A wasp’s head the size of a dog’s head pokes out of the nest and looks at us. I guess these are eye wasps. That’s a bit larger than I expected.

We stay the night in the elfgoblin village, the kids love it, we enjoy ourselves in their tiny huts protected from the ground worms and the ear worms and the fungal gnats and the ass hornets and every other predatory fuckin insect. 

Caleb wants to call the Maze Place “Bonetown”.

D.va scrambles up the room, deliberately trying to knock over at least one priceless grotesque magical lamp, and getting to the throne. 

D.va somehow stabs the lamp-creature that has brought her to the brink of death off of the dais. I think that’s probably the cat nature, where she can knock shit off of other shit. I was all worried for a minute but then the cat knocked the lamp off the table.

Chad pulls himself up into the stadium seating, casually yet subtly touches himself for a bit of healing, and then looks around a bit as though the rest of us didn’t just see him shove his hand down his codpiece. 

D.va is all “but if I thunderwave you I’ll hurt you” and I’m like “fuck that these tiny little shits are stabbing the hell out of me just do it” and then I heard something really loud and everything tasted like floor.

Caleb found a ‘do not disturb’ sign, so we stuck that on the door. D.va found a button near the bed, and pushes it, plunging the room into darkness. So then instead of being a normal person and getting some sleep she proceeds to have a lightswitch rave.

“i had this snacking feeling that they were cannibals” - Caleb, misheard

And then Caleb explains how Karl does not like demons, and in fact demons should be bound, perhaps by matching triplets of blocks in a binding combination chain.

So Chad gives them a bit of a sermon. Pops his collar of rank, puts on his Sperrys, starts going over the concept of the Win-Win Mystery on his Whiteboard of Presentation.

Dr. Castle: “is it throbbing?”
Nyla: “has it been painful and throbbing for more than…”
Dr. Castle and Nyla: “4 hours” (in unison)
Dr. Castle: “I think we got some arcane priapism here.”

Nyla summoned her familiar! It’s a walking blob of flesh shaped like a penis named Richard Milhaus Phalanges. Somehow he’s wearing a suit and is a bit jowly. Has a good, firm handshake. When he unbuttons his overcoat it turns into wings and he flies up around Nyla’s head. 

We go back inside and find the breaker panel, turn the lightning back on, and then head towards the pad. We don’t really have any good ways to mark a path, but we do try to take in how the lightning is working , just in case we can mark the gate when we do find it with a metal tower or something. President Phalanges got drunk on the power on display outside, started making gross grunting noises. Lightning is coruscating across the sky, connecting something on the roof of the brutalist, square stone building we just came out of with snow drifts all around the landscape - we’re pretty sure there are metal girders or poles in those drifts. 

Chad tries to sell some ‘fine, fine textile, you can fit so many knots in this baby *slaps hood of spool*’ to his fellow clergy, and somehow manages to convince some of them that they want some. Somehow he manages to just stare some churchbro into a pool of money and failure and gets 333gp (repeating, of course) for one spool, and sold the other to his senior manager for 280gp and a good performance review. 

“I do not rub myself against things” - D.va

“They are gone now. Fleeing. Like the era of political legitimacy.” - Richard M. Boogerhooks

Chad then goes up to spear range and stabs at the thing. (“As they taught us in Paladin school: Always Be Closing.”)

Chief Executive Ticklebangers sends us back towards a ladder, up to the second level. There’s a huge CROAK and at this point I’m just hoping we don’t end up having to deal with this fucking frog. Nyla reports that she can see a gigantic frog in the water. We keep going up the ladders heading to the door Tricky is sending us to. Meanwhile, the huge frog surfaces in the middle of the whirlpool (and not caring), and continues to try to get up to us. It slams its tongue into the bottom of the walkway as we’re getting up on the top level. Richard M. Phalanges continues to try to herd us towards a small doorway … somewhere in this complex. We head for the door and get out instead of playing with the fucking frogs. Nyla keeps talking about how she just wanted to say hello and the frogs wanted to take all our stuff and eat us and I guess it’s so unfair or something, and Chad counters with “Yes. Communism.”

Then the guard makes some clicking noises and matches Chad’s double-barred B with a streamlined shape that Chad looks at and breathes out, in awe, “to the moon!” They both make some gesture with their hands and Chad says they are “holders”, which I guess is good because he’s excited. The guards click some more. 

There are also a bunch of “money sticks”, which used to carry arbitrary amounts of what Chad calls ‘non-specie currencies’, and which are useless to pretty much everyone but which his church considers holy. 

So while we’re doing this, Nyla is trying to find someone who recognizes any of the signs of Karl, her patron. Caleb and D. Milhaus Schlongpaddles are kind of backing her up, but with tough love and trickle-down support from a significant yet safe distance.

Eventually Nyla finds some bug that knows what the signs of Karl mean, and points her … somewhere. I guess. Caleb and Kielbasa McMilhaus are still “backing her up”, which can’t be helping but it’s funny as hell.

It’s super effective.

Chad starts praying to his Church’s customer support line. ‘zero… zero… zero… operator… zero… two… one… zero… operator… #3234#… zero….” He’s trying to get someone on the “line”, he says, with a “manual” for this matrix plate. The extraplanar entity “Ganesh” is, however, ultimately unhelpful.

Nyla _also_ hears a voice in her ear, but it’s just R. Dickbeaters. “I am shocked and disheartened by the decrepitude which outsourcing our material hardware to overseas suppliers has produced. I regret any part I or my policies may have played in weakening the American technological industry to such an extent. You have my sincere apologies.”

And so on. Chad eventually hangs up. It seems Ganesh was not helpful. Everyone is utterly shocked at this turn of events.

While we’re all dealing with this, Caleb hears a faint snatch of screaming, and we’re so much closer to the source of it now. Caleb grabs Chad, I grab D.va, Caleb telekinetically throws me (and thus D.va, because she and I already decided to leave when Caleb said “WE ARE LEAVING”) down the hall and follows with Chad in hand and Nyla on his back. D. Milhaus Assburger is nowhere to be seen but presumably that floppy used prophylactic made it out as well.

“YES. WE WILL HELP THEM. I mean, this also opens the rest of this ship to resource exploitation BUT YES OF COURSE WE WILL HELP THESE PEOPLE. It’s important to do well by doing good, and really, that’s what doing good is all about, yes?”

“Monks and warlocks are the two short refractory period - wait what” - Henry

Nyla asks The President for some help. After some incomprehensible bullshit about some place called America and how he was a great communicator, R. Milhaus Cockbumpers goes over to one of the corpses and pulls a …. hand plus forearm … out. “You’re going to have to make the call, Nyla. But I can offer you…. a hand.” Nyla tries to mage hand the … body part … around, and The Greatest American Communicator informs Nyla: “You do realize you will have to press the dead fingers of that hand against your head, yes? You have been…. paying attention, yes?” Nyla starts to try to put the fingers on his head, but quickly realizes that his head is too small and eventually sucks it up and presses the fingers of this former crewmember against her head.

Nyla, Caleb, and Chad look out from the rusted remains of the back of the Propulsion section. D.va and Dr. Castle are nowhere to be seen, but they are _certain_ that this ship is not the same one that they saved. Perhaps the worldlines split and there is now both a crashed ship and a ship that survived.