internally seems to correlate with undesirable outcomes.

Pχ - The Airce Heebie-Jeebies: A psychosomatic disorder endemic to the mountain resort town of Airce, Alberta. Those affected report itchiness, the sense that something living is moving through the pipes of their home, and a compulsion to scoop up, melt, and/or eat snow. The disorder appears in new arrivals, and disappears within a few months of living in Airce. The Organization wouldn't normally make a file on something like this, but a higher-up's niece recently moved to Airce and moved resources to make it happen.

Eπ - Green Mary: A woman who appears several-months pregnant. Mary is not her actual name. She is pregnant with a tree. Prone to automatic writing with whatever materials are available - for her comfort paper and pens are to be provided to her. Organization scientists are attempting to decipher her writings, but so far the real value of keeping her contained has been frustrating the cultist weirdos who venerate her as a conduit to their deities.

GLOGust 2026 Challenge 4: Some Unusual Crops

GLOGust

With special thanks to me for the challenge.

I.

Birdfisher Moss: A distant relative of the sundew, a carnivorous, symbiotic plant that dangles in tangled sheets from the branches they're rooted in, sharing a portion of the nutrients extracted from creatures that fly or crawl into their clutches with their host-tree.

The people who farm Birdfisher Moss supplement it with forage, as though it can be made into a fine stew or salad it alone cannot sustain like grains can - though besides being eaten, it can also be worked into rope, and boiled down with certain herbs to preserve its aroma as a perfume while removing its pest-attracting property. With this rope they live among the trees, seeing getting on the ground and walking as similar to having to get out of your car to push it along.

But the forests are shrinking against the fire and machetes of those who farm more productive crops, and the people are driven out to find new ways of living, or die. Many have become adventurers - though they can struggle with flat maps and cardinal directions, they've got a strongly-developed ability to memorize and navigate three-dimensional spaces that makes them well-suited to the underworld.

II.

The Hoherb Colony: The simulacrum-nations of the Hoherb Plateau derive their sustenance, legitimacy, and existence from the stem of the eternal roots which they spring from - for the Hoherb Plateau is encrusted around a clonal colony of trees, themselves capable of cloning other things. War is conducted not through the seizing of territory or the slaughter of populations (for on the Plateau both of these are pointless) but by desecrating and destroying an enemy nation's sacred, central stem. The city of Krammethad is an innovator in this unique form of warfare. Not content with encircling its stem with a wall, or importing venomous serpents to fill the tunnels of sappers, it has armoured its stem in stone from root to highest leaf. Light is allowed to enter through balistraria-windows, and patrols are round-the-clock.

III.

Yeoman's Delight: A flower of pleasing though unexceptional appearance, and a sensitive constitution. Growing it requires a dedicated plot and gardener, and for this reason is the purview of the upper classes. The flower's value is in its nectar, which is stimulating and psychedelic (and it requires quite a few flowers to supply a party, again limiting it to those with leisure-time and leisure-land).

The land in which Yeoman's Delight is farmed practices partible inheritance, and together with the mental effects of regular use of the nectar this has led to a profusion of secret societies with elaborate codes and cosmologies, enabling inter-family conspiracy to cement alliances without marriage and eliminate rival heirs. The foulest weapon of these secret societies are the Soulless (so named for being excluded from the Registry of Souls, due to bastardry or incest or being an orphan surrendered and reported dead), locked away in wretched conditions in attics and cellars and sheds, their minds blasted by mega-doses of the nectar into fearless dogmatic servitude.

IV.

Grincies: Technically not a crop, but functionally so - aquatic insect-nymphs, kept in ponds, and fed on all manner of scraps, converting waste into protein. Their growth is monitored by village elders as a matter of life or death, as metamorphosed into adults they become swift, vicious, and terribly venomous. When it's judged that a pond is too close to maturity an algal bloom is engineered to smother it, and the whole thing is dredged out. Each season a few grincies are transplanted to a water-filled pot to parent the next generation for harvesting.

Armies are loathe to march through villages known to farm grincies - to effectively salt the earth behind them the villagers will leave the pond unmanaged, and soon enough those passing through the abandoned place will find themselves passing through a buzzing, burning hell. 

V.

Chaos Grass: Each stalk is more unique than a snowflake, exhibiting extreme morphological variance with only a few common features between them all. Their riotous iridescence, while beautiful, will give you a headache if you stare too long. Their roots are sharp-tipped and eat right through stone. All the grass is a potent narcotic - when smoked, when steeped into tea, when chewed - even minute differences in preparation and consumption can induce wildly different effects, making the stuff highly addictive to those who crave novelty. On top of that, building up tolerance to chaos grass is impossible. Not too long ago people came to the Chaos Grass thinking they could make a tidy profit off it. They set up farms, shipped in workers, set up supply chains stretching across the ocean.

The grass itself seemed to reject their efforts. It concealed and provided for workers who fled the brutal conditions. It tore down walls and fed fires that razed outposts. Those who became accustomed to its smoke did not become docile consumers, but agitated and uncannily-coordinated saboteurs.

The enterprise was judged a net loss and abandoned, and many of those entrusted to oversee it were abandoned as well. The farms and their practices disrupted the grass's natural checks. Every year the grass grows out a little further.