20220201 - Run 21
So I guess something’s eating the eggs of our poet transdimensional spider buddies.
Well, I like them well enough, so they’re buddies.
Anyway, the spider was hanging out next to the thicket and portal, trying to get in touch with someone to help. (They’re able to get across the shield, but it’s not just ‘the shield doesn’t exist in the ethereal’, it’s more that there’s a complex DAG of planes they have to bounce around to ‘phase in and out’ so it’s a pain in the ass to get across the shield.
They have a place that is “the perfect temperature” for their eggs, and that was great, but now it has acquired a creature that is very hungry, eating all their eggs. They can’t help us get there, so…
There was a rant where we tried to explain that they needed to ‘pay’ or ‘trade’ or something and someone said ‘arachno-communist’ somewhere. I am honestly not sure how we’re gonna get anyone convinced to plane shift us in a way useful to help them. Eventually, D.va points out that maybe they can trade some spider silk in exchange for us helping them out.
We use the “captain’s rod” that we had from before to get back into the shield around the tower. We take the spider back in - it’s a pain for them to make it past the shield, remember. We get a little sample of silk - D.va immediately starts eating it so I have to yank it out of her mouth.
So anyway, we got some silk and then headed back to the Hub to ask Arctilaeus Felginor for some help about the multidimensional architecture of his previous abode and maybe some actual tactical planeshifting assistance. Apparently there is a ‘hot-cold fast-moving place” … plane … somewhat colocated, for whatever that means, dimensionally ‘near’ his tower that fits the description of where the spiders have been gestating their eggs. (Apparently the hot-cold fast-moving place is a thermoelectric beaming station.)
Felginor is super covetous of the spider silk sample we have, so it’s definitely worth something, but Felginor isn’t really interested in the mundane world, so I go try to find Kartho and ask him about how much this silk would be worth. After a few hours, he comes back with a price point of 200-250gp per spool like this. So, we’ve got something we can trade with.
So we make a deal with Felginor to try to get us into the location where the spiders stash their eggs. He goes off to a teleportation circle and appears to try to brute-force his way into the target dimension. He manages to localize how to get there, but the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ parts of this thermo transfer plane place are actually really hot and really cold. We can pick up some cold-weather clothing, but heat protection is a little harder. We end up scoring a few potions of environmental protection to keep us from serious harm in intense heat.
Felginor knows the coordinates for the place the spiders are talking about from the Hub:
We can also get to:
We jump from the Hub to the TPGTS coordinates - it’s like dropping into ice water. Or, rather, a blizzard. I guess we’re on the cold side. That’s good, these cold weather clothes we picked up are pretty decent. My nosehairs froze, I started seeing white in the sides of my vision as snow got all in my facial hair. The plane is dark, but there is continuous thunder and flashes of light as huge bolts of electricity arc through the storm. There’s a lot of flashing.
Well, the eggs probably aren’t in this shitty section of the plane, so we should probably walk towards the lightning.
D.va ropes us together and we move forward. We start seeing some flashes of a huge, blockish structure. We see vast, black maws in the walls(?) opening into the storm that wind appears to be opening into or out of, and on the top of the structure there is a tower, with a spire, that reaches up and spits lightning down, blasting parts of the building, out into the storm…
Basically this sucks a lot.
Apparently the spiders keep their eggs in a temperature-controlled location in this building. Presumably there’s a hot part inside the building. Anyway, we start using climber’s kit gear to not get blown away. I still get blown to the end of my rope, but while I’m bouncing around in the wind I see a door in the building wall and try to point it out.
Caleb seems to know where to step as we go towards the building, and we manage to avoid getting hit by anything. We get to the door I saw and the door is frozen shut, encrusted in ice. I can’t budge the handle, so we step back and Nyla invokes a bonfire right next to the door to try to defrost the door.
We defrost the door and D.va uses mage hand to open it; the door slams open and we all pile in and close it. This building is actually warm, so we deal with getting out of our cold gear - there’s even coat racks. The building is very utilitarian and institutional, built to do a job, not to look good. There are also some helmets and very bright vests. We put on the helmets and I even put on one of the vests, just in case it’s a uniform or something.
I look around and there are in fact a few ratty, tattered signs on the walls of some kind of signs in what we think is Iklik. I look at the vests and the helmets again, and yeah, we could wear them, but they really look like maybe these garments are built for an insectoid frame, not a humanoid frame.
We head down the hallway, and every so often there’s a belch of hot air, and the smell of sulphur. We pass a small room with a bunch of shelves with doors, some archaic devices attached to a wall, some sheaves of some kind of very stiff paper. The sulphurous and fetid bursts of air keep coming down the hall. In the room, however, there are a number of silk streamers, and there are eggs in some of these shelves - these “lockers”. So apparently this is the place with the ‘perfect temperature’.