20221206 - Run 34

We decide to start looking  through the ship.

D.va is pretty sure there will be propulsor rooms in the aft of the ship, connected to generator foci of some sort. We also know there are a bunch of other spaces dedicated to basic infrastructure in this ship. Nobody has described a ‘helm’ or ‘bridge’, which seems interesting, but may mean that the helm was in the part that was crushed on impact. There may be an aux bridge near the engineering spaces, but we know those locations are incredibly bad, with toxic radiation and old passengers. 

We know there are ‘transport spines’ that run through the ship - very long corridors. There are disagreeing reports about whether or not these are safe - most of the insect explorers say they are not safe, but when they _are_, they’re a clear route through the entire ship. One clown with only secondhand information says that apparently the Old Passengers use these spines fairly regularly, but his cousin used a spine to get in and out of the ship when he was exploring.

Caleb and I take a look at the two transport spines we’ve got available to us. The bulk of my patients yesterday successfully travelled through the one Caleb’s looking at, and the other seems much more empty, much faster, and … had a lot more ‘visitations’.  We decide to test out the well-travelled spine first, even though we know it is far more picked over, just until we get more experience from this environment.

We start to climb up - and it is a climb, there doesn’t seem to be any gravity or manifest zone shit going on here - and we notice there are some significant deformations of the structural elements here. Probably from the crash. Probably. It’s a 30 to 45 degree angle going up this thing, so there’s a lot of taking breaks leaning against bulkheads and structural elements as we proceed. We hear creaking, as though the ship is still settling (though that makes very little sense) and every so often I can barely hear faint screams or shouts. Every time I think I hear them, a little later a settling sound occurs. The rooms we pass are all open, pried open, stripped.

Then, all of a sudden, there is a strobe of sound, like a blast of white noise that suddenly turns to screaming, shouting, panic, crying children, things slamming against bulkheads, feet running,. The sound cuts off as quickly as it came. We slip into a side room and give D.va enough time to cast deted magic. 

While D.va is doing that, Chad and I do a search of the room and find something that previous explorers have missed - a plate in the wall, with slots for computronium cards. It’s not immediately obvious, but it’s removable, and we manage to get it off the wall. It is something D.va and Nyla start calling a matrix plate - it seems to accept cards, and maybe does something - but it is still connected to something inside by a bunch of cables or ropes or something, made of a very shiny material.

There’s _also_ a door that appears to be welded shut. We determine it’s probably going to be impregnable to normal weapons, but since I’m bored I start punching it with qi-infused strikes, and it does seem to get a bit marred by that. So, sure, something to do. D.va does finish her chanting before I get anywhere and she goes over with her active detect magic to go look at the matrix plate, which is definitely magical. 

Chad takes a look at the matrix plate looking for makers marks or forge stamps or something, and does find a set of sigils on the device, which he points out to D.va. The makers of this, D.va recognizes, but only knows the makers through books. They were pretty competent - the Church of the Invisible Hand considers these marks to be a signifier of quality. The manufacturer here made … infrastructure. Necessary magical hardware. Things that people needed to be running at all times. And their work did tend to last. 

Also, they didn’t make things that couldn’t be cleanly disassembled. These ropes and cables should be detachable. We figure out how. D.va pulls out her sketch pad and documents the wiring and the connectors involved. The scream ‘incursion’ comes back, and we start to thnk ‘wait, is this a regular timed thing?’ So I go back to punching the door, but this time slowly, while counting, and Caleb pulls out his horn - a bugle - and starts playing a tune to keep time. 

Chad starts praying to his Church’s customer support line. ‘zero… zero… zero… operator… zero… two… one… zero… operator… #3234#… zero….” He’s trying to get someone on the “line”, he says, with a “manual” for this matrix plate. The extraplanar entity “Ganesh” is, however, ultimately unhelpful.

Nyla _also_ hears a voice in her ear, but it’s just R. Dickbeaters. “I am shocked and disheartened by the decrepitude which outsourcing our material hardware to overseas suppliers has produced. I regret any part I or my policies may have played in weakening the American technological industry to such an extent. You have my sincere apologies.”

“… page 45 of the manual.”

“ So now if you are looking at page 45 of the manual you should see the diagram for how to remove the spellcard rack”

And so on. Chad eventually hangs up. It seems Ganesh was not helpful. Everyone is utterly shocked at this turn of events.

Some time later, we do determine that the sounds of screaming, panic, horrible carnage (presumably the crash or whatever) recurs every 15-20 minutes or so. We haven’t seen anything, we just hear things. 

A good 20 minutes of punching the door has cracked the welds on the door, so I figure it’s probably time to stop fucking around and I tag Caleb in. I figure my qi strikes shattered whatever was making this impervious to normal weapons, and so I tag out for The Mountain and let Caleb break the door down.

We get the door open. On the far side, the air is stale. It smells like choking. I immediately figure there’s a body in here - turns out the body was pressed up against the door we just bashed open. The corpse has desiccated and become leathery, and looks elven - so, probably pre-Fall. It is wearing a high-quality single piece jumpsuit with some brightly colored badges along the upper sleeves. We notice that this creature has no sacred lanyards, no holy cards, no … badges or ID, I guess. I put the corpse on the floor and strip it to investigate it (and also to reclaim the jumpsuit). There are a set of ear-studs which luminesce as my hands pass them - anyone’s hands work, not just mine, so that’s fair I guess - and then we hear a chuckle from Dick Yahtzee over here. “Children entertain themselves with various security passes. Of course.” Nyla’s unable to pull more out of him than that. 

This chamber has _not_ been stripped. And there’s a door heading out of this room continuing further in! But this door… looks kind of like it leaked something. Something leaked through that door, and everywhere that the leak occurred, there are scoured, etched lines that look incredibly wrong,  I try to get Nyla to take a look but she gets all offended about it, so fine whatever. 

This room has a matrix plate and a rack with a number of cards still in it, which we acquire. Not all of these cards are intact, and some have been fused into the rack or into each other. The matrix plate behind the rack looks like it was hit by the liquid that came through the door, so D.va decides to leave it here.  We also acquire the detritus of what appears to be several crewpersons, which we take. This room looks like it was set up for dense bunking, and we find several boxes of personal effects. Chad and D.va keep looking for “manuals” for “systems” in every little cache of stuff we find, but we don’t find any.

We continue to explore…