The Farm Job and the Black Hole

The farm was supposed to be a weapons dispute. Jeff of the Black Ward had brought the party there because the Black Ward and the Thieves Guild were both circling the same cache. The Black Ward claimed a sacred investment in the site, tangled up in void energy and the hope that Albert might one day return. The Thieves Guild, more practically, wanted the weapons and wanted fewer people making noise about it. By the time My Alchemical Romance arrived, the place already felt wrong. Bodies had been left behind. One had been thrown through a fence hard enough to turn the farm into a warning. The cultists inside were stranger still: present, speaking, moving, but not entirely their own. Then the party saw what had them. Small beholder-like creatures hovered behind the situation, steering the cultists like hands inside puppets. Before the group could settle into that horror, a Githyanki warrior stepped out from behind the house and hit Maine hard enough to make the encounter personal. Maine went down more than once. The others fought through it. Ash's body answered the danger with something new and ugly: a tentacle, psychic force, and another reminder that the void was not only outside them anymore. They won, but the win did not explain enough. During the long rest, Maine studied the Githyanki attack. He wanted to know why they were there, how they had arrived, and how to avoid being flattened by them again. Victor, already interested in planar movement, worked through disguise ideas and the shape of otherworldly travel. The basement waited beneath all of that thinking. And in the basement, near the rocks, the party found the hole. Not a pit. Not exactly. A purplish-blue-black tear hung there, familiar in the worst possible way. It resembled the black voids the group had seen before at Von Queef University, including the terrible places where Albert's power had already sent people away. It was a portal, but not a polite one. The stones nearby did not vanish into it. Maine did. For the others, the problem became immediate and absurd: Maine had been in the room, and then he was not. Maybe he had become a stone. Maybe the portal had taken him. Maybe both theories deserved testing, because panic rarely arrives with good judgment. Jonah threw a rock through. Somewhere beyond the farm, Maine stumbled into purple light and found himself in a chamber marked with arcane runes, watched by Githyanki warriors whose first concern was not who he was, but whether he had come through the portal and what he knew about dragons. The farm job had stopped being a farm job. The underworld conflict had opened into the Void Realm.