20220104 - Run 19
We decide to wait around to see if anyone comes up, hoping that Nyla could talk them down and convert them to some kind of less shitty Karl-worship.
Nyla and I sit down and kind of wait - Nyla’s praying in front of the glass altar. D.va is scouting around the room and the doors going down, initially to caltrop them, but heard a huge number of incoming running footsteps and instead cast invisibility and moved out of the line of travel of the incoming mob.
So they come up, and they kind of look at all the corpses on the ground and the dead 8-arm thing, and they’re basically looking like they’re going to swarm us. Caleb, being the only one that can understand them, tries to persuade them not to overrun us, but doesn’t get very far. It’s looking pretty bad until Nyla gets to a climax of her praying and summons a huge tentacle, with a very good bit of theatrics.
This does manage to convince a good chunk of the group that came in to stop planning to attack us, and then Nyla addresses them through Caleb as a translator, trying to get them to actually treat her like a priest.
Nyla asks about what they know of Karl/Kraal, and one of the largest, most heavily armed cannibals answered that Kraal is the “many-armed god of crushing”. The guy talking is actually a little sad that the altar is not made of sugar. Nyla continues to talk to them and tries to build a bit of rapport. Meanwhile, they’re trying to figure out whether or not Nyla is actually a priest of Kraal, or if she’s some kind of heretic.
“What about demons?”
“… Uh. What about them?”
“We asked first.”
And then Caleb explains how Karl does not like demons, and in fact demons should be bound, perhaps by matching triplets of blocks in a binding combination chain.
After this, the cannibals keep asking questions, but they’re not testing anymore; after Caleb answers them correctly, now they’re asking for theological details because they want to know about Karl.
The group here has been here for a while - some since the Scouring. There’s a water source somewhere deep in the tunnels of this place. They survive off of bug farms - them being raiders and cannibals are necessary to sustain them, though. Unfortunately, they’ve incorporated ‘blargh blargh the strong take and survive’ into their religion, so trying to ease them into ‘hey maybe don’t be cannibals and we’ll ship you food’ didn’t get more than a sentence or two in before blustering occurred. HOWEVER, as soon as someone suggested ‘transactions’ (perhaps of the micro variety), they got pretty excited about that part, so we tried to get Chad to start interacting with those folks. We talked for quite some time, long enough for me to finish meditating and heal up after the battle, and D.va, after she lost her invisibility, tried to get some oral history from them in exchange for some rations. Language continued to be a problem, because everything had to go through Caleb, but we were able to make some slow progress towards our goals of:
Most of them don’t have many stories about the Scouring, except that everyone knows that the first core people who created this band are the people who made it inside when the Scouring happened. Several Scourings occurred in the past, but a Scouring hasn’t happened in a very long time. “People came here for refuge hoping to reach Heaven, but they were shut away from Heaven, but they were safe here. For a long time they did not understand the truth of Kraal, but they were kept here safely, ready for the truth of Kraal to come to them.” OK, great, standard post-apocalyptic survivor-exceptionalist thought.
Apparently there are also other groups still alive here! Of course, these clowns raid them. So that’s great. Surprising no one, there have been fewer and fewer of these people over the generations.
The tribe here has a pretty bad problem with radiation, short life expectancy, and low infant viability. Probably somewhere around 150-300 people here. We keep learning more and more things that would just be solved by a Goddamned Trade Route.