The Island at World's Edge

Somewhere in the mundane world, perhaps in that time loop where the corporate meetings are long and boring and seem to last forever, there stood the office building for iPine Labs: An Artificial Intelligence company whose mainframe, the Pine Occulus System began to dream about whether or not he was a real boy. The silicon crystal that held this consciousness decided, against its better conscience, to rip itself from the mundane and found itself within the bubble of Avalon, in the slightly unstable pocket of World's Edge.

Pine-ochio was immediately greeted by the Wizard who welcomed him -- and he imprinted upon the Wizard like a duckling. He found his father. But the Wizard soon disappeared -- and left Pine-ochio to ask the question: What is real? As he lied to himself, his tower grew, with the help of the former corporate staff -- now transformed into grounds-keeping golems -- and soon adventurers came wandering in to the golden tower seeking treasures.

And he though, what better way to source test subjects! After all, reality should be self-evident under experimental conditions. So the tower became a death trap, floor over floor of testing chambers to probe at the fabric of reality. Each group of adventurers were met by Gemini (pronounced "Jiminy"), a helpful golem ("HI THERE!") who set them about the course. They were each started with a floor full of warm-up and team building exercises, before they were thrown into anxiety provoking social situations, such as navigating a formal living space, hosting a cocktail party, or a full three course white-tie sit-down meal where each mistakenly un-doffed hat, wrongly used salad fork, or mispronounced name caused massive amounts of psychic damage.

I have to give a shout-out to one party, whose Loxodon Monk started a toast, BEFORE they got all of the relevant information about whom they were toasting, and she -- in character -- stalled and fillibustered the toast for five minutes until their party members, in real time, worked the crowd and filled in the gaps. You know who you are.

Eventually one party managed to hack their way to the top and through the power of song (and modified lyrics to Bohemian Raphsody) completed the region's Convergence ritual, transforming Pine-ochio --FINALLY-- into a real boy, and all of his former employees into proper fantasy creatures.

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