20210928 - Run 15

We’re still in the Hub after our last mission.

We’ve each got a benefactor here in the city.

Dr. Castle works with the Researchers of the Hub, a group of like-minded individuals who have assembled themselves into a College of Research. Generally, they try to pool resources behind folks who are bringing them new information, and write papers about all that stuff. Sometimes they send their own grad students, interns, undergrads along on missions. You can bring any unidentified stuff to the College and they are willing to tinker with it, and try to piece together what they can.

D.va works with the Archaeologists of the Hub, who are interested more in cataloguing and defining exactly how things went down in the Fall and since, whereas the Researchers are more interested in exactly how things work and how to re-use the technologies of the past. Philosophical differences aside, they’ve got just as much information as the Researchers, just… different.

Riann “Chad” Chadwick - who is a Junior Partner of the Church - is a member of the Church of the Invisible Hand, who leverage their position and the abilities of their clergy to manage the spiritual and fiscal wealth of the community of the Hub. He gets a stipend now that he was instrumental in opening up a trade route to the world we were just on.

Nyla is a member of the Disciples of Karl, conspiracy theorists who assert the existence of some sky-squid named Karl. Unlike the groups above, nobody really takes them seriously unless they’re getting an ectoplasmic tentacle waved at them.

Caleb, finally, is a member of the League. They have a regular bowling night. Some people call them the Tenth Framers, because you don’t want to be near the bowling alley on the tenth frame. Sometimes Caleb will go out exploring mountains to ‘get high’. 

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There’s a stable portal - the Church has several trade routes running through it currently - but there’s some kind of large structure along one of the trade routes that has been … causing trouble. Something living in it, anyway. Chad’s church got Chad to come ask us nicely to go be, uh, caravan guards slash murderhobos. 

D.va goes to a meeting with Chad’s fellow clergy and they describe the building, which apparently is reminiscent of the feet, ankles, calves, etc. of a gargantuan bipedal humanoid far larger than a giant. Huge. Looks like the building is melted along a few faces. In the middle of ‘glass plains’. So, something detonated somewhere, probably back towards the portal? Trade route trades a large quantity of pure water (from nearby) and potions, alcohol, small metal goods for extremely magical gems and glass. Anyway D.va and I got distracted about the nature of the glass plains and the explosion Riann dealt with getting the job.

We prep for the mission. We are going to accompany the caravan to near the legs, and then divert and go towards the legs to find the raiders. Everyone in the caravan is wearing desert protective gear to protect against sunburn - one guy has smoked glasses, but most people are just wearing leather masks with eye-slits to protect against eyestrain. We go through the portal.

On the other side, it’s a bit colder than we expected, but windy, and full of dust. All the dust shimmers and sends rainbows through the air. Pale sunlight, a darker sky - purple on top, blue near the horizon. Huge shimmering rainbows coruscating through the sky. The air is kind of thin here.

So something detonated really bad here. Less “arcane weapon of mass destruction” and more “blew atmosphere off the planet”.

The caravan has done this before, so on the way out to the legs, I’m basically trying to remember all of the different ways they do every little thing in this environment. We go along for a few days. Riann decides he wants to dig through the sand on the ground, because ‘there’s not enough of it’, and finds that there aren’t very many dunes because this terrain is just a gigantic sheet of glass with not very much eroded sand/glass/whatever on top. Perhaps this terrain feature is relatively new in geological time scales.

D.va went over to help Riann with digging, and they uncovered a body embedded in the glass. Somehow got embedded in the glass during the calamity. Face is abraded down to the bone; back of the head still has hair on it. Also, there are probably other layers beneath this guy; this might not be the bottom. Maybe whatever detonates here has happened more than once, maybe it happens periodically and makes a layer of glass each time.

D.va casts detect magic on the glass under our feet and sees kind of a ripply pattern, like light going through water, with concentrations of magic - the magic is of the evocation and necromancy schools.

The fifth day on the trade route, Riann gets notified we’re about to pass the Legs, and we get ready to split off from the caravan.