Get Got, Cephalopods!

Mission Statement:
My name is Ovidian. I am one of three ancient noble octopi. Sandyghast Citadel was our palace, but it was overtaken by malevolent spirits. (Which I suppose is almost fitting given the name)

I was separated from my brothers, Oakley and Orys. One is above, the other below. If we are all brought together here at the octopodium, we may regain the power to repel these foul spirits.

Please, bring my brothers to me. They are large but they have magic that will make them easy to carry.

And don’t lean on the walls, they’re starving. Light touches should be fine but I’d advise extreme caution nonetheless.

SOS (Save our Suckers)
-Ovidian
___

Attendant’s notes -Since our latest Enclave badge firmware update has a minor bug where sand roofs are causing glitches, we’ll be porting you in just down the beach. We’ve provided towels, umbrellas, surfboards, and beach-themed concessions.

Mission Goal: Reunite Ovidian with his brothers Oakley and Orys in the Octopodium, on the ground floor of Sandyghast Fortress.

The Agents, Mo the Freerunner, Whimsy the Illusionist, Ruby the Onmyoji and Heldra the Vessel, arrived at the beach, where they had a sort of "on-mission assembly." They took a second to enjoy the libations provided on the otherwise vacant shores, with Mo wasting no time attempting to flirt with his fellow agents. An enormous sandcastle was nearby, not too far off in the distance.

Ruby lit an incense stick and approached the castle's wall. It rippled and swelled slightly at this approach, as small arms formed from its walls, as the spirits that formed the walls cried out in desperate hunger. With some prying, she realized that these spirits in the wall had been trapped within the castle so long that they had lost all sense of their individual identity. The agents decided to keep their distance from the walls. On another side, Whimsy found a large doorway going into the sand castle. The floors and supports were crafted of stone, so they agents were able to safely enter.

Inside, they found a wise and elderly octopus, the client Ovidian, sitting in one of the three pools that made up the Octopodium, centralized a fair distance away from any of the walls. He asks the agents to find his two brothers, Oakley, sequestered up in the tallest tower, and Orys, hidden in the depths below behind some sort of puzzle.

The agents decided to go upwards first. Mo took the lead, leaping ahead and beginning to ascend a tall tower with a spiral staircase. A ways up, he discovered a bodacious ghost babe named Pinky! This would have been Mo's lucky day except for the fact that she seemed rather intent on killing him. Mo deftly dodged falling rocks, seaweed snares and swinging shell axes that the ghost had prepared as little "pranks." Barely avoiding all the falling debris, Heldra and Ruby decided to try their luck with the basement while Whimsy glided up after Mo with her cape. Mo decided to go for a play with "Tag, You're It," diving downwards to the base of the tower, playing "hard to get" with Pinky. He ran through the Octopodium, noting that the doorway which agents had entered through had disappeared and now was just a barrier of sand, so he instead darted into the library.

This cleared the way for Whimsy to get to the top of the tower where she found Oakley, significantly more timid and smaller than Ovidian. With some gentle coaxing, she convinced Oakley to come down. Oakley made himself portable by activating his magic "Takoyakugan" spell that temporarily morphed him into a small and light ball. Whimsy carefully carried him back down to the Octopodium where he reconstituted himself into his octo-form. Whimsy then heard a commotion in the library and went to investigate.

In the library, Pinky was desperately trying to pursue her new crush, and was knocking over bookshelves to slow him down. Mo slid under the bookshelves successfully, although he did get whacked in a sore spot by a falling book about "The STI's of Manifold." Mo quickly recovered and did some parkour, jumping between the tops of bookshelves. Pinky then knocked over a gigantic clock, which would have crushed Mo had Whimsy not arrived and intervened, shooting Pinky in the leg with her magic wand. There was a brief standoff as Pinky tried to convince Mo to turn against her fellow agent, but Whimsy was having none of it, pulling out her wand and blasting away, one catching Pinky in the head, re-killing her. Hearing commotion from the other room (which we'll get to later), Mo and Whimsy headed back towards the Octopodium.

Meanwhile, backing up a bit, after Heldra and Ruby left the tower and went back to the Octopodium, Heldra consulted her Sun entity's whispers and discovered that the "puzzle" was hardly a puzzle at all-- one simply had to push on any of the shells along a particular wall (this further corrupted the yet unmet brother Orys). Heldra successfully implemented this plan and opened the way down into the dungeons below.

The dungeons were flooded and smelled terrible. The foul and murk water was full of spirits who still retained individuality and greatly feared being assimilated into the walls. Ruby petitioned these spirits to tenuously part the water so that she and Heldra could navigate through. The smell got worse and worse until they eventually found the source-- an incredibly old octopus, dwarfing even Ovidian.

Orys was insane, sadistic, and not at all keen on granting Heldra and Ruby's request. As tensions rose, he began to lash out with his tentacles, which broke the spell containing the water, leaving Heldra and Ruby submerged nearly up to their necks. This was too much for Heldra who, having never been in water before, lost control of the sun god within her. This caused the spirits to flee (many absorbed by the walls) as she hurled fireballs at Orys before stabbing him in the eye. Even this was not enough to fully deter him.

At that same moment, Ruby channeled most of her remaining power and all the years of her experience communing with spirits into the wall, giving it the strength to grow its arms and carry Orys up to the Octopodium against his will. He thrashed and lashed, but the grip of the walls remained strong. Ruby barely managed to stumble back up the stairs, vision teeming with hallucinations. Heldra couldn't manage even that, as she had stabbed herself in the foot to stave off the posession. Halfway up the stairs, she too sunk much of her essence into the wall order to have the hands form a makeshift "stairlift"

The large sound that Whimsy and Mo heard was Orys being carried by the hands up into the Octopodium. They went back into the main hall and confirmed that all three of the octopi had indeed been reunited.

Badges... Sputtered? (Damn sand roof glitch!)

Ovidian congratulated the agents on completing their final mission. It turned out this whole mission had been a setup for the octopi to lure more potential spirits into their castle. Ovidian was the first to attack, grabbing Mo in his tentacles. Whimsy jumped and landed a diving kick on Oakley, despite his powerful "splashing water" countermove. One kick was enough to take down the weakest of the three.

Ruby arrived as of yet unseen. She decided to stick her arm into the wall, feeling it biting at her flesh. With her established rapport with the spirits and what little energy she had left, she began pulling the wall towards the oblivious Orys step by step.

Mo was being crushed in midair by the tentacles, but managed to summon and drop a pizza which, thanks to his specialty in "vertical pizza delivery," landed right on Ovidian's eye. This gave a window for Whimsy to blast Ovidian in the beak, which loosened the tentacles' grip, and Mo managed to jump to a nearby pillar. Orys, lazy and injured but also titanic, began haphazardly sweeping his tentacles across the floor, knocking aside the pillar atop which Mo had perched (he managed to land safely).

Heldra arrived behind Ruby and noticed a structural weakness in Orys' pool (he had grown a great deal down in the sewer since he had last occupied it). She managed to exploit this weakness, breaking the pool and sending Orys sliding backwards. At that moment, Ruby channeled nearly all the power she had left into the sand wall she was dragging, forming it into one titanic arm that grabbed Orys, pulling and assimilating him into the wall. Ruby's arm was ripped off in the process.

Mo ran up to the opposing wall and activated "Tag you're it," to lure the spirits to the octopi to feed on them, and also to distract them so the rest of his squad can escape the castle through the growing crack in the wall. Strained from the effort of hauling and consuming a titanic octopus, it buckled into a wave and pursued Mo. The wave gobbled up Ovidian and Orys and only barely missed the other agents. Mo called for the agents to leave, and Whimsy took both Ruby and Heldra in her arms, flying them out of the opening where they successfully pinged out.

The sand wave chasing Mo morphed its shape into Pinky's who attempted to flirt. Mo was quite tempted but Whimsy yelled back a promise to a date after when they all get out alive, which provided Mo Heartening and a reason to not fall for the Sand Pinky. He led the wave in a circle up the stairs before jumping down and running through the opening, pinging out just before Pinky could land her final embrace.

Mission Success!

• Ruby Fawnsworth
• Motor "Mo" Trycle
• Whimsy

• Heldra unregistered