20211026 - Run 17

[Level 5]

We talk a little bit about these cannibal survivalists, and I say I want Nyla making the calls about diplomacy so she can  try to figure out if they are devotees of Karl. We decide on ‘cannoli’ as a drop phrase.

D.va has been watching the skies, and thinks two of the fast moving stars are orbiting heavens - they move too fast to be a full planet. Chad asks if the Legs could have anchored a space elevator, or a humanoid the size of a space elevator, or that worked as one, but if it was just a humanoid it would have only been about a mile high, so maybe or maybe not.

We strip the raiders, pile the armor in a pile and lay the bodies out to be mummified in the desert. We take the two Mk. VII arming swords, but Caleb says they’ve somehow been psionically influenced. He asks for a little help from Nyla but it doesn’t look like they really come up with anything.

We continue, trudging towards the Legs with the wind at our back blowing shards of glass sand all around. Nyla does some kind of magic to make her arms look like tentacles, so she can blend in or something better when we find more cannibal flenser people. 

When we get up to it, we don’t see people. But there’s a hunting blind it looks like on one of the big toes. The feet, 500 feet long by 150 or so feet wide, are on a pedestal (probably 750 feet square or so). I look up and can see some windows, it looks like, on the inner faces of the calves. So, those were there when this was built, not added later. D.va concurs - this was clearly built pre-Collapse, built well, intended to be a mile high. It’s possible that Chad was right and this was intended to be a stairway to heaven or an angel’s ladder, to allow people to ascend to one of the orbiting heavens. Perhaps this statue was holding something and the thing that it was holding was important in some way. Maybe it was an administrative center with a ceremonial mile-high sword or some shit. We don’t know and we don’t exactly have time to excavate this, but maybe we’ll figure something out if we explore more.

We decide to circumnavigate the legs, D.va looking for magic as we go, and this is a fine plan until we get to the heels. There is a door in each heel, and there are 2 cannibal flensers standing in the doorway closest to us, wearing desert stillsuits made of humanoid leather.

They first start to raise the alarm, in Krashth, which Caleb can understand, and then one sees Nyla and says “Wait, this one has been blessed by Kraal!” and get a lot less hostile all of a sudden. Caleb and Nyla start trying to negotiate to talk to someone, and there’s a little bit of back and forth as we try to figure out if we want to walk into a building with a bunch of cannibal flensers. 

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

Caleb keeps talking to one of the dudes in the door, trying to get the Prophet of Kraal inside to come out; the guy in the door wants us to come in. At some point Caleb asks about the clothes they wear and the reaction of the guard makes it pretty clear that the raiders we killed were actually shitty cannibal raiders. Negotiations break down when Caleb tells Nyla that the guy in the door said that their prophet was more powerful than our priest, at which point Nyla hit him with a pair of eldritch blasts and fucked him up pretty badly. Didn’t quite kill him but left him prone and retching. 

Caleb then follows this up with “I apologize if I translated your words poorly.” while Nyla is calling “Cannoli”.  For some reason, we don’t end up acting on this call of ‘cannoli’ - this is probably pretty bad, but we can talk about it after we’re done here.

The guard Nyla shot apologized to her for profaning her connection with Kraal and then limped inside. Some further discussion is held, D.va casts invisibility and heads up to the door. She sees there are 7 - there were 8 - people waiting at the door with weapons (the 8th is the one that Nyla blasted and is hobbling further in), and the door opens up into a large room, lit with a bunch of power globes and a foul-smelling lantern (probably fueled with dried feces). The room looks like a welcoming terminal for an angel’s ladder, or a hotel, possibly both - but it has been transformed. Large pieces have been carved away, other pieces have been blown apart. Massive damage was clearly done to the original structure. The space is broader to the sides than it is deep - full width of the ankle/foot, less than a third of the way lengthwise through the foot - and the large wall in front of us has had something embedded in it torn out to make space for a stack of glass blocks, large glass blocks, carved, stacked in a sculpture, tiled into the damage in the wall.

Also, there’s something at the base of the tower. It has almost a skull like face with one big eye and a number of tentacles drifting out from it, and it is draped in ornate leather ritual vestments. That might be the Prophet of Kraal. It is floating. Probably a beholderkin. Would make a lot of sense that it would worship some kind of aberration power like Karl. At this point D.va also calls ‘cannoli’.