20230328 - Run 39

D.va and Chad realize that Fusion Two couldn’t have been the power plant that blew; based on the spine that had silhouette-corpses in it, the plant that would have blown would have been Fusion One.

We have one of the comm techs on Aux Bridge try to call Fusion 1, and they get … silence. 

We ask the marine to come with us to Fusion 1. The Commander hands the Marine an amulet to get through the doors. Unfortunately, it looks like D.va, Nyla, and Caleb might be actually trapped in the time loop; Chad and I can see different things than they can. That doesn’t bode real well; hopefully, we will not all get stuck in the time loop. At least the rest of the party “stuck” in the time loop can still remember previous loops. D.va seems really excited about the pulsing, strobing red lights that Chad and I can’t see. We can, however, see the light incident on the ‘trapped’ party members.

We get to Fusion One; there’s nobody in there. We haven’t been in here even outside the time loop; we’re significantly further aft than we were when the screaming was happening. (If we had managed a way to get through the screaming mob, we could have gotten here, in theory.) We get the marine to open the door, and the door opens into a green, pulsing hell.

It’s way too bright and green, the pulsing red lights here are overpowered, there’s a guy sprayed against a wall who was probably trying to prevent something bad from happening. There are a bunch of corpses on the floor. They’re not turning into tentacle monsters yet, and it looks like something has crawled out of the green pulsing light in the middle of the reactor. I don’t know what it is, but Nyla starts saying “Nope”, and I have no idea whether that’s going to be “Nope, and I’m going to shoot it” or “Nope, I’m going to run away and we’re all going to get stuck in a time loop from procrastination”, so I just charge the thing and prepare to start punching it. 

The being that came out of the … reactor? … looks … fulminating. Effervescent. Glowing. Made of light, but maybe not in a great way. I’m really hoping that qi works the same way and I don’t get burned too badly right now. Nyla and D.va hit it with eldritch blast and D.va’s armor lightning arcs. I do manage to punch it and interrupt its flow of qi, giving Caleb the ability to hit it real hard with a greataxe. Curly the marine shoots it with his wand, and a beam of something very hot, very fast, hits the reactor-guy, blossoms into a perfect sphere, blinks out of existence, and does exactly nothing. (Speaking of that, D.va did mention something like “Bet that’s immune to radiant” before shocking it.) Chad joins the party, comes in, and whiffs trying to hit the thing with his halberd. 

Twice.

Somehow he manages to shave down the thing’s forearm twice and smash his halberd into some piece of the reactor. Now it’s sparking and I think the thing he hit had something to do with containment, because now the shape in the reactor is a little bulgy.

Nyla hits it a few more times with eldritch blast and then summons a tentacle to mess with the reactor creature. D.va then hammers it with a quartet of force magic missiles, and it looks nearly destroyed, parts of it peeling away, flapping in an invisible breeze, and so on. I move in, punch it one more time, and all of the rents and tears in it vent flames at once, destroying the body, consuming it, turning it into debris, which disappates…. look, I don’t know. It looked like it was going to detonate so I tried to get out of the way and when I turned back, it was down.

D.va tells Chad and I to get out of the room so we don’t get chronotron poisoning, whatever that means. D.va decides to stay in Fusion One trying to shut down the reactor, so Nyla comes with Chad and I. 

Later on, D.va tells us how she went to where the former-crew-officer-now-paste-guy was standing, and see a big translucent panel with big angry words on it and some kind of switch behind it. So she manages to hit the switch and shut down the reactor, so the glow inside immediately starts to dim. That said, the pylon Chad cracked seems to keep getting brighter, so she vaults over and uses some of her artificer magic to mend the broken pylon. Fusion One goes cleanly offline after this.

While Chad and I are running to Aux Bridge and trying to figure out how we’re going to get in touch with Fusion One,

Nyla asks The President for some help. After some incomprehensible bullshit about some place called America and how he was a great communicator, R. Milhaus Cockbumpers goes over to one of the corpses and pulls a …. hand plus forearm … out. “You’re going to have to make the call, Nyla. But I can offer you…. a hand.” Nyla tries to mage hand the … body part … around, and The Greatest American Communicator informs Nyla: “You do realize you will have to press the dead fingers of that hand against your head, yes? You have been…. paying attention, yes?” Nyla starts to try to put the fingers on his head, but quickly realizes that his head is too small and eventually sucks it up and presses the fingers of this former crewmember against her head.

Fusion One does call in, and it looks like we managed to figure out a way to disable it. The time loop, however, recurs. It’s easier to get the crew to listen to us this time, and we tell them to SCRAM Fusion One immediately (as well as let Chad go paladin-aura protect the people on the bridge). 

[And we’ll pick this up next time.]

[We’ve been told that there’s a Fusion Three. In the bow of the ship. Which means that if Chad and I are going to help with this, we’ll have to get trapped in the loop somehow.]