20230117 - Run 36

Nyla mentions to everyone that she is paranoid right now, and she’s looking around, but I’m losing it a bit and in a fit of zero self control, I choose this moment to troll R. Massive Sausagemitts and it’s pretty distracting. Meanwhile D.va’s off looking for more shit. She opens another door and a wave of light starts pouring out of the room. The light is a greenish yellow, kind of wavering, as though it were passing through turbulent waters, and every so often there are blue-white ‘pops’ or flashes. I grab Caleb to go get her out of what she just opened up and start heading over, Caleb just picks up D.va and gets her out of the way and doesn’t break stride, we close the door.

D.va says there were people in there, moving around the source of that light, and best as she can tell, their silhouettes were almost drowned out by the light coming around them. 

Several of them looked like they were at consoles; some looked like they were doing kind of a bucket brigade or something, and one of them was in a command position. I do a quick diagnosis of D.va, and it looks like that wave of light was _highly_ energetic - just the few seconds of exposure showed a minor effect on her.

“Monks and warlocks are the two short refractory period - wait what” - Henry

D.va wants to reconfigure her armor with some radiant protection, so she pulls out some machine tools and etches a huge dick into the door into what we think is the engine room. It works, we think. And we try to leave.

We head out, the same things play on loop again, the screaming, the ship sagging, and shuddering, and settling into place. But we get out. On our way out - we didn’t recognize them on the way in - but we can see silhouettes, shadows, of figures spread across multiple surfaces at different places on the corridor, like a very bright flash behind us went off and embedded them into the bulkheads. 

But we do make it out. With a little more context we can identify the broken front third of the ship, figure out the overall size of the ship, see how this thing must have come down. And we figure there’s got to be a debris field, or a wake, of broken pieces of this ship along the surface (or embedded in the surface) for quite a ways. So that’s cool. I don’t know how much good salvage would be in that debris field, 

D.va starts tinkering on her shit, I take Chad and go participate in his “HMO” thing for a bit. Next morning we head back in.

We head back in and we get back to the “dick” door, and Nyla tells me that she feels a pressure in her chest, like a steel band around her torso. I don’t think it’s a temporal frequency thing, I think it occurs because she’s near the door - it’s like she’s passing over a threshold and experiencing a change in threshold, and she can sort of toggle it by moving back and forth. 

Then we hear screaming. Not on the same schedule as before. And from behind the dick door.  I can just barely make out, through the bulkheads, people screaming about “keep it off of the engineer” “we just need more time” “push it away” and some other screaming.

D.va opens the door. The blast wave of radiant energy slams into her again. It does seem that the armor is somewhat useful against it, though. One of the silhouettes from before - the one in the “interface” - looks like they might no longer be in the proper position to be interfacing with whatever. And there’s something with too many limbs in there flailing around, and there is another silhouette fighting? it? And we don’t see all the silhouettes that used to be in the bucket line. The thing with too many limbs slices one of the other silhouettes in half, so, all right, that guy is not friendly. Oh look, actually it’s a tentacle monster. Someone screams “Don’t use that in here”, and there’s a bunch of bursts of light. Sound pours out of the room. There has been this deep resonant hum of spinning machinery, but now there is a discordant buzz of something else vibrating - mechanical buzz, not electrical. 

D.va looks like she’s going in so I head in. Nyla’s still back at her chalk line, but Caleb looks like he’s coming in with us. I head up to the tentacle monster taking people apart, and punch it once, twice, stun it, and hit it again for good measure. Nyla shows up at the door, fucking nails the tentacle monster with a pair of blasts, and summons Mr. Pokey for extra help. D.va throws a blast of lightning at the creature, and then another, blasting it twice with a little bit of overburn. It seems to be slumped, steaming, with burnt patches, and Caleb comes in like a wrecking ball and joins the fun with the use of his ‘surgical greataxe’.  He notices, though, that the crew this thing has killed still has tentacles _in_ them, that have detached somehow from this creature. 

So OK, great, that goes as expected, those tentacles, uh, incorporate themselves into the corpses they’re in, and more tentacle zombies stand up. 

Chad comes to the door and kind of looks in and makes a joke about tentacles. At this point, two of the remaining three non-zombie crew members get vivisected, including the engineer, and the last crew member points a wand with a curved end at one of the tentacle monsters and blows away most of it with a huge flash of light. Presumably that’s the thing someone’s not supposed to use in here. I dunno, I’m thinking maybe it’s OK now.

And the thing next to me still isn’t dead.

I call to the crew member with the wand and ask if we need to hold this room. She says ‘Save yourself, stranger. Everything is fucked’. I punch the head off of the tentacle zombie whatever next to me, and it still seems like it’s active. So that’s cool, this room is lost, but let’s get this one living crew member out of here, maybe they’re an Old Passenger or something.  I hustle her out of the room, narrowly miss getting slashed by one of these tentacle zombies, and Nyla starts suppressing fire on the other zombies. 

Chad summons the influence of the capitalist system of government and the invisible hand of the free market (it’s invisible, but you can see its effect in all things around you) to physically slap the zombie that Nyla started in on, drastically decreasing its value proposition. D.va follows on with some lightning zaps, and the tentacle zombie falls limp. 

Caleb exits the room, and we close the door. The soldier - pretty clear she’s a soldier, she relaxes against the wall, holds the wand like a crossbow against her shoulder, and asks for nicotine. I inform her that nicotine’s bad for you and hand her a stimulant pill instead. She chews that up and I ask her ‘ok, how long before that blows up’. She says ’30 seconds’ so I suggest: rope trick?

We hop up into a rope trick and she’s like “ok, we’re here, how long does this last?” “An hour.” “OK. We’re going to be sucking vacuum in an hour. Do you have containment suits?” “We’re not in space. This ship crashed 800-1000 years ago.” And then we lose her as she pops out of existence, almost exactly 30 seconds after she gave that time limit.