20220301 - Run 22

We’re walking through these old, institutional, textured concrete “functional architecture” corridors. There is no detritus in here, and the halls are mostly clean. The corridor slopes slightly downwards as we go forward. It takes us several minutes to walk the corridor. There are several rooms off the corridor - they seem like offices, but they have been stripped bare, down to just some rusty metal furniture - filing cabinets, maybe a bench.

We try to figure out what happened to this office. Why is it only metal and no organic elements - gelatinous cube? no, that wouldn’t rust things. Rust monster? Slimes? We don’t know. No residue from organic stuff - no mildew. Some of the metal is pitted like acid, some metal is rusted. 

We keep going down the hallway, and the temperature starts to rise dramatically. We fall back to figure out if that’s where we actually want to go, and go back to a room, and D.va casts detect magic. She notices that there are conduits - lines - embedded in the walls, that magic is flowing along. But the magic is flickery and fluttering, and she’s pretty sure that that’s bad. The conduits are in the walls in these … maintenance rooms, coming from the hot zones and into here, and then the conduits turn and go up and disappear into the concrete.

I try to get us to search for ceiling hatches instead of breaking the ceiling. Meanwhile D.va is telling us about the nature of the magic flows and how they are pulsing.

Dr. Castle: “is it throbbing?”
Nyla: “has it been painful and throbbing for more than…”
Dr. Castle and Nyla: “4 hours” (in unison)
Dr. Castle: “I think we got some arcane priapism here.”

We can’t find any hatches, but we do find a room where there’s a set of metal cabinets that look like they’ve been shifted around; there’s a gap behind them and in that gap there’s a metal panel in the wall. We fuck with it and the panel opens with a horrendous squeal of tortured metal, and there’s a bunch of slots behind it. D.va says the conduits are running through on the far side of the slots. Chad thinks that the design screams switches and toggles should be in these slots, and inside the slots there seem to be the stuff for switches, except with no switches.

Chad’s pretty sure these are supposed to be mechanical switches, but D.va thinks it should not be arcanically conductive. We get to work; D.va gets the rest of us to prep up some metal components and she starts trying to assemble some switches to try to control the flows in this switchboard.

When she goes to install the first switch, however, she fumbles it and a surge of magic goes through her and throws her back. The entire room reeks of burnt fur, which is hilarious. I work on rebalancing her meridians and healing her with qi while she tries to do this again using her mage hand. This time, it works, and the switch manages to make it into the panel. She flips the switch, and the conduit connected to that switch does turn off. 

So she repeats that 17 more times - there’s 18 switches in the panel - and I sit in the corner and rest while she’s doing this. Nyla takes a break as well and casts find familiar while D.va is reassembling the switch panel and Chad is helping. Caleb was over in the corner watching all this shit.

While we’re in the middle of resting, though, and while Nyla’s in the middle of summoning a familiar, D.va finished and shut off all the switches. Which was cool, but then Caleb heard water in the hallway. He went outside and yelled that there was an ooze, water elemental, something, coming up the hall along the ceiling, so we had to go deal with that…