Four mentally ill dangers-to-society poorly disguise themselves as functional people in an effort to prevent gross brain parasites from turning them into squid-faced monsters and only incidentally try to save Baldur's Gate from a bunch of hasbeens who make their lack of relevancy everyone's problem.
Featuring a mage who does not consent to existing within a meat suit, the world's sketchiest himbo paladin, a rogue whose mere presence makes the Sword Coast noticeably worse, and a totally very normal human cleric type person.
No knowledge of Baldur's Gate 3 or D&D in general is needed.
Act 1: you can't wait for a watch; you haven't got the time Chapter 1: the take over, the break's over
"One skull. Two tenants. And no solution in sight."
— 1 —
Edwina Odesseiron of Waterdeep is running on an empty stomach, currently possesses less blood than surgeons recommend, and has a soul-devouring parasite sharing her already crowded brain. Only one of these things is terribly unusual. Once, she had gotten sick after several late nights studying and training. Her doctor had asked her how she felt and Eddie had almost been offended to learn that the appropriate amount of pain to be feeling at all hours is about a zero.
Her skin feels insufficiently cinched to her bones, like her skeleton might slip through the cuts and scrapes if she moves too fast. Sweat lubricates her bare flesh uncomfortably and chafes against her ruined clothes. One of her lungs pulls in air easier than the other, like a twin in the womb strangling its sibling.
The human standing in front of her and screaming barely registers above the ringing in her ears, his breath a cold breeze compared to the fires of the fleshy ruins about her. The stowaway stealing space in her skull reaches out to the boy with a feeling like it's sucking her brain out through a straw. Distantly, Edwina realizes he has a soul-devouring passenger like she does. The things in their heads reach out like old friends, and her body shudders with the sensation.
He turns and hisses, raising his shield. A brain slams into the defense; a brain sprouting four taloned legs and a nest of whipping tentacles. That's an intellect devourer, the mangled remnants of her own brain supply her helpfully, reaching deftly around the parasite to one of the books she'd studied. They serve mind flayers, the same creatures who put that thing inside your own head.
The boy readies his sword and shield as three of the monsters stalk towards him. He looks back at her and shouts again, desperate, pleading. He's covered in his own blood like she is hers.
Eddie's arm feels gnarled and grafted to her chest. Half-wet blood pulls at her loose skin, sucking. The outer layers peel off and stick to her clothes, the joints popping like burning firewood as she holds her limb out.
Her voice is a creaky glob of air that crawls from her good lung, grabbing at her larynx and hoisting itself up with ponderous effort. She dry heaves it with a briney mix of saliva and blood.
"Ignis," she commands, snapping her wrist to throw it.
It takes almost no thought. It's more the lurching death throes of a body that doesn't know it's dead. Pure muscle memory tattooed deep enough to be writ on the intersection of ulna and radius. Not even a true spell. Baby's first magical cantrip.
Her fingers light up in the embers of a fire bolt.
It snaps forwards and hits one of the intellect devourers. Exposed gray matter sizzles and explodes with a smell like fatty bacon. The other two attacking the boy snap towards it.
He surges and stomps one under his boot, his foot going right through the fatty tissue before it even registers he's still there. The last one angles away from Eddie and towards the boy, and he drives his sword through it.
Eddie's arm curls back against her chest, rejoining the peeled epidermis she'd lost. Her eyes move too quickly as she looks at the burning, fleshy ruins around her. It's a tomb that smells like a mouthful of rotting meat. She knows she shouldn't be alive. She knows that thing inside her and the boy's head will kill them in days at most.
Belatedly she realizes the boy is standing before her, trying to talk. She has difficulty making him out despite the mere feet between them. Maybe she can read his lips. But when she focuses on him like that, all she can think is how he is almost everything she's not.
A big boy in his mid-twenties at the latest as pure humans age. Over a foot taller than her. The blazing firelight casts strange shadows over him. He has lips. It's a face full of lips. They tighten around his face, perfectly framing his teeth, which all fit perfectly in his mouth. His saliva doesn't look filled with blood. His mouth likely tastes of tongue and cheek and not of metal.
He grits those teeth together. There's no unsightly gaps between them. His lips are full of blood.
Then he reaches out to take Eddie's wrist.
She feels the warm metal and leather of his gloves against her wrist. The roar of blood in her ears retracts. Because blood, like any other part of the body, is alive. And it's just as capable of flinching in pain as any hand or foot.
Eddie hisses and slaps his hand away, but only succeeds in bruising her hand. "Don't touch me!"
Despite having maybe a hundred pounds of muscle on her and armored, he still flinches away from her, as if actually afraid. "I'm sorry, Eddie."
Her mismatched gray matter aligns enough to parse that through the coherent mental sieve. Slowly, her expression turns into a perplexed scowl. "How do you know my name?"
"You told me," he says.
"No, I didn't." She thinks her throat is raw from screaming, though she can't remember when exactly she had that happen. "How do you know my name?"
He looks at her incredulously, then gestures to the burning ruins they're trapped in. "Is that really what you finna focus on right this now, girl?"
"I…" She looks around, rubbing her wrist where he had tried to touch her. Her fingernails poke at the cuts, the deep, bleeding furrows, as like a hangnail she might dig into and start to peel if left to her own devices for too long.
Eddie is in an open wound with meat sloughing off bone. The ceiling and doors sag like a fat whore's stomach, bloated purple as if already rotting. It only resembles a structure through some vague feeling of what indoors is supposed to feel like. Even before this ship crashed.
She's not sure how she knows they're in a ship and that it's crashed. It's a nautiloid, a mind flayer ship bubbles up a mismatched mix of memory of practical experience. Eddie knows a lot of things. She knows she'd been abducted. They'd put a parasite in her brain. The ship is called a nautiloid. It crashed. She's alive despite everything, though for how much longer she couldn't bear to think. When she looks up, she can see little perforations through the walls that open up into midnight blackness.
Maybe they're back home on Toril somewhere along the Sword Coast. Maybe they've crashed somewhere in the astral plane, or one of a dozen other realms that nautiloids could traverse.
Eddie takes a breath and nearly chokes on the smell. She bites it down and forces her eyes not to tear. "We need to escape."
"Are you a sorceress?" he asks. "Can you magic up a way out?"
She feels a hot well of indignation in her own good lung. "Sorceress? Do I look like some wild witch raised by wolves?"
"You look like a lot of things to me, Eddie," he says softly, something vaguely uncomfortable behind his eyes.
"And you look like—" Eddie's tongue slips somewhere in her mouth. The exertion of trying to retort renders her woozy. She feels herself swaying. Until she remembers the fingers at her wrist.
She drives her nails into her cut, pulling back at the skin, and the sudden wave of white hot pain is like a thousand needles running up her arm into her brain. Eddie inhales sharply.
The boy flinches again, like he wants to grab and steady her. And she'll be damned if she lets him do that.
"Don't sidetrack me," she says, feeling the blood under her nails. "We're getting out."
She picks a direction down what is equal parts a hallway and artery. The boy goes first. He's the only one in actual armor, after all. Meanwhile, she doesn't even know where her shoes are. Her bare feet splash in strange cerebral fluids. Sometimes the fluids are cold. Mostly, they're body-warm and feel coarse with thick salt.
Nothing is at a straight angle: ninety degrees doesn't exist here, and that's before this ship crashed. It's clearly lurched at some angle. They come to a door that looks like flesh lips and the boy has to pull it open like a tarp. That's how all the doors are, like misshapen sphincters. The meaty ship is burning. Some arteries have collapsed.
All they can do is go through the only openings big enough for people. She keeps gesturing her fingers and reaching for magical cantrips to keep her digits occupied and away from her wounds. She thinks this might last forever. That she might die before they actually escaped.
The gods designed legs with a purpose: they ferry mortals across all terrains, all weather, provided you supply sufficient calories to cover the costs. Eddie can't remember the last time she ate. That's her own fault. She remembers a family dinner after a long day of practicing. Anything edible she'd slavishly shoved into her maw until her father almost off-handedly said she wasn't presenting well as a member of the family. Eddie had stopped in place. She had thrown up in the privy later. And redoubled her efforts until she'd passed out a day or so later.
That's how she mastered her first real spell. And she could never shake the disgust with her own body and its desires whenever she felt she was close to a breakthrough.
She knows she was so close to something before the mind flayers snatched her. Something even her father would be in awe of her for achieving.
Then she and the boy cut through a flesh door that opens up into a massive chamber that looks like the insides of a heart. Eddie has seen brined corpses on the surgeon's dissections table before. The far wall is completely blown out, opening into the inky blackness of night with stars she thinks she can recognize.
She can smell trees, dirt, and even fresh water. She nearly stumbles as she picks up her pace. "There!" she says.
"Wait!" the boy shouts in sudden panic, spittle flying from his mouth.
She sees the mind flayer only too late. It's half-buried under rubble, pinned in an awkward place with pasted legs. Its face is a mess of tentacles, like a squid stitched atop some giant, purple-skinned man beneath long, almost imperious robes.
The thing in her brain wriggles in recognition as the creature raises his long, disjointed hand to her. She stares, slack jawed, as she can feel the valves in her brain leaking into the wrong neurons. Tugging at the emotional core that drives a person to do anything, like a lobotomy in reverse: adding new bits of foreign brain and thought into her head.
Psionic powers.
She can feel it all happening in real time, like there're two people inside of her. One half of her, terrified and disgusted. This is one of the things that abducted her. Infected her. Is going to kill her. Another half of her feels something like remorse, pity, care.
It feels like care and affection. She looks at the squid and feels something towards it—what, compassion, a crush, fearful love?
It's an emotion she hasn't felt in a very long time. She remembers one time as a little girl in Waterdeep her father had had guests. He had been a famous adventurer once; he used his contacts and prestige to court business deals that kept their family wealthy. There'd been a woman in his parlor. She'd been so well-dressed, so pretty, so feminine. Eddie couldn't leave the woman alone, asking as children do about everything. How did she get so tall and slender, who made her clothes, where did she buy her makeup?
Until her father called the woman into his office and Eddie was not allowed to follow.
Eddie had sulked. She had stalked the hallways of her home, putting books in backwards in the shelves she could reach, and leaving the window open for birds. Just, whatever. Until she passed her mother's study and heard a noise.
She had poked the door open and found her mouth drowning in a bottle of wine and crying.
That's what she felt for the mind flayer.
She looks at this soul-destroying, brain-eating monster and feels a terrified little girl inside her asking Mummy, why are you crying?
Until the boy smashes his boot through its cephalopod head, spraying silvery-white blood across them both. She snaps out her hand, screaming, "No, what did you—"
He looks over at her, panting, covered in sweat. Eyes wide. Fists tight.
Eddie realizes there's a bolt of fire dancing in her fingers. Aimed at the boy for daring to do that to the mind flayer who'd been inside her head.
The boy gulps. "In our heads," he says breathlessly.
"It made me feel…"
"Love," he says. "Towards it."
"You snapped out first," she says, hugging herself.
The boy shakes his head slowly. "No."
"But you killed it."
He doesn't say anything. Eddie feels her throat coiling around words, trying to give life to half-formed thoughts and fears. Nothing manages to slip out but a vague croaking noise as she points to the massive hole leading outside into the night.
The boy nods.
And they both stumble outside into the fresh air.
— 2 —
They don't make it far. Just to the top of the hills the nautiloid crashed against, on the cliffs overlooking a massive river. Eddie can see better in the dark than most. Certainly more than the human she's with. Her eyes adjust quickly, but all she can do is count the stars. There're familiar constellations and astral bodies. Which means they're not in another world, at least. The flora is no stranger to her, either; she isn't even terribly far from home, all possibilities considered.
"This is a safe distance," she says, legs jelly. Too wobbly to keep walking. Too deprived of blood to fight anything off if it does chase them up here.
If he knows she's lying, he has the courtesy not to call her bluff. Instead, he just looks down the cliffs. She can't help but look after him. It looked like flesh and meat dredged up from the deep seas, ripe with black chitinous, shell, and grabby tentacles. The nautiloid was alive, a living thing of flesh and blood and ooze before it died. A galleon of the skies that had abducted her and the boy.
Before it crashed.
She still doesn't know how or why. And she wonders on the wisdom of looking gift horses in the mouth. So she just focuses on her breathing, trying to suck in enough air to calm the shakiness in her hands. To prevent from doubling over, gasping for breath. She holds herself tighter, back slumped against a rock.
Eddie's nose is full of snot and blood. Her long hair feels glued to itself and her back. Free from the meat smell of the nautiloid, she can smell her own body, and gags at the rotting, sweaty odor.
She turns back to find the boy staring at her. His breathing is correctly timed for a heart at rest, with two clean lungs and the appropriate amount of lung-space. He probably sees the mucus dripping from her nose, hears the way she winces when she sniffles it back up. Is judging her for the mop that was once pristine hair. Seeing all her cuts and wounds and feeling sorry for her.
Her lips curl into a sneer, fingers like talons. "What?" she demands.
"You're hurt," he says.
She scoffs. "What gave it away?"
"I pride myself on my deductive reasoning abilities."
"Wow," she coos. "Very impressive."
He rolls his shoulder. "I find low standards are the key to happiness."
She sighs, resting her head on the rock. "The bar's so low it's a tripping hazard in the hells, yet here you are playing limbo with the devils."
The boy shakes his head. "Look, it don't matter. Lemme help. Gimme your hands."
"Touch me and you're losing a finger," she says sharply.
"Are you really in any position to fight?"
She bares her teeth. "Are you threatening me, boy?"
"What's got you in a mood?" he asks as if offended.
It hits her like a slap across the face. She incoherently tries to stumble through a response. "What? I—what? Are you—huh? We've been abducted by mind flayers, dumped out in the middle of gods-know-where, and we've gone brain parasites that are going to eat our souls. I'm well within my rights to find a mood and settle in for the long haul."
"We have brain parasites?"
"Yes! Have you not been paying attention?"
A distant look crosses his face as he stares out at the nautiloid. "I didn't see any cats, so no."
"Are you dense?" she snaps.
"I've been known to sink in water."
She tries to say something, but the sudden angry flush makes her cough. Eddie chokes in the air, gasping for breath to fill her lungs. They don't fit right within her chest cavity. Everything is out of order. Shuffled out of place to make room for something new, almost. The boy just stands there, patiently waiting for her to finish. She tries to growl something, and that only turns the coughing into dry heaving.
He says nothing.
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" she says, biting back tears.
The boy hunkered down before her, elbows resting on his knees. He suddenly looks very gangly as she shook his head. "No, I'm really not. I'm just trying to understand and I don't," he says, voice soft. Way too level and in control of himself.
Eddie clutches her throat, trying to steady her breathing. Takes control of rebellious lungs.
"It would help if you let me touch you," he says in that same voice.
She thought of the mind flayer making them both love it. She thought of the way the boy was completely under its psionic spell. She thought of how he was perfectly able to kill it all the same.
"No!" she spits.
He remains sitting there. At length, he just sighs, shaking his head. "What do you remember, Eddie?"
She inhales deeply, assuming control of her own flesh again. "About the nautiloid?"
The boy shrugs.
Eddie touches her own cheek as she arranges her thoughts into some coherent order. "We're going to die, I remember that much. They put things in our brains; tadpoles, in a word. Those mind flayers. Or illithids, really. One of those squid things you killed. They abducted us."
"Any hope of a cure?"
She sighs, tasting mucus on the back of her tongue. "Maybe. I don't know. I've done a lot of research, but once illithids infect you with a tadpole, that's usually it. You've got days until your soul and mind are gone. It'll take some serious magic or something to help us."
"We still have our wits about us," he says.
"I do," she says without thinking. "You, I'm starting to doubt."
He grunts. "Point is, if we're still alive, there's a chance. I don't think we can right this now, but maybe after some rest and getting some new blood growing in us, we can find someone."
Eddie makes a noncommittal noise. It's what she'd been thinking. The best possible plan, really. Which isn't saying much. It basically amounts to "the plan is to find a plan."
"Why would they even infect us anyway?" he asks.
She shakes her head. "It's how illithids reproduce, we think. They find intelligent creatures, implant our brains with those tadpoles, and we become like them: psionic things of evil and malice. They don't usually appear on the surface."
"Reproduction?" he asks, grimacing. "They use those things in our heads for that?"
Eddie nods. "Yeah. It's called ceremorphosis. A fairly excruciating process that turns you into an illithid It's generally considered a pretty bad time all around."
"That's the only way they do it?"
"As far as anyone knows, yes," she says, and her skin feels very ill-fitting. As if her flesh is already preparing to stretch and pull to fit one of those things. "Through those tadpole parasites. But it's weird. I think they can talk to each other. Mind flayers are psychic. It would make for an excellent case study if not for the fact that the world would lose out more from my absence than any knowledge we would gain."
The boy is quiet for a very long moment. Before he raises himself to his full height, staring intently at the burning nautiloid on the distant riverside. His fists curl into angry balls of bone, knuckle, and armored glove. "So what you're telling me is…"
She laughs mirthlessly. "Yeah. The prognosis isn't good."
"You're telling me a bunch of no-penis aliens skull-fucked us and now their sentient cum is eating our brains?"
And Eddie breaks out into another coughing fit.
Footnote: Level up!
Eddie Odesseiron — Wizard (2)
The Boy — [?] (2)