20220927 - Run 32

Chad’s talking to the bugs I guess. D.va pulls out her notebook and tries to copy down the pattern of the stars in here, in case it matches anything she can look up later. Chad pulls out some coins and tries to see if any of the guards recognize the currency. One of the guards takes a bite out of one of the gold pieces, so I don’t think they think that’s money. Chad scrawls an ancient rune of fungible currency in the dirt next, to see if he can figure out what they do use for currency or trade. The guards get a little grumpy though, and start to get threatening until Chad files off some gold and ingests it, and then looks down. 

Then the guard makes some clicking noises and matches Chad’s double-barred B with a streamlined shape that Chad looks at and breathes out, in awe, “to the moon!” They both make some gesture with their hands and Chad says they are “holders”, which I guess is good because he’s excited. The guards click some more. 

The guards move over to a hidden door, a textured covering over metal scrap, and open it - the metal looks very old and beat up. Nyla recognizes something about it and says that the door is a bulkhead seal, and it looks like something she recalls from her Karlic scriptures as having gone through “re-entry” from heaven. The door is strong, but it’s likely that neither the insect people (nor us, really) can work it into anything _other_ than a door.

We follow one of the guards, which I guess we’re calling ‘diamond hands’ now, down some tunnels, or corridors, past the door. Nyla is able to spot more re-entered metal in the ceiling, repurposed as … something? hatches, ceiling, etc. It’s not all a straight line, and the passageway shifts a bit, making it a little difficult to keep our bearings, though. We walk about a mile, but it’s a bit twisty. Chad starts to wonder if whatever produced this metal was some kind of object dropped all the way from orbit, maybe as a weapon or a strike, and we talk about that for a bit, but I honestly don’t know if any of the holes and disrepair down here were caused by such a strike.  

We leave the corridors into an open area that looks a lot like a hive, but the occupants clearly appear to be free-willed, not a hive mind. I guess this is the city or whatever! And it’s really crowded in here. All of the space in here that is available is being farmed for mushrooms, beetles, etc. and there is a lot of salvaged ‘star metal’ everywhere - propping things up, acting as parts of walls for conical structures. We can see further up here, the ceiling is less solid, and we can see lights, the same star lights as in the ‘entrance’, dotting the levels above. We might be in some kind of construct made more to human measurements and not these insect folks. We recognize a doorway! And a bunk! And a horribly melted area where there maybe used to be a bunk! D.va says this is a spaceship, something to take people to the heavens.

This thing is definitely pointed the wrong way and is being used by these insects as their home. So that’s cool! I support reuse, I guess. Nyla and D.va are pretty excited about this, Caleb’s his normal chill rock self and Chad’s trying to make money as usual. Diamond Hands leads us through this to another insect sitting outside one of these little conical huts, and who has what Chad says are vestments - they don’t look like robes, or a Suit of Power like Chad’s organization, but there’s a piece of fabric hung in a V over the insect’s torso, with buttons attached to it, and there is a small pin with the sign of the barred B on that fabric, and there is one button unbuttoned at the top of the vestment.

They make signs at each other, it’s very reminiscent of when Nyla ran into crazy cannibals that worshiped Karl.

D.va makes a tiny magic device and records a language particle that the two insects appear to be using as an interjection and hands it to Chad to assist in his communications with the capitalist brosect hive. D.va and Chad start using their skillz at Trade Pidgin to start building some way to talk to them. 

Eventually this person, this Priest of the Coin, asks us “What trade you?” D.va pulls out a bunch of trade goods - 2 skeins of spider silk and 30 pounds of dyes and dyeing supplies. We put some more stuff out, the safety gear for insect people from the power plant, and I throw my cold weather gear in as well, since it looks like they have very little fabric. All around, there are these very bright, very ornate, small tapestries which may be decorative or may have some kind of informational or social purpose. The Priest of the Coin looks more and more distraught as Chad and D.va produce more and more gear until he finally tells us to stop, and …appears to run off to get someone else, I think.

Nyla and Caleb are looking around while this is all going on. Caleb recalls a story from the Bowling League that some people used to move ‘through the heavens with the power of their minds’. He’s not sure this ship is such a ship, and he doesn’t know quite how it works, but he’s very interested in this now. Nyla, on the other hand, looks at this and knows, for sure, this is exactly the kind of ship Karl talked about when talking about “space ships”. The bulkheads, the decks, the interior markings, all of what she can still see, all of this is exactly like Karl described.

Nyla notices a numerological resonance to some of Karl’s preferences in the spaceship, and so she asks Dickward M. Turgidity his opinion. Meanwhile, the Priest of Coin returns with another bee person, who Chad starts calling Beelon, and they start coming up with suggested trades. I get a huge facefull of formic acid somehow and can’t smell anything else, but D.va notices something in their goods, a relic of the stars, that she decides to make sure we get in our trade. It’s a bit larger than a tarot card, it seems to be made of a semimetallic material, and it is covered with filigree that, if D.va is correct, is made of pure computronium. She’s pretty sure Arctilaeus Felginor would know a thing or two to do with this item (not sure about his skills as an instructor, though). 

There are also a bunch of “money sticks”, which used to carry arbitrary amounts of what Chad calls ‘non-specie currencies’, and which are useless to pretty much everyone but which his church considers holy. 

I notice a few packets and small bags; one bag with a tear and a little dust in it, but not much left in it. One bag with some writing on a tape, and one vial, with more writing on it, and an ancient medical push-to-twist lid, filled with what I believe are pills of focus. Somewhat legendary, a chartreuse color, we can produce similar effects, but I toss that in the pile of ’shit we want Chad to make sure to get for us’.