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At the GURPS game last night, I managed to basically incorporate the things I was intending them to do, and they came up with some stuff on their own that could be useful. Trying to wrap it up in the next few weeks so that we can move on to a game that I'm not GMing and that isn't in GURPS.

There was a burned out, but easily repairable, car at the ruined farm, so Don fixed it up and everyone piled in, heading for... well, for Parkersburg, initially. even though they were between, Kitten seemed to think he'd have friends to go back to (well, he hadn't been a part of the between antics so long ago, so he can perhaps be forgiven). They resupplied in a steampunk town (since they were between, they could sort of access both worlds), and... well, decided that maybe Athens would be a better destination. As long as they weren't intending to dismantle the barriers there or enter Charlie's house, they should be able to at least get inside the city, and the rumors they heard about it deserved inspection.

The steampunk (formerly, vampire) world had good roads, so they made decent time, even with the other cars ignoring them. Don made sure to drive as fast as the car was physically capable of, but so was everyone else, so it was okay.

Eventually they neared the outskirts of Athens, and Kitten had them stop to talk to the encampment of spirits watching the road. "Er, is there anything I can do to help you?" he asked the scary scythe-armed demon that approached him when he tried to get there attention.

"Operations are underway that will resolve the current situation without the need for outside assistance. If you try to interfere you will be dealt with."

"What are you trying to do, so that I can avoid interfering?"

"Giving you that information would not serve our purposes."

But they let them go through unharmed, after inspecting each of them carefully. Apparently, none of them were on their no-drive list.

Athens itself was a mix of a prosperous college town and a prosperous college town with lots of refugees and armed militia wandering all over the place -- it wasn't hard to guess which part of it was from the version the scythe-arms were beseiging. They went to the college to try to find Don's storeroom, which he'd jammed the lock to to keep anyone from wandering off with his stuff, and instead found Charlie's strategy room.

Apparently, Charlie was in charge of defending Athens, at least against the attacks from the spirit world. Kitten read his aura, and saw that the Charlie who was moving little figurines around the map and giving orders to the Librarian from the Keeper of the Flame was a cold-hearted person who wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice his friends... and that he was a spirit possessing the body, and not its original owner.

From that description, Don and John could neither confirm nor deny that it was the Charlie they knew, so instead they decided to approach the Librarian. He had wards against being approached from Between, but they mostly alerted him to their presence and allowed him to use some True Sight ointment to give himself the ability to see and communicate with them.

He told them that under Charlie's orders, they had been sending members of his order to assist them in the other worlds in dispelling the barriers, and how he himself had been popping in and out of between using the True Sight ointment and the antidote (which Charlie had asked him to make long, long ago), to put up wards like the ones they'd run into, and also to allow himself to do more magical things than the Athens they knew would allow.

Kitten offered to give him more time to research the things they needed, but there was a problem with the limited duration of the True Sight ointment's effect. So the librarian collected all the strange books from the floors of the library that he didn't normally remember existed, and wrote down a list to himself of what he'd need to research. "I've been leaving myself these notes a lot lately, so I'm sure that I'll follow my own instructions." They then absconded to the Front Room (as a place where the Librarian hadn't been in the past 24 hours and therefore could be sent back in time a day without causing a paradox).

On the way, the True Sight ran out, and as was his habit the Librarian pulled the antidote out of his pocket and applied it to his eyes, to make sure that he didn't get lost between (like he was pretty sure some of his friends had, although of course he wouldn't remember them). Kitten, surprised that he carried the antidote *on* him, pickpocketed it from him, and he and John used it on themselves to fully enter Athens Industrial.

Don decided to defer that step until he could write down a detailed account of everything he'd done and seen in the past few days, since he remembered that entering AI tended to erase or alter one's memories (it was why the Marquis never did it, for instance).

And sure enough, Kitten and John's memories were altered. Kitten was a frustrated student of magic who for some reason was unable to prove magic's existance to the unbelievers, since it wouldn't work (or at least, wouldn't allow him to create obvious effects) when anyone else was watching. John... was Little Arrow, a spy for the armies of Indians and Blacks roaming the countryside outside Athens, who was periodically sending information about what the people inside were planning via carrier pigeon. Or at least, all his memories for the past week or so (since he'd used the magic syringe) were consistent with that. 'John' was his cover identity.

Now, time travel was out of the question, as it was an obvious effect, but time-stretching would work as long as they had a room all to themselves. The Front Room had such a room, and the librarian (as Charlie's second in command, more or less) had the clout to get it reserved for them, and so Kitten gave them a very long subjective time to do research, so long as no one opened the door.

The research on fictional worlds turned up two things: A story about a city that had deliberately been made fictional in order to preserve it from its enemies, and a note from psychologists about how certain insane people in asylums all over the world often shared the same consistent delusional world despite never having had any contact with each other -- maybe that was what happened when you got trapped in a fictional world. The only one whose name was recorded in the book that they thought likely to still be alive was a woman in an asylum in France. Kitten thought that maybe he'd be able to teleport himself there, but it was risky and not to be done without a good reason.

The research on the barriers didn't turn up any way to defeat their effects at first, since Kitten already knew all the magical rituals that were suggested for use against them, but the librarian was able to match together their effects and other data collected about them with the gods that were typically invoked for protection:

Loki, for the luck barrier.
Melchior for the death barrier. This one was obvious because they'd seen him.
Enochin for the spirit barrier. They'd seen him too, but not known he was a god.
Thunderbird for the weather barrier.
Gleemax for the mind barrier.

Apparently, a true beleiver in one of the gods would be able to walk right through the barrier to the center and disable it, if they knew they were on a mission from their god. Unfortuantely, 'true belief' wasn't something you could fake. Not without heavy brainwashing, anyway.

John did not volunteer to be the brainwashee.

Luckily, there was a member of the Keepers still in Athens who was both not subject to the 'plague' (of scythe-arms) that had killed all the white men, and overconfident enough to agree to a hare-brained scheme like this. They decided that perhaps brainwashing her and sending her after the barriers was safer than going up against them with brute force (of magic) like they had been.

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BEES! Giant bees have been swarming through my apartment! Aaaargh!

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