20220621 - Run 27

[Logistics and brain-fried run.]

Treasure:

8x spools of spider silk

Tools - 60 pounds of random tools from a workshop

[All the eggs]

D.va finds a gem wedged in a compartment in the welding kit, but it seems to be required for the welding kit to function. The gems are lostech. Dr. Castle makes a New Fucking Rule - “We Do Not Sell Lostech”. Caleb abides the rule, and D.va is too busy stroking her gems, so it doesn’t look like we’re gonna have a problem here.

For accounting purposes, D.va has 1 welding gem loaded and 4 spare welding gems.

D.va and Dr. Castle go hit up their patrons and ask ‘hey, what are these welding gems made of’. The Archaeologists think it’s a sex toy and have no idea; the College know that it’s a battery but the last guy working on this blew himself up so I bully them into giving me his notes so D.va can go fuck with the batteries.

So we go to Kartho and ask if he wants to buy the spider silk, and he’s willing to buy all of them for 200gp per spool. We immediately sell 4 of the 8 to Kartho for 800gp, and then we send off Chad and Caleb to their respective patrons to see if they can get a better non-bulk rate, just to make sure that their patrons get *some* benefit from this.

Chad tries to sell some ‘fine, fine textile, you can fit so many knots in this baby *slaps hood of spool*’ to his fellow clergy, and somehow manages to convince some of them that they want some. Somehow he manages to just stare some churchbro into a pool of money and failure and gets 333gp (repeating, of course) for one spool, and sold the other to his senior manager for 280gp and a good performance review.

Caleb takes a pair of spools to the League and tries to see if anyone’s interested in some of that. He doesn’t really bowl his best game, but he’s not doing too bad, has a decent run, manages to hit the Ball-mer Peak with his careful drinking of beers. He’s playing the stone with two other League members, one of whom is all over the place, no control, but the other, Gina, is just sitting there, drinking tea, and playing flawlessly. The tea drinker asks what Caleb’s been doing, and Caleb spins a tall tale for her of the jaunt to the beamed energy plant. She asks what he managed to get out with, so he shows her the spools of spider silk. She says she knows of someone who might be interested, but then asks if he’d ever been to the Old Sinks. Caleb had been close enough to the Old Sinks to be able to … smell them, but he hadn’t gone through them.

“The Old Sinks are a multi-layered complex full of stagnant water, a dead megalopolis. The Ancients built it to store runoff? It rains there all the time,” she says. “It’s plugged? It doesn’t drain all the way, there’s multiple levels of it. Not all submerged. There’s some nasty critters in it. But I usually stick to a route that stays near the top side of the Sinks, I don’t go down through the water. You have to watch out for the archerfish, and there are people there who eat outsiders…”

Caleb asks if they’re lifestealers, and she says no, they are … frogs. She goes on and says that on the other side of the Old Sinks, there is a … grotto. It comes out into this beautiful place, and the folks there grow the herbs that she uses for the tea she’s drinking. “I’m sure some of the people there would love to get their hands on that silk. They do such wonderful weaving.” She figures we could get 400gp per spool in trade good equivalent if we make the trip out there.

Total for spools: 800 + 333 + 280, and we keep 2 of the spools to take to the grotto on the other side of the sinks.

Gina shows Caleb the symbols for the control stones to get to the Old Sinks megalopolis - there’s one portal “up high”, which she doesn’t recommend, and one in an old courtyard, which she prefers. The courtyard is generally more central, safer to port into, but more dangerous when you leave the courtyard. She says there are trapdoor spiders to look out for, archerfish, crabs, and the frogpeople. At some point it becomes pitch black, and then we’re supposed to watch out for lights. There’s a bit of consternation when she finds out that Caleb can’t naturally see in the dark, but we basically ignore that, I’m sure we can hack it. It’ll be fine.

We decide to get some bolts of cloth and replenish our gear before heading out, and we also need to figure out how to get Caleb and Chad a way to see in the dark.

(Everyone gets 282gp6sp)

We go refresh our gear and we’re off. Gina shows us the pattern, and we teleport into the same courtyard that we always teleport into, same cobblestones … but everything is a little weird. Because… everything is slightly tilted. Walls reach up to an angry, grey sky, and the wind blows over the walls and courtyard and sound a low, deep dirge. There’s a small amount of standing water, and water seeping down the walls. The water runs down the slight slope of the courtyard into a channel that runs down the center of a massive, arched passageway, heading into the darkness that Gina warned us about.