20220524 - Run 26

We’re in the room with the lockers, and we gather up the eggs here too, as well as about 8 times as much spider silk as we showed Felginor. Meanwhile we’re all sort of realizing that we aren’t sure how to get back to the gate location. D.va thinks she can maybe scan for magic using detect magic and Caleb is enough of a traveler that he believes he remembers the way back, but as soon as we look outside we notice that we have a problem - the lightning has stopped. So whereas before, we were able to see by strobe light, now we just have no light.

We go back inside and find the breaker panel, turn the lightning back on, and then head towards the pad. We don’t really have any good ways to mark a path, but we do try to take in how the lightning is working , just in case we can mark the gate when we do find it with a metal tower or something. President Phalanges got drunk on the power on display outside, started making gross grunting noises. Lightning is coruscating across the sky, connecting something on the roof of the brutalist, square stone building we just came out of with snow drifts all around the landscape - we’re pretty sure there are metal girders or poles in those drifts. 

We discuss the building and whether we want to explore the roof, and so since I know how to fall, I take the risk to get up the building. The top of the building is slippery, gusty, and generally horrible and full of wind. The structure is encrusted in ice and snow, but there is a large metal tower with conduits running into it, and it looks like there is something up at the top of the tower, which I can barely see at the edge of my vision. It looks like there’s something above the point where the lightning is coming from. I think there might be something broken here, like the conduit to the magic thing at the top of the tower is broken, and raw power is coming out instead of going to the magic thing.

I try to tag in D.va and Nyla to go look at the broken thing. D.va is weirdly reluctant to turn the lightning back off, but sanity prevails. So anyway, they go up in the dark, and after a few close calls, they find a snapped conduit. D.va and Nyla head down, she spends about an hour hacking together a replacement cable out of some of the stuff she picked up from inside the plant, and then D.va and Caleb head back up the building to put the conduit patch in place.

They get the patch in place, and we go back in, we turn the thing on, we go back out, and … it’s not immediately obvious what changed. But there’s a beam. The beam itself isn’t visible, but it seems to be so much power that it is sucking in the blizzard - the snow comes in, and it comes in and up, getting shot up along the beam. And all along this is a strange, gentle blue glow coming down through the blizzard. The wind is still strong, but it’s regular. There is gentle light, flickering, but we’re not going to get blasted apart by lightning. It seems maybe unstable, but it’s stable enough for us to get out, and that’s enough for Caleb to walk us back to the gate stones.

We get back to the Hub! It’s the middle of a winter day and all we can think about is stripping off this cold gear and walking around in the light and warmth. We’ve got the eggs and we also have a shitload of phase spider silk.