20221011 - Run 33

So Nyla is about to get bored and climb up into what was probably some kind of ship that travels to the heavens (it has seen better days), probably along with Caleb. Chad is negotiating with some cryptobees to get us some good profits (I mean ‘gainz’, Chad, it’s OK). The bee bros seem a little scared that Chad’s going to walk away from the deal, so he leverages (heh) that to get everything on the board that they brought out AND ALSO permission to go check out the ship and such. 

The ship looks like it has holes in the outside that the fiery crash assisted in melting. Looking now, we can see that the tunnels we came into this area through - the ceiling of those tunnels was not salvaged metal, it was just part of the ship. Also, the dark spaces into nothingness we saw there were probably just opening into the ship. 

D.va, in a moment of insight, realizes that the insects have replicated the patterns in the card of computronium she is holding in their bright tapestries.  Chad finishes the deal before the deal gets screwed up. They owe us a reasonable, but not extortionate, debt in addition to the trade goods we get.

Items (40 pounds of gear):

• Pills of focus
• Powder of wakefulness - ignore exhaustion levels for 1 minute, then incur another exhaustion levels
• Card of computronium
• Pile of assorted shit
• Scrap metal (ship metal, we think)
• Some things the bees wove, using the designs of their cultural heritage (computronium card diagrams)
• [potentially other things]

So while we’re doing this, Nyla is trying to find someone who recognizes any of the signs of Karl, her patron. Caleb and D. Milhaus Schlongpaddles are kind of backing her up, but with tough love and trickle-down support from a significant yet safe distance.

I’m looking at some of the population and I see that a larger group of them than normal are afflicted with some kind of wasting sickness. Pretty standard really, this kind of thing happens around stuff broken during the Calamity. I can’t talk to these creatures, but I convince one of them to let me try to heal them. I manage to heal this creature’s wasting illness, some other infection, and some mites or such horseshit. That seems to work out, so I draw a little circle on the ground and start alternating between healing bug people and meditating to restore my qi. 

Eventually Nyla finds some bug that knows what the signs of Karl mean, and points her … somewhere. I guess. Caleb and Kielbasa McMilhaus are still “backing her up”, which can’t be helping but it’s funny as hell.

Nyla tries to get the bug person that knows about Karl to come over and talk to D.va and Chad, I guess. I’m still kind of surrounded by diseased bug people at this point, but hey, I drew a 15’ circle and told everyone to stay the fuck out unless they’re getting treated, so really I might have the most personal space of all of us soon. Nyla rolls up to them dragging a bug while D.va is trying to figure out how to build a goddamned forge out of rocks and scrap to smelt some of this ship metal. D.va is also talking about how she’s going to find a fucking autotranslator on this fucking spaceship and build a fucking helm of comprehend languages from it. I talk to the rest of the party and convey the potential that there’s some kind of broken archaeotech in the ship emanating toxic radiation. Chad goes and talks to one of the bug people that I healed up and gets them to draw a map of unknown quality of the ship above.Then he decides to disrupt the fuckin industry and sets up shop in my “free health clinic” to get patients to draw a map of where they’ve been in the ship in exchange for healing.

It’s super effective.

We manage to put together a composite map of the ship, to some degree. Some sections of the ship are easily accessible - those have been rather well looted. However, there are some deeper reaches that probably still have significant deposits of archaeotech and probably other stuff we could use. There’s a bunch of stuff up there that they haven’t bothered taking out, because:

• some of it is holy
• they know it is valuable because their stories say it is, but they can’t use it and can’t work it into anything else
• and then there is the problem of the previous passengers. Apparently the whole thing is cursed by ‘those who went before’, and most of the things that survived are hungry and extremely dangerous.

I end up healing a bunch of these insect folks, and D.va negotiates to get us a place to take a night’s sleep. D.va takes a look at the card she acquired, and determines it’s not a spell, but a piece of a spell, that if assembled with other cards with the rest of the spell would basically build a magic item. Based on what we’ve heard while gathering intel, there’s a lot of this up in the ship and it hasn’t yet been recovered. These cards are actually considered sacred, and a lot of people are impressed that we have it, but we probably have this because one priest was willing to trade one of these holy items to another priest. We should probably be careful about waving further cards around. D.va also thinks that if we get enough of these cards, and maybe the device they go into, we might be able to improvise spell effects. We’d probably generate some unintended consequences as well, but I don’t think that’s really a thing D.va gives a shit about.

The ‘old passengers’ - might be undead, might be immortal and still alive, are bad news, kill interlopers - are mostly concentrated around the central spar and upper aft sections of the ship, which we think are probably engineering sections. Some of the sickened insects report that their wasting sickness and withering are because of a run-in with these ‘old passengers’.

We’ve got decent maps of the ship and a pretty good idea of what we’re looking for. Time to turn in for the night and then go exploring in the morning.