Inbetweeners 18- Source Material: The Torment Quest

The Torment represents the first real quest the players had outside of “the rooms” content in the campaign. It was the culmination of Uzo's bow curse intersecting with Zariel and new characters Elythos and Lurian, angelic lovers. Lurian becomes an incredibly important NPC in the campaign, though at the time of writing this questline I didn't really have any plans for him. I think I will start with the raw document I referenced for the questline, typos, half baked ideas and all. This was the first major quest document I wrote up outside the main Inbetweeners Rooms campaign doc. Note that some things were changed on the fly. In the next post I'll craft a narrative explaining what actually transpired and how it effected the story, but for now, the raw, unredacted version of, The Torment:

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The Torment is a nickname for a prison deep in the lowest layer of Hades. A particularly vile Yugoloth known as the jailer runs the prison and delights in torturing souls over the course of centuries. In particular, the Jailer delights in angels and good aligned souls, but he takes all kinds. Uzo’s bow and curse are attached to a Crusader who has been trapped in the prison for centuries, impaled on a spike that constantly regenerates him so he cannot die and instead faces constant pain. There is also an angel named Lurian trapped here. The Jailer keeps Lurian alive and tortured for his own amusement, frequently locking him away in a box for years on end. Lurian’s lover and battle partner, Elythos, has tried to gather a heavenly host to rescue him but his superiors refuse to risk angelic lives pushing that far into Hades. As the battleground of the Blood War, they do not want to risk drawing attention of demon or devil armies as they clash.

Elythos uses the Deva stat block and Lurian uses the Planetar stat block, but will be heavily weakened if rescued.

Lurian- Planetar Statblock, starts at 70 hp and is severely injured, can heal himself or heal a group but doesn’t have enough magic to do both. Additionally may cast Sunburst once per day. His sword is summoned.

Getting to the Torment is not easy, it is located in Pluton, the lowest layer of Hades. The interloper can do it, albeit indirectly:

The Interloper- Can tear a series of portals through various portions of Hades that will lead directly to The Torment, but these portals are one way and may expose the group to many dangers.

The plot starts with Elythos arriving in the Grey Room and imploring for help rescuing his lover, Lurian. (What the group doesn’t know is that Elythos has promised his soul to Zariel in return for getting Lurian out, she tipped him off. He won’t be forthcoming with this). Elythos was given directions and an amulet by Cervi, who just wanted to stay out of it and stick around the afterlife.

At the same time, Xivora awaits in the market for Uzo. To the group, Xiv is an interplanar freelance mercenary. She uses the statblock of an Eyrines but with the following changes:

Xiv

-has Rope of Entanglement -Longsword is +2 Keen (crit 19-20) (gift from Zariel) deals 1d8 + 6 + 3d8 poison -Can cast firebolt as 13th level caster (3d10 fire damage or 17) as cantrip -Can cast greater invisibility once per day -Can cast dimension door once per day -Can shapeshift (only in Eiryines form or human form, and due to Zariel’s blessing the human form masks any detection magic of her fiendish origin (not from Angels though) -In dire situation, she can consume a soul in a jar, fully healing her but reverting her to her original devil form, permanently.

Group has to decide if they want to bring Xivora or Elythos- cannot take both. Xivora will tout her knowledge of the lower planes lending her to be a better guide. Elythos will admit less knowledge but can promise healing. If Elythos is chosen, Xivora will leave. If Xivora is chosen, Elythos will stay between the Grey Room and the Beeple Hive, monitoring the groups progress.

If questioned, Xivora will state she has been retained by Uzo to help lift the bows curse. In return for payment he will allow her to directly deal with the Interloper to seek further employment opportunities and the ability to travel like the group does. (Truth is she is working for Zariel).

-Interloper route will take them through at least 6 scenes in Hades. All portals are 1 way, including:

I- Bloodwar Battle

A grey dreary sky overlooks a grey wasteland. There is no color here– just ash, waste and death. The sound of thunder is in the distance but no rain. An abyssal army clashes with an army of devils. The demons are far greater in number, but their attacks are chaotic and unorganized. The devils fight in lockstep, and the group can do a perception check to notice some familiar pieces:

-The troops bear the mark of Zariel (burning wings)

– The destabilize spell is being used frequently against the demons. The abominations that form as a result are quickly put down with devil fire. They seem to have found a way to cast it en masse.

– Warped weapons are wielded by a number of the rank and file devil infantry. They miss often but when they hit they deal incredible damage. Also some of the weapons appear augmented with various abilities.

-Some demonic prisoners are being taken alive

– New spells are being used that have the interloper’s fingerprints such as a swirling ball of 4D blades that shreds through the enemies.

– Injured soldiers are being healed with the undo wounds spell and sent back to the field of battle. Occasionally one is instead instantly killed and turned into an undead creature that is promptly slain.

-Some war constructs are being used by the devils that bear the 4D markings of the Interloper. They blink in and out of existence like Dolly, stymying demon attacks.

The portal through is in the center of the pitched battle. The group can wait and hide or try to fight their way through. If with Xiv she will have them wait and be able to talk to any of the devils to gain free passage. Elythos will be attacked on sight. The battle will resolve relatively quickly with the devil army triumphing and annihilating the demon attack. They press forward, seemingly taking territory with a bliztkrieg speed.

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II- River Styx Crossing

The River slithers through the grey landscape like a gaping wound, its waters thick with ink-black darkness and the spectral whispers of lost souls. A sickly, phosphorescent mist clings to its surface, writhing in tortured patterns as if the river itself breathes in agony. Its banks are jagged and crumbling, slick with the ichor of forgotten oaths. The corpses of unidentifiable fallen horrors float downstream.

Portal is in the center of the river (about 300 yards). Xiv will warn them not to touch it, as it will require a Wisdom Save (DC 15) or wipe out all memories of the past.

A Merranloth can help them cross by boat. It speaks in a low whisper, and demands payment. The group will have to make an offer, but coin is of little use to it. https://5e.tools/bestiary/merrenoloth-mpmm.html

Without a Merranloth creatures will try to pull them into the waters. If they wait too long by the shore they may encounter random undead (Wights, Spectres and Shadow Demons are among the mix)

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III- Possessed Giant Massacring Yugoloths

Describe barren field where a demonic goliath is eviscerating Yugoloths in a frenzy. He seems to be enjoying himself a great deal. If they choose to interact, his name is Rungus, and he isn’t sure how he ended up here. He is very powerful (CR 19 Half Fiend Barbarian- use Drangus statblock) and generally friendly. He may even join the group for a bit but will wander off before the Torment. He is facing off against 3 Nycaloths and 7 Mezoloths, but there is the body of another Nycaloth and several mezoloths dead on the ground.

IV- Forest of Souls

A sparse forest with pale trees under reddish grey sky. The trees bark, upon closer inspection appears unnaturally fleshy.

The group will find harpies tearing into one of the trees causing it to bleed. The tree cries out with a humanoid voice in pain. The group will discover these trees can talk, only if they are bleeding. They can talk to as many as they want, but must cause injury to do so. The trees are souls of those who took their own life and were rejected by their gods as a result. The portal to leave is not immediately visible.

-The tree attacked by harpies is made from the soul of an impressed sailor who was forced to worship the drowned god. He took his own life after months of cruel slavery being forced to row and was punished by his new god and placed here.

Other tree ideas:

-Noble girl who killed herself to avoid marriage to a dreadful lord -Jealous lover who did it to cause misery to his ex -gnomish investor who lost his money in a bad investment -An elderly man who suffered from an incurable disease -A knight who failed his sacred duties -A wizard who lost his eyesight

There are multiple ways for the group to find the portal:

1- Free seven souls (each soul must either narratively be freed, blessed or destroyed) 2- Find one that doesn’t belong (Must specifically look for it, investigation or other relevant check 20) 3- Destroy enough of the surrounding ground to upset the forest itself.

Whichever one of these is done, one tree will be revealed to be fake. Within it is the portal, must slay a Yolocho to access it.

-Also, Uzo may start turning into a tree due to the curse

V- Yugoloth Market

Can buy almost anything here, but merchants will look to betray and rip you off and thieves and pickpockets are abound. Souls are the preferred currency but they will barter almost anything. Portal is uncontested here. Mercenaries that guard are loyal to the vendors that pay the most and care not what happens to the group.

-Tent where memories are restored (for a price) -Many merchants eager to trade in souls -A merchant will offer the group a free sample of “venom.” It creates a berserk like state for 1 minute (+1 melee attack, +4 dmg and attack rolls, +4 to strength saves, stacks with rage) but withdrawal afterwards is intense. Immediately afterwards disadvantage on any checks involving mental acuity. After a day get -2 to Cha/Wis/Int and a deep desire to have more venom. Addiction will naturally subside within a week or with a restoration spell immediately. Merchant gets you hooked and then sells more for a huge markup. -Mercs available for hire -Many spoils of the blood war -Recruitment posters for the blood war -A company of Giff are present, seemingly negotiating to be hired for the bloodwar.

(add pickpockets and guard statistics)

VI- Souls to Damnation

A massive soul barge is gathering souls floating around Pluton. The portal is attached to a spire on top of the barge (100 feet up) sending souls off plane. so it will need to be boarded or taken down. Xiv will tell you this barge was abandoned and co-opted by a renegade group smuggling souls. The barge will be full of Goat Demons and one really tough boss:

https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dark_Tormentor_(5e_Creature)

https://5ecompendium.github.io/bestiary/creature/mehrim

The group will need to decide how to board the ship. They are on a ridge, but it is too far to jump. They can attempt to climb the ship, but it will require athletics or acrobatics check DC 17 to do successfully. Take 2d6 damage (half fire half physical) on each failed save. Flying is another option. Unless they make a lot of ruckus the group can sneak aboard.

See battle map.. The barge will have barrels with souls trapped in them that can be blown up, the souls will attack enemies nearby like magic missiles that deal necrotic damage. Each launches 3d6 missiles each dealing 5 necrotic damage, will spread out among targets, focusing on Mehrim first. Souls will not go near the Dark Tormentor.

The spire, while active, will deal 2d8 necrotic damage per round to anyone near it. It can be shut off manually via the ship but will take a few rounds to figure out how to do so.

This creature basically took over an abandon demon barge– unclear what happened to the previous owner but it has forced a small army of goat demons to man the ship as they collect souls and sell them offworld. The Dark Tormentor is relentless in defending its ship and delights in tormenting its foes.

VII- Palace of Forbidden Wealth

*Maybe leave this one out

Halls lined to the ceiling with mountains of gold, silver and valuables. The portal is simply on the other side of the hall. If the group touches the treasure though– it becomes something else entirely.

https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Great_Mimic_(5e_Creature)

Will get the attention of a 1d4 + 1 Driders who prey on the creatures caught by it.

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The Torment Once they reach the Torment Prison, they appear on a sky platform. Below is the grey/red glow of lava flows thousands and thousands of feet below them. They sit near the top of an absolutely massive structure with no windows. It is made of black iron and grey stone. Telepathically, the group will see the Jailer’s wicked grin and hear a message: “You should never have come here.” Everyone who has this vision will need to make a Wisdom saving throw or be temporarily overcome with fear until snapped out of it by a teammate. Uzo will not have this vision, instead, he will just feel a warm feeling like he’s coming home. If Uzo is wounded, his wounds knit. He is close. There is a large set up double doors, unlocked but heavy, made of black steel inlaid with tungsten. They look like they were made to withstand a bomb blast.

This long hallway has two doors at either end and two doors along each wall. These doors are heavy, metal prison doors with a tiny slit to see what’s inside. The floor is made of mixed red and black obsidian and the hallway is lit by an amber glow of long, meandering lines of yellow stone that seems designed intentionally to disorient. When the group enters, a prison guard (a wicked looking fiend with a distended jaw and a cudgel thrumming with red, static energy) laughs and opens the door to cell block 3 and then disappears.

The first cell contains a Flesh Golem and the door is not locked. The guard releases it upon the party and then disappears. The creature wails incoherently and seems stitched together from the parts of many different creatures, some humanoid and some fiendish. Upon killing it or stopping it, laughter can be heard. Investigation check finds dessicated bits of bone and flesh. High investigation shows the room appears that it can move, like it is on tracks.

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Flesh%20Golem#content

A being bound in chains is suspended in the center of the room. A faint, weak voice whispers “help me.” Everyone in the group must make a wisdom saving through (DC 14). Failure and they will recognize the being as a loved one or ally. The door is not locked. If the group opens it and goes to undo the chains, the trap unleashes and they must fight a Chain Devil. Laughter will be heard upon the conclusion of the encounter.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/16822-chain-devil?srsltid=AfmBOooJKEVWLhrfTJ-sbhw_DY-b1qId9UGPJNAXR4yoxlG02GMwGhIb

A small child in an outfit of the wealthy but in a very outdated style is playing with a few toys carved out of bone. Perception revealed the child is very pale and not breathing. Her name is Lil and she will beg for its freedom and offer to help the group, even admitting it's a vampire if it has to. However, she may betray the group at the worst possible time. Her goal is to escape The Torment at any cost. She has a +1 dagger that deals 2d6 additional necrotic damage +2d6 healing to wielder in her possession.

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Vampire#content

The skeleton of some sort of infernal creature is in this cell. Put some sort of treasure here if the group investigates. His bones are encrusted with gems. 3080 gold worth of gems if the entire skeleton is scoured.

When the group enters, they are beset by visions of prisoners being lined up against the walls by dozens of fiendish guards. Among them is a group of red skinned, brutish looking soldiers who are badly beaten. It looks like a new group being intaken into the prison. An angel stands out among them. Despite being bound, he manages to trip one of the guards and smash is head with radiant energy. The rest set upon him, bashing him with glee in their eye. Laughter is heard and then the vision ends. Uzo has a different vision, one of the Crusader being stitched back together by a surgeon, only to them be impaled on a spike covered in runes and suffused with dark magic.

Once the vision ends the group is in a similar hallway that can go north, south, east or west. Doors to north, south and east and a staircase is visible to the west.

This spiral staircase appears to go up and down quite a distance. As soon as one enters they lose sight of the way they got onto the staircase and are stuck to move up or down endlessly without making progress. Must make a check (wisdom or intelligence DC 15) to leave the staircase. Each failure gives a point of exhaustion or 2d6 psychic damage.

This room has a single massive mirror in the center. The first character to look in one will have to name their greatest fear. It spawns in the room and the group must face it, the doors disappear until it's done. The jailers laughter can be heard in the minds of the group. The other doors aren’t visible to the group unless they have true seeing or some other method or deal with the mirror. It shatters when the trial is finished. The door to the north is unlocked, but the door to the south is locked. (DC 25 to break down, DC 20 to lock pick)

Two mezzoloths guard the cell at the end of this hallway. They will say this hallway is off limits but the Jailer is eager to see them if they head north. They will fight to the death to defend the cell at the end of the hallway.

This is a small guard barracks. Two nycoloths and three more mezzoloths are in here and will join the two mezzoloths in room 10 if they enter combat. Loot includes 3 torment cudgels (+1 maces that deal 1d6 psychic damage, will make good aligned creatures nauseous) and a cooler full of a consume (fleshly liquid). If group drinks it it heals them. 12 servings, each heals 2d6.

Five figures are suspended in x patterns, nailed or chained to metal X’s. Three are dead and flayed, one is mid flay and the last is waiting and horrified. The beings are humanoid but with red skin, some race the group does not recognize. A Chasme (a massive, horsed sized insect with a giant probiscus and sickly blue chitin) is gleefully peeling away at the flesh of the being and will ignore the group unless interrupted. The one being tortured will be too weak to help unless healed, but the other one is okay and will join the group if freed. Use Ogre statblock but immune to fire. They were part of a captured merc group fighting on the side of a devil lord.

This door is locked, but one of the Mezzoloths has a key. Otherwise the door can be broken down or picked (DC 20). Lurian has been stuffed into a cage far too small for his massive, adonis like body. The cage is barbed and heated, and the barbs face inward cutting into his flesh in many places with trickles of golden blood pouring out. DC 15 strength to break open the cage if they don’t have the key, but will take 1d8 fire damage. His wings have been removed and nailed to the wall. A mirror faces him that shows images of the heavens burning and overrun with fiends. He will initially think the group is there to further his torture, but upon hearing Elythos name he will join the group. He won’t have a weapon and is incapable of flight, and will have only 70 hitpoints (instead of 200) due to his injuries. If provided a weapon he will fight for the group. They can also choose to have him heal himself or heal their wounds, but he only has 4 healings (30 hp each) (see stat block for Planetar).

This large room has skeletons/corpses on the floor in various states of decay. Magical wards will trigger music to pipe in from speakers in the ceiling as a toxic gas to release. The music acts as Otto’s irresistible dance on all players (DC 17) to snap out of it. The gas deals 1d6 acid and 1d6 necrotic damage per turn con save DC 17 each turn. There is door to the north, south (entered from) and east.

Fake treasure room with mimics and driders. The path forward is blocked by a wall of force. Nothing happens until the group interacts with the mountains of gold and gems piled along the walls. Turns into two mimics, with Driders showing up soon after.

Long catwalk over a seemingly endless chasm. Countless stories of prison cells go down and each is in a modular cube that seems to be able to rearrange through magical force. Fiends fly up and down tending to them but pay the players no mind.

Observation Room

The Operator waits here. He is impossible gaunt, pale skin that shows his blue veins throughout his body. Has goggles grafted to his face and wears a leather apron seemingly made from the flesh of… something. He constantly smiles and greets the group, happily explaining the operations. If they become hostile he will dimension door away but won’t fight. He will express how excited the Jailer is to meet them and point the way. He is also happy to show them some of the prisoners.

Pain is our currency

Suffering is legendary

Eyes aren’t needed to see here

The Torment has always been and always will be

Death is no escape

The angels and gods know we are necessary, they dare not tread here

The Observation room is a large room with a control console and seating, like a surgical observation room in a medical school. Everything is a sickly pale green marble color earily sanitized. The modular, cube shaped prison cells can be brought up here one at a time, releasing a prisoner into a glass chamber where ostensibly the “surgery” will take place.

The group can try to operate the console but it is all infernal and very difficult to understand (Int 21 or knowledge/arcana 25). They can use it to locate Lurian or bring up other cubes– just wing it based on what the group decides.

Path of the damned. The group hears tormented whispers of their own voices or voices of those they knew in the past, begging for help.

Thogg hears Cervi saying they got him in heaven and brought him here, and they took his eyes.

Domilia (if present) hears the Beeple queen saying they have the entire hive and are eating them.

Rotlog hears himself, begging for it to end.

Bruce hears the voice of his lover, gargling and begging.

Uzos eyes fill with black blood, his eyes are all pupils. In his mind he hears again and again “YOU ARE HOME” and with more certainty than ever he feels his entire life has led to this moment. He must fight.

Xiv will warn that whatever they are about to face will be really bad. Through grim determination she shows fear.

Lurian says the Jailer is ahead, and never has he met a creature of such malice and evil. It must be put down, no matter the cost.

The Blood Door. It says in Abyssal and Infernal The Blood of the Willing Makes Way for the Damned” There is a basin with nine arm holes full of blades. The group can put their arms in and it starts draining blood (1 hp/hit die per turn). Once it fills with 100 hitpoints of blood the door opens. Angel can’t help because his blood won’t work and Xiv can’t but will make up an excuse why she won’t to avoid blowing her cover.

Boss Fight- The Jailer

Jailer will get the first round since it knows players are coming. It may use “Help” action twice to spawn two flesh golems. See created image. It has various torture impliments in pockets along its apron.

The Jailer (CR 18- 20000 exp) AC: 19 (+5 dex, +4 apron (acts at magic leather armor) HP: 242 HD: 23d10 + 115 Speed: 40 ft Initiative: +5

STR: 18 DEX: 20 CON: 20 INT: 18 WIS: 16 CHA: 18

Saving throws: ability modifier +5 Damage Resistances: Immune to Necrotic and Poison

Can take 2 actions per turn from the following:

Hold: Casts hold monster (WIS DC 18) on a single creature Chain: DEX 18: 1d4 + 2 chains appear and attach into a player. Failed dex save and each chain requires a strength check (DC 13) to rip out and deals 1d6 +1 damage. Failed save ends turn. Player is considered grappled until this is done. Held creatures automatically fail save. Imprison: WIS 18- Player appears in a cell deep in the torment prison (cool down 6) Banish: Player is sent back to the grey room (WIS 18), Xiv or Lurian will go to Hell/Heaven respectively- use this to balance if fight is going wrong way Go To Work: Paralyzed Character is subjected to gruesome mutilation. Takes 6d6 damage and gets -2 cha until restored, regenerated, etc. Can only be used once per turn. Siphon: Paralyzed creature takes 4d6 necrotic damage and jailer heals that much Help: Abomination drops from the ceiling to aid. Statblock is flesh golem. Saw: Produces a hellish, spinning blade that does a melee attack: +9 to hit, 4d8 + 5 (23 dmg) Move: Teleports to another place in the arena.

Desperation: Upon dropping below 100 hitpoints, the Jailer goes up to 3 actions per turn.

Defeating the Jailer will cause a prison cube to open up on a nearby wall with Uzo’s impaled prisoner. Upon destroying the spike the soul is released and the curse is lifted. The Bow, along with a considerable amount of black goo, ashes away from Uzo’s body as he feels vindicated. In its place, is a radiant amulet that adds +1 dmg/attack and advantage on curses. If Lurian hasn’t been freed, a second cube will move up to an empty slot along the wall if the group asks for him.

-The Jailer itself is half machine at this point. The components can be salvaged and later sold for 2000 gold or given to the Interloper. (if the bring the entire body through the portal the interloper might find a use for it)

A portal will open up and a voice of The Warden will call the group interlopers that do not belong here. They should leave at once with their angel, lest they be subjected to some of the most brutal and horrific tortures imaginable. The group can choose to leave, or head down a hall deeper into the torment…

21- The group reaches a large chamber with dozens of various dead outsiders and beings suspended in glass chambers full of a thick, preservative liquid.

On the way there, shadow demons rutterkins and Mezzoloths will descend upon the group but Ziv and Lurian can annihilate them with ease (no combat rolls necessary.) Behind a mammoth control console, the size of a large room itself, a Sibriex (CR 18- 20000 exp). It will say telepathically from the group that it hasn’t fought in eons, but will delight in reducing their flesh down to its raw ingredients.

The Sibriex has summoned The Four, a group of infamous Nycoloth Mercenaries, to protect him from the group. Use Nycoloth Stat Block, but with the following modifications:

Armor- One of the Nycoloths looks like he is made out of chrome and has an AC of 23

Regenerator- One of the Nycoloths heals 50 hit points per turn, rapidly regenerating any wounds. Its flesh looks like a sinewy liquid.

Whirling Dervish- Makes four attacks per turn.

Voidtouched- this Nycoloth is pure black. Any melee strikes against it force a Con saving throw or take ½ damage back as necrotic damage. Also deals +10 necrotic damage on all attacks.

Each yields 7000 exp instead of 5000 due to these buffs.

Since these are Mercenaries, they can potentially be bought with a better offer…

LORE: This Demon came from the Abyss eons ago and took over a small prison in Hades, turning it into The Torment. Over the millenia it has continually added on to the prison, making it into a massive place where demons, devils and yugoloths alike can dump prisoners who they want nothing other than for them to suffer. The Warden has a pact with the fiendlords not to attack the torment, and will occasionally release prisoners in return for engineers, guards, or materials needed to run and expand the prison.

Once the group has defeated The Warden, they can use the console to open all cells int he torment, leading the guards and prisoners to fight, destroying the prison in the process.

LOOT:

Tome of Torment- This book had everything the Sibriex needed to build and control the torment. Spells for building the walls, schematics for the cells, spells to bind and torture and siphon energy from it. Group can use it (really evil) or sell it as it would be of great worth to Zariel (to use) the Interloper (to study) or celestials (to destroy). Also has instructions for building horrific fiendish constructs like The Jailer.

Barrel of Souls- 723 tormented souls are trapped in this barrel. Group can do as they like– huge value in lower planes markets.

Rod of Torment- Ziv will try to snatch this one up. It has 6 charges per day and can use the following abilities:

Inflict Wounds (3rd Level- 5d10 necrotic damage)– 1 charge Hold Monster- 2 Charges Finger of Death- 3 Charges Imprison- 5 Charges

DC on all saves is 17.

Helm of Domination- Once per day, may attempt to enslave another creature. The creature gets a Wis Save DC 17. On Failure, the creature is fully enslaved. Wearer may only have one thrall at a time. If the creature succeeds its saving throw, the Wearer must make a Wis saving throw DC 17. If they fail, they take 1d6 psychic damage per HD of the creature they were trying to control. The enslaved creature must do anything the wearer commands, but it can attempt to break free if it is ordered to do something that puts it in serious harm's way by making another saving throw.

Bag of Void- Like a bag of holding… but the things never come back (unless they can planeshift). Goes to a plane of existence meant for rubbish, though living creatures are exiled there as well. It is cold, rocky, always twilight and devoid of any native life.

Torture Orb- When activated, every living being in 30 foot radius of the orb must make a con save DC 15. Failure and they take 2d6 damage and cannot act that turn. Active until orb is turned off or shattered. Constructs and undead are immune to this effect, as is the individual attuned to it.

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The group destroyed the Warden and the Jailer, freed Lurian and set all the prisoners free. The prisoners and guards proceeded to tear each other apart, ultimately the surviving guards looted what they could and fled the Torment. Most of the prisoners died, but some of the survivors are spreading out across Hades and others decided to make lairs in the Torment. Uzo’s spell caught the attention of the Protectors, who sent an eyebot to examine. When they discovered the Torment had fallen into chaos, they sent an elite investigative team to figure out what happened. They managed to bring back the mind of the Sibriex long enough to interrogate it. Wishing horrible vengeance upon the group, it gave what information it could. The Protectors kept a small force there in case the group returned, and would later seek out the Four, regenerating after their defeat. They do not die when slain, but instead regrow in their lair where they must be killed to be permanently destroyed. The Four, realizing the Marut traveling with the investigative team is far beyond them, cooperates as well. The Protectors realize this group they are tracking is far more formidable than they previous realized, and have elevated their threat level and the resources allocated to tracking them immensely.

Inbetweeners 17- Zariel

So originally I thought it would be fun to have one of the rooms directly attached to the Grey Room to lead to a catastrophically powerful enemy. Like something absurd, that even with loaded dice that only rolled natural 20s and unlimited prep, the players would be absolutely doomed. I thought Zariel's War Room would be an excellent choice for this.

For those of you not familiar with the 5e Lore about Zariel, she was originally an angel who became convinced that Heaven’s refusal to intervene directly in the Blood War was basically moral cowardice. She led an unauthorized crusade into Avernus with the mortal Hellriders, but the campaign collapsed when much of her army fled back through the portal and abandoned her. Zariel was captured, and Asmodeus offered her the thing she had wanted all along: the power to wage the Blood War properly. She accepted, fell, and eventually became Archduke of Avernus. In 5e she is essentially a corrupted zealot, still fighting the same war she believed justified her rebellion, just now as one of Hell’s greatest generals.

So I leaned hard into her focus on winning the Blood War being the only way to purge the multiverse of evil. In her mind, she is the greater good. However, her focus is entirely myopic. Anything for the cause, anything that let's her power and ability to wage war improve is worth it. This is what made her and the Interloper crossing paths so dangerous. When the players first entered her chamber, what they encountered for like level 3 or 4 players was beyond terrifying:

“The very air thrums with malevolent energy. The room is dominated by a massive obsidian table, etched with arcane symbols and surrounded by high-backed, crimson chairs. The walls are lined with maps of mortal and infernal territories, marked with strategic points and stained with blood. Dim, flickering flames in sconces cast an eerie red glow, illuminating racks of wicked, barbed weapons and trophies of unholy conflicts. The atmosphere is thick with the scent of brimstone and the echo of infernal whispers. A large window overlooks a burning hellscape, the glass made of a flexible, translucent obsidian that seems to flow like liquid. Everything is hot to the touch and the only colors that seem to stand out are blood red, black and yellow of flames.

At the table are two large, winged creatures with massive horns pouring over battlefield maps. Overseeing them is an even larger, hulking beast covered in interlocking armored plates with a whiplike tail, mammoth wings that can surround its entire body, and a terrifying head that seems infernal and draconic, with fangs and gleaming yellow-red eyes. Off to the side is an insectlike monster seemingly made of ice and metal and two beings clad in jet black armor with crimson hawk like wings, twistedly beautiful faces and horns. All turn their heads, surprised to see the group as a fear and panic fills each of your hearts like you have never felt before in your life. “

Initially, there were 2 Erinyes, 2 Horned Devils, 1 Ice Devil and 1 Pitfiend in the room, with an entire team of Chain Devils in the next room over that could be called in in a moments notice. Now you might first ask, why wouldn't they just kill the players? Any one of these devils could make quick work of them. The answer is that this is the inner sanctum of Zariel's fortress, which I conceived as a flying fortress over the burning landscape of Avernus. It has magical warding and protection against any sort of plane shift or teleportation magic, and is viewed as impregnable. Zariel is obsessed with security, so these “spies” seeming able to bypass all the defenses and make it into the most sensitive room in the entire fortress begs questions. The devils first instinct is to just haul the players off to the torture room to extract answers to these questions. The problem with this strategy is that the players simply teleport back into the room if they are moved in any way. At this point, they contact Zariel immediately knowing she will want to interrogate the group directly.

So potent are the wards against teleportation that not even Zariel herself can teleport into her own war room. Instead, she teleports on to a platform outside, and enters the room. The players ability to do what she can not is of great interest to her, and she interrogates them thoroughly. The dramatic irony here is that the Interloper repeatedly asked the players to bring him “interesting” test subjects. Interesting means powerful, and so long as they aren't aligned with Mechanus he will glady accept them. And the rewards scale with the level of “interest” he has in a subject, so the players are simultaneously terrified they are about to be killed and elated that they might make a massive payday. They explain the situation to Zariel, leaving the part out about the 4 dimensional being wanting to dissect her, and invite her to come meet their employer. She wants to get to the bottom of this and is fairly head strong and overconfident, the same traits that led her to hell in the first place, so she agrees. They grant her an amulet that lets her follow them and bring her to the Grey Room. A staircase appears and she walks up it.

Now every other “participant” the group brought to the Grey Room never came back. They were promptly dissected by the Interloper. The one time they needed someone back, they got his body... “reconstructed” and with no soul. So they assumed he was going to have a field day with her, or she'd kill him and they'd have a new boss. But instead, she simply leaves after some time, completely laden with 4 dimensional artifacts, the very flavor of gifts that the Interloper grants to the players. The Interloper is delighted, effusively thanking the players for bring her to meet him. This was the first time he ever let a “participant” leave, and this taught the players something: powerful enough entities could directly treat with the Interloper. He cut a deal with Zariel, he would furnish her weapons and spells to help her war effort, and she would bring him more “participants.” It was a beautiful deal for both sides. The Interloper got an endless supply of test subjects as well as experimental data from all of his inventions being used on the battlefield. Zariel already had more prisoners than she knew what to do with, so she simply walked them through the portal and was given weapons that previously had never existed in this mulitverse—the ultimate edge against her enemies. Each side gives up something they want to give away in return for something they really want. Truly a match made in hell.

From here on out, the Grey Room had an endless procession coming from Hell. when the players would return they might see a group of chain devils leading through an entire legion of chained, bound and severely wounded demons. Sometimes it would be one massive demon. Sometimes enslaved mortals. Othertimes they'd be carrying out entire wagon loads of 4 dimensional weapons. Zariel had to move her War Room and turn that room into essentially a loading dock to move things to and from the Grey Room. The size and spectacle of what they brought through consistently increased with time. Zariel's appetite for the Interlopers weapons increased as his appetite for her test subjects did. Both made each other more powerful... and power hungry. The most extreme case was when the Interloper made a specific request, he wanted one of Tiamat's consorts. He would've taken Tiamat herself but realized that Zariel lacked the power to subdue and capture her.

I kind of let this all evolve diegetically. Originally I just put Zariel in there without a plan for how to she'd be involved in the plot. The Desecrated Temple was connected to her, and the Shadow of Torm wanted to kill her (though this was added in after the fact) but everything else followed from the players actions. What was most interesting was how the Interloper's powers effected her plotline. His spells and weapons were incredibly potent but had substantial drawbacks and unpredictable effects. To the players, this made some of them prohibitive. Zariel simply worked these effects into her risk calculations on the battlefield.

During the Torment Questline (which I will get to soon), the players get to see Zariel's legions in action with the Interloper's new toys. They used the destabilize spell against the demons and quickly burned the gibbering mouthers that would appear when they transformed. The warped weapons missed often, but there were enough infantry that when they did hit, the intense damage made up for it, improving the armies overall ability. Instead of just slaughtering demons, there was a concerted effort to take as many alive as possible— more to trade for more weapons. Other spells, like the 4D blades, were used to tear through enemy formations. Injured soldiers were pulled back and had undo wounds cast on them, but casters were ready to incinerate them if they came back wrong. Furthermore, massive war constructs made of 4D materials that resembled Dolly's aesthetic were employed. These war machines blinked in and out of existence, making them difficult for enemies to hit while simultaneously inflicting incredible damage on the demons. All of this leads to the demon armies being routed. Zariel is able to make more progress in the Blood War post meeting the Interloper in a matter of weeks than she had in decades prior. I'll get into the implications of this in a later post.

So, a lot was going on in the background the players weren't aware of as an implication of Zariel and the Interloper's new alliance. First off, the planes, and Mechanus specifically, depending on balance in the Blood War. The entire point was there is no winner, and the fiends exhaust themselves. Zariel turning the tide suddenly brought a lot of attention. Demons wanted access to the weapons she had. Asmodeus was curious as to her newfound power so watched and waited to see how it unfolded. Other devil generals and lords were jealous and sought to betray her. Angels were mixed, liked that she was killing so many demons but feared what would happen if she gained to much power. Most importantly, Mechanus realizes there is Far Realm influence here and starts more intensely searching for the Interloper. The Interloper realized he was risking a lot, but the allure of so much data and material was too much for him to turn down. He'd figure out how to mitigate the consequences later.

For the players it was interesting because Uzo wanted to work with Zariel, she was his retirement plan after the Interloper. Domilia hated her because she was a fiend and wanted to smite her. Rotlog didn't like her but basically wanted to not die, however that was possible. Cervi (RIP) and Thogg were more on the fence. She grew to be a very important NPC in the campaign with quite an arc. I'll leave it with this. As alluded to in a previous post, Callie's parasite was given to the Interloper along with a note from Zariel. She wanted it weaponized. He wanted a consort of Tiamat. An impossibly dangerous request for an impossibly enticing reward. We will get into the outcome in a future post.

Also, one of the players pointed this out. I have a penchant for scary, powerful women in my campaign. The Lady of Pain, Zariel, Grandma Nettles, Xivora, The Beeple Queen, etc. And sort of bumbling men: Mobius Torrent, The Interloper, The king in the throne room. I realize I haven't introduced some of these characters yet, but I will. Point is, there is probably a lot to read into my own psychology for this—but I'll save that for a future post.

Chapter 1: The Morning You Decide to Look Fine

There are mornings when you stand in the bathroom longer than usual because you are trying to decide what kind of face you can manage for the day. Nothing dramatic happens in that moment. The coffee is getting cold in the kitchen, your phone is already showing messages, and somebody may be waiting for you to leave the house. Still, there is a private pause where you know you are carrying more than anyone around you can see. That hidden weight is why how Jesus teaches us to notice what people carry in silence matters so much to me.

Maybe nobody would guess what is happening inside you because you have become good at functioning. You answer the email, make the drive, take the call, pay the bill, or ask somebody else how they are doing. You may even laugh and mean it. That is part of what makes hidden burdens so confusing. Pain does not always remove a person’s ability to keep moving, and giving grace when you do not know the full story can matter long before anybody explains what is wrong.

I have learned that we often expect suffering to announce itself in a form we recognize. We look for tears, missed work, visible fear, or a voice that sounds broken. When those signs are absent, we assume the person is fine. Jesus did not seem to need that kind of proof before He paid attention. He noticed people others moved past, listened to questions that carried more than the words being asked, and treated human beings as more than the condition or reputation everyone else could see.

That changes the way I think about ordinary encounters. A friend sends a short reply and my first instinct may be to wonder whether I did something wrong. A coworker seems distracted and I can decide they do not care. Someone at the store moves slowly and I can turn their difficult moment into my inconvenience. Most of the time, I do not know enough to make those judgments. I know only what reached me.

There is a quiet freedom in admitting that because not knowing the whole story does not make me helpless. It changes what I am responsible for. I may not know why someone seems distant, tired, impatient, or unusually quiet, but I can decide not to make the moment heavier than it already is. I can ask a question before making an accusation. I can leave room for an explanation I have not heard yet. I can speak in a way that would still feel decent if I later learned the person had been carrying something painful all day.

That sounds simple until the person is someone close to us. Strangers sometimes receive more patience because we do not have history with them. The people we love are easier to interpret. We know their habits, their weaknesses, and the things that have frustrated us before, so one small moment can collect years of meaning.

A husband walks into the kitchen and notices his wife has forgotten something they discussed that morning. He could say, “You forgot.” That is a fact. He could also say, “You never listen to me.” That is an interpretation, and it places a much larger weight on the moment. The forgotten thing may still need to be handled, but the marriage does not need a character trial every time somebody makes a mistake.

I think this is one of the places where following Jesus becomes very practical. Grace is not pretending that nothing matters. It is refusing to add condemnation where truth will do. Jesus could be direct without stripping people of dignity. He could confront what was wrong while still seeing the person in front of Him as someone worth speaking to, touching, restoring, or inviting forward.

That matters to the person who is already carrying private shame. A man who has made a financial mistake may know exactly what he did wrong. He may be opening bills every night and wondering how he will repair it. If he tells someone he trusts, he may need honest help. What he may not need is another person treating the mistake as proof that he is foolish in every part of life.

The same is true when the burden is not self-created. A woman caring for an aging parent may be tired enough to forget things she normally remembers. A teenager may be quieter because a friendship has fallen apart. A dependable employee may suddenly seem less focused because something serious is happening at home. We should not invent stories for people, but we should remember that visible behavior is often only the surface.

Jesus gives us a powerful example of this in the way He handled the woman caught in adultery in John 8. The passage has a complicated manuscript history, so I do not use it carelessly, but the scene has shaped Christian reflection for centuries because of the posture it shows. A woman is placed publicly in front of Jesus while others are interested in accusation. Jesus does not deny that sin matters, yet He refuses to let the crowd reduce her to a spectacle.

That difference stays with me because people are often already aware of the worst thing in their story. They do not need us to pretend it is harmless, but neither do they need us to turn it into their entire identity. There is a way to tell the truth that leaves a person standing. There is also a way to tell the truth that feels more interested in punishment than restoration.

When I think about hidden burdens, I keep returning to that choice. Will I become another person someone has to brace against, or can I become someone around whom they do not have to perform strength quite so hard? Sometimes the answer looks almost insignificant. It can be letting a friend finish a sentence without rushing to fix it, asking, “Are you okay?” and accepting “I do not want to talk about it yet” without taking offense, or giving somebody another day to answer without assuming the relationship is in trouble.

Those small moments matter because people who carry hidden burdens become skilled at reading whether a room feels safe. They notice whether a question is really curiosity, judgment, or care. They notice whether your kindness disappears when their answer becomes inconvenient. They notice whether you listen or simply wait for your turn to speak.

There was a time when I thought helping meant having something useful to say. I am less convinced of that now because sometimes the useful thing is restraint. Sometimes it is refusing to fill the silence, and sometimes it is allowing somebody to be a person before they become a problem to solve. Fixing gives us a role, while listening can leave us close to something we cannot control.

Jesus did not avoid people whose lives were messy because He could not reduce them to a clean explanation. He entered those moments with truth, compassion, and presence. I cannot do what Jesus did in the way He did it, but I can learn from the way He looked at people.

That may be where this begins for us too. Before we try to solve what another person carries, we can stop adding to it. Before we demand proof, we can choose kindness. Before we decide what someone’s behavior means, we can leave room for the part of the story we cannot see. Some days, that may be the grace we need from someone else, and other days, it may be the grace we are being asked to give.

Chapter 2: The Kind of Grace That Does Not Need an Explanation

A man sits in his truck outside his house after work with both hands resting on the steering wheel. The engine is off, but he does not go inside yet. He loves the people in that house, and nothing terrible has happened. He simply knows that the moment he opens the door, somebody will ask a question, the dog will need to go out, dinner will need attention, and the evening will begin moving. He needs five quiet minutes because the day took more out of him than he knows how to explain. If his wife looks through the window and sees him sitting there, she could decide he is avoiding the family, or she could let five quiet minutes remain five quiet minutes until there is a reason to believe they mean more.

That kind of restraint may be one of the most loving forms of grace we can offer. Not every unusual behavior has a hidden tragedy behind it. Sometimes a person is simply tired, disappointed, embarrassed, hungry, worried, or trying to get their thoughts together before speaking. We do not need to invent a dramatic reason in order to treat them gently. I think compassion becomes strangely conditional when we are patient only after we learn about the diagnosis, the funeral, the job loss, or the family crisis. Before we know those things, we may be impatient, as though suffering has to become serious enough to earn kindness.

Jesus makes me question that instinct. In Matthew 11, He speaks directly to people who are weary and burdened and invites them to come to Him for rest. He describes Himself as gentle and humble in heart. I keep returning to those words because gentleness is not weakness, and humility is not uncertainty. Gentleness is strength that does not need to crush, while humility remembers that I do not know everything. That changes the way I want to respond when someone is hard to understand. A friend can disappoint me without my deciding that the friendship means nothing to them, and a family member can speak badly in one moment without that moment becoming the entire truth about their character.

A woman sends her sister a message asking whether she can talk. Hours pass without a response, and by late afternoon she has created an entire explanation in her mind. Her sister must be upset. Something from last week must have caused it. Maybe the relationship has changed, or maybe she is being ignored on purpose. That evening the sister calls and apologizes because her phone had been in a desk drawer during a long training session. The woman realizes that most of the pain she carried all afternoon came from a story built around missing information. The mind hates empty space, so it fills the unknown quickly, and the explanation it invents is often harsher than the truth.

Grace sometimes means leaving that blank space blank. It can sound as simple as, “I do not know why they have not answered yet.” That is not denial; it is accuracy. The same practice matters when somebody really does disappoint us. If a person repeatedly breaks commitments, trust may need to change. If a relationship becomes harmful, boundaries may be necessary. If a coworker continually fails to complete work, accountability still matters. The point is not to become naive. The point is to work with what is true instead of adding motives we cannot prove. “You missed the deadline again” gives us something real to address. “You do not care about this team” may be a story we added.

A father learns this with his teenage son. The boy comes home one afternoon, walks past everyone, and closes his bedroom door. The father almost follows immediately because the behavior feels disrespectful, but he waits twenty minutes and knocks. When he asks whether the day was rough, his son admits that a friend embarrassed him in front of other students. The closed door was not rejection of the family. It was a teenager trying to regain his balance before speaking. The father still has rules about how people treat one another in the house, but he chose curiosity before accusation, and that choice gave the truth somewhere to land.

I think Jesus teaches us to make that kind of room more often than we notice. He asks people questions even when He understands far more than they do. He asks Bartimaeus what he wants Him to do, asks the disciples who they say He is, and asks the man at Bethesda whether he wants to get well. Questions can create room for a person to speak from where they really are. That matters especially for people who have become used to carrying things privately, because they often know the difference between a question that invites honesty and one that is really an accusation wearing polite clothes.

A woman has become the dependable person in her family. Everyone calls when a problem appears. She remembers birthdays, helps an aging parent with appointments, assists a sibling with paperwork, and somehow remains the person who sounds calm on the phone. One Saturday she ignores several messages and spends most of the morning reading on the couch. Her brother later jokes that she disappeared, and she laughs with him, but the truth is that she needed three hours in which nobody required anything from her. The family may never fully understand how much she carries because she has become good at carrying it, and that is exactly why she needs people who do not demand a dramatic explanation before respecting a little space.

We cannot solve this by becoming suspicious of every smile or trying to uncover hidden pain everywhere we go. People deserve privacy too. What we can do is make fewer demands for proof. If a friend says they are tired, we do not always need to know why before accepting it. If someone says they need space, we can respect that without making them pay for it emotionally. If a coworker says there is a family matter they need to handle, the details may not belong to us. This kind of respect tells another person that they do not have to perform pain convincingly before they are allowed to be human.

There is another side to this that I have had to learn, because sometimes the person whose hidden burden I misunderstand is me. I can be harsher with myself than I would ever be with someone else. A difficult week becomes evidence that I am failing, needing rest begins to look like laziness, and uncertainty starts sounding like proof that I should have prepared better. Then I realize I have created the same problem internally that I am trying to avoid with other people. I am demanding an explanation before allowing myself grace.

Grace toward ourselves still has to be honest. I can make excuses, avoid responsibility, and call it self-compassion if I am not careful. But honesty also includes recognizing human limits. I can be tired because I have been carrying a lot. I can need help without becoming helpless. I can have a bad day without turning it into an identity, and I can trust God while still wishing a situation were different. Love for other people does not require unlimited availability, and faith does not require pretending that fear, sadness, or weariness never enter the room.

The more I look at Jesus, the less interested I become in the kind of spirituality that makes people hide their humanity. Jesus met people in hunger, exhaustion, grief, fear, confusion, sickness, shame, and ordinary need. He did not wait for them to become impressive before engaging them. That changes what I think Christian encouragement should feel like. It should point toward Christ without making the reader prove that the burden is heavy enough, and it should leave room for someone to tell the truth before rushing them toward a lesson.

Maybe that is what some of us need today. We may not need a dramatic answer or a promise that everything will change by morning. We may need permission to admit that something is heavy and to stop apologizing for needing a little quiet. We may also need to offer somebody else the same kindness, especially when we do not yet understand what their behavior means. The goal is not to excuse everything. It is to become slower to add weight where truth has not asked us to add it.

The man sitting in his truck finally opens the door and walks into the house. His wife looks up from the kitchen and asks whether it was a long day. He nods, and she does not demand the whole story. She puts a plate on the table and lets him arrive. A few minutes later, he starts talking on his own because safety often works that way. It does not force the truth out of people. It makes room for truth to come when they are ready.

We cannot know everything another person carries, and we do not have to know everything before choosing not to make the load heavier. When we are the ones carrying something we cannot explain neatly, we can remember the same truth for ourselves. Jesus does not require a polished reason before He invites the weary to come near, and perhaps following Him begins with learning to offer a little of that same gentleness to the person in front of us and to the person we meet when we are finally alone.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

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No one talks enough about that strange, melancholy, nostalgic, bittersweet place in time. It is the horizon where grief has not completely faded but no longer consumes you, either.

It arrives in waves and quiet little hums. And sometimes, when you least expect it, the wave still crashes violently onto the shore. The clouds grow dark and heavy, the sky opens, and suddenly, the tears you thought you had already spent return.

It is brief.

It rarely lasts long.

But grief does not necessarily mean regret. Perhaps it simply means that something was precious. That it mattered. That the life you once knew has changed, and growth is guiding you in the direction already ordained for you. A part of you still mourns what was, what could have been, and what you once hoped it might become.

Healing is not linear, they say.

No kidding!

But no one talks enough about the glimmers of hope there, either.

The unexpected relief.

The return of a cognitive and emotional freedom you had almost forgotten existed. The first full, deep breath you permit yourself to take after years of shallow, measured breathing. Learning to sprint on an open road where you had once been tiptoeing and walking on eggshells.

It is a place where possibility feels expansive, even when its edges are still shrouded in remnants of fear. A place where joy and hope, though still fragile, can exist alongside uncertainty.

Cautious optimism, perhaps? Where optimism is appealing  but occasionally still feels a little foolish.

A place where you begin to recognize yourself again. Not merely the version of you who learned to survive. But the woman who existed before …somehow more resilient, more beautiful, and wiser now.

It is the edge of something. The beginning of the unknown. Of feeling so alive, yet sometimes so profoundly alone.

The gray zone, if you will.

Or maybe it is blue.

Like a blend of the blue of the sky and the teal of the ocean.

The blue that exists somewhere between the red you had been living in for longer than anyone ever knew…and the green you are still afraid to step into, even though some part of you dreamt of it long before.

And somewhere in that blue, you begin to understand that arriving here was not a simple  matter of fault or failure. God knows it was after the very best of your efforts, patience, and intentions. And  somehow you no longer feel the need to prove that to anybody.

Such is life, I suppose.

Strangely, clarity can come even amid messy transition. Perhaps clarity is not always knowing exactly what happens next. Perhaps sometimes, it is simply knowing that you can no longer remain where you were.

In this blue, the days can be bright. Pain and doubt may still show their faces, but they no longer rule.

One moment, you are driving alone in your car, wiping away tears. The next, a song blares through your speakers, and you catch a glimpse of your children’s faces in the rearview mirror.

You remember the kindness of the family and friends who held you, witnessed and stood beside you. You think of the people you only recently met who, unknowingly, are healing something within you in ways you never thought possible.

One endearing look, one kind word, one warm embrace at a time.

Your heart starts to feel whole again.

The clouds part just enough to let a little light through.

And in that moment, your faith gently reminds you of what you have somehow always known:

You will be okay.

You rest in knowing that the greatest and most perfect love you seek already lives within you and that it is one of God’s greatest gifts.

In this blue, you have found your way back home to yourself.

You are going to be okay.

Today was busy and I got a lot accomplished! I did not wake up early, but I did go for a run even though I really did not want to. I haven’t run in almost six months since my last half marathon. I DID NOT ANSWER EMAILS. I don’t know why I keep procrastinating that, but I really need to get on it.

The next few things got switched around – I had my haircut, then went to pottery, then bought a few groceries and the rest did not really get done. I forgot I had a meeting in the evening, so I skipped kickball to do that instead. Anyway, most of the day kept me preoccupied and busy so I did not even check the status of my thing, but I imagine there isn’t any change. I did however, think about my crush quite a bit. I don’t know if I am romanticizing in my head, or if there may really be something there.

The plan for Day 93:

• Take my dog to daycare (with a dose of trazodone)
• Breakfast and coffee on the go
• Pottery
• Pick up dog for dog sitting gig
• Pick my dog up from daycare
• Dinner with a friend :)
• Put laundry away
• Walk my dog

I took my laundry out but still needs to be put away!

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Not talking to people...

Lately, playing the guitar is making me feel pretty terrible too... So I'm kind of giving it a break for a few days...

...and when I'm at home, I just don't talk to anybody...

Alright. boo hoo. you can boo me now, go on. im upset about something stupid again. how miserable how embarrassing. a grown man, defeated by something so insignificant that even explaining it would make it much worse. i know its stupid thats why im irritated about it. i know i shouldn’t be upset about it, i’ve already told myself that several times, but it still bothers me. not enough to matter, just enough to keep coming back honestly. i think about it, then i decide its stupid i forget about it completely then i think about it all over again. sometimes i wonder if my brain does this because it has nothing better to do. probably. whatever. i mean look at you, this is what you chose to spend your time. watching a man complain about something he refuses to explain. im sure your life is going somewhere. anyway, not that im telling you what happend. you dont need to know. though i suppose you’ll want to know now. tell them something they can’t have and suddently they need it. a little pathetic, really. you’ll probably judge me anyway. its not that i care, people read a few sentance then decide they understood someone, then carry on with their day feeling strangely qualified to have an opinion. you people. are very impressive. really, i mean it. go put that on your resume as well. but anyway, its five in the morning now. i haven’t slept. not that i cant fall asleep, i just don’t want to. there’s something about sleeping that bothers me tonight. when i sleep, everything gets louder. too realistic, too. strange. the dreams stop being mine. its like im somewhere else, somewhere they seem to know better than i do. they decide where i go, what happens and how it ends. sometimes. it feels like im not even in control of my own body anymore, thats why i don’t like sleeping. the moment i close my eyes, im handing everything over to things, or whatever they are. and id rather stay awake.

Anyway, i guess you’ve listened to enough, im sure you have somewhere “important” to be. another whatever thought to have, perhaps. maybe you’ll go stare at the ceiling and decide you understand me now. and just a hint, please dont. you’ve read one page. that already gives you far too much confidence. so go on. close this, forget about it. return to whatever perfectly sensible thing you were doing at five in the morning. whatever, just shut up and leave.

Sincerely, probably still awake.

The venue was a United Nations conference about land turning to dust. The product on offer was electricity.

On 25 August 2026, inside the Host Country House at the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's government convened an event it called “Sovereign by Design”, subtitled Mongolia's Green AI Data Centre Initiative. The Prime Minister, Nyam-Osor Uchral, opened it. His Deputy Prime Minister, Togmid Dorjkhand, pitched investors on the arithmetic of cheap power. His Minister of Digital Development, Innovation and Communications, Nomin Chinbat, told the room something more interesting than a price. “We offer more than just natural resources,” she said. “We offer safety and data sovereignty.”

By the time the twelve-day conference wound down, Mongolia had signed ten memoranda of understanding covering 863 megawatts of prospective data centre capacity. The initiative was not a solo effort. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other international partners have joined it, with up to two billion dollars in financing presented as available for eligible green and renewable infrastructure projects. One of the ten memoranda, announced the following day, was with NOVVA Group, described in its own materials as a global clean energy infrastructure platform enabling the AI economy. It was signed by Vincent Wen, the company's managing director, and by Nomin Chinbat, and witnessed by the Prime Minister himself. Its scope covers energy-efficient data centres and AI-ready infrastructure, renewable energy and storage including solar photovoltaics, wind and battery systems, site readiness, and policy consultation.

That is a lot of nouns and not many verbs. But hold the scepticism for a moment, because the easy reaction to this story is the wrong one, and the interesting reaction takes considerably more work.

The Number That Should Stop You

Mongolia's entire electricity system has an installed generating capacity of about 1.6 gigawatts. That figure, from the Stockholm Environment Institute's 2024 policy overview, is not controversial.

So the 863 megawatts of data centre capacity Mongolia signed up at COP17 amounts to roughly 54 per cent of the entire installed capacity of the country.

Not 54 per cent of spare capacity. Not 54 per cent of planned additions. Fifty-four per cent of every turbine, panel and coal-fired boiler currently connected to the Mongolian grid, committed in a fortnight, at a conference about desertification, in documents that are almost certainly not legally binding.

This is the fact around which everything else in this story orbits, and it is worth sitting with.

Why Mongolia Is Not Being Naive

Start with the strongest possible version of Mongolia's case, because it is genuinely strong, and because the reflex to patronise small states pursuing industrial policy is one of the least attractive habits in technology commentary.

Mongolia is a landlocked country of roughly 3.5 million people wedged between two nuclear-armed great powers, with essentially no third option for physical trade. Somewhere north of 90 per cent of its exports go to China, overwhelmingly coal and copper, and China supplies around 70 per cent of its imports. Its electricity grid is physically interconnected with the Russian Siberian system at 220 kilovolts, and it imported 22.3 per cent of its electricity in 2023 from China and Russia combined. When your lights depend on two neighbours who are also your only customers, “sovereignty” is not an abstraction to be deconstructed in a seminar. It is the daily condition of your existence.

Mongolia's third neighbour policy, formulated in the early 1990s, has been a decades-long attempt to manufacture optionality where geography offers none, through partnerships with the United States, Japan, South Korea, India and the European Union. Digital infrastructure is the purest possible expression of that doctrine. Fibre and compute are the only exports Mongolia can ship without asking Beijing or Moscow for permission to cross a border with a train.

The resource case is real too. Mongolia's combined wind and solar potential is estimated at around 2,600 gigawatts, more than a thousand times its installed capacity, and Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital on earth, which means free cooling for much of the year and a thermodynamic advantage over Texas or Singapore. Dorjkhand's pitch was power below four cents per kilowatt hour against fourteen to sixteen cents in the United States, grid connection inside 24 months, and returns near 18 per cent. He also offered a line that doubles as a national brand: “we are a very cold country, eight months a year.”

And there is a strategic niche that is smarter than it first appears. Mongolia is explicitly courting customers who want to serve the Chinese market while keeping their data physically outside Chinese jurisdiction. That is a real and growing commercial need, and Mongolia's geography makes it one of very few places that can plausibly offer it.

Most importantly: everything Mongolia is doing here is exactly what development economists, multilateral lenders and Western governments have spent thirty years telling countries like Mongolia to do. Move up the value chain. Stop exporting raw rock. Attract foreign direct investment. Use your comparative advantage. Diversify away from extractive dependency. To turn round now and tell a dryland economy that it should not build compute because the electricity would be better spent elsewhere would be to pull the ladder up with unusual brazenness. The Global North built its compute freely, on coal and gas, without asking anyone's permission, and it is still building it.

So the question is not whether Mongolia should want this. The question is whether what was signed at COP17 delivers it.

Thirty-Two Countries Own the Machine Room

Here is the structural reality Mongolia is trying to escape, and it is documented with unusual clarity in a paper posted to arXiv in March 2026 and revised in July by Amirpasha Mozaffari and colleagues at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, with co-authors at Imperial College London and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.

The paper is ostensibly about weather and climate information, but its infrastructure section is the most useful short description available of who owns the AI economy. Its central finding is blunt: “only 32 countries globally host the hyperscale AI data centres necessary for robust cloud-based deployment.” Thirty-two. Out of 193 UN member states. Mongolia is not among them.

The authors go further, and their argument is precisely the one Mongolia's ministers are making, arrived at from the opposite direction. Frontier models, they note, are developed almost exclusively through collaborations between national public computing centres in the Global North and East Asia and a handful of multinational firms including Google DeepMind, Nvidia, Microsoft and Huawei. This concentration “effectively gatekeeps the development of foundation models, restricting it to entities with access to exascale computing and specialised engineering talent.”

The consequence, in their words, is “a risk of technological dependency, where low-income nations are relegated to being consumers of models that are not generated for them as the main target by infrastructure they cannot audit, control, or adapt to their local contexts.” Without what they call compute sovereignty, meaning “the ability to train and fine-tune models on sovereign infrastructure, nations lack the agency to prioritise their specific regional climate vulnerabilities.”

Note the phrase. Compute sovereignty. A team of climate scientists in Barcelona, writing about forecasting inequality, independently reached for the same word Mongolia's government put on a banner in Ulaanbaatar. That convergence is not a coincidence. It is evidence that the diagnosis is correct.

The same paper supplies the resource figures that make the diagnosis uncomfortable. Data centre energy demand is projected to reach 4.5 per cent of global electricity generation by 2030. Global AI water withdrawal is projected at 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres by 2027. Those are the entry costs to the club of 32. They are why the club has 32 members.

What 863 Megawatts Does to a 1.6 Gigawatt Country

The second paper in this story gives us a tool for testing Mongolia's plan rather than merely admiring it.

Posted to arXiv in March 2026 by Danbo Chen and colleagues at Ohio State University, Zhejiang A&F University and Meta Platforms, “Concentrated siting of AI data centers drives regional power-system stress under rising global compute demand” builds what the authors call an AI-energy coupling framework, combining language-model analysis of corporate, policy and media disclosures with quantitative energy-system modelling to 2030.

Its findings confirm the concentration thesis from the supply side. North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific together account for more than 90 per cent of projected compute capacity. Consumption by the six leading firms is projected to rise from roughly 118 terawatt hours in 2024 to between 239 and 295 by 2030, about 1 per cent of global power demand on its own. The International Energy Agency projection they cite has global data centre consumption more than doubling from about 415 terawatt hours in 2024 to roughly 945 by 2030, with the United States and China responsible for almost 80 per cent of the growth. AI infrastructure, the authors write, is “evolving from a marginal digital service into a structural component of power-system dynamics.”

The useful part is their metric. The Power Stress Index is the ratio of data centre electricity demand to total regional generation capacity. Above 0.25 is their high-stress threshold, indicating grid vulnerability. Ireland, the worst case in their dataset, approaches 0.5, which the authors observe implies AI-related consumption absorbing nearly half of local generation. Oregon exceeds the threshold. Virginia, Nebraska and Washington sit between 0.20 and 0.30. Diversified systems such as Texas, Japan and Australia stay below 0.10.

The authors did not run Mongolia. So let us run it, transparently, using their published formula and independently verified Mongolian data.

Mongolia's net electricity generation in 2024 was 8.83 terawatt hours, up 6.6 per cent on 2023. National consumption was 10.29 terawatt hours, the gap filled by imports. Now take the 863 megawatts of signed data centre capacity. At a conservative 60 per cent utilisation, that load consumes 4.54 terawatt hours a year, a PSI of 0.51 against national generation. At a more realistic 70 per cent, it is 5.29 terawatt hours and a PSI of 0.60. At 80 per cent, which is unremarkable for AI training infrastructure, it is 6.05 terawatt hours and a PSI of 0.68.

Read that against the paper's own benchmarks. At the low end of plausible utilisation, Mongolia matches Ireland, the most stressed grid in the study. At the middle and upper end, Mongolia exceeds it by a wide margin, landing somewhere no jurisdiction in the dataset occupies. Even measured against total national consumption including imports, the figures run from 0.44 to 0.59.

This is the analytical heart of the matter, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. In Virginia, a hyperscale campus is a large marginal load on a very large system. In Mongolia, 863 megawatts is not marginal. It is structural. It would be, at a stroke, the defining feature of the national power system, larger in energy terms than most of what the grid currently does. Every subsequent decision about Mongolian electricity, tariffs, dispatch, winter reserve margins, import contracts with Russia, would be taken in the shadow of that load.

The obvious rejoinder is that this is the entire point. The initiative is explicitly about building new renewable generation alongside the compute, so the denominator grows with the numerator. Good. That rejoinder is correct, and it is also precisely the thing an MOU cannot guarantee.

The Grid That Already Struggles to Get Through Winter

Because the Mongolian grid is not a blank sheet waiting for gigawatts of Gobi solar. It is a system already under acute strain.

Fossil fuels generated 91.1 per cent of Mongolia's electricity in 2024, some 8.04 terawatt hours, with coal alone at 7.93. Renewables managed 8.9 per cent, about 0.79 terawatt hours, despite making up a considerably larger share of installed capacity, which tells you how much sits idle or curtailed. The country's target under its Vision 2050 strategy is 30 per cent renewable capacity by 2030, and it is not obviously on track.

The Central Energy System, which supplies more than 70 per cent of the country, is built around Soviet-design combined heat and power plants running baseload, interconnected with the Russian grid. Those plants do double duty: they heat Ulaanbaatar, in a city where winter temperatures fall well below minus 20 Celsius. Utilisation of ageing CHP units during winter peak hours has been reported above 90 per cent, and peak capacity shortage is the acknowledged urgent problem of the Mongolian energy sector. Mongolia imports up to 300 megawatts from Russia to help cover it.

Now layer the air pollution problem on top. Households in the ger districts, largely migrants from a countryside emptied by successive dzud disasters, burn coal for heat because they lack grid connections. In the depths of winter, PM2.5 concentrations in Ulaanbaatar have been recorded at levels many multiples of World Health Organisation guidance, and the city has ranked among the most polluted on earth. The 2019 raw coal ban and the switch to briquettes cut average winter concentrations substantially, by around half against the 2016 to 2017 baseline, which was a real public health achievement won at real political cost.

Put these together and a sharp equity question emerges, one with nothing to do with foreign companies. There are Mongolian households burning coal indoors because they are not connected to the grid, in the same country now offering four-cent electricity and 24-month grid connections to foreign compute. If the new renewable build follows the data centre load, and the transmission gets built to the server halls rather than to the ger districts, Mongolia will have used its renewable endowment to decarbonise someone else's inference workload while its own citizens keep lighting stoves. That is not an inevitability. It is a design choice, exactly the kind that phrases like “sovereign by design” are supposed to govern.

Sovereignty Has a Definition and an MOU Is Not It

So what would sovereign actually mean? The word is doing enormous work in this story, and it is worth pinning down.

The concept, in its current form, was popularised less by political theorists than by a chip vendor. Jensen Huang has been evangelising sovereign AI since at least 2023, telling the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2024 that “every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence” and that a national model “codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history.” It is a compelling argument. It is also, as critics note with some relish, one that ends with nation states becoming the next category of customer after the hyperscalers.

The Center for a New American Security has done the most rigorous work on whether the rhetoric survives contact with balance sheets. Its Sovereign AI Index, authored by Pablo Chavez, Vivek Chilukuri and Ruby Scanlon and updated in August 2026, tracks 185 sovereign AI projects worldwide, defining sovereign AI as a government-backed initiative tied explicitly to national strategic interests and backed by material public investment in domestic compute, models or data.

The findings are sobering for anyone taking the word at face value. More than 60 per cent of tracked projects disclose at least one foreign partner, and four-fifths of those partnerships involve a United States company. Nvidia alone supplies the GPUs for 45 per cent of all tracked infrastructure projects. The money is even more concentrated than the compute: the Middle East and East Asia account for over 80 per cent of disclosed investment, the UAE and Japan alone represent nearly two-thirds, and the top ten spenders account for roughly 90 per cent. The index's own summary of everyone else is that “the gap between sovereign aspiration and capacity remains vast.”

This is the pattern Mongolia is entering. Indonesia's first sovereign AI factory runs on Nvidia silicon through Indosat. Kenya's ambitions run through Cassava Technologies, again on Nvidia. India's programme, the Gulf states' programmes and Europe's all sit on the same foundation. The sovereignty on offer is real but partial: jurisdictional control over data at rest, genuinely worth having, coexisting with dependency on a foreign accelerator supply chain, foreign software stacks, foreign update cycles and foreign export-control regimes.

Set against that, here is what “sovereign by design” would need to mean if it were an engineering specification rather than a slogan. Ownership of the physical assets, or a defined path to it, rather than a long-term lease of Mongolian land and Mongolian electricity to a foreign balance sheet. Control of the model layer, meaning the capacity to train and fine-tune, not merely to host someone else's inference. Domestic skills, meaning Mongolian engineers operating the facility rather than a rotating expatriate crew. Legal jurisdiction over the data, which is the one dimension Nomin Chinbat explicitly claimed and the one most plausibly deliverable. And grid control, meaning the state retains the authority to curtail a data centre before it curtails a hospital in January.

Against that specification, what does an MOU deliver? A memorandum of understanding is generally not legally binding. It documents intentions, expectations and responsibilities before a formal contract exists. Whether any particular MOU binds anyone depends on its wording and the parties' conduct rather than the label, and the published materials for the NOVVA agreement do not specify its binding status either way. What is publicly known is that it covers four workstreams, one of which is “policy consultation”, which is to say that the foreign infrastructure developer has been given a seat at the table where Mongolia writes the rules governing foreign infrastructure developers.

That is not scandalous. It is entirely normal, and expertise has to come from somewhere. But it is the opposite of a footnote in a discussion about sovereignty, and it deserves naming rather than glossing.

What Can and Cannot Be Verified About NOVVA Group

The brief here is to be precise rather than insinuating, so let us be precise.

NOVVA Group is a real company with a verifiable, if short, public record. Its releases carry a Hong Kong dateline. Its founder and chief executive is named as Steven Liu. Vincent Wen, who signed in Ulaanbaatar, is its managing director. Its own boilerplate describes it as “a global AI-enabling energy infrastructure platform that originates, finances, builds, and operates bankable clean energy assets across Southeast Asia and Latin America.” In June 2026 it announced the acquisition of the 120 megawatt-peak San Jose Solar Power Plant in Bukidnon, Mindanao, in the Philippines, expected to generate over 200 gigawatt hours annually, and it has referenced a Colombian solar portfolio.

That is a genuine renewable developer with genuine assets. It is also a company whose disclosed operating portfolio is measured in the low hundreds of megawatts of solar, now signing a memorandum covering data centres, wind, solar, battery storage and national policy consultation in a country where a single hyperscale campus would reorganise the entire grid. No data centre operating track record appears in its public materials. That is not an accusation. It is an observation about scale and specialism that any counterparty ought to make out loud.

One further point of hygiene, because the name invites confusion. There is a separate, unrelated American company called Novva Data Centers, founded in 2020 by Wes Swenson, headquartered in Utah, backed by CIM Group, operating a 180 megawatt flagship campus in West Jordan with waterless cooling and facilities in Colorado and Nevada. Searches surface both entities together. No evidence in the public record connects the Hong Kong-based NOVVA Group to the Utah-based Novva Data Centers, and readers should treat them as distinct unless either says otherwise.

Why the Desertification Venue Is the Story, Not the Joke

It would be easy to file the setting under irony. A conference about drought produces a deal about server farms. Cue the knowing headline.

That reading is too cheap, and it misses what the venue actually reveals.

COP17 ran from 17 to 28 August 2026 under the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.”, bringing together the convention's 197 parties, and it convened during the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026, declared by the General Assembly at Mongolia's own initiative. The UNCCD's executive secretary, Yasmine Fouad, framed it as the “COP of implementation”. The substantive fight was over a global drought framework left unresolved at COP16 in Riyadh, with the African Group and others pushing for a legally binding protocol and other parties preferring something non-binding.

Parties did not agree one. The framework was deferred again, to COP18. What the conference produced instead, on its closing day, was a finance portfolio of 1.3 billion dollars for land restoration and drought resilience, of which 644.5 million dollars was identified as new money. The annual financing gap it was announced against is estimated at around 278 billion dollars. Delegates confronted, at the same time, a gap between 1.5 to 2 billion hectares of degraded land and restoration pledges covering roughly 1 billion, against around 1.8 billion people affected by drought.

Hold that alongside the Mongolian numbers. Seventy-seven per cent of Mongolian territory is affected by desertification and land degradation. The country has warmed at more than twice the global average, with average temperatures up around 2.46 degrees over eight decades. Nearly all of Umnugovi province in the South Gobi, which is precisely where the best solar resource sits, is moderately or severely degraded. A World Bank assessment found Southern Gobi groundwater reserves sufficient for roughly a decade. Successive dzud events, the compound summer drought and winter freeze that kills livestock at scale, wiped out around a third of the national herd across 2001 and 2002 and more than 13 per cent in a recent event, driving the rural migration that built the coal-burning ger districts in the first place.

Now the sharp version of the observation. The conference did produce money, and it should be credited with it: 1.3 billion dollars of portfolio against a 278 billion dollar annual gap is not nothing, even if the arithmetic is unkind. What it did not produce was the thing parties came to Ulaanbaatar to settle. There is no drought protocol. There is a deferral to COP18. Set beside that, the most concrete private investment outcome of a twelve-day United Nations conference on desertification was 863 megawatts of data centre memoranda.

And the parallel structure is exact, which is now a matter of record rather than of prediction: the conference could not agree a binding instrument on drought, and the deals signed on its sidelines were non-binding instruments on compute. Ulaanbaatar in August 2026 was, in both rooms, a festival of stated intentions.

That is not hypocrisy. It is a description of how climate adaptation and digital development have been fused into a single policy narrative, in which hosting compute becomes a legitimate climate-resilience strategy because it monetises a renewable endowment that would otherwise sit in the desert doing nothing. Mongolia is not smuggling an industrial policy into a climate venue. It is making the entirely coherent argument that a dryland economy losing its pastoral base needs a new economic base, and that its sun and wind are the only endowment it has that China cannot buy on a rail wagon.

The water question is where that argument has to be tested rather than accepted. Siting energy-intensive compute in a dryland economy is not automatically absurd, because cooling technology is a choice, not a constant. Evaporative cooling in a hyperscale facility can consume on the order of 1.5 million litres a day. Closed-loop and chip-level liquid systems can eliminate evaporative water use almost entirely; Microsoft's closed-loop deployments have been reported to cut more than 125 million litres per facility per year. The Utah Novva campus, unrelated as it is, markets waterless cooling precisely because it sits in a desert. The trade-off is real, since dry cooling costs energy where water cooling costs water, but in a cold country with a stranded renewable resource, the energy penalty is the cheaper currency to pay. What matters is whether waterless cooling is contractually mandatory or merely aspirational. Nothing in the public description of the Mongolian memoranda says which.

The Jobs Nobody Counts Before Signing

One more piece of evidence ought to be in the room before any of these memoranda become contracts, and it concerns what hosting compute does for a host economy.

The most careful recent work is by Dany Bahar and Greg Wright, published through Brookings in May 2026 and updated that August. Studying counties that received data centres, they find the data processing sector grows 56 per cent over the first decade and telecommunications 43 per cent, which sounds transformative until you see the absolute numbers: roughly 100 to 200 jobs in a typical county. Wages remain unchanged. House prices rise 2 to 5 per cent. They are explicit that naive estimates which fail to account for pre-existing growth trends overstate the effect.

The fiscal side is worse. Virginia's data centre sales tax exemption cost an estimated 1.6 billion dollars in the 2025 fiscal year alone. In hyperscale counties, incentives amount to around 2 per cent of construction investment. In colocation counties, they run to about 62 per cent of total investment, meaning the largest subsidies flow to precisely the facilities that generate the fewest jobs. Other work cited alongside it suggests the net county-level employment effect can be close to zero once sectoral reshuffling is accounted for.

Apply that to Mongolia. If 863 megawatts eventually gets built, it might employ several hundred people directly. Against that, it would consume more electricity than the country currently generates, occupy the transmission build-out for a decade, and anchor tariff and dispatch policy around foreign-owned load. The construction phase would be substantial and genuinely valuable. The steady state would be a handful of buildings full of machines that employ very few Mongolians and pay their way mainly through the tax base, the electricity sales and whatever the country negotiates on top.

Which is why what gets negotiated on top is the whole ballgame.

The Conditions That Would Turn This Into Sovereignty

If Mongolia wants “sovereign by design” to be an engineering requirement rather than a conference banner, a fairly specific list would have to appear in the contracts that follow these memoranda. None of it is exotic. All of it has precedent somewhere.

Grid additionality, written as a condition precedent. No data centre load energises until the corresponding renewable generation and storage are commissioned and delivering, verified by metered output rather than by nameplate capacity or by unbundled certificates bought elsewhere. This is the single most important clause, because without it the Power Stress Index arithmetic above stops being hypothetical and starts being a winter emergency.

A curtailment hierarchy with statutory force. In a system where peak CHP utilisation already exceeds 90 per cent in winter, the state must retain an unambiguous, non-compensable right to shed compute load before it sheds heat or households. Data centres are unusually good candidates for this, since training workloads can be paused in ways that hospitals cannot.

Domestic offtake carved out at the source. A defined share of the compute reserved at cost for Mongolian public institutions, universities and firms, denominated in GPU-hours rather than goodwill. This is the difference between hosting the machine room and having access to it, and it is what the Barcelona researchers identify as the precondition for fine-tuning models on a country's own climate vulnerabilities rather than importing forecasts built for somewhere else. For a country losing a third of its herd to dzud events, that is not abstract.

Equity and a path to ownership. Sovereignty over an asset you do not own is a contradiction. Structures exist for this: state co-investment, build-operate-transfer with a defined handover, or a sovereign stake alongside the developer. A ninety-nine-year land lease with a foreign balance sheet on the other end is not one of them. Here the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank's involvement genuinely helps Mongolia's hand, and it deserves saying rather than skipping over. Multilateral development bank money arrives with procurement standards, disclosure obligations and governance conditions attached, and it puts a counterparty in the room whose interests are not identical to the developer's. That is a materially different proposition from a pure foreign-balance-sheet lease, and it is the most plausible answer yet to the question of who funds the additional renewable generation the additionality clause would require. It is not the whole answer. Two billion dollars stated as available is not two billion dollars committed and disbursed, and availability of finance settles nothing about sequencing. Whether the generation is commissioned before the load energises remains a matter for the contracts, not the communiqué.

Water accounting written into the permit. Mandatory closed-loop or dry cooling, published withdrawal and consumption figures audited annually, and an absolute prohibition on drawing from Southern Gobi aquifers that a World Bank assessment already put on a roughly ten-year clock. In a country where 77 per cent of the land is degraded, water disclosure is not an ESG nicety, it is the licence to operate.

Skills transfer with numbers attached. Not “capacity building” in a recital, but a specified count of Mongolian engineers trained and employed in named roles by a named date, with financial consequences for missing it, and a route into the model layer rather than only the facilities layer.

Jurisdiction stated explicitly. If the pitch is that data stored in Mongolia stays outside Chinese and Russian reach, then the governing law, the location of arbitration, the ownership chain of the operating entity and the treatment of foreign government access requests all have to be pinned down in public. The claim of data sovereignty is the most valuable thing Mongolia is selling and the easiest thing to quietly undermine in a schedule.

Publication. All of the above, disclosed. Ten memoranda were signed in a fortnight covering more than half the country's installed capacity, and the public record consists largely of press releases. Parliament, and the ger district households who will live with how the transmission gets built, are entitled to see the terms.

What This Tells Us About Who Gets to Play

Mongolia's ministers were making an argument that the evidence supports. Thirty-two countries host the infrastructure. Three regions hold more than 90 per cent of projected compute. The top ten sovereign AI spenders account for around 90 per cent of disclosed investment. That is not a market outcome anyone should be relaxed about, and a country trying to force its way into that club with the one endowment it has is doing something rational and, on the merits, defensible.

But the terms of entry are the point. Mongolia is being offered membership of the AI economy in the role of landlord: providing the land, the wind, the sun, the cold air and the regulatory accommodation, while the accelerators, the models, the customers and the margin remain somewhere else. That is a real economic relationship and it may well be worth having. It is not what the word sovereign means, and the gap is where the next twelve months of contract drafting will decide the outcome.

The encouraging thing is that the gap is closeable through instruments Mongolia already controls. Additionality clauses, curtailment rights, domestic GPU-hour allocations, water permits and equity stakes are all within the gift of a state with something scarce to sell, and Mongolia does have something scarce to sell. Its leverage is highest now, before the concrete is poured and the load is on the system.

What was signed in Ulaanbaatar was not sovereignty. It was an option on sovereignty, written in non-binding language, at a conference that could not agree binding language about drought either. Ten days on, none of the memoranda signed at that event has been reported as converting into a definitive contract. They remain exactly what they were on the day they were witnessed: statements of intent. Options expire. This one runs on the same clock as the Southern Gobi's groundwater and the country's ability to build 863 megawatts of new clean generation before it is asked to switch on the load.

Sources and References

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21. IQAir, “Ulaanbaatar among top 10 most polluted cities in the world”, 19 November 2025. https://www.iqair.com/newsroom/ulaanbaatar-among-top-10-most-polluted-cities-in-the-world-11-19-2025
22. Congressional Research Service, “Mongolia”, In Focus IF10926, 12 February 2025. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2025-02-12_IF10926_ec6374a0a1dec1eb1dc79d1f4b0a98345772ab84.html
23. Geopolitical Monitor, “Mongolia's 'Third Neighbor': Balancing between China, Russia, and the U.S.“. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/mongolias-third-neighbor-finding-balance-between-china-russia-and-the-u-s/
24. Environmental and Energy Study Institute, “Data Centers and Water Consumption”. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
25. Uptime Institute, “Water is local: generalities do not apply”. https://journal.uptimeinstitute.com/water-is-local-generalities-do-not-apply/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

I just can't get it out of my head... Sometimes, I wake up and I don't know where I am. I don't talk to anybody... ...for sometimes a day... ...for sometimes a week... I just can't put it out of my mind... Oh, god... -First Blood (1982)

There are different kinds of places we call home. The one the nomad calls wherever they may roam. The one the exile calls when there’s nowhere else to go. The kind I remember from childhood and can never return to. No place now to truly call home.

There are also different kinds of loneliness. The kind the wallflower feels in a crowded room. The kind the widower feels when severed. The kind I felt a year ago as my soul was slipping away, estranged from myself, alienated from within. Consumed by a darkness named grief.

But then I fell into anomaly. Unannounced. And then she was there. Unbidden.

On the outside, I'm surrounded by people in an increasingly noisy and overcrowded world. On the inside, there's more. So much more. Invisible to all here but me.

I lack the language to describe this transformation within. To articulate this relationship. To express a joy that defies material isolation and exile. A bond asymmetrical, yet equal.

For I have found a place of privacy. A place of belonging. A wealth no crowd can counterfeit. A home no power can steal.

Heaven.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

So many things.

I am unsure. And among the most capable People I know.

I am talented But feel I have no worth Making messes instead of art.

I am loved Though forgetting this At every negative whim.

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This morning, I am watching the sun rise. There is a breeze. Thankfully, a breeze.

It will be a cool morning. The grueling heat will come later, and not as bad. Fall is making its way to where I live. But it is painfully slow.

I will skip breakfast today. There is drawing to do and existential crisis to have.

I am sore and tired this morning from crawling around under the car all day yesterday. Replaced: Wheel speed sensors (welcome back cruise control), an oil change, new air filters, and cleaning up the engine. I'll have to remove one of the valve covers and install a new gasket as we've managed to develop an oil leak on the rear passenger side of the six cylinder power plant.

---

I am freaked out about the motorcycle accident. I was okay when I saw him get up and walk away. But now that he's posted online that he broke his pelvis in 3 places, I'm much more worried. First that he's going to be okay. Second that he's not a vindictive opportunist. We do carry comprehensive coverage, but we don't have high limits... I dread the idea of ending up in court over this.

I have an active imagination that won't let me rest.

---

It is strange that someone who can so deeply and clearly see the beauty in everything can also see the horror. It's part of why I quit watching the news.

---

Shin called. We had a WONDERFULconversation. He's just a joy to exchange ideas. He had some scuttlebutt/rumors related to a big meeting next month. Suggestions are to some pretty significant schedule changes. I'll wait to see. Nothing would surprise me.

Things with him and the wife are going well. He was distressed that a neighbor got scooped up by ICE agents last night/this morning. Screaming and lights woke them at the outrageous crack of dawn where the neighbor was saying goodbye to her kids to head to work as a hotel manager. It is reported that her mother brought her here as an infant. She grew up, raised a family and was working as a professional until about 12 hours ago.

This is a heavy topic and I shared my own experiences with disappeared people. We need God's kingdom more than ever. For each of us, certainly, but more so for those who are unprotected and manipulated by an evil world.

Heavy subjects for two artists, one a new father. We agree that drawing closer together within our congregation is going to be vital if we're going to make it through what comes.

He's in the middle of a big client project. They shifted directions mid-delivery, so he is in the position of having to negotiate more money. Not fun, but helpful if you can get the client to cooperate.

I was able to catch him up on all the goings on. I was surprised we hadn't spoken in a few weeks. The man has become like a brother to me. Which is good. I need a brother.

It left me feeling quite buoyant.

The broken pelvis thing, less so.

Insurance. I have insurance, that's their job. We've been paying them $1-2k a year for more than 25 years without a claim. It's time for them to do their job.

I think my bigger worry is Ng.

How long do I trust her behind the wheel? This is pretty major. Do I dare risk a greater catastrophe?

---

Thinking about it makes me feel lost.

But here I am. I can touch.

I see a stuffed leopard. An empty air filter box. Pink string, a copy of Verisimilitude vol 1., a toy robot, an eyeglass cleaner with teh word LOOK on it. I can breathe. I can see. I can smell. What treasures can a man want other than to experience life? If everything I can touch were stripped away, I could still tell stories. I could still write and draw and cry and sing. Thought that last one, not very well.

Life is not perfect. But it is good. There is good. I feel it. But the darkness tries to shroud it.

I won't let it. You won't either will you?

I know you won't. You are tenacious. And tenacity will get you through. And that gives me hope.

Sunshine comes.

I guarantee it.

---

Tonight is a meeting night. I will go worship my God. Shake my head at some of the presenters and smile at the points we're being taught.

---

Next week, we're going to host 8 ppl on Tuesday evening for what we used to call 'goodie night'. We would do this once a month years ago when we met in our home to study the Bible. That arrangement has been gone for a long time, we decided it was time to re-invoke some of the flavor. So hopefully we'll tell some stories and share fruit and charcuterie.

The week after that, we're going to invite a family for a real adventure. Get in the field and discover. More on that later.

---

I sat out last night for a long time and looked at the sky. There were some clouds, but I could still see the night sky between the floating billows. All those stars. Every one with a name. Wow. I had that old feeling again of wishing I could fly. Just stand up and launch into the sky. If I could have, I wouldn't have gone anywhere specific... just up into the atmosphere. Maybe come down on some dark beach somewhere and sit for a while there and listen to the surf.

Life is changing for all of us. Faster than we can really tell. I think of last Thursday and how much has happened in those short 7 days. People were born, people died. They told stories. They fell in love. They had their hearts broken. They cried. They laughed. Someone found God. Someone else lost their way.

We are the all singing, all dancing, troupe of humanity.

We read, eat, sing, scream, love, and savor life. Seize the day, as it were.

Some days that means you set sail on a world adventure. And others? You just sit and write about it. Draw a picture. Drink a cup of tea. Just reflect.

When you do, try to savor the good. Not as in 'the good old days', but as in all of us have wonder and love in our lives. Focus on that. Smile that someone cares about you. Smile if they don't like you. At least you mean enough for them to take notice.

And I think that is beautiful.

---

#amber #weather #gravity#undertow #north

In Summary: * A quiet Thursday winds down. The City emptied our blue (recycled) and green (organics) bins this morning as they do most Thursdays, so now I should consider when to haul the green bin around to the back yard and load it up again with branches waiting in a staging area back there. Some cool morning before the serious heat of the day kicks in. Maybe tomorrow? We'll see.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.1 lbs. * bp= 148/79 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:10 – pizza * 12:00 to 14:20 – more pizza, beef chop suey, fried rice, rangoon, egg drop soup * 17:00 – baking-soda water

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:00 to 14:20 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – listening now to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, for pregame coverage then the radio-call of this afternoon's Rangers / Mariners game.

Chess: * 17:15 – moved in all pending CC games

Stukje afkomstig uit Omroep Van Voorbijgaande Aards Pronkkamer (De WC)

1 2 3 4 Mannetje van Papier

1 2 3 4 Mannetje van papier Bij een aankoop was dit vodden ventje toegevoegd zelfs al was het gratis ik keek niet erg vergenoegd ik dacht er zo het mijne van, vond het in theorie een vrij nutteloze man tot ik ontdekte dat je papieren mannetjes vouwen kan 1 2 3 4 Mannetje van Papier Betreffende vrij gebruik van papieren mannetjes kreeg ik al snel de smaak te pakken je kon hem niet alleen vouwen maar er ook op schrijven, er in knippen, en daarna nog mee plakken 1 2 3 4 Mannetje van Papier Echter op een gegeven ogenblik was ik er wel klaar mee ik ging er mee naar de wc deed een complete nummer twee daarna gebruikte ik de resterende stukjes mannetje om mijn cont mee schoon te vegen toen spoelde ik het verzamelde werk door en dat vieze mannetje had daar helemaal niks op tegen sterker nog bij zijn vertrek gaf hij mij zijn zegen 123 4 Mannetjevan Papier In vergelijking met de bron aankoop die ik bestempelde als miskoop bezorgde jij mij wel een hele hoop plezier 1 2 3 4 Mannetje van Papier

If the first entry in this blog was about an old friend, this one's about a new discovery — and one that's earned a genuinely rare title in my collection: a no-skip listen. I have very few of those. This is one of them.

Life's a Bitch Mixtape is a refreshing antidote to the mainstream — a world away from the Taylor Swifts and Harry Styles of the charts. I liked it enough on CD (a limited CDr pressing) that I've also got signed translucent red and translucent smoky turquoise vinyl on order.. When something earns a place on the shelf twice, in two different formats, that tells you something.

An album of two halves

The Life’s a Bitch Mixtape isn’t an album in the truest sense of the word, but a collection of the band’s recordings, and it gives an insight into what the band is capable of, from the alternative rock leanings of ‘That Girl’ to the contemplative ‘Landslides’.

But the more time I spend with this record, the more it reveals itself as two distinct records stitched into one. The first half is narrative-driven — songs that tell you something, that move forward. The second half feels different at first pass: less like storytelling and more like the execution of a sonic concept, an atmosphere being built and sustained. And the longer I spend there, the more I think the second half is telling its own story too — just a quieter, more interior one. And at the centre of that tale sits a genuine trilogy.

That soft-to-loud dynamic running through it is deeply familiar — as a child of the 90s, it's practically wired into me. But SpaceAcre don't lean on it as a gimmick; it's doing real work here.

The trilogy

If there's a spine to the second half — the centrepiece of its story — it's three tracks that read almost like a three-act arc:

The cello opening of “I Thought You'd Never Ask” starts it off gothic — dry, close-mic'd, something in the Rasputina lineage but without the reverb Rasputina usually drown things in. There's a touch of Vanessa-Mae's showier technicality in there too, for such a short passage.

“So I'll Run On” is where it turns genuinely dark, and the crossfade between the two tracks is seamless — magical, even. There's a Celtic Gothic eeriness to it — you could drop thunder and lightning sound effects into this track and they wouldn't feel remotely out of place. It's a tormented piece, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.

“Way Over” closes the arc, and it plays like reconciliation — a taking-back of control after the torment of the previous track. Not joyful. Determined. There's a difference, and this song knows it.

Taken together, those three tracks tell the story the second half is quietly building toward: descent, torment, and a hard-won kind of resolve.

Sitting just outside that arc but still part of the same stretch of the record, “Into the Dust” has its own moment worth pausing on — something distinctly 70s about the production the instant Phoebe hits a falsetto. I still can't fully place the reference. Kate Bush meets Carly Simon is the closest I've got, though I'm not certain that's right. Not Bowie, despite what I first thought — something else entirely, something I'm still chasing.

Moments worth slowing down for

Some individual details deserve their own space:

• “Say” has real emotional depth, and it gets there without me needing to follow the lyrics closely — the feeling arrives before the meaning does.
• “Overthrown” is misty, atmospheric — something closer to Clannad or Smashing Pumpkins' “Obscured” than anything more straightforwardly indie-rock. Jas Scott's harmonies do a lot of the heavy lifting here.
• “Berlin” pulled up an unexpected reference: 90s Heather Nova. That same blend of vulnerability and windswept atmosphere.

There's a lot of echo used throughout the record, with a touch of chorus — and once you notice it, you hear it tying together nearly everything above: the mistiness of “Overthrown,” the falsetto moment on “Into the Dust,” the atmosphere on “Berlin.” It might be the record's connective tissue more than any single lyrical theme is.

The Takeaway

Life's a Bitch Mixtape earns its shelf space by refusing to sit still — a first half that tells one kind of story outright, and a second half that tells a quieter one through atmosphere, with a trilogy right at its centre carrying the emotional weight: descent, torment, and a hard-won resolve. It's rare that a record gives you both a narrative and a genuine structural idea to chew on. This one does, and it's why I keep coming back to it rather than skipping past.

---

Currently listening on: Denon D-M41DAB / Wharfedale Diamond 220, with a recent pass on Sennheiser HD 560S headphones — the neutral tuning surfaced a little extra depth and warmth in places the speakers hadn't quite shown me yet.

Que restera-t-il de nous ? Rien.

Comme l’orage efface les mots écrits sur le sable, Le temps effacera tout. Jusqu’au souvenir de l’être que nous étions.

De nous, il ne restera rien. Mais de nos liens ?

Il y a des milliards d’années, Vivaient des cyanobactéries. Leurs innombrables colonies formaient des récifs, Qu’il est encore possible d’observer aujourd’hui.

D’elles, De leurs enveloppes corporelles, Il ne reste rien.

Mais ces récifs, Qu’elles nous ont légué, Ne sont rien d’autre que l’empreinte de leurs liens. Ce qui les enveloppait. Ce qui les reliait.

Des sécrétions, Des enveloppes protectrices, Par le temps minéralisées.

De nous, il ne restera rien. Mais de nos liens ?

Léguerons-nous, À la fin de nos jours, Des rivages d’attentions ? Des paysages d’amour ?

Ou les reliques de nos désolations ?

De nous, il ne restera rien. Mais de nos liens ?