20210622 - Run 11
Here is a small list of the things we got from the alchemy lab:
We sat around in a circle in the lab and started talking about milking and vasectomies as we waited for D.va to attune to the pearl of power we found, and then we headed through the door we found on the ‘other side’ of this lab.
The door opens onto a skybridge - no railings, definitely not “safe” for guests - and the skybridge heads for a 5-sided tower on the other side of the complex. The tower ahead of us is large - hard to get an idea of how large, but probably at least an 80’ radius. There’s some variation in the size of the tower at different heights. As we get closer it almost looks like portions of the tower’s face are shifting when we’re not watching it. We can also look down and see hedgerows, and owlbear nesting grounds with a bunch of owlbears.
We get to the tower; the door is quite small, but turns out to be unlocked. When we open it, the very faint ticking we could hear initially becomes much more distinct and profound, and the interior of the tower - it becomes apparent that it is full of gears and clockwork. D.va heads in, we follow. The walls are thick and actually opaque, as though they are trying to keep things out on more than just a physical level. Caleb draws a comparison between this and the power system of the heating element in the lab, and hypothesizes that the entire tower might be sort of like a … straw, pointed at a source of … energy? The gears in here might serve to maintain consistent alignment to a target.
Entering the door gets us access to a narrow walkway crossing our path, going slightly up to the right, slightly down to the left. The walkway is about 3’ wide, with 7-9’ of clearance, and it’s made of 3 planks side by side, but the middle one is a bit depressed compared to the other two. (So, ball trap.) We decide to go up.
We go up for 3 full loops, and we’d thought that the tower wasn’t that much taller, so there’s probably still some weird spacial fuckery inside here. Chad’s in front, Caleb right behind him. We pass a stack of clockwork and discs - large, metal discs, like huge coins - that are about a minute from putting a disc on the path and letting it roll down the path. Chad gets us to hustle past and we get to see a huge coin be put on the path and roll down the helical path, instead of experiencing it the hard way.
We continue, and after a bit longer some part of the clockwork swings out and slams into Chad, injuring him pretty badly, slamming him into Caleb, and knocking them both down. We carefully move past that section and continue. Chad notices a second piece of gearwork that would have done something similar, we get past that, and then we emerge into a large flat space with an orrery in it.
D.va notices that there’s a part of the ceiling that is transparent, not opaque. It reminds her of a telescope she saw once. It’s like that is a receptor of some sort of celestial energy and the orrery is the control mechanism to align the receptor in the ceiling.
D.va notices Language of the Stars script around some of the orrery items. in the shadows of the “outside” of the room, there’s a slice of … body, just kind of hanging in different places. like at one point it was in the same place, but it all shifted out to the outside of the room. I notice a magic circle on the floor, positioned in a place that intersects neatly with the ‘orbit’ of each of these chunks. (I do look around the outside of the room until I find the entire human, complete with robes and nice slippers and hands with some rings on them.) The magic circle is a pointer to some kind of power reservoir, down below this space… probably in the basement.
The slices of humanoid - probably an elf - are, of course, alive, and while the person appears to be unconscious and unmoving, we can see the internal workings of their body, we can see things beating and blood flowing. I think there must be a way to manipulate the orrery to put this person back together. Nyla thinks she has an idea about how to do that but it’d take knowing how to do this. D.va has notes she took about a star map on a globe but she’s not sure it’s quite enough to figure out how to arrange the orrery.
We decide to try to get more information. D.va sketches the sliced person’s face from the components of the body, and we go back down the tower, dodging the gear pieces and the rolling coin trap and getting back out on the skybridge. We’re intending to go to the majordomo, show him the picture, brief him and ask him for some help.