20210608 - Run 10

As soon as we get the door open D.va scampers up the stairs, so I follow her. She gets up to the next room and it’s packed floor-to-ceiling with Shit. Perhaps Stuff, but probably Shit. It’s dark in here so D.va sets up a small light. D.va pulls out some ritual components so she can cast detect magic as the rest of the party shows up. Nyla notices some of the shelves are not actually shelves, they’re glass columns that go down to a section where they narrow, and there are some metal fittings that end in a valve.There are a number of large spider webs up in the top area of the room; they look large enough that they might have been spun by dire spiders, but we don’t see any huge spiders yet.

This looks to me like the storeroom for an alchemy lab, but not the alchemy lab itself. Caleb is heading off down a hallway so I follow, looking for the lab or generally anything else. 

This alchemy storeroom is a treasure trove of expensive, expired, frequently toxic and explosive items. Kind of like grad school. So D.va offers up her bag of holding and I start putting some of the less nitrogenated, sulfated, arsenated, and selenated items in there as she finishes casting detect magic.

There are a number of lab benches where Caleb looks, along with what looks like some kind of plumbing (attached to what, we don’t quite know). It’s also brighter over there, because there’s a light fixture overhead with white peeking slightly around a sheet of metal (as though a light has been covered). Before I notice, Caleb opens it up and there’s a strange apparatus that allows one to move a continual light based directional light either near a lab bench or put an area light up near the ceiling. He shines it at me and I yell at him to stop that shit so he doesn’t set off any unstable photosensitive compounds in the store room. (but also good job finding a light)

D.va finishes her detect magic and starts looking for things that are “small, magical, and fun”. She and I start working on harvesting stuff, and I’m pretty sure we managed to find a lot of very pricey goods.

Meanwhile Nyla’s listening around the room and she hears a very faint rustling, except as though the rustling of paper is spoken. She listens a bit more and hears a pair of voices discussing a poem in Unctan, which she can’t really make out but it seems like something discussing whether something is or is not food.

We figure out that the large cylindrical tanks in here probably drain into the main room somehow, so I start trying to figure out which tank holds the acid. I find an empty tank that looks like it used to have acid in it over where we think the acid damage was downstairs, so then I start trying to figure out what’s in the other reservoirs. One of them is filled with an opaque and sort of smoky liquid that is also enchanted according to D.va, but really in order to know what it is, I’d need to open it up. But I think maybe the liquid is supposed to be an easily aerosolized oil that is intended as a conductor of magic. Another tank looks like it might have a liqueur in it, and another pair look like they might just have water in it - but one is slightly pink tinged and one is slightly blue tinged. 

Nyla and Chadwick tell us they think the sounds are coming from above us, so maybe there’s someone up there. 

I go over to the lab and the lab bench and check that there are 2 pipes going to it, and i figure out how to use the hot and cold water after flushing pipes that haven’t been used in hundreds of years. (Still in very good condition, considering.)

Nyla then manages to hear enough of the poetry to hear “That one’s clearly not food, it understands poetry”, at which point the nature of the threat starts to become clear - probably a poet-spider on the ceiling trying to figure out whether or not to attack us. Nyla starts trying to speak Unctan poetry back at the weird voice, talking about delicious eye-wasps as food - trying to distract the whatever-on-the-ceiling into deciding on a different meal. 

The other speaker starts to speak in counterpoint with Nyla, demonstrating that it heard her and is conversing now. Nyla starts scribbling in her notebook and speaking louder while looking at Chad, and then the ceiling responds, and it goes on like this for a bit as Nyla apparently tries to convince the ceiling voice that the party is not food. Presumably. Who knows. I don’t know Unctan so she could have just been talking about dicks the whole time. She did manage to get Chad to do poetry along with her, and then after that the chant turned sort of happy and a Large spider came down from the ceiling and asked if she wanted to know anything.

Apparently there used to be a wizard here, but it likes this area because “it’s so permeable”. It demonstrated this by scuttling towards us and disappearing at the same time. It comes back and explains, basically, that it the permeablilty makes it easier to hunt. Also apparently it exists in multiple realities, so that’s cool. 

The spider is not the wizard, but is very thankful that the wizard thinned the space here - usually it takes a lot of work to do this. Great. Cool. They did apparently see someone that could have been the wizard, though, in this lab quite some time ago.

At one point during the conversation I guess Nyla asked if the spider was alone and, well, nope. A bunch of other spiders blinked in and out across the ceiling. But that’s OK, apparently they all think we’re not food.

The spiders do point out that there’s a way out of this room that are not the stairs we took to come up here, so that’s good. It’s just on the other side of the room, obscured by a bunch of shelves that we haven’t searched yet. The spider leads us to the door (implausibly walking on the side of the shelves yet not putting weight on anything). (door is a tiny door on a raised platform with a pair of staircases going up to the platform, looking like a little hemisphere)

So we got ready to go out the door.

[Meta note: GM to provide some documentation on what loot we scored from in here]