20230103 - Run 35
As we move through the ship, every time we get to hear the intermittent screaming, it seems to come from the other transport spine. And … as we listen, the sounds seem to repeat. Some of the settling sounds of the ship are not just similar, they seem to be _exactly_ the same. It’s like - it’s not like a thing keeps happening, it’s like the exact same sample keeps getting played. Somehow.
D.va thinks we should go check it out, so she starts looking for maintenance passages or something between the two transport spines. She checks a bunch of doorways finding clearly previously-salvaged spaces - service room, a locker room, a mess, a blown out mechanical room that got destroyed by excess power - and then we do find a corridor that seems to cross over. We see evidence of the weird ichor that etched the ship metal - we opened a door that had appeared to be welded against the ichor. This looks like the ichor burst from where we are, into the other half of the ship - which seems a bit weird, but OK. So the corridor we’d be going down looks like it got corroded by ichor. There’s no remains of this that we can see, just the etching of its presence. We speculate a bit on how this could have happened, and then D.va takes off down the corridor. We all kind of look at each other, say ‘Oh my gods she just ran in’, and I take off after her with Caleb (and Nyla on Caleb’s back) next to me and Chad following behind.
D.va is bouncing around (invisible) and opening doors. Looks like we’re in the looted section of the ship still, she sees a bunch of corroded stuff, and she keeps opening doors, and then we see a door open and a visible cloud of white fog boils out of the door and settles to the floor before disappearing. D.va must have been able to tough it out, because no cat appears from thin air, but that fog definitely seemed thick and heavier than air. We can hear the coughing, though. I rebalance her qi with a quick bit of acupuncture and we go look at the room.
The room she opened up seemed to be looted already, but it looks like there is some piping in here; the piping seems to have been torn by a set of large, sharp objects - claws? - before it burst outwards - the contents appeared to be under significant pressure. The pipe got damaged by what looked like 4 claws in a single swipe, and the claws are several inches apart, implying that the hand doing the damage was attached to a pretty big creature, maybe twice as tall as us.
While we’re all dealing with this, Caleb hears a faint snatch of screaming, and we’re so much closer to the source of it now. Caleb grabs Chad, I grab D.va, Caleb telekinetically throws me (and thus D.va, because she and I already decided to leave when Caleb said “WE ARE LEAVING”) down the hall and follows with Chad in hand and Nyla on his back. D. Milhaus Assburger is nowhere to be seen but presumably that floppy used prophylactic made it out as well.
As we bail, a burst of glowing green plasma explodes into the room we were just in, and even tens of meters away we can still feel heat from the blast. The door at the end of the service corridor all of a sudden isn’t there anymore, and we can see and hear as a huge mass of screaming people pours down the transport spine, on the other side of the door that’s not there anymore. It’s a panicked mob, and …. they don’t quite look right. They look a little glowy, like someone put a bright light inside them - they are not glowing brightly, but they are slightly luminescent.
People stumble, some leap through the air, there’s a stutter and for a moment gravity disappears, some of the people fall, some of them are plowed into bulkheads. Some start to push through the door into this service corridor towards us - there’s too much momentum for most of them to get in, but we get some. We see a flash of light, the screaming gets louder and louder, and then everything stops and is dark, and the door into the other transport spine is back and the door is sealed. And we can hear the sighs of the ship as it settles back into gravity.
The hot green plasma seems to dissipate into the white heavier-than-air fog that D.va got hit with, but we’re out of the way so nobody inhales it.
We watch this again. We watch the rush of people go by, And we see a difference. One of the people that gets thrown through the door locks eyes with Chad before getting ripped back into the flow, and we’re not sure, but we’re pretty sure
“YES. WE WILL HELP THEM. I mean, this also opens the rest of this ship to resource exploitation BUT YES OF COURSE WE WILL HELP THESE PEOPLE. It’s important to do well by doing good, and really, that’s what doing good is all about, yes?”
So now I’m thinking we’re going to try to save some people, but then D.va starts talking about ‘let’s go to the engine room’ and I call a halt to that, because Chad clearly wants to save people. And they’re asking how we’re going to get them out and I turn to Caleb and just ask “Can you yeet ghosts?”
So we come up with a plan to try to rescue a few of these folks. D.va ties a crowbar to a rope, puts the crowbar end next to the door (we don’t open the door), and we give the other end to Caleb and Chad. Caleb gets ready. And the phenomenon repeats.
D.va’s got detect magic up, so she sees that there are waves of necromantic energy, but mostly what we are seeing is a field of transmutation magic with some conjuration. Then gravity fails, the person we’re looking to extract slams into the side of the door, looks up, reaches out a hand, and is screaming in Old Kraskyan for help. We tell them to grab the crowbar; they do and we pull them out with the rope. They sail towards us, in zero-G. They ask for help getting their family (…. good luck with that), and asking for help getting to the escape pods.
I try to interrogate them while they’re there, in case they disappear at the end of the event.
We don’t get a response this time, before he disappears - he mostly goes into mental shock from this information, and then everything cuts off and we’re back in the corridor again.
We want to do one more experiment before continuing, to see if this person remembers previous iterations through the loop. Turns out they don’t remember. I get their name - Hullocks, passenger number 30282.
We’ve got a bit to go to unravel this shit, but we’re making some progress. D.va thinks she can trap a ghost in a device of some sort. We’ll see how this works out.