20220329 - Run 24

Nyla summoned her familiar! It’s a walking blob of flesh shaped like a penis named Richard Milhaus Phalanges. Somehow he’s wearing a suit and is a bit jowly. Has a good, firm handshake. When he unbuttons his overcoat it turns into wings and he flies up around Nyla’s head. 

D.va goes back to messing with the circuit breaker switch cabinet, briefly, but notices that the “dirty” energy is no longer going up to the roof. So we decide to try to go into the heated zone to see if we fixed anything.

We go in, but it’s still very hot. It smells hot and crisp/sharp to me, like it’s molten rock or something. We decide that we’re probably not going to be able to “turn this off” by playing with switches, so we quaff our potions of environmental protection and head in quickly to see what the fuck is going on here.

We run down the hallway and get to the end, and it opens out into a huge chamber. Huge pipes, large enough for Caleb to stand up inside one, running across the walls. Very large in all dimensions, but wider than it is deep, and there is obvious structural damage to large portions of the room, and especially the middle. There’s a twisted metal bridge, half destroyed, across a pit in the floor with the glow of presumably lava shining up from below. There’s another bridge that looks half-melted across the same pit. There’s a door, back and to our right, that looks like it has the marking for ‘stair’ in it, but it is full of rubble. 

We look in the chasm, and there are pipes that go most of the way down to the lava before branching and going back into the rock. There are pipes everywhere. 

There are also hallways coming out of this room to our left and right. Large hallways, actually, ceilings go up the top of this room, and pipes go down the hallways as well. The magic down the right hallway is more erratic/intermittent/treacle-y/slow according to D.va, so she heads that way and we follow her. She’s slowly heading out in front of the party, so I make sure I keep up with her while the rest of the party is lagging behind us. 

The hallway is interesting, but dark, as we leave the main room. Ambient light drops off, and the hallway opens up into a room with large shapes. There’s a rhythmic discharge of hot, sulfuric, gross gas, and a loud blorping sound from above us. So that’s terrifying and we dodge, but something huge drops down onto us from the pipes above our heads.

Remembering the last time this shit happened, I pulled out a pair of pitons and used those to punch this thing. It’s the same thing, it’s full of acid, but I do appear to make it quiver and stop wobbling aggressively at me for a bit when I punch it with a qi-empowered stunning strike. Caleb sprints up from behind us and Nyla eldtritch blasts the one next to me; D.va, on the other hand, fucks all of the off from her black pudding and runs back to where Chad’s coming up to back us up. 

Chad calls up the hand of the invisible market to slap the one going after me, and then the one that was next to D.va blorps over to me and attacks me, but barely misses. I stun the new one, and then finish off the one that had dropped next to me with a pair of strikes and a hand of harm, but doing this covers me in their acid and I barely limp back to the back lines to try to get some healing from D.va. As I’m falling back, the one I tagged with a hand of harm disintegrates into black dust.

Caleb starts to lay into the one I stunned, with help from Chad and Nyla. I catch my breath, move up, and drop a pair of darts into the remaining pudding, but then I fall back; I feel like I’ve fed the puddings enough for one day and the rest of the team can probably handle this, and in fact, Caleb pastes the last one with his maul. Unfortunately, his maul’s nearly destroyed. Fortunately, D.va knows mending. Unfortunately, we’re on a timetable, so Caleb switches to his axe (which might be a problem if we run into more puddings I guess) and we go try to figure out how to make the heat stop sucking.

I light a torch as we notice that there’s a pile of broken pipes and a piece of stuttering machinery. D.va notices that there’s a time lag between the stuttering machinery and a pulse of stuttering magic, and so she starts examining the machinery trying to figure out how to maybe fix it, and I go over to try to help. The rest of the party notices that the room is clean, like … all the other locations where there have been black puddings… and also has some rusted bits… so I don’t know what they’re observing and I go back to trying to help D.va.

On some further examination, we see that this room is … basically fucked. The pipes are broken, the machinery is messed up, and it looks like this might have been caused by some kind of earthquake. We don’t think we can fix it; it’s a huge mega-artifact, and we don’t have the equipment or tools. We definitely can’t fix it in an hour. So we go try to check out the other hallway.

The left-side room appears functional where the right-side room was broken. We also notice that the temperature is not too bad on this side. We stop for a bit and try to figure out how to fix this.