Challenge #9

The crew is finally reunited! Not a single person is missing. The fact that you all landed not only in the same region but also the same timeline of ancient history feels like a miracle.

Now you must make a plan together to return to your rightful time, and hopefully thwart Eos along the way.

First, the facts:

• You were all blasted backward through time when the Aurawroughts' machine collapsed. The pulse of its death throe scattered the crew into the past.
• Although Eos exists in this era, she knows nothing of you or the fate that awaits her (the galactic prison, and the attempts to free her). You are not being hunted. For now, this world is unaware of what she will become.

But the question looms: how do you get back?

The obvious solution is to send a message to your future selves to not destroy the Aurawroughts' machine. This will prevent you from being thrown into the past in the first place. This won't work, though, because Eos still has to be stopped. Unless… perhaps she doesn't. Maybe you can prevent her rise now, long before the Aurawroughts ever contact her. It's a dangerous tangle of timeline manipulation, but the stakes in your original future are too dire to ignore.

You inform the team of an interplanetary beacon that Eos had built for herself at the center of her Grand Temple, a fact you've discovered at the reliquary. This is what puts her in contact with the Aurawroughts in the first place. Destroying the beacon will prevent her autocratic rise to power.

You share your other discoveries from the reliquary, along with everything else you've learned on your travels. Most importantly, you inform the crew that the Grand Temple is guarded by a thousand golems crafted from the very same magical stones stolen from the bathhouse.

Admiral Grace Hopper, the STS Solara's cybersecurity specialist, suddenly snaps her fingers.

"To stop a system like those golems," she says, "we need a 'good worm'… a defensive virus we infect a single golem with. If it propagates properly, it'll spread to the rest and neutralize them." She turns to you. "Do we know anything that weakens or disrupts these stones?"

You immediately remember the bathing-pool posters. No Gourds. The gourds have an adverse interaction with the stone. Grace's eyes light up. "We can engineer a bio-agent from the gourd itself," she says, "something that spreads by contact from golem to golem."

But first, you need gourds.