"We're all imprisoned inside our own mind." ― Fortuna

"To mark, interpid cartographer of the mind." - Ricken

“Your mind is real, materiality is simulated.” 

“The basis for everything material is immaterial information.” ― Alex M. Vikoulov, Is Reality a Simulation? 

“The mind evolved in the sea.” ― Peter Godfrey-Smith

"Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds?" ― Gordon, Goblin Philosopher

The heroes are in the Diving Chamber. Taking stock. Preparing to traverse the nightmare fluid in the diving bell to the prison beyond. A gas is released into the chamber. Something enters their minds. They black out and reawaken each of them alone strapped to a chair in the prisoner conditioning chamber, or so their minds tell them. An illithid specialist is inserting things into their minds. The riddle of thought and identity and consciousness begins. How do we escape from the prison of our minds? What makes us free? How do we know that others are as as we are? Faith. Communion. Mindfulness. The heroes trap the Warden inside his own prison and proceed through Manzessine. The devise a way to pass through the liquid methane without taking damage. At the beginning of the Downward Spiral of the prison cells, they come face-to-face with a rag-tag group of escape prisoners, and evidence of massive slaughter. The prisoners are trying to break into the Diving Chamber and the two groups reach an accord. 

Hazel senses the presence of a Monster in the Labyrinth. And a Hero.

The refrain from Basile-Not-Basile, Inside-the-Prison… the echoes Hazel has heard repeated at the edges of perception: “Nothing is what it seems… Nothing is what it seems…” 

When Basile-Not-Basile touches Hazel's mind, it leaves echoes that feel like Braal.

HAZEL: I direct my faith and prayer at Basile.  He is my Saint, and the true connection to my faith.  I seek clarity in the power of his intellect, perceptiveness and truth seeking.

St Basile of the Ascendant is engaged in a Titanic Struggle. In doing so, Hazel realize he is trying to protect Hazel and his companions. Once Hazel makes the connection of faith, Basile-Not-Basile draws power from Hazel. Lose one of each of Hazel's spells of each level at random (the randomness of the power grab  represents the grasping need of St Basile during this struggle)

These are memories of experiences you piece together from fragment of a shattered mind.

You are looking upside down at an illithid in a stained leather butcher’s apron. It stands above you. It has just placed something inside your temple. It wriggles. You feel the trickle of blood down your ear.

--There, you see what happens when we cooperate.

It speaks inside your head. You cannot move. You are strapped to a chair, but you cannot bring yourself to struggle against the restraints. You recognize this room. You’d cleared it out on your way to the dive chamber. “Prisoner Conditioning.” The door was labelled in Qualith.

The tentacled thing hums merrily as it goes about cleaning its tools.

--Wait here. The Warden will be here shortly. He has some question for you.

It leaves via the doorway you once entered the room.

Each of you experiences variations on this. You can tell that you are alone. You instinctively try, but you cannot reach out to one another’s minds. What do you do? You can speak to one another as players – though as characters this is imagining a debate amongst your companions. Of course, they are not with you.

What gets you out of your own head? (piecing together the clues)

• Shroktath disbelieves, like Fortuna.

• Hazel: "Basile revealed to me that, 'nothing is at seems.'"

• We are inside a prison. Mentally inside a prison...

• ...or were we immobilized the second we arrived, and we're just waking up now?

• We thought we had agency, but we didn't...

• ...or did we just have enough agency. It was deceptive. Was it all too easy? 

• Hazel: "The voices of Braal, Azael and Basile came from inside the prison. They were helpful."

• The Warden is powerful and acts as the prison's Elder Brain

• Are these physical restraints or mental restraints

• This is the Final Defence to protect the prison. We're actually getting closer and this is a delaying mechanism! Another layer of the defence.

FORTUNA: I focus on the room we're in. On the hydra blood, the icy blood wiggling on my skin. I focus on the tangible. [DM: Mindfulness!]

SHROKTATH: I am inspired by my dream. Using the power of my soul, I focus on community and belonging. 

FORTUNA: I'm confused by my friends. The voices in my head aren't them. They are me. I try to break free of the voices. It's not them. I'm revealing that. They are a tool of control. Trying to extract information from me. Trying to get me to reveal something.

KHALID: What is the problem to be solved? The world is a million things. I discard everything that is not the problem at hand, or save them for later. And I focus on the problem to be solved. The blood of the hydra. The smell of the gas. The temperature of the room. The next thing, next.

HAZEL: I focus on my being. I make y thoughts into reality. I manifest my being. This conversation was real, and so it was. I call upon my LIBERATION domain. And I seek to free the thought entities that were my comrades.

There is an ante chamber where barrels can be filled with the brown-yellow sludge that passes as “food” are here. There is a pallet with ten barrels ready to be transferred.

Once you open the sealed door you see a dive room beyond a double suppressor field wall powered by two fail safe psionic crystals. There is a methane pool beyond. Something like a submersible jet with two handles hangs on the wall, with room for two more. You recognize it from your time assisting the Heros of Ancorato, though this one is different – designed for another type of liquid. It looks like two barrels of food sludge can be placed on top of the thing at a time. There are 4 empty barrels in this chamber

There is also space for a much larger submersible to be lifted out of the liquid methane with chains.

Traversing the liquid methane, you felt the familiar lurch as you passed through the gravity plane. 

The receiving chamber is shaped like  a sphere but is otherwise similar to that which you left, though designed with a rotating plane in mind. Bearing in mind that Illithids can levitate at will, all equipment is stored in lockers around central pillar, alongside machinery to operate communications as you’ve seen elsewhere in the facility. The methane mini-sub and the other two jet skiffs are already here.

The comms and information and alarm systems are knocked out. The door from the dive chamber to the spiral remains physically sealed from this side. It can not be psionically manipulated.

The rounded stone walls are covered with irregular ribs and ridges, like the bark of a tree. You’ve seen this before. Steel Stone! The prison inside the asteroid is fashioned out of a great spiral root of steel stone. It’s powers to sink magical energies, including psychic power must be invaluable here!

All of a sudden, the voices of the Okalappa weren’t all that I felt in my head. In the seconds after the battle with the hydra, I think we all became aware of a less physical foe. Something was pressing into our brains, like a child’s fingers into a sliced up gujamellon. Hazel was staggered, on his knees, clutching his symbol of St. Basile for dear life. We had only just noticed that the room’s illithid psy crystals were blasting out energy when - bammo - it was too late. 

The next thing I knew, I was in a dream. It was one of my favourite dreams: oddly, it usually came to me when I felt at peace. Calm. It was always some variation of the first time that Illeyesar had taken me out beyond the walls of the Hieronian monastery. Just the two of us. To say I’d been having a tough time fitting in at the monastery would be like saying that Khalid was a pretty good shot. It was a tough love - we were sometimes literally fighting for our survival - but it was the first time I can remember feeling cared for. It was always a nice dream.

Then, poof. The dream was over, and I was hanging upside down and all tied up in the torture chamber that we’d cleared earlier in the prison. Weirder still, the head torturer that we’d already killed was creepily threatening us - did we want to keep our dreams? Then we had better be good boys and girls… 

But even as he was saying his creepy shit in his creepy way, it was like I could hear the voice of Fortuna in my head. Was any of this real? It seemed too strange. I tried to put myself back in the Hydra chamber again, to do away with whatever this “reality” was. I focused on the feeling of the Hydra’s blood on my skin - freezing, itchy, gross. But I couldn’t hold it in my thoughts, which slid  the chill of the Hydra’s blood to a more frightening source. I imagined the Architect, imprisoned, apparently, here by the Illithid. I felt a terrible rage from this virtual god - my “god” - and it sent a chill through me that held my attention in an ice-like grip.

That is, until Fortuna woke me, bless her. Sure enough, we had never left the Hydra chamber. The Illithid warden had used its admittedly impressive powers, reaching out through the power of the psionic crystals to assault our minds. Which gave me a thought - passages take travellers both ways. If the warden had opened this path to us, was the pathway open back to him?

Quickly, our group poured themselves into the effort before the last spark of life faded from the psy crystals. We tried to turn the tables on the Warden, trapping it in a world of its own imagination. The others used their potent magics, I closed my eyes and joined the spirit of the Okallappa to our counter-attack. Who (what?) better to understand the workings of an Illithid mind and help to keep it occupied.

No time for dilly dallying. We prepared to take the one remaining Illithid craft through the lake of Methane and down to the prison. Fortuna’s magics really made the day - again - protecting us from the gasses so brutally cold they would have harmed even my undead body. I had to get sealed up in an emptied food barrel that the craft were designed to transport - not my favourite part of this mission so far - but a few hours later we’d made it to our goal. 

I couldn’t get the memory I’d had of the enraged architect out of my thoughts. I had no idea if it was real, some trick of the Warden’s, or a bit of both. But I knew I had to do all I could to free it.

As we left the docking station to the real prison, we nearly bumped into a motley crew of prisoners. A standoff that could have turned deadly was, wisely and with little fuss, eased by Hazel sending out a healing pulse from Azael to all nearby. With tensions settled, we got to talking. We learned a lot.

Fortuna’s magnificent brainwave when we first arrived to fry the fungal nerve centre of the prison had caused more chaos than a little bit. The illithid guards had a full on jail break on their… tentacles. And they were struggling to handle it, if they even were. The escaped prisoners had grouped into two camps - those trying to get the fuck out, and those trying to kill off their jailers. The Warden had moved down to the bottom of the singular spiral to try and secure the most “dangerous” of the Illithid prisoners. 

We worked out what we hoped was an understanding from the escapees - including a couple of the Okallappa, so there was that - that they would wait for us in the docking station, and prepared to plunge even deeper into this horrific place in the hopes of freeing Yurgon Gos. And more, besides.

[Players’ note: at the docking station, Shroktath cast Greater Aura of Courage (duration of 130 minutes), and Eagle’s Soul (duration of 13 hours) as well as Sacred Bond (duration of 130 minutes) on Hazel.]

The problem of other minds: a disturbing world of polite, smiling zombies

The problem of other minds asks how it is that we can be sure that other people have mental lives when we can only infer that this is the case from behavior and testimony....The problem of other minds boils down to standard epistemological skepticism, which means to say that it is one of those, “How do we know?” questions that philosophers love. In this case, we have to ask how it is that we know other people have thoughts or minds at all.

The only way we know what a particular mental state is like is because we also have them. 

The many-worlds theory of consciousness

The theory seeks to give an account of how consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience, fits into the world and how it relates to other, non-subjective features. To capture the irreducibly subjective nature of conscious experience, the theory drops the common assumption that all conscious experiences – yours, mine, and those of everyone else – are features of one and the same world and postulates instead that different conscious subjects are associated with different “first-personally centred worlds”. Roughly speaking, I am experientially located in my own first-personally centred world, in which my own conscious experiences are first-personally present. You are experientially located in your first-personally centred world, in which your conscious experiences are first-personally present. We can think of these as distinct and parallel “first-personal realizers” of a shared “third-personal world” – hence the reference to “many worlds”. 

Splitting of the Mind: When the You I Talk to is Me and Needs Commands

Fragmented self-talk, defined by the use of the second person, You, and the imperative, was specifically expected to arise in contexts requiring explicit self-control. Results showed that fragmented self-talk was most prevalent in response to situations requiring direct behavior regulation, such as negative events (Study 1), experiences of autonomy (Study 2), and action as opposed to behavior preparation or behavior evaluation (Study 3). Therefore, people refer to themselves as You and command themselves as if they are another person in situations requiring conscious self-guidance.