The Library Under the Mountain, Part 1
A month has passed since the successful foray to the Tower of Stars. The party separately receives summons to visit Luminaire Foscari, a professor at the Lycaeum; she tasks them with searching for a missing professor, Dr. Collodi. Collodi had ventured eastwards through the woods towards Marilun to field-test a new invention that Foscari and Collodi had collaborated on, the wooden amulets, but had yet to return after a reasonable amount of time. She handed the group the remaining prototypes to aid them on their way.
Reaching Marilun, the party pieced together what had happened recently in the town. While pursuing a celestial waterfall in an abandoned mine north of the town, a cave tremor had blocked the normal way out and forced a group of locals to pass through what seemed to be a library under the mountain - sealed away since possibly the pre-miasmic age. Out of academic curiosity, Collodi and her retinue had visited the library twice, but on their third trip, they did not return. The only thing of note left behind was a copy of the Tales of the Mage-Knights.
The party ventured to the library themselves, finding the miasma had animated books into strange book-mimics — and also that the library seemed to be occupied by monsters that didn’t originate from the miasma. They chose to explore the eastern half of the library, a private dormitory that had long since been deserted.
Above the dormitories, the party found a map room, which held a very modern-looking map on which were arranged a number of tokens like game pieces, mostly near major towns and cities. They found that they were unable to even budge most of the pieces, barring one near Orologio that had fallen on its side. Serafina had a very intense sad reaction to Orologio, but wasn’t able to clarify why; she pocketed the piece for later. Cynthia and Irving investigated the piece and found a sort of sympathetic magic linking the pieces to some external force or forces outside of the library; asking the mysterious grimoire, it said that they likely marked some sort of real-world movement, like individuals troops of some kind.
The session ended with the group puzzling over this development, and continued in session 3.