20220830 - Run 30

So the fish that was harassing us went back into the depths of this body of water, and now we’re still here. 

D.va scrambles back up the ladders and such to where the lemurs were, and she tries to get the rest of us to come up with her.  On our way up, Nyla mentions she spoke to some things while underwater, which I think is potentially bad, but maybe it will be fine. D.va already marked the non-rotten rungs on a ladder going up a few levels, so that made it a bit easier for us to get up a few levels.

We managed to get up a few levels to where the lemurs were, and D.va gets into their berries when we’re not watching and eats a few. I look at them - slightly astringent, white, skin breaks easily, has a pulpy interior, isolated in 1s and 2s on the plant. Also, importantly, we did see the lemurs eating these. I check some of the lemur stool and see that there’s seeds from these things in there, implying that the lemurs ate these and then clearly survived long enough to shit them out the other end, so I figure the worst that’s going to happen to D.va is either a horrific allergic reaction or an eruption from one end or the other, and I figure she can deal with the consequences of her own dipshittery. We head on this level towards the places where the chamber expands.

We try to keep going further in. We disturb a few more groups of lemurs - some of them were resting, some of them were scratching algae off the wall - and D.va slows down a bit, looking around with very wide eyes, and then she just starts looking at the back of her hand, like she found something there. I go over and ruin the fun with a nice quick application of acupressure to purge whatever the hell she was just hallucinating on. She then horks up the contents of her stomach, loudly.

We make ourselves to a relatively central support pillar, and it becomes very clear that this is meant not just as support, but also as a way to move up and down. There are ladders and doors embedded in the pillar, as well as passages to pass through it. We also see our first example of a lemur getting eaten by … something, that makes sloppy crunching noises, in one of the ladder spaces in the hollow support pillar. 

We try to investigate, and something scuttles up the shaft, dropping a bit of lemur down the shaft. Half the party can’t see in the dark, so we give up and keep moving on. We pass some glowing mushrooms on a corpse of some sort. We can look forward to the next dividing pillar, there’s a bunch of frogs eating bugs from a cloud of insects that have been attracted to the dim light of some fungi over there, so we try to make sure we’re not giving off light. We start to hear more and more sounds of insects - mosquitos - and we just try to get through this so we can interact with someone. 

Somewhere up ahead the chamber bends and we start heading towards what looks like a longer passage. Stay on upper levels. Keep lights off. Don’t attract attention. We just keep moving through the dark maze, relying on Nyla and Milhaus Dickbeaters (mostly Nyla) to describe the area. D.va keeps grabbing quasi-edible plants and fungi for later ‘investigation’. We see a cluster of lemurs get slammed by an archerfish waterjet but somehow all survive the shot, so we remain subtle. We sat there and watched a poor doomed lemur trying to not fall into the water - I even tried to throw a javelin with a rope over there, but no luck. 

Nyla and I hear this weird chorus of croaking sounds right about where the doomed lemur loses its grip and is being held by one of its lemur buddies. Nyla looks down and a fuckload of frogs, person sized, bipedal-ish, come boiling out of the water, with spears, coming up the ladders and such. For a moment, some of the croaks sound like the voices she heard underwater earlier. The noise and crashing in the water calms down, sinks deeper, fades away. The lemur slowly manages to get back up onto the walkway, assisted by his lemur buddy. 

Chad says as he listens to the frogs below that they’re executing some kind of religious song, some kind of praise or propitiation. The croaking builds up - definitely loud - to an echoing chorus and then falls silent. And then we can all hear one very deep echoing CROAK. Like they summoned something.