20230606 - Run 40

So we believe we have a way to save Fusion 1, Fusion 2, and Aux Bridge. We think swift orders to Fusion 1 and 2 along with Chad’s aura helping save Aux Bridge will safe these three things, and we can then send Caleb, Nyla, and Diva to Fusion 3, and Chad and Dr. Castle take a short rest.

[The Timeloop section of the party gets there and … everything is fine. Everything is functional. Apparently this is how it is supposed to work. D.va is very skeptical, but… it’s functional. None of the Time Cadets, on the other hand, speak Old Kraskyan, so they have to figure out how to communicate. One of the reactor operators, however, speaks Fala, which Caleb can communicate in.

When the transition happened, one of the crew in Fusion 3 said the ship felt like it was ‘writhing’, and the reactor operator for Fusion 3  at the time, who apparently was incredibly good at their job, had a little trouble holding their position but was able to do so, and is now worried in the “did i do a good job?” sort of manner.

D.va, after getting as much info as she thinks she can, casts rope trick and gets people up into the extradimensional space to wait out the end of the loop, just in case the loop ends with a crash that abrades the front of the ship into nothing. But… the loop ends.]

Caleb has the theory, when discussing what they saw, is that there is less … demonic turbulence. Aetheric vortices. something - at the front of the ship. With no ideas, we decide to go try Propulsion next. (We now have a routine - authenticate with Aux Bridge, send orders to Fusion 1 and 2 to keep them from blowing up, commend Fusion 3 for not blowing up…)

On the path aft to Propulsion, we see some acid etching of the walls within the time loop, and Caleb and D.va come to the conclusion that everything seems to be erupting from doorways. Portals. Passageways. Liminal spaces. And there’s some kind of deity of portals and doorways, and we thought this god was dead - there’s lots of dead gods, very few gods survived the Shattering, the Collapse, but this ship went down very close to the Collapse. This god of doorways is typically depicted with a yawning mouth (the mouth is a portal). This is a god of travel and passage, but, uh… also a god of death and the in-between. Thanks, The Ancients! What a wonderful fucking religion you have created, you fucks! [OK, it would be basically Charon and generally fine if not for all the iconography being a bunch of fucking teeth.]

[Cassie decides that the holy scripture for this god is the theological equivalent of a Michelin guide, and there’s a digression where we ask ‘is this the Lady of Pain’ and it’s not, because the GM is actually unfamiliar with Planescape/Sigil/the Lady of Pain. “but there’s some overlap, clearly…”]

We try a bunch of stuff. Lots of discussion about the portal god - perhaps the event that breaks space and clearly causes the problem is the portal god’s death. A mask of the god on the wall when we go through the discontinuity shows paranormal activity - the eyes bleed and the wall behind the mask is etched with acid.

But anyway, we get to Propulsion, and we open the doors onto … a view of Hell. There’s a large space, packed with tubing and heavy machinery, huge machines that fill the space, and as best as we can tell those are supposed to be the propulsion units. The space extends for a very long way, all along the aft of the ship - only a small portion is something we can see. But what we can see is full of writhing, dying people, blood, and acid, and it smells like burnt metal and dead people. And the physical space feels wrong, like someone has twisted the space in spacetime. 

So we enter the space, of course. As we enter, we can see that the aft section of the ship around the far end of the propulsor units just … opens onto space. So that’s kind of a door. A large one. But, I guess they could seal the area and evacuate. Chad and I let the Time Scouts set up a rope trick to watch the end of the time loop in Propulsion while we walk back to Aux Bridge. They apparently get to watch Propulsion turn into a fucked-up hellscape through a very quickly hacked rope trick that D.va managed to modify on the fly to make it less of a “portal, thus fucking them multiversally” and more a “window, just a bunch of ectoplasmic blood please”. But anyway, Propulsion gets more and more fucked up the closer one gets to the forcefield/door at the back of the ship, and just gets worse and worse.