20220816 - Run 29
We arrive in the Old Sinks, a large cavern; we see a large tunnel exiting the cavern. Interior is covered in debris.
“I do not rub myself against things” - D.va
Caleb received some advice from a colleague of his named Gina; she told us there was a community of weavers here that we could trade with, and she gave us a few rules for moving in here:
We take the corridor away from the cavern we landed in. The floor of the corridor is covered in algae - quite slippery when wet.
The tunnel is quite wide - a 5ft channel in the center and 2 10ft-wide ledges on the sides - and it gets wider, with the cut in the middle widening to 15ft. We all stay on the left side of the tunnel and move in. Jumping across the cut would risk slipping in the algae. As we go further in, the storm light behind us fades and it becomes entirely dark. Caleb and Chad can’t see anything at this point. So Chad’s the first to see a glint in the darkness. We approach and find a gem in a sconce; this gem is ‘burning out’, stuttering like a flame. It gives off a 10ft radius of dim light, so at least Caleb and Chad would be able to see, but it has a sickly, wan feel to its flickering light. D.va casts a ritual of detect magic to see what the light _is_, and sees that the light is evocation; We go to move on and I ask why not use the light in the sconce to let Caleb and Chad see; D.va instead tinkers with a stone to produce light, and then wraps a mage hand around it, and we move on.
We keep going, and we more feel than see the passage around us widening. It opens out into a chamber acting as a ‘foyer’ of sorts of an larger chamber; there are more of those little faint lights on small sticks or pillars, along the sides of the bridges. We have the sense that there are vast, tall things filling the larger area, and we can make them out only because they obstruct some of these faint lights in the distance. Nyla can see that there is water in the bottom of the room, and it looks like where we are is replicated in tiers into the depths of the water. D.va and I can just barely make out a broken bridge that runs between two platforms in the cavern; Nyla can see that above that there are two tiers of platform pairs with intact bridges, and she can also see a ceiling.
D.va, trying to figure out how to get to one of the higher tiers, gets Caleb to hammer a piton into the wall. The sound echoes throughout the chamber, very loudly, but nothing appears to happen. We had sent Phalanges off to scout, and he came back with no useful information about the tiers above, which made us want to go up and look just to double check. We decide to just throw a rope over the entire bridge of the next level and climb up the doubled rope.
From up here, we can look into the distance and see even larger bridges in the larger cavern. D.va manages to wait until we all get up the rope before doing anything. Nyla can see into the distance and thinks we’ve just exited from one of three bays into a central chamber (not equidistant; three *consecutive* points of a hexagon). And at this point, all of us can see all through the large cavern, the entire space filled with the little ill-light stars.
Nyla finds us a ladder, set into the wall, which runs up and down between the tiers. D.va and Dickfingers cast invisibility and go off to scout. She marks the ladders for corroded rungs (the rungs get worse the lower you go) and during investigation startles a group of pale, white-skinned lemurs off from eating a bush of berries. Meanwhile Phalanges starts reporting to Nyla and the rest of the party what he’s doing, including and up to the incident with the lemurs.
“They are gone now. Fleeing. Like the era of political legitimacy.” - Richard M. Boogerhooks
We move to support D.va and on the way we get attacked by some kind of water creature The creature starts out by ripping Nyla off of Caleb and tossing her against the wall with a jet of water, and then Nyla falls into the water below. Caleb drops a rope and Nyla, in the water, sees the rope, ties it around her, and tugs for an extraction. D.va shocks the creature, the fish, that attacked Nyla and I throw a spear and a dart at the fish. Nyla zaps the fish underwater with an eldritch blast and then Caleb hauls her out of the water, and the fish sinks back into the water, looking for less hassle in its food.