Santova 2022/08/02(Tue)19:44 No. 1039859 ID: 3f01d5
File 165949466258.png - (898.06KB , 804x536 , counterintuitive.png )

rolled 20, 1, 10, 9, 7, 5, 4, 3, 5, 14, 15, 5, 10, 2, 16, 4, 12, 2, 1, 9 = 154

---

>>1039794
>>1039780
Paprika runs down the mountainside for hours, with Natalina in pursuit, a zigzagging trail of nightmare-fire and space-splintered rock as they skip over switchbacks and shout impassioned arguments that are mostly lost to wind noise. On arrival back at the half-evacuated town, Paprika is incoherent with exhaustion and rage. Elanyah's bodyguard observes what appears to be a blatant assassination attempt against one of the parties engaged in negotiations, and with a flick of the wrist sends both sprinters plummeting together into the sky, like a falling star in reverse.

Natalina and Paprika pass through the Death Zone, lose consciousness, wake up two steps down the damage track in an unfamiliar environment, or possibly an exceptionally vivid shared dream. Both are weak and nauseous, probably wouldn't be able to stand unaided if not for the fact of also feeling light as a feather. Push off with the force of an ordinary footstep, takes five heartbeats before reaching the floor again.

First room: about fifteen or twenty meters wide, eight high. Roughly hexagram shaped, with six aneen-sized alcoves. Well, five alcoves, plus a door shaped like a giant gear. Four are empty, while the one directly opposite the door has a metallic statue bearing an uncanny resemblance to Milaconi Whose Mere Touch Can Heal Or Slay, at least based on Reiko's descriptions and artistic depictions. Ceiling has a dome or something eight meters in diameter, showing starry night sky and a solar eclipse.

Second room: gear shaped door has triangular windows with rounded corners and a glossy black panel in the center. Touching that causes it to roll aside, revealing an antiseptic-white hallway, curved like a corkscrew down and to the right, punctuated by curtains of oddly cohesive smoke or fog. Is it getting narrower, or are you growing larger? Pleasant tingling sensation where the swirling particles touch your skin. Overall condition improves from "debilitated" to "impaired" without costing a recovery roll. Head still feels like somebody tried to clean out your earwax with a pickaxe.

Third room: past the last smoke curtain and another gear-door. Fifteen meters wide, floor and ceiling about four meters apart, both dappled grey synth with protrusions shaped like mushrooms. Average is waist high, but there's a lot of variety, larger flat-topped type surrounded by clusters of smaller, rounder ones. Clear synth cylinders with a wide assortment of colorful contents - green slime, red pebbles, what might be puffed rice, etc. - all around the perimeter wall, and at the bases of some of the larger mushroom structures too. Previous two were oddly devoid of scent, but this one reeks like an alchemy lab, and something worse is up ahead.

Fourth room: Door is an inert panel on a simple spring-loaded hinge. Previous two might have been airtight, this clearly isn't. A Y-shaped path, bordered by canvas privacy screens attached to the floor and ceiling with elastic cords, divides the room into three sections, each about six meters high and wide. One has a lathe and other reasonably comprehensible machine tools, the next has snarls of plumbing focused around coffin-sized upright cylinders of pink ice, the last has... well, they might be chairs, or torture devices. Four of them, sized for humanoids about three meters tall. Two vacant, two occupied by mummified corpses.
One of the exits, between the lathe and the chairs, is crudely barricaded, while the other, between chairs and ice, is padded for soundproofing but opens easily.

Fifth room: through the soundproofed door, similar size and shape to the fourth, but everything is black velvet. Y-shaped path is a raised catwalk with chest-high handrails between pits in the floor. One has stacks of quilted fabric, another is packed full of hollow fist-sized synth spheres, the third is flooded with warm salty water. Both exits (besides the way you came in) are gear-doors without windows. One is already open, the other only acknowledges your touch with an angry honk.

Sixth room: by far the smallest, roughly a four-meter cube with no other apparent exits. Everything is gleaming polished metal. Dozens of baffling curvilinear fixtures, at least some of which seem to be trapped - first one you poke whips out a small razor on a mechanical arm which flails around for a few seconds before withdrawing.

>>1039791
Reiko attempts to follow the pair back down the mountainside, but can't keep pace. Tayle the Chirurgeon is even further behind.

Reiko barges in on the preliminary negotiations, introduces herself with what seems like an appropriate degree of informality ("My full name is a killing word which the very spirits of the Datasphere dare not speak") and proposes:
-That the site of the former bathhouse be ceded to the King Under The Mountain, for use as an embassy
-That the Volcano Tamer installation be dismantled (she volunteers to do that part of the work herself)
-That components salvaged from the Volcano Tamer be used for embassy construction, as an initial symbolic step toward reparations
-That seismic stabilization services equivalent to the installation's benefits be provided by the King Under the Mountain as part of a mutual nonaggression pact
-That a Farspeaking Pylon be constructed for embassy use, at Tayle's expense apart from material known as Quantium, which the King Under The Mountain should provide

Elanyah asks what her employer would be receiving in exchange for that iotum. Reiko replies that if plans for the farspeaking pylon alone aren't enough (and, admittedly, she's still assembling / unpacking those, based on cross-reference of volcano tamer innards with chainpod dashboard navigation systems), they could deliver steel spiders or other salvage from under the Eye of the Sea - two live specimens are already captured and ready for transport.

Mia Xan asks where Tayle is supposed to be getting food, let alone wages, for the workers needed to build a suitable embassy, and what they could possibly use as fireproof building material if the nonaggression terms prohibit quarrying local bedrock - which Elanyah agrees they almost certainly will.

At that very moment, Eliznyabeth comes crashing in through the wall, having slightly misjudged safe stopping distance when the rear chainpods are overloaded and one of them doesn't have a working drive mechanism. She disembarks, shows her cousin the paperwork. Elanyah confirms that the King Under the Mountain has had past dealings with the First Bank of Ephremon, through intermediaries in Vebar beneath the Amorphous Fields, and so would accept it as proof of creditworthiness. Then Eliznyabeth explains that she's going to need help preserving three tons of meat before it spoils. Oh, and she also got a minor status update from the mysterious patron who sent them on this quest in the first place. Y'know, the one who claimed to be able to extrude vast quantities of shapestone from almost anywhere on the ground?

The smell of hours-old blood mixed with trampled tallgrass and the whir of machinery spinning down brings bad memories to the front of Reiko's mind. She's shaking slightly, staring at something beyond the horizon. Takes a step back and crosses her arms. Mia Xan, looking at her but not quite seeing, says "I suppose you're right, nothing more need be said. Sounds like a very solid plan."
> rolled 18, 14, 1
GM intrusion, traumatic flashback in this case means you're stunned for a few minutes and take ten points of intellect damage.

rolled 4 + 2 = 6

---

>>1039880
>Mia Xan: How will you deal with logistics?
"W-well, I happen to... erm... would they be interested? I don't know if they actually cover catering... I mean, if I remember correctly, House... erm... what did those business partners do again? Something... rocks? No, no, I think it was salt... and... no, no, wait, the cattle barons got pissed off at us... I think... and House Sparlow is definitely not going to work with us, those assholes tried to-"

>Eliznyabeth bursts through the wall.
"... Hot damn, I need to stick with you gals. You seem to have the *sniff* solu-urk?!"

>Trauma
As Reiko grows nauseous from the stench of big game, her vision swims in simple sparks of light waving into existence and then flickering out as their trails fade. Flashes of red interlace her vision. As she tries to concentrate, her hearing tunes out to the sound of a radio, as loud blaring explosions swarm around her. The visions are back.
"P-p-lease excuse me I nnneed to iron out my brain."
Reiko manages to stumble outside and somewhere near the town's entrance before collapsing into sobbing jitters, occasionally forcing herself to vomit as her stomach commits seppuku over and over.

After the PTSD episode, she walks to the local workshop. Playing with the tools there helps her mind calm down. (Recovery Roll, all to Intellect)

rolled 14, 10, 2, 15, 7, 8, 9, 18, 11, 8, 1, 4, 15, 19, 7, 20, 8, 2, 5, 5 = 188

---

Natalina feels disoriented and confused, and her head and eye are throbbing again. Did they really run for... hours? It felt like a snap decision, but it just went on, like some kind of trance. If they were thrown, how did they end up indoors—that first room did have a dome of strong-glass or transparent synth, didn't it? The discontinuity only adds to the dreamlike quality of their current environment.

"I don't know about you, but I really need a rest after that."

Going to retrieve some of the quilted fabric from room 5, and then spend an hour resting with Paprika in the first room, applying the recovery roll to move back up the health track instead of recovering points.

rolled 4 = 4

---

>>1039993

>>1039993
Paprika sits cross-legged next to Natalina on the quilts, scrawling out a rough map and notes with a furrowed brow and shaky hands. "I'm so sorry I got you into this mess. Wherever we are..."

>applying the recovery roll to move back up the health track instead of recovering points.
Same here, also giving Natalina 1XP for the GM intrusion.

rolled 1, 13, 19, 19, 2, 5, 1, 17, 4, 14, 11, 10, 6, 9, 19, 10, 4, 17, 2, 10 = 193

---

Forgot to roll

>>1040037
You've got sticks of chalk and charcoal for sketching, but the parchment set aside for maps is... well, way too parched. So dry and brittle, it's like trying to write on a fried potato chip. Any leather bits in your clothes (boots, belt, etc) feel like they haven't been properly oiled in months, and so are similarly at risk of structural failure without reasonably prompt maintenance. You're also really, really thirsty, but your canteen's half-empty, and what's in there is mostly a solid block of ice.

>>1039844
>>1039846
>>1039859
Saoirse, Mask, and Old Grundle, scouting out the relatively small rubble-choked room marked "x" on the map, dig up a set of six sinister hovering orbs, about half a meter in diameter - slightly larger than the steel spiders. Upon being released they bob up to head height like corks in a stream. Mask discovers that they can follow directions in the form of traditional whistles and hand gestures used for falconry: "go over there," "come back," "circle around looking for trouble," "kill what I'm pointing at" (unlike actual falcons, they're willing to attack rocks, intensifying that cherry-red beam they constantly emit until it drills straight through, but they don't seem to eat), "stop," "don't bite that person's face, they're a friend," and so on.

All three of them get 1 xp each for the discovery. Also found six shins and three units of parts.

Through the entrance numbered 11, no monowire webs are found within broom reach, but there are some thick coiling vines or cables up near the ceiling.

That first big room, southeast of point H, has four shinspinners (previously described here: >>1037851 ). Two of them are frantically working cranks on the spindly brass tripod holding up what looks like an enormous conch shell, pivoting it around so that the narrow end points toward you. A third races across catwalks four or five meters off the ground, apparently headed for a cluster of vines just above the entrance. Last one chitters and squeaks and jangles a ring of keys.

Potential GM intrusion: due to that nat 1 Santova rolled, key-wielding shinspinner seizes command of the hovering orbs, who immediately turn and make a coordinated attack on Mask.

rolled 3, 3, 4, 6, 16, 19, 1, 13, 14, 7, 6, 16, 2, 8, 10, 15, 10, 7, 18, 20 = 198

---

To Reiko's delight, a quick test reveals that the boost to her processing power means she no longer gets a headache when she uses her scan tool. She decides to scan the burnt-out husks of buildings and the beach for traces of iotum.

Then Reiko remembers she left Mia and Elanyah with someone who burst through a wall.
Reiko hurries back, though using one of her furs as a scarf mask may not be the best idea.
"Sorry about that. I can't be around rotting meat for too long."
Reiko has the nagging feeling she has forgotten something. Aside from fixing the chainpods, fixing her arm, 'fixing' the Volcano Tamer by deconstructing it into a million new embassy parts, fixing Paprika from her flaming fugue-
"Wait, where's Paprika?"

rolled 9, 8, 14, 1, 20, 9, 17, 11, 6, 10, 10, 3, 1, 6, 6, 20, 9, 17, 12, 14 = 203

---

>>1040044
"Are you all right? You look worse than I feel."

>after an hour, back to hale
"This morning we faced fire, this afternoon snow and a sphere of water, and tonight... I'm not even sure how to describe this place." Natalina's going to start figuring out their surroundings. (I figure more exploration will follow, but might as well start with answering some questions about the first room).

Is the sky above the right sky? Does it contain the north star, any well known constellations, familiar moon(s), or whatever the equivalent of those things are in the ninth world? The duo are lacking the necessary tools to determine lat and long from the stars, but they can still make a quick reality check. Has the solar eclipse progressed over the course of an hour? (No looking directly at the sun, even eclipsed). If it's unchanged, that might mean that's an image rather than the live sky.

Not touching yet, but any indication the metallic statue is actually an automaton? Seams, joints, wear marks or scuff marks on it or its surroundings? Is it small enough to fit through the door to the spiral hallway?

Any sign of how they arrived in the room with the skylight? Is the dome above covered or sealed? Any seams or markings in the room that might indicate concealed doors to the outside?

Now that we're less out of it, maybe pay more attention to the "healing fog"? Does it have any noticeable effect besides the tingling sensation? If it does have medical properties, might be worth trying to collect some later, once we have containers for it.

Natalina's training in perception, detecting differences, and/or noticing flaws or strengths from Cultured is probably relevant to most of that, and the inability in understanding numenera to some of that. The arkus will take the time to apply Understanding to each thing she's examining.

>>1040163
>Is the sky above the right sky? Does it contain the north star, any well known constellations, familiar moon(s), or whatever the equivalent of those things are in the ninth world?
It's the left sky. Familiar constellations around the horizon, most of which wouldn't normally be visible at this time of year, plus central sections that are never visible in the part of the world you're from.
>Has the solar eclipse progressed over the course of an hour?
It has, though not as far as you'd expect if time was passing at the usual rate and the sun and moon were still approximately the same apparent size.

There's another occlusion, like a dark egg, large and nearby enough you can triangulate it just by walking around to different parts of the room. If this was a barn sized for aneen, that shape would be in the hayloft directly above Milaconi's twin sister, large enough for another such pair of twins to hatch out of as full-grown adults, though perhaps not sufficient for triplets. Could probably get a better look at it if you lit a torch or glowglobe and/or climbed up there.

>any indication the metallic statue is actually an automaton? Seams, joints, wear marks or scuff marks on it or its surroundings?
Abundant signs, including a half-meter-wide hatch on top. Could easily enough pop the manual release and see what's inside. Looks like it was sitting there undisturbed for at least a couple hundred years before you arrived. Lots of activity in the baffling abyss of time before that, though. Wear marks and wall fixtures in the other four alcoves suggest they're each meant for another automata of similar size but significantly different body plan.
>Is it small enough to fit through the door to the spiral hallway?
Yes - past the first fog-screen, anyway. Beyond that it'd be an increasingly tight squeeze. You'd need more information about exact dimensions, range of motion on those joints, etc. to say for sure whether it could crawl all the way through to the barricaded or honking doors without demolition work.

> Does [the "healing fog"] have any noticeable effect besides the tingling sensation?
Primary function seems to be cleaning. It disintegrates plucked or cut hairs, but not those still rooted, even if the actual break point is still some distance away from the curtain. Interface panel in the wall nearby (inconveniently far above eye level) seems to be for calibration or supplementary effects. One such setting resharpens Paprika's sword. Not just grinding it like a whetstone, but actually adding new material, filling an old notch in one edge... plus scalpel-like extension to a fingernail on the hand that was holding it. Probably something on that menu could perform the necessary maintenance for your various leather goods, but the wrong setting might finish wrecking them, or do bad things to your actual flesh.
>If it does have medical properties, might be worth trying to collect some later, once we have containers for it.
Container would need to be something special, the stuff seems to either actively flee or go inert when scooped away from those arches set into the walls.

rolled 3, 13, 6, 3, 13, 6, 15, 2, 7, 18, 11, 20, 4, 19, 8, 14, 13, 4, 15, 5 = 199

---

>>1040044
Paprika crumbles her paper a bit in frustration, then lies face down on the quilts.

>"Are you all right? You look worse than I feel."
"Nn 'ink so." She says a few more words too muffled to comprehend.

>Hours rest
>"This morning we faced fire, this afternoon snow and a sphere of water, and tonight... I'm not even sure how to describe this place."
"It's been an eventful day! ...it's only been a day, right?"

>There's another occlusion, like a dark egg, large and nearby enough you can triangulate it just by walking around to different parts of the room ... Could probably get a better look at it if you lit a torch or glowglobe and/or climbed up there.
Paprika will climb up and get a closer look. "Could you hand me a torch, Nat?"

>metallic statue
>half-meter-wide hatch on top
Since she's already climbing around all over this room, Paprika will get up there and pop open the hatch.

>One such setting resharpens Paprika's sword.
Paprika will test the sharpness on some of her dried parchment.

>interface panel
Can we mess with the settings without standing in the fog, then experiment by throwing various materials through?

>Primary function seems to be cleaning.
"Ahh...hey I need a moment." Paprika will take the time to fireproof her belongings again once they're done experimenting in room 2.

In the first room, Paprika will use her charcoal to scribble a map on the floor, leaving a few black handprints here and there. In addition to the areas they've explored, she'll take notes on what the different settings on the interface panel in room 2 do.

She'll also take a closer look at those mushrooms in room 3, as well as the synth tanks. Are there any more interface panels in this room she can play with?

rolled 5, 9, 20, 6, 8, 7, 1, 4, 6, 11, 3, 15, 5, 6, 11, 7, 13, 20, 8, 7 = 172

---

>Familiar constellations around the horizon, most of which wouldn't normally be visible at this time of year, plus central sections that are never visible in the part of the world you're from.
"Far from home... but at least not somewhere stranger."

>Not just grinding it like a whetstone, but actually adding new material, filling an old notch in one edge... plus scalpel-like extension to a fingernail on the hand that was holding it.
"Ah, excellent, we've discovered where we can get our nails done. That's one necessity taken care of then!" Natalina jokes. (She's not going to stick her family blade in their right now, though).

>Interface panel in the wall nearby (inconveniently far above eye level) seems to be for calibration or supplementary effects.
>Probably something on that menu could perform the necessary maintenance for your various leather goods, but the wrong setting might finish wrecking them, or do bad things to your actual flesh.
>Can we mess with the settings without standing in the fog, then experiment by throwing various materials through?
Perhaps we should save further experimentation until after we locate a stool or ladder, or some other means of getting a good look at the control panel? If we accidentally change the settings to something harmful (say, changing what the fog disintegrates) that could leave us trapped on one side.

>Paprika will climb up and get a closer look. "Could you hand me a torch, Nat?"
Natalina will pass Paprika a torch from the explorer's pack the glaive left on the ground when she started climbing.

>She'll also take a closer look at those mushrooms in room 3, as well as the synth tanks.
Natalina will join in examining the equipment in the third room (after Paprika is done climbing around the first room). If it's some kind of laboratory or storage, it might be a source of edible food or other useful materials we have in short supply. (Once again, training, Understanding and potentially an inability apply, and maybe teamwork?) Identifying the stuff in the synth containers, especially.

>>1040201
>>1040203
>Paprika will climb up and get a closer look. "Could you hand me a torch, Nat?"
Between low gravity and abundant handholds, climbing up is easy enough. Most of it is solid metal, but the top surface of the rim just below the "dome" seems to be padded with a ridged pattern of soft synth. Raise the torch more than a handspan above that level, flame goes out - not flickering from a strong wind, but almost instantly, as if you'd shoved it through thin ice into a lake. Pull back and it reignites.

Natalina, down below, got a better look at the "dark egg." Flat surface rather than curved, bulky hinge mechanism at the bottom.

> If we accidentally change the settings to something harmful (say, changing what the fog disintegrates) that could leave us trapped on one side.
It seems to revert to default settings if left alone for a few minutes.

>She'll also take a closer look at those mushrooms in room 3,
Rather than spores, the gills under the cap seem to serve more like the gills of a fish, for gas exchange. Smoke from the torch gets visibly slurped into one of them.
>Are there any more interface panels in this room she can play with?
Nothing fancy.
>as well as the synth tanks.
Simple enough mechanism. Met an aeon priest once using something similar to train rats. Tricky part is figuring out what you'll be getting.

Each cylinder has a pattern of raised bumps and ridges, nearly invisible from a distance or in bad light but possible to read by touch. Most of them are focused around a geometric diagram, paired with simplified heraldic images of animals, plants, and/or monsters. Diagram section includes no long curved lines, only straight segments between tiny symbols (lots of repetition among those, possibly single letters from an unfamiliar alphabet) at well defined points, which, along with the overall circular layout of the room and night-sky dome nearby, suggests a code based on astrology... but what depraved prior-world madman would split up the zodiac into nearly a thousand segments and try to keep track of separate symbolism for each of them? Oddly high proportion of perfect pentagons and hexagons, too, where you'd expect naturally visible stars to occur at less convenient angles. Also, some of the lines are doubled or even tripled, and others are actually long narrow solid triangles.

First container you checked is labeled with a stylized ear of maize, and a constellation that looks somewhat like a pentagonal sea turtle being stabbed in the armpit. Green slime inside turns out to be dense, viscous, sticky, almost painfully sweet, but can at least loosely approximate proper food. http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/155 No obvious signs of acute toxicity, though eating a whole bowlful at once (the dispenser mechanism squirts it out in globs of uniform size, about a quarter-kilogram each) leaves you jittery, manic, and mildly nauseous.

rolled 15, 6, 12, 13, 2, 17, 2, 19, 5, 14, 6, 20, 3, 17, 6, 9, 10, 12, 17, 5 = 210

---

>>1040080
Mask is pretty thrilled at the discovery of the laser falcons- and equally torn when they turn at the appearance of the shinspinners. Their mind races- I have to avoid death by automaton, but they can fly, potentially faster than I can run. That means we have to hope we can turn them off. The key ring the shinspinners have? Looks like if I rush them, they'll spring a trap, so I can't go in. Have to get them to come to me. Block off the entrance, get them to rush forward? Fire, maybe?

"Warlock! Can you peer into their minds? I'm going to try and draw them towards us, but they'll likely scatter! Capture if you can, heavy gloves, grab and pacify! I don't relish the thought of killing scared animals trying to keep their dens safe, and they're like to be less of a threat out in the open, so long as we keep our wits. Who knows, they might even be tamable!"

>>1037575
>As for equipment, only thing I really want that's not on the list yet is wine and oil. Seems like the kind of things that might come in handy in a dangerous place.

As per this post, Mask should have some oil- going to chuck it at the ground behind the shinspinners and then aim to strike a blow on the electrical cables with my lucerne hammer. Goal is to create a shower of sparks that ignites the oil, cutting off the obvious escape route and hopefully pushing the creatures out of the tunnels towards us, or at least panicking them enough to disrupt whatever their plan of attack is. They probably have some sort of secret tunnels, but if I can flush them into the open...

Applying a level of speed effort since that seems applicable when accuracy and reaction speed are the most important parts here. Medium armor only increases that by 1 instead of 2, thanks to armor training, and speed edge 1 reduces that back down to 0, so it should cost 3 points flat, putting pool totals at 8/13m, 9/12s, 9/9i

Bookkeeping wise, I'm accepting the GM incursion and gifting 1xp to Eliznyabeth. I'm going to spend 4xp to increase might edge to 2. That should put Mask at 5 remaining xp, out of 9 total earned.

>>1040201
>Since she's already climbing around all over this room, Paprika will get up there and pop open the hatch.
>rolled 3
>rolled 5
>inability at understanding numenera
Space for a human to climb inside, and extensive controls... which are mostly unresponsive. Maybe some core system is broken or depleted, or maybe you just can't figure out how to unlatch the parking brake. Further attempts are possible but will require at least one level of Intellect effort.

rolled 12, 12, 4, 18, 4, 2, 1, 8, 7, 16, 5, 12, 20, 11, 17, 8, 6, 16, 1, 17 = 197

---

After negotiations are finalized, the meat is properly seasoned and stored, and Eliznyabeth is sufficiently distracted from renovating new porches, Reiko decides to fix her arm with the local workshop. (Intellect, 1 Effort)

rolled 12, 20, 14, 11, 8, 3, 9, 6, 2, 1, 13, 18, 10, 17, 12, 18, 11, 20, 9, 6 = 220

---

>Raise the torch more than a handspan above that level, flame goes out - not flickering from a strong wind, but almost instantly, as if you'd shoved it through thin ice into a lake. Pull back and it reignites.
Natalina gulps. "I... don't think there's any air up there."

>No obvious signs of acute toxicity, though eating a whole bowlful at once (the dispenser mechanism squirts it out in globs of uniform size, about a quarter-kilogram each) leaves you jittery, manic, and mildly nauseous.
"Ugh. Well that was hardly pleasant, but at least we're not going to starve anytime soon. I'll have to work to translate these markings later, try to identify what ingredients are safe." Judging by the height of the control panel, whatever previous world-er built this place wasn't human, so not everything dispensed in this kitchen of cafeteria may be safe to consume. Hopefully they can figure out better meals than blobs of corn-sugar-goo.

Next up... let's check room 4. How or with what was the blocked door barricaded with? Does it look like there was an attempt to force the door from the other side? Does the barricaded door have window? Not clearing the barricade yet- whoever did this had reason to do so, and either left by other means... or is those corpses nearby.

Examining the tools: are they in useable condition or suffering from rust and a lack of maintenance? Are they sized for human hands? Scavenging a set of portable tools might be a good idea.

After that, let's examine the plumbing. Anything inside the pink ice? Any sign of controls or valves? Does the equipment appear damaged?

Still applying Understanding on each task one by one, and training hasn't changed.

>>1040263
All five points of inorganic damage are successfully repaired, at the cost of one unit of parts.

JamesLeng 2022/08/07(Sun)20:56 No. 1040321 ID: f57349
File 165993097006.png - (556.62KB , 1053x561 , Steel Angel.png )

>>1040274
>After that, let's examine the plumbing. Anything inside the pink ice? Any sign of controls or valves? Does the equipment appear damaged?
>rolled 14
Thinking back to some of Reiko's rants about tumor rationing, you realize it's a bioreactor - sort of basic workshop for modifications to living flesh - which has been frozen to minimize maintenance needs during long-term disuse. No obvious damage, though it's hard to be sure when you've never seen one before. To check for subtler problems you'd presumably need to thaw it out, start it up, run a test project, and compare results to some known-good baseline.

>Examining the tools: are they in useable condition or suffering from rust and a lack of maintenance? Are they sized for human hands? Scavenging a set of portable tools might be a good idea.
>rolled 20
Lathe works fine. Handgrips are awkwardly oversized, but not unmanageable - reminiscent of the chainpod controls, actually. Feels almost like you're a little kid again, messing around in the kitchen. Ten minutes and 200 lb of raw materials later you've built yourself a stepladder and satisfactory set of portable crafting tools.

>How or with what was the blocked door barricaded with? Does it look like there was an attempt to force the door from the other side? Does the barricaded door have window?
>rolled 12
Thin, flexible sheet of clear synth (same sort of bag you could buy for two shins at almost any marketplace back in the Steadfast, but cut open and spread out flat), held at the corners by hand-sized diagonal strips of bright pink adhesive synth, sealed around the edges with a trail of lumpy golden-brown stuff that's somewhere between wood, fungus, and extremely stale pastry, then backed up by a stack of heavy barrels and crates which are in turn strapped down with more pink tape.
Don't seem to have been any serious attempts to force through - based on accounts of your family's history, damage from a failed siege leaves patterns of successive disruption and reinforcement or refinement, like waves, tides, and storms on the shore, while this looks more like it was laid down all in one go.
If there's a window near the middle of the door, you can't reach it without moving the crates. Some gaps around the edges might be possible to peek through, but you're not sure if they're blocked by something or it's just really dark on the other side.
A flickering light says that "the shelter-in-place order has not yet..."
>rolled 11
Oh, crap, something snuck up behind you! Looks like the bastard spawn of forbidden romance between a steel spider and some fancy footstool or end-table.

>>1040201
>pop the hatch
>I'm fine with spending intellect, though my pool's not huge to begin with
Climbing inside, Paprika can't quite figure out how to get the five-meter-tall machine actually moving, but manages to persuade a viewscreen to light up. It fills the pilot's field of view, showing immediate surroundings clear as day, but luridly color-shifted and with cryptic annotations. More and more detail emerges wherever focus lingers for more than a moment. Wires behind the walls, Natalina's heart beating inside her chest.
Through the dome on the ceiling... it's not a dome. That distant disc eclipsing the sun, isn't the moon.
You can see the Clock of Kala, the Black Riage, Cerdyn's Pass. The Eye of the Sea is like a tiny chip of sapphire on a dark rugged face peeking out between underbrush, cheekbone to the north still blushing with volcanic heat.

It would seem you traveled here in a straight line.

rolled 16, 11, 11, 19, 19, 18, 10, 16, 18, 19, 14, 7, 11, 8, 8, 14, 5, 18, 6, 19 = 267

---

Well...I'll leave the mech for now.

>Natalina, down below, got a better look at the "dark egg." Flat surface rather than curved, bulky hinge mechanism at the bottom.
And it's outside the pressurized area of the room? Paprika can't reach it with her spear can she?

>"Ah, excellent, we've discovered where we can get our nails done. That's one necessity taken care of then!"
Paprika's sunny disposition starts to return. "Oh and I love the look. You think we can figure out how to make it do the rest of our fingers?"

>It would seem you traveled here in a straight line.
>Natalina gulps. "I... don't think there's any air up there."
"I think it's a good bet that's where we came in." Paprika twirls as she drops back down to the floor, "Well Nat, it looks like we're really lucky to be alive!"

>Rather than spores, the gills under the cap seem to serve more like the gills of a fish, for gas exchange. Smoke from the torch gets visibly slurped into one of them.
What happens if Paprika jabs one with her sword?

>"Ugh. Well that was hardly pleasant, but at least we're not going to starve anytime soon ..."
"I was a little worried we'd have to eat the dead aliens, so this is a relief."

>"... I'll have to work to translate these markings later, try to identify what ingredients are safe."
>Ten minutes and 200 lb of raw materials later you've built yourself a stepladder and satisfactory set of portable crafting tools.
Paprika marvels at how quickly Natalina is picking all this up. "I'll try to help however I can. Soairse was kinda the brains of our operation."

Paprika decides to start up a conversation while Natalina is working. "So back on...the ground, you said something about eel men? Your family history sounds really interesting."

>investigating the barricade
>Oh, crap, something snuck up behind you!
Paprika's hair ribbon shrivels into ash when she activates her halo, and her long waist-length locks escape their braids and float and billow, lighter than air, glowing white hot and leaving thin purple streaks across the vision. "Hold it!" She moves between Natalina and the spider, gripping her spear, and waits for it to make an aggressive move before she strikes.

rolled 14, 7, 18, 12, 13, 17, 17, 9, 12, 19, 11, 14, 8, 16, 5, 16, 14, 3, 1, 7 = 233

---

>Thin, flexible sheet of clear synth (same sort of bag you could buy for two shins at almost any marketplace back in the Steadfast, but cut open and spread out flat), held at the corners by hand-sized diagonal strips of bright pink adhesive synth, sealed around the edges with a trail of lumpy golden-brown stuff that's somewhere between wood, fungus, and extremely stale pastry
An attempt to create an air-tight seal? Whoever put that up might have been concerned about disease, or gas, or... a lack of air on the other side.

>Oh, crap, something snuck up behind you! Looks like the bastard spawn of forbidden romance between a steel spider and some fancy footstool or end-table.
>A flickering light says that "the shelter-in-place order has not yet..."
From behind the suddenly-glowing Paprika, Natalina will attempt communication- if the machine is transmitting, perhaps it can be reasoned with... and hopefully not trigger a blinding headache? She'll try flashing reflected Paprika-light (she's now the brightest thing in the room) in a quick request for identification and intent. Short and to the point, since human-hand semaphore is comparatively slow.

No time for Understanding, but maybe training in Persuasion applies.

>>1040413
>Paprika can't reach it with her spear can she?
Could easily enough reach out and touch the lower quarter, maybe third or so, with one end of the spear, while keeping hands and head safely inside the region where fire can burn normally. Feels like hard metal, mostly smooth. Could plausibly be the same stuff as the walls and floor, maybe with a different paint job and/or in odd light...
>trained in all tasks involving physical performing arts
...except that tapping on it is quieter than expected. Good solid whack which ought to have set it ringing like a gong is barely audible, even with one ear pressed right up against the ceiling below the hinge. That sound persists pretty well once you can hear it at all, though, so there can't just be some squishy thing on the opposite side muffling the drumhead.
>What happens if Paprika jabs one [of the mushroom gills] with her sword?
A flake of pale, slightly porous synth, about the right size and shape to use as notepaper, snaps off somewhere inside, then falls out like a loose tooth. Mildly annoying intermittent whistling noise from the thin gap where it was.

>Paprika's hair ribbon shrivels into ash when she activates her halo, and her long waist-length locks escape their braids and float and billow, lighter than air, glowing white hot and leaving thin purple streaks across the vision. "Hold it!" She moves between Natalina and the spider,
It holds perfectly still for three tenths of a second. Then the current room's lights abruptly shut off (dispenser-tube room is still lit, can't be sure about the black velvet room at a glance since it was dim already) and spiderbutler vomits a stream of icy froth at both of you.
>rolled 16, 11
Paprika easily dodges the initial jet. Then, rather than splashing against the wall behind her, the froth slows in midair, spreads out, and coheres into a swarm of white butterflies... or perhaps it would be more correct to call them moths, since they actively seek out fire. At point-blank range, with clutter limiting space in which to dance and a continuous spray from the original source still coming, she can't quite escape them all. Six Might damage from hypothermia, reduced to 5 by armor.
>rolled 14, 7
Natalina also manages to evade the direct spray, thanks in part to being slightly further away and Paprika providing cover. Fluttering follow-up extinguishes the torch she was carrying, from which ice-moth residue drips down onto her hand for two Might damage, reduced to 1 by armor.

>>1040415
>request for identification and intent
>rolled 18
Rather than a name, the mechanical end-table replies with a hierarchical title (hard to translate across cultural contexts, maybe somewhere between "bosun" and "abbot"), seniority in units of 1.008*10^-8 of a sidereal day (total value given is within an order of magnitude of your own age, not sure of much beyond that without taking a few more moments to think), and some sort of training certification from a trade guild you've never heard of. Seems to be trying to establish chain of command for purposes of dealing with an emergency.

rolled 2, 8, 6, 4, 2, 4, 1, 1, 4, 17, 18, 12, 12, 4, 20, 4, 7, 1, 5, 14 = 146

---

>>1040418
>spiderbutler vomits a stream of icy froth at both of you.
Paprika will try to scrap the spiderbutler. Might effort for extra hit chance.

rolled 2, 9, 9, 17, 4, 8, 18, 4, 16, 8, 4, 5, 5, 12, 17, 14, 2, 18, 8, 8 = 188

---

With negotiations steady at the moment, Reiko uses her spare time to craft another temperamental cypher.

rolled 19, 19, 7, 17, 8, 11, 2, 3, 12, 7, 8, 16, 10, 2, 6, 20, 2, 3, 12, 14 = 198

---

"Ah!" Natalina winces, dropping the now-inert torch. "...fire suppression response?"

>Seems to be trying to establish chain of command for purposes of dealing with an emergency.
First responder protocols? Assume one is the highest ranked survivor until one encounters a superior.

Natalina draws herself to her full (not great) height, glaring with indignation at the fire-fighting sub-abbot. "I speak with the authority of generations of leaders, and- with the deputized authority of the space rock defense force!" The arkus calls out as she begins signaling a similar (more concise) light-missive, attempting to assert a higher hierarchal rank, hopefully before Paprika risks shutting off their remaining light source to avoid further heat-seeking ice-moths missiles. "Stand down!"

>>1040449
Level 1 gravity-nullifying spray. You can permanently reduce a single nonliving object's weight by 50 lb, with a minimum of zero in most cases. If the target is of sufficiently homogenous composition, could be used to produce as much as 60 shins worth of floatstone, though you'd then need some way to hold it down or it would drift off into the sky.

Applying the spray to a block of wax which was then molded into candles, or glass or clay to be shaped into small containers, would let you portion it out to send several smaller "message in a bottle" packages to Paprika and Natalina, wherever they ended up, simply by "dropping" from the point where they were launched. However, absent an actual guidance system or some other clever trick to correct for variability in high-altitude winds, having the package end up close enough for them to actually find it would be subject to the same challenges as making a ranged attack against a distant, invisible target.

>>1040422
>scrap the spiderbutler
>rolled 2
Low gravity throws off footwork, so that what was intended as a step forward and thrust to a vulnerable-looking spot becomes a hop into the air and awkward overhead swing which it barely even needs to dodge.
>rolled 8, 6, 4, 2
Paprika gets hit again, five more damage.
>>1040450
"Ackn. With regard to maneuvers necessary for avoidance of high-velocity impact, you have precedence. For ongoing damage control in this area, I have precedence. Please instruct your subordinate to stop panicking and,"
There is a noticeable gap but no 'message ends' designation.
"emitting flammable gas? Or otherwise being on fire."

rolled 3, 11, 20, 1, 5, 18, 17, 18, 1, 11, 20, 6, 8, 2, 19, 15, 3, 2, 1, 5 = 186

---

>>1040454
Paprika halts her clumsy assault but she doesn't drop her shroud. "What? Tell it to turn the lights back on first."

rolled 16, 12, 7, 2, 16, 14, 6, 13, 1, 6, 16, 4, 14, 11, 9, 12, 17, 9, 19, 17 = 221

---

With the negotiations finished and Reiko's new toy spray complete, Reiko addresses Eliznyabeth, Elanyah, and her bodyguard.
"Where are Paprika and Natalina? I was busy chasing them and they went straight for you. We need to make sure they're safe."

rolled 8, 15, 16, 14, 14, 3, 5, 4, 12, 20, 10, 18, 16, 8, 16, 2, 2, 4, 6, 15 = 208

---

>>1040413
>"I think it's a good bet that's where we came in." Paprika twirls as she drops back down to the floor, "Well Nat, it looks like we're really lucky to be alive!"
"Even if the... skylight is open above, something must have caught us." The arkus replies with a small frown. "We would have been much worse for the wear 'falling' to this floor at speed."

Could the mystery egg/hatch be/include/provide some manner of net or capture mechanism (perhaps invisibly, like the helm Reiko constructed)? That might make sense if machines like the augmech they found are meant to disembark from and return to this room.

>Paprika decides to start up a conversation while Natalina is working. "So back on...the ground, you said something about eel men? Your family history sounds really interesting."
Natalina visibly brightens at the invitation to speak on one of her favorite topics. "Oh, they are." The next ten minutes are filled with energetic and romanticized rambling on tales of past exceptionalism, heroism, and honor. "The eelfolk were part of a trade agreement, oh, two centuries back? 'Reverse honey' was involved, though surviving records aren't clear on what that was and I haven't been able to find the waterway named in the route on modern maps." She muses as she pulls a completed hammer off the lathe.

" ...of course we haven't held a position of nobility since great-grandfather's time." Natalina sighs. "My parents are merchants. And, ah," she makes a wordless noise of frustration. "I just want the world to see what we can do again."

>>1040454
"Paprika, the uh, firefighting automaton, whishes for you to stop being on fire.

"Are you all right? You took the brunt of that."

>>1040482
Jet of foam sputters to a stop, then the automaton half-kneels and rams its rounded head into Paprika's solar plexus, hard enough to knock the wind out of her and send her flying into an adjacent room. She bounces off a black velvet wall and lands in warm, chest-deep water.
XP from the GM intrusion, and impaired due to Might zero. Could climb out of the pool and keep doing things, but spiderbutler doesn't seem to be making further aggressive moves, and you're shivering uncontrollably, so to lay back and relax in the hot tub for at least an hour also feels like an option worth considering.

rolled 8, 16, 15, 7, 16, 20, 15, 15, 15, 18, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 4, 5, 1, 17, 20 = 245

---

After checking if Paprika is all right (a little more frantically than previously posted), and assuming the spider-abbot is willing to cease hostilities while the glaive doses her corona, Natalina has questions for their... host? She'll translate the conversation for Paprika's benefit, and any questions she has to add, as well.

> I'm sorry I should have asked this sooner, how many colors and polarizations can you distinguish?
If Natalina managed to talk Reiko or Grundlehaven into providing a mechanical description of the limitations of the human eyeball to Elanya, the blonde is going to do her best to restate that information before asking additional questions, and hopefully avoid a second laser-induced information-overload migraine.

-Do they speak the Truth, or any other languages? (That is, uh, Truth the language, usually conveyed using sonic vibrations, not the veracity of statements). Her subordinate doesn't speak Light, and her own translation module will need to recharge eventually.
-What information can they share about the nature and extent of the current emergency?
-This isn't our normal operational area. Can they describe the purpose or use of these rooms, or provide a map? (Chambers devoted to providing safe shelter or amenities for sustaining organic life are of particular interest to us, for obvious reasons).
-Do they know the route to the beanstalk—the structure connecting this location to the planetary surface? Or to vehicles capable of reaching the surface?
-Are there any important rules relating to this sector we should know?

And of course, the pertinent quest:
>In essence, I am looking to hire a courier. Across the Black Riage, halfway to the Clock of Kala, you'll find the Light'ning Beanstalk, where it is said - though this was before my time, so I cannot vouch for the historicity of the account - Jack the First stole nitrogen-fixing bacteria from a giant whose castle was built above the clouds. That castle's ruins are still present, or some structure which could reasonably be mistaken for them. A ship may be docked there which can take you the rest of the way, or if not, materials to build one."
-Forecasting has predicted an extremely large, high velocity-impact will occur in the next several decades if it is not intercepted in advance. Are they aware of a ship docked here, or the location of ship-fabrication facilities?

rolled 11, 3, 16, 7, 17, 16, 10, 19, 16, 12, 10, 6, 7, 5, 2, 3, 3, 9, 4, 6 = 182

---

>"I just want the world to see what we can do again."
"Well I think you'll be the one to show them. Have any plans for your castle?"

>encounter
>"Are you all right? You took the brunt of that."
Now that the excitement of combat has died down a bit, Paprika almost-whispers in a shuddery voice, "I think so. One of those blankets would be- OOF!"

>the automaton half-kneels and rams its rounded head into Paprika's solar plexus, hard enough to knock the wind out of her and send her flying into an adjacent room.
>checking if Paprika is all right (a little more frantically than previously posted)
>you're shivering uncontrollably, so to lay back and relax in the hot tub for at least an hour also feels like an option worth considering.

Paprika surfaces pale and bedraggled, with her ego perhaps even more injured than her body. When she's finally able to speak, she says in maybe the most pathetic voice Natalina's ever heard, "I'm going to stay here and float for a little while if that's okay."

>She'll translate the conversation for Paprika's benefit, and any questions she has to add, as well.
Paprika will ask if there's a way to communicate with their friends below.

>>1040643
> Paprika surfaces pale and bedraggled, with her ego perhaps even more injured than her body. When she's finally able to speak, she says in maybe the most pathetic voice Natalina's ever heard, "I'm going to stay here and float for a little while if that's okay."
Natalina will delicately sit down on the catwalk besides the pool during the discussion, and offer Paprika her hand (her right, with her left still being used to communicate in reflected-light-semaphore as needed).

rolled 6, 10, 9, 8, 20, 3, 7, 12, 9, 18, 20, 4, 19, 18, 16, 3, 8, 19, 10, 5 = 224

---

Eliznyabeth, for her part, was perhaps showing more generosity that was entirely wise. She similarly had indulged more on 'samples' of the meat in the curing process than was perhaps wise, having reasoned that whatever she would take from it in such small doses would be insignificant next to the about 6,000 pounds she brought in and also that she was the one who hunted it.

That was an accurate assumption, but the fact that she was laid out on a couch with a stomach ache from having eaten almost 5 pounds of meat in a single sitting is a testament to the folly of her hubris.

"Yeah, go ahead and take the money and just pay off whatever debts the town has and give them the rest to pay for that plan they have, it's not like I'm actually using it for anything else." She would say, handing off the check of credit to the Elenyah.

>>1040483
"Oh, fuck, people are missing?"

rolled 15, 2, 13, 2, 16, 6, 1, 17, 8, 2, 16, 20, 5, 6, 12, 7, 4, 6, 15, 8 = 181

---

> Warlock can you help with the shinspinners

Oh can he? Presumed unsentient spider beasts the lot of them and one just so happens to have the keys we will likely be needin to get some progress going.

"Warlock...*mumbles grumbles* not much use carin about things trying to kill ya if I have my say of things!"

Mumbling grumbling moaning and groaning Grundle probably makes too big of a fuss over monster sympathisers but non the less pulls out his WEB DETONATION CYPHER. He either runs into the group and has it detonate or throws it and had it dedonate depending on the physical limitations of the cyper. im assuming by owning it he would know it

"Also no use in trying to control em. Not sapient as far as i know. Me magic aint limitless"

Grundle does however try to use Hedge Magic (-1 intellect) to yoink those keys away from the one of em.

The PCs are currently split up into three groups:

Reiko, Eliznyabeth, the chainpods, Elanyah and her mobile embassy, Mia Xan the diplomat, and at least fifty locals are back down in the half-ruined town of Hallux, preserving meat for longer-term storage and hammering out the rough draft of a treaty with the King Under the Mountain. Literally hammering - official copies need to be engraved in wolframite tablets with sapphire and refractory synth inlay, to stay legible while immersed in molten rock. Elanyah has broad authority to negotiate on her employer's behalf, but that's at least partly because the sublithene lacks a long-range comm system, so distant micromanagement is impossible. Such a treaty can't really be considered final until it's been seen and read, and ideally given some formal endorsement, by the actual magma-dwelling leaders.

If all continues to go well, most of the haggling over trade concessions and border definitions and so on should be settled, and quantium sufficient for construction of the farspeaking pylon delivered, in four or five weeks. Then it might take a few more weeks to build.

Saoirse, "Old" Grundlehaven Havespont, "Mask," and a ring of six recently-unearthed sinister hovering orbs are raiding the shinspinner nest under the Eye of the Sea. (That's 15 miles away from Hallux as the xi-drake flies - uphill is a hard all-day trip for a normal person with a full backpack or aneen-drawn wagon, or half an hour by chainpod. Downhill on foot was recently shown to be possible inside three hours for someone agile, lightly laden, and intensely motivated). One of the shinspinners has a key ring which prompted the orbs to switch sides, while others are rushing to activate traps and an emplaced artillery piece, so that's likely to be either a tough fight or a hasty retreat. They're currently the furthest back on the timeline, mid-afternoon.

Aram the Stablemaster and Tayle the Chirurgeon are also nearby, along with about twenty other locals and two aneen - one still hitched to a wagon, the other a dwarf albino known as "whitesides" who follows Aram everywhere. They're mostly busy recovering from the hike or making preparations for other incoming refugees, not directly participating in dungeon exploration.

>>1040232
"Mask" sprints all the way to the far side of the room by applying speed effort to fleet of foot, then splashes foul-smelling oil in a thick perpendicular line which ends at a sparking rat's-nest of copper wire. Dodges between most of the gazer beams, aided by distance. Armor feels uncomfortably warm in a few spots but no damage penetrates.
Moments later, oil ignites and roaring flames fill the room's northwest exit, blocking off direct route toward point H. Only apparent path for shinspinners to flee now is by leaving the way you came in... but they don't seem very interested in retreat just yet.

>>1040882
>web detonation cypher
>rolled 15
Entire set of orbs are stuck, as is the shinspinner holding the keys. Acrid fumes rise where angry red light touches gluey strands, but it'll definitely hold for at least a few minutes (better than some rocks managed!), and more importantly the orbs can't pivot far enough to focus beams in the right spots for an efficient escape.
>Hedge Magic to yoink
>rolled 2
Unfortunately that means the keyring is also firmly glued to the floor.

Saoirse flicks a series of razor-sharp playing cards at the shinspinner overhead, delaying it and inflicting injury while "Mask's" pet lizard climbs up to intercept.

Conch cannon extrudes a toroidal ring of curdled light which becomes narrower and brighter as it glides through the air, from dull smoky orange to yellowish-green to a searing azure that briefly reveals bone structure inside whichever hand is instinctively raised to shield eyes. At the point where it stops, a thunderclap. Everything within a three meter radius takes 8 damage before armor. Mask and the lizard are out of the AoE, but that includes Grundle and Saoirse unless they manage a level 5 speed defense task. Loose items across the whole room are briefly tugged toward the blast.

Paprika and Natalina are tens of thousands of miles up beyond the sky, and a comparatively trifling distance to the northeast, at the local equivalent of a hotel.

>This isn't our normal operational area. Can they describe the purpose or use of these rooms, or provide a map? (Chambers devoted to providing safe shelter or amenities for sustaining organic life are of particular interest to us, for obvious reasons).
Yes, this is a flesh shelter. Rated life support capacity divided by baseline human requirements is ten, but redundancies and stockpiles mean that under crisis conditions, a thousand could be crammed in for two or three weeks with reasonable expectation the vast majority would survive, or a hundred for at least a year.

Parking garage, decontamination spiral, refreshment dispensers, business center, rest area, toilets, storage vault. Business center's topstation-interior-access door is currently barricaded due to the shelter-in-place order.

>Do they speak the Truth, or any other languages? (That is, uh, Truth the language, usually conveyed using sonic vibrations, not the veracity of statements). Her subordinate doesn't speak Light, and her own translation module will need to recharge eventually.
No direct familiarity with Truth, but recognizes some loan-words from Classical Uxphonese. Could spend 2xp to say you happen to already know Uxphonese, in which case you'll be able to converse normally - and in the actual city of Uxphon too of course, on the off chance you ever go there. (It's a rank 4 community, built in and around a canyon tangled with ancient plumbing, on the side of the Black Riage facing the Cloudcrystal Skyfields. Several hundred miles north of Cerdyn's Pass, past Legrash or the Amber Monolith, halfway to Gaian territory.) Alternatively, could spend a month learning the basics at no XP cost, in between some other long-term activity.

"Didn't want to make a fuss about it during damage control, but your Light accent is just awful - like an off-the-shelf format-conversion submodule, with barely any personal idiomatic refactor, choking on an improvised transciever with three-digit actuator ping times."

Similar options open to Paprika, though the innkeeper got a less favorable first impression.
"Oh, I'm sorry, is setting yourself on fire your culture's standard signal for 'no further service needed, everything is fine'?"

>Are there any important rules relating to this sector we should know?
Four nearly identical cylinders clustered around a mushroom-table on the ceiling, filled with liquids so colorless you initally thought they were empty:
"This is oxygen hydride. You need it to live, but too much of the pure form without correct drit will rot your teeth."
"This is a mixture of oxygen hydride and carbonyl hydride. The smell can burn, or make you sick. If you drink it you will almost certainly die."
"This is methyl hydroxide. It burns easily. The smell is adequately safe, but if you drink it you will almost certainly go blind, and perhaps die."
"This is ethyl hydroxide. It burns almost as easily, will addict, too much causes crabmeat of the liver, but adequately safe for recreational drinking."
Steel angel skitters over to the far wall, indicates a tube of red gravel.
"This is human-safe drit substitute. Crush one pellet into each bowl of pure oxygen hydride."
Finally it directs you to a cylinder which Natalina initially skipped past, based on visual similarity between the contents and raw sewage. Constellation thereon is actually a few unconnected diagrams, including one resembling a chain or ladder implied to repeat indefinitely. Heraldry is a boxy, triangle-faced ungulate with horns like the crescent moon, standing amid a field of ripe wheat. Lumpy brown sludge inside turns out to be delicious slow-cooked beef stroganoff.

Natalina and Paprika get 1xp each for discovery by exploring the dispenser installation's range of options. Once you're finished with your food and drink (one way or another), that small polished-metal room is designed for disposing of waste materials, and generally providing personal hygiene a bit more nuanced than decontamination screens. Mechanism initially interpreted as a trap is actually an automated barber.

Room with black velvet walls and ball pit https://xkcd.com/150 usually has courtesy rules against whatever might result in sensory impressions which interfere with someone else's rest, but since the two of you have nobody to annoy but each other, that's largely moot.

Storage vault is off-limits to visitors. Already retrieved materials to restock the workshop while you were building that ladder, so if you need anything else, ask.

>What information can they share about the nature and extent of the current emergency?
Biocontaminant causing hemorrhagic fever. Treatable, often survivable even without treatment, but prevention preferred. A given patient either coughs up all their blood and dies within two weeks of initial symptoms, or recovers to the point of being non-contagious and permanently immune in four. Should be an all-clear announcement soon if it's coming at all.
It started "One minute, five and a half seconds in the immediate future," which is a figure of speech those fluent in Light, particularly automata, often use when they actually mean "long enough ago that I'm not qutte sure." Unless there's some other confounding factor (incomplete secondhand reports, temporal anomalies, brain damage), that almost never refers to anything more recent than thirty-nine days (65536 minutes).

>Do they know the route to the beanstalk—the structure connecting this location to the planetary surface? Or to vehicles capable of reaching the surface?
>Are they aware of a ship docked here, or the location of ship-fabrication facilities?
Easiest route would likely be by rail, and there's a rail station just two miles away... along the exterior. Local supply vault has a selection of protective equipment, some of which could fit you with minimal modification, but the steel-angel innkeeper is somewhat puzzled how you ended up here, alive, without bringing your own.

>Paprika will ask if there's a way to communicate with their friends below.
Chainpods have a... sawtoothed azure grapevine? An invisible machine channel for chatting with each other, which by itself has very limited range. There's a farspeaking pylon near here which could easily link to such grapevines, if they're within roughly two thousand miles of the Plains of Kataru (the known world and then some) and not e.g. underground or deep underwater or tucked away in an Otherspace or something. Under normal circumstances you could seamlessly relay through that nearby pylon, with one of those chairs in the business center as the actual interface, but it's on 'priority only' bandwidth rationing due to a hardware fault, possibly space-rock-related.

That's your department, as deputies, right? Just hop over, five miles in the opposite direction from the train station, patch whatever's wrong (which, if you're lucky, might be as simple as re-socketing a loose cable), and key in the relevant pod's unique 32-character ID code.

>>1040483
That status update Eliznyabeth received while scouting ahead was a terse text message on the chainpod's dashboard, saying that Paprika and Natalina are alive, not in immediate danger, and significantly closer to the objective than was expected by this time. It didn't provide much further detail, but lots of bystanders can confirm they saw those two being launched into the sky.

rolled 19, 3, 2, 18, 4, 13, 12, 14, 10, 12, 14, 9, 1, 3, 7, 9, 12, 19, 4, 8 = 193

---

Reiko gets started on the disassembly of the Volcano Tamer, asking for Elanyah's assistance relaying the responses from the Volcano King. Having preserved this shoddy, complicated, and noisy machine for the past three months, her only regret is that she can't blow it up for catharsis.

Of course, she'll enjoy reverse-engineering its sub-functions and unlocking its true potential even more. A pity her former boss-hole is a pile of ashes; she'd enjoy dissecting his pride and joy while he's forced to watch.

Merely powering the device off without causing an eruption or giving the Volcano King indigestion will take a fair effort. But her new processing power lets her understand the 'instruction manual' made of floating pointers and ASCII binary.
(Intellect, Effort 1)

rolled 7, 5, 6, 13, 15, 8, 3, 9, 18, 1, 6, 5, 12, 17, 20, 19, 5, 12, 12, 17 = 210

---

>>1040650
>handholding
Paprika takes Natalina's hand and her expression shifts into a ragged smile. Small whisps of steam rise and swirl from her soaked skin.

>"Oh, I'm sorry, is setting yourself on fire your culture's standard signal for 'no further service needed, everything is fine'?"
Paprika responds to the light show before Natalina gets a chance to translate. "Well fuck you too. Walking trashcan..."

>one of those chairs in the business center as the actual interface
"The ones with the corpses in them? Can you ask it how they died?"

>Just hop over, five miles in the opposite direction from the train station, patch whatever's wrong (which, if you're lucky, might be as simple as re-socketing a loose cable), and key in the relevant pod's unique 32-character ID code.
"Sounds fun, but I gotta be real with you - I need a breather first. My paper is ruined too so we'll have to figure out another way to write the code down."

rolled 14, 3, 15, 1, 19, 15, 10, 17, 16, 2, 10, 1, 1, 20, 15, 19, 16, 19, 5, 19 = 237

---

>Yes, this is a flesh shelter
"It would seem your earlier assessment was correct, Paprika.  We were exceedingly lucky to arrive here." 

>Could spend 2xp to say you happen to already know Uxphonese, in which case you'll be able to converse normally
Sure, let's go with that.  A city with well-established nobility and meritocratic upward mobility is the kind of thing that would have attracted Natalina's interest.

Natalina is quite relieved when she can switch from awkwardly reflecting light with one hand to actual speech...
>"Didn't want to make a fuss about it during damage control, but your Light accent is just awful - like an off-the-shelf format-conversion submodule, with barely any personal idiomatic refactor, choking on an improvised transciever with three-digit actuator ping times."
...as is their host, it would seem.  They're not wrong either, as attempting to 'speak' Light by flashing a hand-mirror in reflected light seems comparable to attempting to 'speak' by drumming one's hand on a table to produce audible words.

"I apologize for the disrespect." she replies in Uxphonese, inclining her head.  (And she'll continue translating into Truth for Paprika as needed).

>>"Oh, I'm sorry, is setting yourself on fire your culture's standard signal for 'no further service needed, everything is fine'?"
>Paprika responds to the light show before Natalina gets a chance to translate. "Well fuck you too. Walking trashcan..."
Natalina will opt not to accurately translate this line, however. "Threat display in the face of a stranger of unknown intentions, actually."

>Biocontaminant causing hemorrhagic fever.
So the sealed door in the 'business area' was in response to a disease.  That means exploring further down that path means gambling on it having burnt itself out... and likely earning the ire of the local innkeeper for breaking quarantine protocols.  And while one path risks disease, angry spider-abbots, and the loss of a safe space, the other available path risks hard vacuum.

>the steel-angel innkeeper is somewhat puzzled how you ended up here, alive, without bringing your own [protective equipment]
"As are we, to be honest.  Does the 'parking garage' perhaps contain some mechanism to safely catch someone arriving at high speeds?"

She'll also request the safety equipment from storage at the abbot's convenience. If provided, Natalina will spend some time familiarizing herself with it and it's use. (Applying Understanding).

>rail station 2 miles away, communication systems 5, along the exterior
Several hours of walking then (assuming the strange gravity here doesn't reduce their pace), faster if... "Oh".  A concerned expression crosses Natalina's face at the thought of applying Phase Sprint.  "You wouldn't happen to know if this facility exists beyond Euclidean dimensions?"

>"Sounds fun, but I gotta be real with you - I need a breather first. My paper is ruined too so we'll have to figure out another way to write the code down."
"It has been a long day, and we are fortunate enough to have arrived at a kind of inn."

>"The ones with the corpses in them?
There are two other chairs currently unoccupied.
>Can you ask it how they died?"
"There was a discontinuity, and when I was reinitialized from backup they were already in that condition. Resuscitation may be possible so please do not disturb them."

>Does the 'parking garage' perhaps contain some mechanism to safely catch someone arriving at high speeds?"
Certainly not at full miss-the-ground speeds, but, if you were initially set on a suborbital ballistic arc by something along the lines of an overclocked gravy bowl... and then, given your respective anomalous capabilities, somehow continuously vented hot gas through an asymmetric phase-pocket plenum for both marginal life support and brachistochrone thrust... relative velocity at intercept could theoretically have been subsonic, while still within a slim window of overlap between 'time in transit' and 'traumatic abaryia survival time.' At that point, perimeter sandpipers and the garage's vapor screen might have brought you to a safe stop with only a few relatively minor miracles.

>the other available path risks hard vacuum
>request the safety equipment from storage
Protective option the spiderbutler presents first (with some passive-aggressive apologies about the engineering constraints imposed by Natalina and Paprika's powers) initially appears to be a comically oversized pair of fur-lined handcuffs.
Looking through either cuff from one direction reveals an empty fishbowl-shaped otherspace, less than a cubic foot. Stick your head in the hole and close the cuff around your neck, smart fluid flows out to cover the rest of your body, supplying breathable air, compression, and adequate protection from most concievable hazards, for... a while. Multiple days possible, but inadvisable without more data. Eight hours at 95% confidence, so try to stay within two or three hours' travel of shelter or resupply points.
Flip it over, there's a different space, possibly similar size but packed solid with coiled synth rope. Tether between the "helmets" can extend or retract from either end at 3 m/s without interfering with closed-circuit audio. Liquid armor distributes shocks across the whole body so any yank or impact is like a perfect water landing.

View from inside the otherspace helmets is similar to wearing strong prescription glasses - in Paprika's case, the exact ones she didn't know she needed, providing an asset to visual perception of anything more than an immediate distance away from Natalina.
Natalina, however, takes a similar penalty, with anything outside potential reach of Paprika's flames refusing to come into sharp focus. The two can see each other normally, but to anyone else, and reflective surfaces, looks like their heads are missing.

A level 4 artifact overall, so 4 xp will be split between the two of you once you've accomplished something useful with it.

rolled 19, 16, 13, 6, 12, 6, 15, 9, 18, 11, 20, 8, 12, 6, 5, 13, 2, 2, 9, 6 = 208

---

"Form fitting, headless... wear these without anything else underneath and we would be fulfilling someone's fetish, I'm sure."

>Resuscitation may be possible so please do not disturb them.
Natalina mutters something quietly—a prayer for the departed?—before answering. "Your optimism and commitment to a duty-of-care are to commended, at least."

Before the not-quite marooned duo turn in for the night (can one truly be stranded if one stumbles across an operational and still-staffed prior-world inn?) Natalina will attempt to prepare for the journey they're planning tomorrow. First, she'll return to the spiral, step ladder in tow, and examine the control panel. Is it possible to set it to ignore or whitelist the fire-proofing chemical Paprika uses? It would save needing to spend time reapplying the treatment to everything she owns, coming and going. Could be tested by, perhaps, lobbing some treated synth balls from the recreational room.

She'll also examine the augmech Paprika examined earlier—perhaps her education will provide some additional insight into its operation?

Applying Understanding to both tasks, the Understanding Numenera disability most likely applies in both cases, but training in Perception might too. Applying Learned to figuring out the augmech as well. Perhaps cooperation factors in as well, if the innkeeper-abbot offers advice.

>>1041328
>Is it possible to set [decontamination] to ignore or whitelist the fire-proofing chemical Paprika uses?
>rolled 19
Yes. Additionally, innkeeper is very interested in that artifact, willing to accept application to designated items and/or interior surfaces as payment.

>without anything else underneath
Conventional clothing or light armor fits inside the semiliquid space suit just fine, and the outer surface ends up more resembling a swarm of revolting insects, or thistle burrs soaked in cottage cheese, rather than, say, smooth latex. The device probably was originally intended as recreational bondage gear for those three-meter-tall humanoids, though, with short-term life support and other protections courtesy of 'feature creep.'

Shock-absorbing goo squelches with every step, so even though the structure underfoot is solid metal it feels like trudging through loose sand or an ankle-deep swamp. Where the exterior surface isn't a corrugated labyrinth of tripping hazards, it's smoothly covered in some dark purplish powder with odd electrostatic properties that interact with smart fluid to provide about as much traction as greased ice. Overall, two miles per hour seems to be the best pace you can maintain safely...

>She'll also examine the augmech Paprika examined earlier—perhaps her education will provide some additional insight into its operation?
>Applying Understanding to both tasks, the Understanding Numenera disability most likely applies in both cases. Applying Learned to figuring out the augmech as well.
>rolled 16
...or would be, if you were stuck on foot. Spidery innkeeper considers augmech maintenance "somebody else's problem," but negotiating expedited vehicle repairs, with nothing to offer but imported perfume in lieu of overtime pay, is exactly the sort of thing Natalina's more recent ancestors have taken pride in. Thus, the book helps.

Paramedic augmech has a Might pool of 22 with Edge 1 (and Armor 1), Speed pool of 22 with Edge 0, uses the operator's Intellect. Working through it provides three free levels of Effort on medical care and repairs to biomechanical creatures, but hinders many other tasks. Onboard pharmacy is restocked with raw materials, but needs more time to sort out contaminants and configuration errors before the advanced options are fully available. It can walk like an aneen on metal walls or ceilings as easily as the floor, while carrying two people internally in addition to the pilot, or one passenger/patient and a few hundred pounds of non-vacuum-rated luggage in the other coffin.

rolled 3, 4, 10, 9, 17, 15, 18, 8, 17, 6, 10, 1, 16, 19, 4, 8, 8, 12, 7, 5 = 197

---

>>1040930
Going to try to wrestle the cannon away, intact. If I'm carrying it, seems like they probably won't be able to shoot at us with it, and maybe we can make use of it later.

rolled 3, 6, 18, 4, 19, 9, 1, 11, 11, 18, 4, 18, 13, 11, 17, 14, 7, 19, 13, 13 = 229

---

Grundlehaven takes the danage as he has no real time to prepare himself. Shaking in his bones he pushes himself to act upon something and aims his buzzer atthe set of keys and flicks it twice to try to carve the key ring out of the sticky mess then tries hedge magic once again

>>1041396
>rolled 3, 6
Grundle gets knocked down by the blast. Buzzer-blade shot misses the intended target by a mile, but ricochets off a wall and disables the shinspinner on the overhead bridge, saving Mask's pet lak.

>rolled 18, 4
Saoirse dodges successfully, activates the monoblade cypher (which she won from Grundle in a card game earlier that day), and extracts the ring of keys from the mass of sticky webbing.

>rolled 19
Hedge magic makes it possible to operate the control device without quite touching it (since that would just glue it to your hands for the next hour), and Grundle's other skills quickly turn the hovering orbs back to supporting your side.

>>1041391
>rolled 3, 4
Mask runs over toward the side of the conch-cannon. Turns out it's bigger than he is, and weighs hundreds of pounds. Response to the full-speed tackle is one leg of the tripod rising a few inches off the ground.
Still, that's enough to rattle the two shinspinners operating it. One of them bites him on the nose, but fortunately, the shape-matching effect only works in one direction. No damage gets through.
>rolled 10, 9, 17, 15, 18
After that it's a relatively simple matter of grabbing the two, smacking them into each other until they stop fighting back, then disconnecting the cannon from surrounding detritus and clearing a smooth path across the floor so you can drag it back to the entrance.

rolled 15, 8, 20, 13, 6, 2, 20, 3, 15, 13, 11, 20, 11, 3, 2, 1, 7, 15, 7, 17 = 209

---

>>1041403
Alright! Laser falcons secure, dignity only slightly singed, time to haul this stuff back home, and see if we can trap the shinspinners in something sturdy enough to start breaking them in, see if they can be tamed and put to work.

rolled 2, 5, 5, 5, 2, 2, 1, 4, 1, 3, 1, 1, 3, 5, 4, 2, 1, 6, 5, 1 = 59

---

Dice for everybody's ten-hour recovery rolls, and others as appropriate.

>>1041022
Reiko extracts 5 units of quantium and 25 units of parts from the first stage of dismantling the volcano tamer. Saoirse's monoblade peels 4 units of pliable metal off the conch-cannon's casing, then another 16 units of parts tumble out of it. Both have potential to yield more, but each successful extraction cumulatively hinders subsequent attempts from the same source.
Even with just that much, though, assuming Reiko and/or Old Grundle are willing to offer some io and responsive synth from their own personal stocks to contribute to the establishment of the fire nation's embassy, construction of the Farspeaking Pylon can begin more or less immediately with one unit of pliable metal left over.

In the pre-dawn hours, a 60lb chunk of Earthshaker rump roast goes missing from the butchering-and-smoking operation. Eliznyabeth follows tracks back uphill toward the eye of the sea, into the entrance previously designated number eight >>1039859 toward an elaborate pattern of green inlay on the floor of room F, about 18 meters in diameter. Drippy trail ends there. Outer section of the pattern is mostly just concentric circles, but closer to the center it gets more complicated. Maybe an illustration of some profound truth about geometry, or the sort of thing somebody would use to trap a demon?

rolled 9, 1, 8, 17, 9, 12, 8, 16, 5, 14, 14, 16, 11, 14, 14, 4, 10, 9, 1, 2 = 194

---

>Pylon
Reiko agrees to contribute some of her precious iotum stocks, on the condition that she be given partial access to any and all leftover materials. You know, investments.

>60lb chunk of Earthshaker rump roast goes missing
"Not that we don't have plenty to spare, but we should make sure they're just feeding their families and not planning a raid for the other 5,940 pounds of titan pus."

>Drippy trail ends there. Outer section of the pattern is mostly just concentric circles, but closer to the center it gets more complicated.
"Hm... doesn't take a genius to realize this is a transporter of some kind. But is it an elevator or a teleporter? The wrong answer could get us killed."

What do
Reiko investigates by (yet again) scanning for iotum.

rolled 11, 11, 19, 20, 17, 15, 11, 20, 10, 13, 3, 2, 12, 8, 12, 18, 16, 5, 1, 18 = 242

---

Forgot to mention earlier, the 1 XP from my previous intrusion will go to Natalina. They probably all will until the party reunites.

>innkeeper is very interested in that artifact, willing to accept application to designated items and/or interior surfaces as payment.
Paprika will spend some time with the inkeeper spraying the halls and items as instructed. By the time she returns to Natalina in the parking garage, she's somehow won the robot over despite bad first impressions. Spending 3XP to lock in the innkeeper as a friendly NPC.

>Protective option the spiderbutler presents first ...
>"Form fitting, headless... wear these without anything else underneath and we would be fulfilling someone's fetish, I'm sure."
>outer surface ends up more resembling a swarm of revolting insects, or thistle burrs soaked in cottage cheese
"Eeugh, not mine. Can you ask Abbot if they've got any other options?"

>Shock-absorbing goo squelches with every step, so even though the structure underfoot is solid metal it feels like trudging through loose sand or an ankle-deep swamp.
"Hopefully ones that are easier to walk in?"

rolled 13, 13, 10, 8, 2, 11, 15, 5, 14, 13, 5, 7, 1, 20, 18, 15, 20, 18, 14, 18 = 240

---

After figuring out the basics of the augmech (there's simply so much numenera where they've ended up, from their host, to the facilities, to the wondrous (and creepy) armor provided so casually, to the oversized machine itself which responds to even inexpert commands) Natalina plans to turn in for the night, trusting the inkeeper to live up to its profession. Now that the pair know the rest area is for that purpose, they might as well make blanket forts there instead of in the garage, this time.

She'll suggest to Paprika that in the morning they take the paramedic and go investigate the damaged communication systems.

>>1041537
The five-meter tall frame of 'Milaconi's cousin' had the aspect of an imposing temple-statue inside the garage, but after Natalina and Paprika have caught up on sleep, had breakfast, and headed back out, sheer dizzying immensity of the station's exterior soon makes it feel more like some tiny insect crawling out from a knothole and along the branch of a tree. Surface curves down to the east and west, roughly a mile-wide strip between level enough to comfortably walk on. Six miles south of your starting point, that surface ends in a abrupt cliff, with nothing but starry black visible beyond. Destination is a full mile short of that edge, though.

From a distance it looks a little bit like a silver fingernail clipping, floating on the horizon. Up close, this resolves into a bowl-shaped section of metallic foil, just under thirty meters wide and maybe three meters deep, suspended above the surface you've been walking on by a hollow truss, not entirely unlike the superstructure of the windrider repair shop where this all started. Underside of the bowl is close enough for the augmech to reach up and touch, but not so low it needs to duck when walking underneath.

There's an ugly gash in the east side of that bowl. Looking up through the hole, you can see the upper section of the truss. Pattern of converging triangles abruptly ends ten meters short of a parabolic reflector's focal point, followed by roughly eight meters of twisted wreckage, bringing to mind some ragged war-banner or loose tooth. A wrist-thick cable rises up from the ground, fastened along the intact truss and through the bowl, to loop loosely around that wrecked segment, where some biomechanical thing - smaller than a human but not by much - has set up a nest.

Below the torn hole in the dish, trailing off down-slope further to the east, there are scuff marks in the dust, as if something roughly the size and shape of the main pylon you're looking for fell, bounced, and slid.

>>1041451
>rolled 9,
>But is it an elevator or a teleporter?
Elevator, sort of. No iotum readily accessible for salvage from up here.
>1, 8, 17
>The wrong answer could get us killed."
As a GM intrusion, Reiko falls through the quicksand-like membranous surface of the 'binding circle,' beneath which a bath (silo? bottomless pit?) of preservative gel starts trying to put her into stasis. If Eliznyabeth (or somebody else nearby) assists, might be back out in only one round, taking 2 points of speed damage; otherwise, two rounds for Reiko to escape under her own power, and 4 speed damage. Anybody else would be taking twice as much speed damage, but Reiko's mechanical parts render her partially immune - presumably steel spiders can swim in the stuff unhindered.

Either way, the piece of meat you were looking for has been found and retrieved.

rolled 2, 7, 2, 9, 20, 11, 13, 20, 3, 11, 13, 6, 15, 10, 4, 13, 6, 11, 1, 4 = 181

---

>>1041580
"Whoa Nelly, no falling into the floor for you." She would say as she would quickly grab Reiko's hand as she fell in.

"Alright. Magical preservation goo... And the meat was in there..." Eliznyabeth would do the only sane thing imaginable in this situation and take a bite of the magically preserved meat with the stasis goo wiped off at least, and already start imagining ways they can use this for more industrial scale preservation efforts if this doesn't mess up the taste and nutrition too badly. Maybe even obviate the need for refrigeration.

>>1041606
Between awkward retrieval and imperfect goo-scraping, Eliznyabeth also takes 4 speed damage. The meat tastes profoundly bland at first, almost waxy, but once the stasis wears off it's as delicious and safe-seeming as ever - maybe not quite the same as when truly fresh, but actually a bit better than it did right after the two-hour drive back. Almost like the opposite of pickling.

>rolled [...] 20
Eliznyabeth realizes this must be the steel spider's larder, keeping rot at bay when too many meat-things are caught in the web at once. Could probably just dump all the meat straight in there, dredge it back out years later in the exact same condition, no need to worry about smoking or other laborious conventional preservation methods.

rolled 3 + 1 = 4

---

>>1041552
"Isn't this all terribly imposing." Natalina murmurs. "I suppose we have three problems then- following the trail of the missing part, ousting whatever nests in an airless void, and conducting actual repairs. Where do you think we should start?"

We would have passed through the healing mist on our way our, so rolling for the one-per-day recovery that provides.

rolled 11, 5, 2, 12, 13, 7, 2, 2, 3, 11, 4, 9, 14, 2, 18, 13, 11, 17, 2, 12 = 170

---

>2 Speed Damage
"Ow. I'pth nod ethaptlya reffnifiath." (Ow, it's not exactly a refrigerator.)
Reiko spits out the rest of the goo.
"Thanks. Crap, I think some of it got underneath my 'skin'."
Reiko opens up yet another panel in her arm. Apparently, the goo is jamming a servo. After a few moments, the servo moves again but easily halts when a weak force is applied against it. Luckily, the engine seems unharmed and is whirring away smoothly.

>Eliznyabeth realizes this must be the steel spider's larder
"Hm. I wonder what else is in there. More specifically, who else is in there."

>Elevator
"Guh, I can't remember my science classes. Eliznyabeth, can you study this while I try something?" (Reiko has a disadvantage to understanding numenera.)
Reiko spends some time building a sturdy retractable bridge across the circle, along with a tethered shadoof (crude crane) in case someone else falls in.

rolled 10, 16, 11, 1, 18, 7, 19, 17, 16, 13, 3, 17, 1, 6, 4, 17, 13, 6, 20, 4 = 219

---

>>1041552
Let's try to get an idea what we're dealing with- move 'Milaconi's cousin' around the dish to maybe get a better look at the nest, see if we can perhaps identify whatever made it. Not closing with the nest yet- don't want to get jumped by surprising whatever beastie lives on this immense, airless metal plain.

rolled 4, 2 = 6

---

Paprika will say goodbye to the innkeeper, offering a warm hug and a kiss before she departs with Natalina. Rolling two recovery rolls, one free from the decontamination spiral and another expended from her daily allowance. Next post will have resolvable actions (I figure I'll separate recovery from d20 rolls for the sake of our record-keeper's sanity)

rolled 18, 11, 12, 7, 3, 15, 14, 9, 19, 4, 1, 17, 7, 4, 11, 17, 13, 5, 15, 19 = 221

---

>"Isn't this all terribly imposing."
"I think it's beautiful. I've never seen anything like it."

>"I suppose we have three problems then- following the trail of the missing part, ousting whatever nests in an airless void, and conducting actual repairs. Where do you think we should start?"
"I say we chase off the nesting creature before it causes more damage."

>There's an ugly gash in the east side of that bowl. Looking up through the hole, you can see the upper section of the truss.
"You think we can get Milaconi's cousin up through this hole without mangling the dish any further? If not, I can leave the cab and climb up there myself. I think you should stay in the mech in case we need to go in a hurry."

>>1041746
It resembles a winged insect, suckling lightning out of the plug at the end of the cable the way a young mammal drinks milk. Ecological niche is more like a vulture or jackal, though. Level 4, can shoot darts that expand on impact to entangle and drain power. Augmech would be much more vulnerable to that than the goopy smart-fluid suits are.

rolled 13, 9, 14, 1, 10, 16, 4, 20, 2, 17, 12, 8, 6, 16, 7, 18, 4, 16, 5, 6 = 204

---

>>1041755
"A literal lightning bug? Perhaps more a lightning flea or mosquito, given the scale of this place."

>>1041753
>"I think it's beautiful
"I suppose it is at that, though no less imposing for it."

>chase off the nesting creature, climb out
"Sounds like a plan. I'll have Milaconi's cousin keep her distance, to avoid having its lighting stolen, and try to support you."

Paprika, trained in climbing and balancing, is the least likely to be slowed down by the sickness of the traction, and less vulnerable to the creature than the machine.

"...this feels odd to ask, but did you want any drugs? One of those our ride restocked seems to temporarily boost physical performance." (Might Edge).

rolled 8, 16, 14, 3, 13, 14, 2, 11, 1, 19, 11, 15, 15, 11, 6, 6, 16, 5, 7, 17 = 210

---

>>1041686
"Nyah, bi ban bo pat." (Yeah, I can do that) she would reply, her entire mouth almost entirely not working from the chunk of gel she specifically actually ate.

And she would hunt to work out the secrets of the elevator that they might board it and ride deeper into the dungeon.

>"...this feels odd to ask, but did you want any drugs?"
Paprika snickers, "Fuck me up, Nat."

Paprika exits the augmech and begins assembling her spear as Natalina injects her with might-boosting drugs. "Hey Natalina, listen. I've got a huge crush on you. I think I've had it since we first met back in the City of Needles...two days ago? Wow it feels like so much longer. Um...I just wanted to get that off my chest in case, you know, I get killed by a giant robot fly in space."

Paprika climbs up through the hole in the dish and carefully approaches the giant fly thing, waving her spear to try to shoo it away.

rolled 20, 11, 12, 3, 18, 15, 4, 10, 18, 19, 16, 6, 1, 15, 6, 3, 5, 19, 1, 9 = 211

---

Oops!

rolled 2, 11, 14, 13, 12, 3, 5, 15, 10, 14, 6, 14, 11, 2, 18, 2, 1, 20, 1, 5 = 179

---

Having completed the retractable bridge (a piece of rusted, warped plating, screwed and soldered into the floor, and then a ladder with a handle soldered perpendicular to push through the hole between the plate and the floor), Reiko opts to investigate the hunting pattern of the spiders. How much meat they move at once, if they eat some of their surplus just before storing it, potential hotspots for nests, etc. (Intelligence, 1 Effort)

>>1041953
Only apparent route further down is swimming in the preservative gel, which would at minimum require an air supply, and some sort of sealed suit or personal force field or other countermeasure to avoid being put into stasis.

Now that Eliznyabeth knows what that goo looks like when it's dripped on the floor, she realizes the steak-stealing steel spider climbed back out the other side and walked off through the room's west exit to somewhere else on the same level. Follow it, or turn back and report what's already been found?

>>1042064
Paprika leaps up parallel to the truss without touching it. This catches the lightning mourn completely by surprise. When she floats back down it's twitching helplessly, impaled on the end of her spear. Could be repaired and released, or broken up for parts.

Next problem: a mile away, the detached pylon is found, battered but intact. It's three meters tall, just over a meter wide, ~30 cm thick, and as long as the augmech's height in a direction you can only just barely see with those helmets on, for an overall 1:4:9:16 ratio atop a small rubble pile, near the center of a circular slab of metal eight meters in diameter which protrudes from the main structure like a shelf.
Main surface here is a near-vertical cliff over an effectively bottomless starry void. Paramedic augmech can walk around, but it's very important not to let go. Farspeaking pylon is close enough to touch, but, even in the low effective gravity, too heavy to lift safely at such an awkward angle.

Sensible approach would probably involve ropes and pulleys. Some chattering datasphere imp proposes a faster option: if a gravity detonation cypher were positioned at just the right spot underneath, [garbled noun] could act as a sort of lens, isotidally launching the pylon back up onto relatively level ground.

rolled 17, 20, 19, 5, 3, 5, 1, 14, 5, 18, 14, 1, 4, 14, 17, 17, 19, 13, 20, 15 = 241

---

>>1042064
Caught off guard first by surprise, then by a rush of mortification, a flustered Natalina doesn't manage to respond before Paprika escapes outside. Wha- How did she not notice- she invited her flower picking for goodness- oh. And just lept a story and plucked that creature from the sky with effortless grace after confessing. Um.

After a pause, a descending Paprika hears a sigh over the communication-tether. "I feel quite foolish for not realizing sooner. In retrospect, you were not being particularly subtle."

>>1042244
>When she floats back down it's twitching helplessly, impaled on the end of her spear. Could be repaired and released, or broken up for parts.
"Is that safe to bring inside?"

Natalina isn't going to protest if Paprika plans to show mercy and release the critter (preferably after moving it further from the communication installation). If we're to harvest her hunt, we can put it out of its misery for now, but cleaning and gutting can likely wait until we return. (When we can safely expend bonuses to overcome our disabilities on salvaging numenera).

>Some chattering datasphere imp proposes a faster option
Wait, hold on, that seems important. Some kind of... information spirit is aware of our situation, down to details of our surroundings and avialable kit, to the point they can offer tactical advice? How are they communicating? Have they been following along, are they local to this area, do they reside within some piece of the numenera we've gathered for this airless expedition...?

Actually, were the protective suits smart enough to ensure a belt-secured grenade ended up outside the protective layer? If not, disrobing inside the augmech could retrieve the cypher, but that wasn't functionality Natalina thought to check in advance.

>>1042347
The datasphere is ubiquitous, but mostly intangible and inaccessible. People catch random fragments from it reasonably often, daydreams known as 'glimmers.' Some machines and creatures can access it more directly, finding prompt, useful answers to specific questions. Terrifying predatory beasts known as jiraskar use it as their primary sense for hunting. Things live in the datasphere, ranging from vast alien gods all the way down to the equivalent of worms or beetles. Based on what's spilling over into the augmech's communication queue, immediate vicinity of the farspeaking pylon seems to be very crowded from the datasphere side, like the line outside a popular nightclub, or the office of a politician who just made a very unpopular policy decision. Imp itself has already wandered off, but proposal's geometry is still present, like a note scribbled on a napkin or a footprint in snow.

> were the protective suits smart enough to ensure a belt-secured grenade ended up outside the protective layer?
No. Transferring stuff from belt to hand is easy enough, but attempting a throw without the right setup leaves the projectile still inside a gooey pseudopod. Likewise, if you had a hammer or chisel from your crafting toolkit inside the suit, and tried to use it on something outside, smart fluid would probably end up cushioning the impacts to frustrating effect.

Fortunately you figure out a trick for transferring items through the armor - or rather, convincing the armor to start treating them as if they belong outside - by tying knots in the retractable tether, which it prefers not to enclose, and then using them to 'cut' the smart fluid pseudopod. Takes about a minute per item, though, and when you're gripping a tool firmly enough, might start trying to re-enclose it. Proceeds relatively slowly across metal, though, particularly with a coating of that dark purplish powder, so you could rig up an atlatl to throw grenades using a bar from the wrecked truss.

JamesLeng 2022/09/02(Fri)21:43 No. 1042716 ID: f57349
File 166218018729.png - (853.74KB , 804x536 , New Hallux in progress.png )

>>1042215
>rolled 2
Reiko successfully repurposes lava-proof pontoon bridges to cross the stasis pit safely (though this turns out not to be necessary, since it's possible to just walk around) and follows the spider's trail deeper inside.
>rolled 11, 14
Scrap and debris in one of the rooms it passes through (on the way to room D) seems like a potential iotum source. First pass doesn't find much of note, but scan confirms there's got to be something, and you're not under much time pressure. Second attempt, with Eliznyabeth's help, turns up a whisperlock and an oddity: a red scarf that, when one end is wrapped around a living person's neck, the other end blows dramatically perpendicular to the wind... or when there's no strong wind, in whichever direction is least likely to get it caught on anything.

rolled 18, 6, 15, 12, 15, 17, 7, 9, 6, 7, 12, 15, 18, 16, 19, 16, 14, 17, 18, 14 = 271

---

>Protagonist Scarf
Reiko dons the scarf, wondering what kind of poser of the previous worlds spent the time and effort to make such a classic decoration a reality. Wondering how many other would-be heroes and captains have donned this cloth before her. Then she realizes this thing has probably gotten people killed, as having a bright red scarf trailing everywhere makes for a good targeting beacon in ambushes.
She opts to use it to bind her chest instead. Perhaps whatever spirit remains in this façade of heroism will take lustful appeasement.

>>1042716
Reiko opts to take paths further from the center, at least until she and Eliznyabeth can regroup with the rest of the party. Reiko leads to Point B and continues scanning.

>>1042721
Room B has two more fungal stalactites on the ceiling, but unlike the one found in that outlying circular room these aren't shriveled up. Instead, they glow with a dull brown-orange inner light. Similar thin layer of dry soil across the floor, but instead of a perfectly uniform distribution it rises to shallow peaks.
>rolled 18
While still a short distance away, Reiko notices bone fragments and a scrap of chainmail protruding from the northern mound. Also, faint smell of vinegar.

rolled 12, 3, 17, 16, 7, 16, 7, 18, 9, 18, 11, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 11, 18, 9, 13 = 257

---

>>1043058
"Right, so I will ache he ock." (Right so I will take the lock) Eliznyabeth will cautiously poke at the fungus from afar to see if it reacts, especially wanting to make sure it's not going to explode with a puff of gas. And possibly try and come up with an explanation on the vinegar smell.

>>1043059
Eliznyabeth throws a small rock, which bounces off, then narrowly dodges the stream of acid squirted back in response.

rolled 14, 11, 6, 6, 13, 19, 11, 3, 9, 8, 10, 5, 3, 9, 13, 9, 11, 12, 13, 9 = 194

---

>>1043065
Alright, well then we just need to drain the two mushrooms to be able to safely get at the refuse piles. So, a dumb idea occurred to her.

She wasn't the best at trick shots, but she was practiced at them, and so she would line up a bowshot to bounce off of the ceiling and stab into a section of the mushroom towards the bottom, so that the spray of acid would be both near the bottom so that gravity could assist the spray, and aimed away from them. Then they could figure out if the mushrooms work on a pressure system, or if they have some way of regulating spray as some kind of weird ammo system.

rolled 7, 17, 13, 13, 10, 14, 4, 13, 5, 9, 6, 10, 11, 3, 17, 18, 18, 13, 16, 16 = 233

---

>>1043058
Ah yes. Reiko barely remembers, but this was one of the spa's guests. She and her adventuring party made a horrible drunken ruckus that pissed the whole staff off. They threw stools at kids, fed chocolate-coated aneenshoes to the aneen, and even farted lit candles at the drapes. Reiko personally pushed them far, far away from the Volcano Tamer before they inevitably 'adjusted' it with a greathammer. She didn't even get reprimanded for firing iotum lasers at them.
At least they tipped extravagantly.
Nobody asked where they were going next, and frankly, the staff collectively agreed to forget the whole incident to prevent PTSD.
"... This is definitely a deathtrap. What a way to go, you obnoxious party animal."
Reiko turns to Eliznyabeth.
"We should come back la-"

>>1043065
"... Could I deplete them of acid with enough stones?
Eh. Let's get back to camp. I have an idea..."

Reiko (and Eliznyabeth) walk back to the nearest camp. Reiko gets to work on engineering and constructing an acid collection apparatus and some basic hazmat equipment.

>>1043067
>rolled 14
Eliznyabeth figures out a clever way to line up a bowshot so it'll bounce off two of the walls and strike the fungal stalactite from a completely different direction. That hits, but only deals 1 damage (target apparently has the equivalent of heavy armor). Acid spray comes straight at her rather than falling for the misdirection,
>rolled 11, 6, 6, 13
...and she doesn't get out of the way quite quickly enough this time. Three speed damage, paralyzed for a round, a third spray without immediate provocation, three more speed damage, second round of paralysis successfully resisted.
>>1043068
>rolled 7, 17
Reiko helps Eliznyabeth retreat to a safe distance, and notes how fumes from wherever the corrosive spray touched flesh seem to be flowing back toward their source with uncommon directness, almost more like a fisherman pulling in the catch of the day than typical turbulent-vapor fluid dynamics.

rolled 6, 5, 16, 14, 7, 17, 5, 4, 18, 7, 8, 14, 4, 20, 8, 20, 5, 11, 4, 8 = 201

---

After a few minutes of shock, Reiko manages to shake herself out of it.
"Okay, that's enough adventuring for today! Eliznyabeth, did you get all of it off?"

On the way back to camp, Reiko makes small chat.
"Now that I think about it, the spiders are expected to perform maintenance on their territory. I guess even they can't handle a sentient colony of semi-telekinetic acid-spewing fungi...
Wait, I think Grundle said something about his power working on anything that thinks about eating people."

Back at camp, Reiko brainstorms a plan to 'capture' the fungi, or at least contain their acid, in the hopes that they can be used to kill the spiders - or better yet...
"If we could somehow dominate the fungal colonies, their psychic control over the acidic spit would easily eat through the grunge while leaving the fine-tuned components intact. And better yet, they've been looking for the cheapest form of mass-produced engraving...
I wonder if those @#$%ing ferrets will melt faster than they can burn."
(Intelligence - Engineer a strategy to capture the fungus, Effort 1)

rolled 20, 7, 6, 14, 6, 3, 19, 13, 12, 10, 16, 16, 6, 12, 9, 16, 16, 15, 1, 5 = 222

---

>>1043115
"Yeah, I absolutely agree, that's enough adventure for today, we should come up with a plan of attack, but go the opposite direction in the morning from the fork that we took. After all, as much as I want to take my vengeance on the mushrooms they are otherwise a low priority if there's a safe alternate route."

And so, Eliznyabeth would take the lead out of the dungeon, and start to rest under a tree.

> Roll a recovery
> Roll a 4+1

> Roll a recovery
> Roll a 2+1

Of course, she wasn't exactly tired or anything, and 10 minutes later she realized that she was actually really bored. So, rather than take the rest of the day off after getting almost melted, it was probably a good idea to tell Elenyah about the preservation goo since she was really the only person here she actually knew. Maybe also tell the chirurgeon since he's kind of the person that she just gave a LOT of money to. But after all of that then go find Reiko and see about going back into the dungeon on that other path now, as opposed to later.

rolled 11, 1, 3, 6, 19, 15, 7, 11, 16, 3, 12, 15, 6, 5, 4, 7, 1, 9, 19, 19 = 189

---

Hours have passed, and Reiko has come up with little. Her best bet would be to either use her cypher or Eliznyabeth's to bring the fungus to their level.

A harried messenger from Mia Xan unfolds a letter and begins chanting its contents in what can only be described as an anti-iambic pentameter. Annoyed, Reiko snatches the letter from the messenger and skims the contents. Turns out that leaving an intentionally half-dismantled device which formerly kept the volcano from completely blowing over (or so the residents incorrectly assumed) without its formal replacement has left the townsfolk... agitated. It is only due to her love of unsinged mahogany that she hasn't formally written a letter of complaint (i.e. an assassination contract), and Reiko should probably be back to work by three hours ago.

After leaving behind a message for Grundle (with the messenger, who should enliven the old man), Reiko and Eliznyabeth quickly chainpod their way back down the mountain, at which point Reiko hurries alone to Mia Xan, briefly reports Eliznyabeth's injury and explains her discovery of a specific fungal acid (which is somehow prehensile) which should speed all repairs and construction once they manage to capture / kill the damn fungus colonies producing it, and then jogs to the Volcano Tamer to begin another round of disassembly.

rolled 6, 6, 2, 5, 3, 1, 4, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 3, 3, 6, 6, 1, 5, 3, 2 = 79

---

Progress around Hallux shows while the engineers work on assembly and repair projects- Mask spends this downtime trying to capture/train shinspinners to be useful around camp. Once Eliznyabeth and Reiko are both freed from their respective duties, the glaive works with them to clear a safe path towards room D and handle whatever threats are present within.

Hallux during the off-season is a rank 2 community with Health 6 and Infrastructure 6. It was faced with a rank 2 eruption, as well as those magma weasels. Repairing the volcano tamer reduced the eruption to rank 1. Eruption inflicted 2 health damage while weasels inflicted 3 infrastructure damage, leaving health at 4/6 and infrastructure at 3/6.
If the PCs hadn't gotten involved, the town would have hit zero infrastructure at the end of the next hour-long community-scale turn, downgrading it to rank 1. While the immediate attack would end at that point, and food and water reserves might last longer with fewer surviving mouths to feed, overall prospects would have been grim.
Grundle >>1036633 and Saoirse >>1036659 patched up the Health, while Mask fixed one Infrastructure. Remaining damage can be rebuilt by local NPCs, one point per day.

Over the course of the next month, anybody who's staying in town can take a number of long-term actions equal to their tier (meaning one, unless you get a lot of XP first). Non-exhaustive list of options:

-Build up food and water stores. This is what I'm assuming Eliznyabeth will be doing. Foraging, rationing, imports... regardless of approach, each PC doing this adds 1d6 days to the deadline for clearing the dungeon.

-Craft Object or Structure. This is what I'm assuming Reiko Lastname will be doing to set up the farspeaking pylon and embassy. Requires a roll.

-General maintenance. This is what I'm assuming Grundlehaven Havespont will be doing, by applying crafting and medical skills to set up an efficient and hygenic refugee camp with room for further development. Increases the community's maximum Infrastructure, semi-permanently.

-Enhance Community Happiness. Focused on cultural and aesthetic rather than directly utilitarian factors. Increases the community's maximum Health, semi-permanently.

-Discover new site of interest. This is the sort of thing Elanyah was busy with on previous months. Ruins, monster lairs, previously unknown neighbors, etc.

-Treat with a neighboring community. This is the sort of thing Mia Xan does. Must be within one week's routine travel... but that can include vehicles, portals, etc.

-Create a closer relationship with an NPC. Requires a roll to initiate, ongoing time to maintain. Emotional benefits expand your Might, Speed, or Intellect pool.

-Earn XP or gain other benefits by focusing on self-improvement. Diminishing returns for repeated use between adventures, no direct benefit to the town.

-Scavenge dry iotum. Parts, plus 24% chance io, 24% chance responsive synth, 16% chance apt clay, 12% chance each orthogonalium fiber, synthsteel, or pliable metal. A whole month's work sifting through the less exciting sorts of ruins only provides two units.

-Scavenge bio-iotum. Similar to the above but focused on different sources, yielding 16% chance each immorcell colony, cognitive weave, optogenetic muscle, or mother marrow, 12% chance each allophene nodule, bio-circuitry, or metabolic vesicle.
Side benefit is organic matter rather than mechanical parts, which isn't worth much around a functional ecosystem, but might be relevant in other environments.

>>1044178
>rolled 11
Salvage result is two cyphers, a level 6 stim and a level 7 iron wind resistor. There's no obvious way to use the latter for embassy construction apart from leaving it in an emergency-supplies locker, but a stim cypher is exceptionally versatile: it eases ANY single task by three steps. Given sufficient materials, you could use that to set up a specialty workshop or other high-end commonplace structure in days rather than years. Appropriate specialty workshop would then cut a week off the build time for the farspeaking pylon, and have many other benefits besides.
Thanks to Grundle's assistance you also extract 6 units of Azure Steel, which might be even better than tungsten for engraving magma-proof formal documents, or setting up thermal-mirror surfaces so visiting volcanic nobility can 'let their hair down' inside without accidentally setting the walls on fire. Lot of Parts, too, but the exact count probably isn't relevant unless you're embezzling.
>rolled 1, 3, 6, 19, 15
GM intrusion from that 1 on crafting: once the pylon is built, for every recipient of any given message sent through it, next single meal they eat which includes meat, the meat will taste like soap.
Otherwise, looks like reasonably smooth sailing for whichever thing you build first. Construction is resolved as a series of subtasks, starting at difficulty 1 and increasing incrementally over the course of the total time required, so the hardest part always comes last. Failing any given subtask once just results in a proportional delay, but failing the same subtask twice in a row also ruins some of the components (which is mostly a problem when working with hard-to-replace iotum).

>>1043668
>rolled 20
Short nap in direct sunlight and some stretching exercises suffice for Eliznyabeth to mostly shake off the effects of two potent, and unrelated, paralytic poisons. Shriveled fungal stalactite in that outlying room seems like a sensible practice target for parkour tactics in her vendetta against the vapor feeders. Series of wall-jumps leading into a forearm-blade stab see it torn loose at the base, revealing a long narrow hole leading up through the smoky flying buttress.
>>1044189
Mask fetches a ladder so non-acrobats can reach the hole, and figures out (partly based on Eliznyabeth's description of the smell) that it's an alternate entrance to the shinspinner lair - probably close to whatever they're using to extract food and water from the Eye of the Sea. Depending on what you find at the other end, might even be possible to convert the passage into an aqueduct so townsfolk can resupply without needing to intrude on the main tunnel complex. Downside is, you'd have to be crawling in there single-file, and while it's unlikely the shinspinners would have built traps in what was until very recently a dead-end passage, that's not a guarantee. Spherical laser falcons refuse to enter such tight quarters.

rolled 8, 8, 13, 16, 1, 10, 16, 16, 12, 8, 5, 8, 7, 16, 10, 6, 9, 20, 2, 1 = 192

---

>GM Intrusion: Meat tastes like soap
A quick pulse test of the base transmitter causes Reiko's mouth to ache with the equivalent of chewing melted rubber bands and a side order of acid. After gargling for two minutes, she tries to snack on a meat ration - only to discover, to her horror, that it tastes like what she just cleaned off.
After panicking for about a half-hour, she manages to inference the cause and effect. As the 'curse' appears to reset after a single 'meal', Reiko concludes that the side-effect, while disgusting, is acceptable. In fact, she realizes this could be a great dietary aid! Or a way to help vegetarians make sure their 'mystery salad' is not, in fact, a pile of fried pork rinds.
"Dear Mia Xan... some complications... hire a vegetarian... Wuv, Weiko. Nah, too silly."
She warns the other townsfolk that they may want to cut down to a quarter-ration for one lunch.
(Offering an XP to Eliznyabeth)

"... That's what it was capable of?! He used it as a goddamn counterweight!"
>If there's enough resources to build the specialty workshop
Reiko immediately injects herself with the stim. Her cyber implant quickly hums to life, gaining temporary access to the datasphere with a hacked account and a pre-selected list of topics. Reiko has enough time to download a single instruction manual before the archive's security protocols kick in and banhammer the account. Reiko selects "how to create precursor-quality construction tools with big dum-dum butterfingers" and is hit with a full Maester's knowledge. It's fading fast, so Reiko quickly begins crafting the advanced workshop, designed specifically to repair and maintain fine-tuned components. By the time she's finished, the information is a hollow memory she can't quite recall, but she can't believe she managed to create an electron microscope out of hot sand, oak fibers, and a tub of butter. This is the workshop she needed three months ago.

>If not, or afterwards
Reiko stores the cyphers, hoping they won't break down on their own, and begins basic construction of the pylon. The magma-proof documents take priority over thermal mirrors, keeping the records fully accurate and preserved is worth more than a fiery hairdo.

rolled 20, 20, 15, 13, 14, 16, 11, 20, 10, 4, 15, 16, 17, 11, 12, 11, 20, 7, 18, 18 = 288

---

>>1044189
Whoops, rolled d6. Here's a better roll.
>>1044394
Mask takes point, explores for traps, so the engineers can figure out how to widen it and get the water out.

>>1044464
>rolled 8, 8, 13, 16
The magma embassy's farspeaking pylon is fully operational in less than a week, with no further complications.

>>1044842
>rolled 20, 20, 15, 13
Only trap on the route in is a force-wall projector. Semi-domesticated shinspinners approach it without triggering activation. Mask persuades them to move it to the room's other entrance, alter the trigger conditions, and redirect some pipes. Soon enough refugees from Hallux have a functionally unlimited supply of fresh water and fish, while the shinspinners have to beg, steal, flee, or starve.

>>1043668
>rolled 20
Steel spider base unit has three main sections: input disassembler, eggshell projector, and the control console across the top. Materials which the spiders dump in are reassembled inside the shell to build new spiders, with surplus converted into energy or something almost like spraymetal to recharge and repair existing ones. Console seems to be describing the device's connection to the Eye of the Sea - it's not an essential component, more like a simplified toy model for educational purposes, or possibly a sort of remote control.
Eliznyabeth sneaks in and rips out the reassembly mechanism, castrating the "queen." Any steel spiders still loose may pose a threat, but with no way to repair or replace, time is firmly on the town's side.
The factory's death throes graft a linear accelerator and set of malformed steel-spider face-parts onto her forearm blade. Through the string of thumb-sized sapphires, she can view targets up to 1 mile (1.5 km) off as if they were just a short distance away. Once a target is sighted, the device can almost silently fire a tiny slug of metal, dealing 6 damage. Kick to the shoulder might knock her down if she's not braced for it, though.

Everybody gets 4 xp for neutralizing the main threats under the Eye of the Sea. Hallux is saved - they'll probably all survive the winter, and come back stronger next year thanks to that new potential trade partner.

Another few hundred miles closer to the Beanstalk, beside a small lake on the northernmost fringes of the Ba-Adenu Forest, you've tracked rumors of a renewable supply of amber crystal to the village of Glawv. Lake Lom is home to dobworms, a type of arm-length, aquatic invertebrate that produces pea-sized bits of amber much like how oysters produce pearls. The 400 or so Glawvians tend to the dobworms, either in wild “farms” along the edge of the lake or in basins in their yards, and harvest the amber pieces (called dobs) to make jewelry. The farmers have a technique for heating and squeezing the dobs so they either form larger pieces or temporarily liquefy into a resin that can be painted on as a durable seal. Each worm produces only a few grams per year (caged dobworms tend to produce dobs with a more consistent color and clarity, but dobs from wild, lake-living dobworms tend to be larger) while a chunk sufficient to serve as part of a chainpod's power core would need tens of kilograms of the stuff.

Grundlehaven Havespont observes that leftover dobworm slime would be an ideal dunking medium for his humiliation hospital plan, and setting up such a beneficial numenera installation would probably be fair trade for a dozen or more units of amber crystal. Apt clay and responsive synth can be easily scavenged from the Eye of the Sea, Mayor Delby happens to have a few jars of mimetic gel in her cellar so worst case you could use more of that to substitute for a shortage of synthsteel, and quantium is available as Reiko's share of the treaty with the King Under The Mountain... but that still leaves the hardest part: midnight stones.
There's a clave called Elsawn Observatory half a day's walk deeper in the forest (or a few minutes by chainpod), to whom Glawv sends food and various other gifts in exchange for help with weird problems. An offhand comment from that many-handed automaton who set you on this quest in the first place, which didn't make sense at the time, could be taken to imply that Elsawn Observatory has a stash of midnight stones, but the aeon priests are reluctant to discuss their inventory with heavily armed outsiders.

rolled 3, 11, 13, 15, 3, 6, 6, 4, 20, 11, 17, 15, 20, 18, 4, 6, 11, 12, 10, 1 = 206

---

>>1042347
>>1042244
>Paprika leaps up parallel to the truss without touching it. This catches the lightning mourn completely by surprise. When she floats back down it's twitching helplessly, impaled on the end of her spear.
It takes a moment for Paprika's breath to catch up to her. She tries to stay calm, despite this possibly being the most awesome thing she's ever done.

>After a pause, a descending Paprika hears a sigh over the communication-tether. "I feel quite foolish for not realizing sooner. In retrospect, you were not being particularly subtle."
"Really? I was trying so hard to play it cool...I have been told I'm about as subtle as an earthshaker, before."

>"Is that safe to bring inside?"
>Natalina isn't going to protest if Paprika plans to show mercy and release the critter
"I think so. It's not looking too good, poor thing. You think we can fix it up and let it go?"

>disrobing inside the augmech
Paprika visibly blushes at the suggestion.

>if a gravity detonation cypher were positioned at just the right spot underneath, [garbled noun] could act as a sort of lens, isotidally launching the pylon back up onto relatively level ground.
"Haha that sounds really risky. I'm all for it though, what do you think?"

rolled 14, 8, 1, 18, 15, 7, 4, 7, 19, 3, 4, 2, 10, 3, 11, 19, 20, 20, 8, 13 = 206

---

>>1045364
>"Really? I was trying so hard to play it cool...I have been told I'm about as subtle as an earthshaker, before."
An aborted laugh comes across the communication cable in response. "Much as I'd like to credit your success and spare my dignity, they may have been correct."

Natalina continues, hesitantly. "A part of me feels like I should expound on the perils of a workplace romance, or one between two people stranded alone with one another. ...although, no, we're not the only two people present counting our inkeeper-abbot. And of the two of us, I'm not the one you kissed.

"...I'm sorry, I quite lost track of where I was going with that."

>You think we can fix it up and let it go?
>Working through [the augmech] provides three free levels of Effort on medical care and repairs to biomechanical creatures
Natalina, operating Milaconi's cousin, will attempt to extricate and repair the impaled lightning mourn. Not sure how quickly the creature can travel, but if we're engaging in catch-and-release, we should do so away from the nest we're trying to evict it from.

>"Haha that sounds really risky. I'm all for it though, what do you think?"
If only one of the pair ventures out onto the platform to plant the grenade, the risk of falling into the abyss is a lot lower, since they'd be tethered to the other and the augmech. Paprika would be better at a balancing act, but Natalina could apply discounted Intellect effort, Learned for training in demolitions, and training in noticing flaws to help pick the right point in the rubble pile to place it (and to not knock the pile down on herself doing so).

"...I'm not confident in my ability to accurately throw in this gravity, but I think I could place it."

>>1045399
>rolled 14
Lightning mourn has been patched up, and gently reprogrammed to see you as neither a threat nor a food source. It immediately zooms back to suckle at the sparking end of that loose cable, though.
>rolled 8, 1, 18
You find the correct spot, and (after burning xp on a reroll) a position from which Milaconi's cousin can simply throw the gravity-pear with exactly the right speed, angle, and timing. Detonation is shockingly loud, in contrast with the near-total ambient silence of the station exterior.
>rolled 15
By the time you hike back to the dish, that mangled support truss has somehow been completely repaired or replaced, and farspeaking pylon landed in what looks like the right spot atop it. The lightning mourn gives you an insectile salute before skittering away.

After simply touching the reconnected cable, Milaconi's cousin can interface with the farspeaking pylon, and even maintain the connection from a distance. Local datasphere is still very crowded, but seems to be making progress toward clearing the queue.

Now, to see if you can remember the chainpod's ID code...

First attempt: at the other end of the connection you're looking up from the bottom of a squarish shaft, 2.5 meters by 3 meters and at least five meters deep. No light apart from the display screen itself. Error message, core... something something... not found... reserve power... blah blah catastrophic blah... This chainpod is in very bad shape. Not just neglected maintenance, somebody tore important pieces out of it. Only other item of interest visible through the dashboard camera is a jumbled pile of bones including at least three human skulls. Advanced state of decay, but with hair still visible, suggests time of death somewhere between two months and ten years ago, depending on accessibility to scavenging beetles.
Wait, no, this isn't even YOUR chainpod! Got that last digit wrong.

Second attempt: it's outdoors, in or near Cerdyn's Pass, maglinked to two others, and the engine is having problems consistent with accumulated volcanic ash, so you're fairly sure you found the right one. Audio transceiver unresponsive, dashboard camera seems to be blocked by a large furry butt.

Third attempt: one of the other two linked pods. Camera is, again, mostly obstructed, but this time by some pale papery-looking thing, leaking a thin trail of blood.

Fourth attempt: last linked pod, fully functional, empty, and wide open to the sky. Shattered wall of a building - one you recognize as among the few in Hallux which were completely intact during the eruption's immediate aftermath - and to the other side, greasy smoke rising from out of frame in front of the wrecked volcano tamer. Reiko is laughing somewhere nearby, but it doesn't seem like the happy sort of laughter. Several other voices, crying or shouting, mostly unintelligible. A not-quite-humanoid silhouette approaches. Bright red eyes flicker "This confirms that you survived." Reaching toward the 'disconnect' button, a finger of angular stone.

rolled 14, 4, 12, 8, 18, 5, 9, 10, 5, 12, 16, 11, 5, 7, 1, 19, 12, 11, 2, 5 = 186

---

As the weeks pass, Reiko's new workshop hums and grinds to the tunes of her whimsical experimentation. Most of her work is centered around replicating the fine-tuned components of the chainpods, with the occasional request from the weary townsfolk for something she doesn't think is important like an aneen fence or a bakery. As the last component is cannibalized from the former Volcano Tamer, Reiko recommends to Mia Xan that they turn it into some kind of fire department as a (literally) practical joke. Or at least a major storage area so the next disaster doesn't starve everyone.
(Timeskip is spent developing Parts and improving/repairing the chainpods)

The calm after the stress-fest has given her enough clarity to realize she may have been blowing her personal problems out of proportion - but it was her new friends that found violent, hilariously improvised solutions. Reiko concludes that she likes this new party and would join them even if this temporary contract didn't pull the fur out of her arms.

A fortunate function of her brain implant created a neural copy of the manual she downloaded from the datasphere was kept intact. This copy is linked to her mental experiences when viewing the files rather than the actual data, and so will only work for her. It managed to compress and encrypt the copy in time to delete the raw evidence, lest the Archive she downloaded the manual from confirm her data theft and send out a cease-and-desist order for evidence of copied data - which usually means sending assassins.
Unfortunately, the Archive's cybersecurity has a creative way of dealing with hackers - they counter-hacked her implant and purged the file containing all the encryption keys. And then managed to forge evidence they had simply erased a folder of porn - that constitutes a lip-service fee for the Archive and a headache for Reiko. It's going to take time and resolve to decrypt all the files.
What little she has decrypted... it's not pretty. Most of the schematics are viewed in proportions to other components, and copies of the same objects used in various blueprints were stored and compressed in separate files, most of which are not decrypted, so most of the schematics are jumbled messes of 3-dimensional scribbles and File Not Found tokens.
(4XP - Crafting Numenera)

>>1045669
>developing Parts
>rolled 14
A full barrel of parts is only 80 units, when they're sorted and packed safely. Could plausibly gather more than that, by some combination of scrounging under the Eye of the Sea and early-completion bonus from the King Under the Mountain, but if you're sharing three single-seat vehicles with five other people (Saoirse ran off - something to do with that duke of the Beyond to whom Eliznyabeth sold a hundred-ton pack animal) there's already not much room left for luggage.

>and improving/repairing the chainpods
Each of the three pods is, more or less, a two-meter hamster ball with gyrostabilized throne inside, ominous sealed box under the seat, handspan-wide textured belt like the bastard spawn of a sawblade and a monster truck tire wrapped around the outer circumference, serving as both access hatch and traction surface. Cruises up to eighty miles per hour over good roads, half that on rough terrain or submerged. Typical humans will need to surface for fresh air every four hours or so. Any single pod can only roll along under its own power for five hours before needing to rest in direct sunlight for an hour - clear canopy gradually darkens, reaching full opacity when exhausted. However, pods can magnetically link up in a chain (hence the name) like a string of beads. Leader pulls while allowing the others to rest. Three is just enough to keep moving nonstop, provided it's not too cloudy around dawn or dusk. The seats and controls seem to have been originally intended for humanoids almost three meters tall, hunched up into a fetal position.
The three chainpods you've got access to have consecutive serial numbers, suggesting that they were produced as part of a single batch. Based on comparison to the "official" design (which you've reconstructed from a combination of datasphere glimmers and ransacking one of the pods' own internal memory), and careful nondestructive scanning, that box under the seat is a solid block of amber crystal, serving as both power storage and buoyancy control.
>inability at understanding numenera
>rolled 4
...but it's much larger than it needs to be, given the extraordinarily high purity of the crystals in question. Assuming perfect gem-cutting, and abundant supplies of the other ingredients, should theoretically be possible to build twenty or thirty adequate chainpods with the amber crystal from those three. Maybe there's some secondary function?

Anyway, you get the volcanic ash residue all cleared out, confirm lack of other urgent maintenance problems, and rig up more efficient interior cargo storage.

rolled 9, 17, 14, 3, 10, 9, 14, 20, 16, 5, 2, 11, 3, 9, 10, 19, 10, 1, 11, 10 = 203

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>>1042427
>Based on what's spilling over into the augmech's communication queue, immediate vicinity of the farspeaking pylon seems to be very crowded from the datasphere side, like the line outside a popular nightclub, or the office of a politician who just made a very unpopular policy decision.
>>1045410
>Local datasphere is still very crowded, but seems to be making progress toward clearing the queue.
Natalina is quite pleased their effects have apparently helped their invisible data-compatriots. There are more people (or close enough) up here than she first throught.

>>1045410
>Fourth attempt: last linked pod, fully functional, empty, and wide open to the sky. Shattered wall of a building - one you recognize as among the few in Hallux which were completely intact during the eruption's immediate aftermath - and to the other side, greasy smoke rising from out of frame in front of the wrecked volcano tamer. Reiko is laughing somewhere nearby, but it doesn't seem like the happy sort of laughter. Several other voices, crying or shouting, mostly unintelligible. A not-quite-humanoid silhouette approaches. Bright red eyes flicker "This confirms that you survived." Reaching toward the 'disconnect' button, a finger of angular stone.
"...I am having second thoughts about helping you pick flowers for that. In fact, I think I would be quite happy to never see them again." Natalina reacts, shakily. "Maybe... wait for them to move away, and then keep trying to see if we can reach someone helpful and find out what happened? We're too far to help, and it's a long walk back to the inn."