I Wish I Had a Beer

We had to rescue Holland Baker from the Farlands

Baalphas, a fiend Librarian, Morgan Darillium, an Illusionist, and Olivette Bouchard, a Gunslinger, teleport to the Far Lands, a bright, depthless expanse filled with impossible objects and warped gravity, prominently including a flowing river inexplicably suspended in the air. Morgan immediately tests the realm’s reality-bending rules by wishing for hipster craft beer, which appears exactly as he vaguely imagined it. Baalphas studies the disordered environment, noticing a crude cinderblock shack nearby. With no other apparent destinations, the squad heads there. On the way, a gigantic black king chess piece appears in the distance and crashes down, sending shockwaves across the ground. Morgan commands it to rise and fall again, which it does. The shockwaves pass over the agents without doing them harm, but briefly disassemble the shack’s bricks, giving them a glimpse of a seated man with a chessboard inside.

After Morgan’s attempt at wishing away the door fails to get rid of it when another, stronger door appears in its place, Olivette visualises this one as a push door and pushes it open, allowing everyone to enter. Inside, the tiny shack becomes an impossibly long, torchlit corridor. Olivette walks forward while playing an encouraging song on her keytar, and the architecture responds to the music, the hallway swaying, floors bouncing, and additional musical accompaniment joining the song from somewhere. Doors materialise along the walls, which Olivette checks as they’re passing them, abruptly ending her performance before a door labelled “Holland Baker’s Private Hell.”

The squad debates how to prevent their target from speaking, since the Enclave has warned them that his statements made in this place will immediately become true. Before they settle on a plan, Holland Baker opens the door and greets them. Baalphas passes him a notebook with which to test whether they can communicate in writing, but when a controlled experiment turns the walls royal purple, this makes it clear that writing is no safer than speaking. The agents next attempt to occupy him with a beer and a book, to keep him quiet, but the man proves utterly incapable of shutting up for even the tiniest amount of time. He makes an offhand comment about being a fast reader, then proceeds to speed-read entire chapters with a single glance, and when Olivette advises that he take his time and immerse himself in the book, he mumbles “immerse myself” then proceeds to start drowning when a sphere of water forms around him.

Olivette quickly uses another song to dispel the water and impose silence on the room, literally preventing any of them from speaking. Mr Baker tries to say something about not wanting it to be so quiet, though none of them are good enough at lip reading to catch the exact words. Either way, that does the trick, and the silence ends. The squad decide to give up on the planning they’d been attempting and they just tell Mr Baker that his punishment has ended, so he’s now free to go. Unfortunately, he refuses to leave while his sentencing document remains valid. Morgan tries to alter the paper through song (with a musical accompaniment provided by Olivette, since Morgan doesn’t have his own guitar with him on this mission), yet a couple seconds later, Holland accidently restores its original wording. Baalphas examines it next and identifies suspicious replacement text imposing exile in this private cell for a period of thirty days.

Speaking with scholarly authority, he declares it an illegitimate document, then stamps it “VOID.” The stamp compels Mr Baker to treat the sentence as non-binding. Relieved, Holland agrees to follow the agents, although his aphantasia complicates the journey home, as he’s unable to picture the front door to his house. Still, they eventually manage to explain that he can make the cell door lead back to his home, so he reaches out to open the door… but as he’s doing that, Morgan decides to “help” by using his power to make illusions physically tangible, which has the effect of creating a solid—yet still very much fake—instance of Mr Baker’s home, including a replica of his wife, Bonnie, which seems realistic at first, but after Morgan realises that something is amiss and successfully wishes into existence another beer, to test whether they’re still in the Far Lands, the replica transforms into an inanimate mannequin.

Then the solid illusion shatters, revealing a dark void, in which a toddler with a sinister voice meets the agents and insists that Baker cannot leave. He makes some comment about Baker getting what he deserves for the great crime he committed (which was stealing a single cookie) and three gigantic cookies appear overhead and begin falling, looking like they’re about to crush Holland… until Baalphas catalogues them, visualising a giant jar into existence and sorting them away neatly. The toddler is annoyed by this effortless deflection of his attack, but then Olivette adds insult to injury by using the dark void to her advantage; since this place has no texture, it appears to have no depth, so she simply reaches out to the jar, imagining that it’s a nearby, normal-sized jar rather than a distant, giant-sized jar. Opening the jar, she takes out a cookie and eats it.

This mockery of its power makes the toddler throw a tantrum, dropping them all into a bottomless hole, falling down into the endless darkness and terrifying Mr Baker… but given that they were already in a dark void, and there was no visible floor beforehand, not much has actually changed visually, it’s just that there’s now a feeling of weightlessness and rushing wind. Viewed objectively, this might actually be even less intimidating than the falling cookies. Olivette just pictures herself standing on the same dark surface from before, and instantly is back to normal. The others still appear to be falling, but they remain level with her as she stands still. Realising the trick to it, Baalphas and Morgan quickly follow suit, with even Holland soon catching on.

Unfortunately, Mr Baker lands with some of the momentum from his fall maintained, so gets banged up a little, and needs a bit of healing from Baalphas. The toddler next conjures a couple of aeroplanes to try and threaten the squad, but tiring of these antics, Olivette sings a song which berates the kid for acting like he owns the place, with its chorus repeating the phrase “know your place!” and in the process, this transports them all into a memory of sorts, depicting the toddler’s bedroom, back when he was just a normal kid. A dark mass reaches out from a closet and attaches itself to the child’s arm, quickly corrupting him until Olivette’s magically-empowered song halts it in place. Morgan takes advantage of this opening to convince the child that the dark mass is just his imagination and offers him a cookie.

Their combined efforts rewrite the moment in time, separating the boy from a floating, tentacled brain that seems to be a visual representation of that dark mass. However, splitting the two is far from enough to defeat the eldritch horror, so it seems that the agents are about to have a long and grueling, imaginary battle on their hands… right up until Baalphas spots an opportunity. Rather than attacking, he hands the tentacle monster a travel pamphlet about the hells he calls home and makes it a job offer, pointing out that it seems like a being which would feel right at home in a place devoted to tormenting sinners.

After thinking it over for a bit, the disembodied brain agrees, imagines a portal to the hells, which appears, then floats through. With it no longer causing problems, the agents are able to coach Mr Baker through the process of opening another door, this time without any illusionary assistance from Morgan, and he makes it home to his actual wife this time. After a test by Baalphas verifies that reality no longer bends beyond this door, with their badges pinging, the agents congratulate one another on a successful mission, then each pingout in turn. Morgan is the last to leave, but before doing so, he takes advantage of the Far Lands one last time, summoning a Cold One™ branded beer and downing it prior to his departure.

• Morgan Darillium

• Baalphas unregistered
• Olivette unregistered