20210803 - Run 13

D.va thinks that not only did Felginor make a math error in his work, but he was compounding the error by miscalibrating the rate at which two variables would change in relation to each other while tracking a position in space, and he may have locked one of those variables… somehow. I don’t know. After she said ‘constant’ too many times I went to go get a drink. Chad started making jokes about ‘hey you forgot a spine error’ because I guess he saw sine and cosine somewhere. We think maybe he was lacking some peer review that he was used to having pre-Collapse.

We consider for a bit going back to the Hub for academic backup, but really I don’t think D.va likes that idea. Maybe if we get really stuck, that’s a thing to do.

We decide to head back to the orrery room where Felginor disassembled himself, and see if we can find more info on the orrery rings themselves or some kind of control. D.va wants to put together a magic projector to shine the points on a globe we found across the room, to see if we can line up the orrery with the globe, to maybe ‘reset’ things or put the guy back together. I help put it together, and Chad helps by making sure we don’t, uh, I’m not really sure. But he thinks it looks good I guess!

While we’re on the way over someone brings up how Felginor could do all this shit but couldn’t build a system to check his work and how that’s maybe dumb. Then someone thought maybe that wasn’t actually his area of expertise, and he was mostly about mushrooms and maybe someone else built the tower and the orrery that he’s stuck in. I dunno.

D.va also manages to decode the notes that she found impressed into the back of Felginor’s used notebooks. Well, kind of. We get star names, and we get gibberish as well. I drop the idea that it might be double-encoded or something, and we go back to Kartho to bounce some ideas off of him. He is a little weird about it, like he is about anything relating to Felginor, but he brings himself to admit that he’s not the best person to solve this and introduces us to someone named Elcet.

Elcet looks Familiar. None of us is sure why. And they seem to be shifting in race a bit. It might be that they’re some kind of changeling or doppleganger but that’s fine, whatever, what’s more important is they seem very logical and may be able to help D.va check Felginor’s math. (Chad thinks doppleganger.) But Elcet does manage to help D.va decrypt the notes further; it was in fact a double-encoding process.

We take a nice long rest, and then in the morning we go up to the orrery room. We examine it, and we get ready to work on the big orrery, and then Chad and I look at each other and say “wait. There’s a smaller one of these in the stove in the kitchen. Let’s test shit out on that!” So we get out of there and then go down to the kitchen, and go fuck with the stove.

Over the next day we end up breaking the stove in the same way as we think Felginor broke the orrery. Once we have that, we figure out a way to get it functioning again, and disassemble and reassemble Mr. Toothpick #6 as a test. (Mr. Toothpicks 1 through 5 didn’t make it. Nor did Mr. Toothpick 11 through 89)

We need to find the control chants for the orrery in Felginor’s notes. So we go to Elcet and ask for help, but it turns out that they have heard the chants for the orrery before. So that ends up working out.

We think we might have a plan now.

We go back through the towers, past the spiders, up the coin slot ramp, back into the orrery. And we try again.

And D.va is successful at getting us to move the orrery and putting the dude together again.

As we put him back together we see his face reassemble in a mask of horror. Chad’s holding things and singing, Nyla’s helping with her tentacles, D.va’s directing, Caleb’s holding things, I go in and remove the patient while directing healing qi through my hands. He starts to babble, and I plead for quiet, walk him out of there. Caleb and Nyla come out next. D.va gets out and records about 18 seconds of Chad’s chant - the only thing keeping this orrery from unfurling is Chad speaking an immobilization chant. After that, Chad manages to stop chanting at exactly the time D.va turns on her devices, and leaves the orrery room.

We all start going down the ‘coin ramp’, and walk away.

[Note: Nyla and Caleb didn’t make it this run, or we would have had spider backup singers, most likely.]

Chad is the last one out, and he managed to run into every trap - I mean ‘timing device’ - on the way down. But he’s a burly-ass paladin so he manages to run fast enough to get out. Of course he ran out so fast that he nearly slid off the skybridge.

The orrery room that we were just in is now as bright as a star. Felginor looks up at it and gets us to get across the lab as we tell him critical things like:

* your alchemy lab is full of spiders

* your spatial enhancement on the central tower is degrading

* it’s been 800 years or so

He drags us all to the alchemy lab to cook up some kind of shielding potion. I ask ‘for what’, and he informs me that the sun effect is 800 years of stored energy about to exit in an uncontrolled manner, at which point I shut up and played alchemy apprentice while Chad rang the butler bell to get everyone in the house staff into the alchemy lab where Felginor could protect them.

Arctilaeus Felginor cooks up a round of utterly disgusting potions and tells everyone to drink it - he does take the first shot, though, so we do it. After a little while, the light - which was coming through the walls by the time we drank that stuff - fades, and Felginor comes down from his adrenaline and …

We’ll find out next time.