20220426 - Run 25

We decide to explore the other side of the lava pit. There is a broken bridge jutting out into the pit from the other side, and Caleb telekinetically launches me out onto the bridge (because he couldn’t get me all the way across). When I landed, the broken bridge collapsed quite a bit more, but did not fully break, so I continued across the bridge and tied off on the other side. (The pit is 70 feet across) I actually decide this bridge sucks and I go to the other one, which is just broken in the middle but is still anchored on both sides. We use the rope to sort of make that other bridge safer, but the heat is getting to us even through the potions of environmental protection. 

The corridor on the other side of the pit is a larger version of the corridor coming in. More pipes, pipes into walls, stuff like this. And it looks wrecked - huge cracks in the stonework, places of the floor and ceiling that have sheared and shifted by several inches, sometimes a foot, stress on structural members and pipes. However, the visible pipes in here haven’t broken. 

We come into a big open space, larger than the room with the pit, larger than either of the engine rooms, and there’s just this glow coming up from down below. At first we think there’s no floor, but then we see the dust covering the clear floor. There are large rectangular prisms under the glass? and one of them is broken open, and some kind of lava ooze is boiling some other fluid that’s under the glass floor…

Whatever. There are some doors on our level, we’re gonna look at them now. I arbitrarily pick the first door on the right and go towards it. First room: somewhat large room, 2 doors exiting out into the same space, full of racks and shelves in the center, tables around the perimeter of the room. A large quantity of the “stuff” in here has been neglected for long enough to freeze in place, but this looks like a workshop with a lot of machine tools and power tools. D.va runs in and starts knocking tools into her bag of holding. 

We leave D.va there for a bit to look at the tools and go into the ‘next’ room. This room is narrower and longer, but still big. Still 2 doors into the previous room. This room “goes up” - a series of walkways and staircases climb the sides of the room. But this room contains equipments, spare pipes, what looks like spare machinery, and a bunch of big boxes sealed with tape packed into huge shelves on the interior wall between the two doors.

We take a better look at the outside, and realize that there are metal ‘rods’ stretching from the top to bottom of the pit, a ‘fill line’ presumably for water near the top of the pit, one of the rods is cracked and what looks like glowing molten metal has oozed out of it, and the water is nearly at the bottom of the pit and nearly gone.

We open one of the tape-sealed boxes in the ‘second’ room - the box folds open and there is a neatly packed piece of high-precision machinery, very heavy, in this box. Caleb can lift the item inside, but we tell him to put it down and we go to the next room.

The third and last room goes down, stairs along the sides of the room. D.va sprints down the stairs for some reason and we start to follow. We get down to a landing with two heavy bulkhead doors. One is actively heated and points into the ‘reactor core’; the other is not overheated, so we open it and go in. 

We don’t quite get what’s in here, there’s a lot of archaeotech in here and a bunch of it looks broken. Dickfingers the Imp flies in and starts chuckling unhelpfully. It looks like some of the broken archaeotech has something written on it in multiple colors…. some of which we can’t see. Because of course this place was inhabited by insects that saw colors we can’t see. So I ask Dickfingers if he can see like a bug, and so he changes his eyes to be compound eyes and starts walking across the tops of the old machines. He points at the wall, and we see a huge crack in the wall that has severed a number of power connections.

Chad points out that we’ve spent more than half an hour here.

D.va casts detect magic and starts looking for how to fix the connections, and the rest of us headed down the stairs to a large room, low-ish ceiling (only 12 feet tall), with a bunch of pipes coming down and going into the reactor pit. There are some switch panels on the walls as well. This is clearly full of machinery that should be dealing with the stuff immediately adjacent in the pit, but it’s all still and quiet. 

We head back up, pick up D.va, and head back. We get across the pit on the ropes we left, and keep heading out. We make it to the one working engine room, with the spider eggs, and spend the last of our time protected by our potions collecting all the spider eggs and putting them in D.va’s bag of holding. 

Once we’re done, we pop the door and sprint for the exit. Caleb notices that there is a gauntlet of oozes we’ll have to go through. We’re all sweating and I suggest we take a rest before trying this; Caleb doesn’t want to so fine, we just suck it up and sprint through. Nyla nearly gets melted off of Caleb by one, and Caleb gets hit solidly by another on the way out. One swings at me and I manage to barely evade it, and D.va and Chad just sprint through. And then once we’re past the oozes, we get out. 

We go back to that one room with the lockers and the eggs in the lockers, and we take a short break, catch our breath, try to figure out our next steps.