Dramatis Personae
+Red Flanagan as Classified
+Ronnie Whelan as Ronnina
+David Carli-Arnold as Acheron
Loot
A sphere of white stone, about the size of a basketball, with a divot and some grooves representing the pupil and iris of an eye. Taken from a black stone skull in the temple of Neve Canri. This is Acheron’s loot, for which he was offered 1,000cc, and 1,200cc by various merchants; and 30,000cc and 50,000cc by a mysterious member of the Internet with unknown allegiances. Acheron decided not to sell.
NPC Interactions
The Third – A priestess of the unspoken goddess. Very powerful, very much displeased with the party.
The Hangman – Contacted about the temple. Didn’t really know anything.
Mr. Burns – Another member of the Internet council. Noted that they spend a good amount of time on the outside of the dome.
Spanner – Originally played by +Cory Davidson in Session 7. The players sought him out and conferred with him, since he’s the only cleric they’re on anything close to friendly terms with. He gave them a valuable hint about why the goddesses name might have been left unspoken, which led Ronnina to asking some interesting questions.
Haven Turn
Hazard Die: 1. Complication. 13. A New Faction Emerges.
New Morthuka: Long thought to be extinct, the subrace of Morthuks has suddenly re-emerged. There are only 11 of them, but they’ve somehow rallied a veritable army of humans to serve them, and taken over the territories of 3 Dukes of the Dome, who were busy on the front in the war against Technotopia. The players last encountered Morthuks in Session 46.
Technotopia v. Dukes of the Dome: Technotopia rallied their strength after their failed surprise attack, and surged forward,
War in the South: Much of the territory once controlled by the Rulers Beneath the Black has now fallen to the rapid expansion of The Lords of Light, and The Outsiders. The two forces are only a few blocks apart from one another now, and they seem to be willing to let the boarder between their territories fall where it is. As of now, the Rulers Beneath the Black only control the South Pillar.
This war is effectively resolved now.
Ronnina: studies “The Inscrutable Machinations of Neve Canri” searching for clues.
Acheron: Continues skill training to raise Piloting to 4-in-6. Month 2 of 5.
Classified: ???
The Inscrutable Machinations of Neve Canri
After countless hours of study, Ronnina stumbled onto a curious pattern. If you assign a number to each word in the book, in reverse order. (So that the last word is ‘1,’) then read only the words associated with prime numbers, the text reads:
“Worship her in the dark, ye women chosen by sacred violence. Worship her beneath the dead worlds. Expect Her to deliver sisters unto you. When the one who need not tan in unlight is among born, know that she is ordained. Prepare her to carry out The Lady’s vengeance. Fervor. Together. Eleven. Pinnacle. Be. Hate. Then. Rope. A. Ubiquitous….” (It seems like after the word “vengeance,” the sequence just produces gibberish.
Highlights Recap
The session began right where the last left off: with Ronnina and Acheron staring into a giant face. A big thing, roughly 10′ in diameter, filling almost the entire passageway with only narrow sliding space on either side. The PC’s first instinct was to flee, or to hide, or prepare for combat, but the face did not seem to react to their presence at all.
I will spare you the meticulous recounting of their many experimentation. Suffice to say, they eventually realized that this was nothing more than a stone head, wrapped in a thin layer of leather “skin.”
They scooted past the head, further down the corridor, which eventually turned and opened up into a massive cavern, filled with similar heads of every description. All were roughly of the same size and artistic method, but each face was unique. Also present, at the far side of the chamber, were two massive sets of double doors built right into the cavern wall.
At this point, the vanguard decided the party should regroup. Ronnina used her still-active Cling To Rock spell to climb her way back up to Classified, Spooky, and the skeletons. She used her SynthRope dispenser (acquired in session 26, and never once mentioned since then) to create a 60′ cord for the others to climb down. (Reducing the SynthRope’s potential to 340′). The 14 baby skeletons were left at the top of the cliff, to help the party up and out if it proved necessary.
Returning to the doors, the party opened both of them and decided to descend down the left one. Then it turned out that both stairs descended down into the same room. A kind of entry chamber. The whole thing was made of polished local red stone. Ronnina, with her magically empowered architectural knowledge, estimated the structure to be between 1000 and 3000 years old. Significantly predating the Dome.
In the entry hall, the players found another statue, very different from the ones outside. It was made from sandstone, and depicted a creature with the body of a man, the features of a bull, and the head of a fish. It was weathered, and obviously was not originally placed within this temple. The party examined it for some time, but determined that there was nothing particularly interesting about it, and moved on.
They explored the adjacent rooms, discovering a rushing river of mercury, and a skull carved from black stone, with a single white stone eye. Achernar took this. He tried to put it in the other eye socket, and in the mouth of the sandstone statue, but it fit in neither location. They continued on.
In a hallway filled with cells–doorless little stone rooms, like those found in a monastery–they encountered a woman. She was sitting on the floor, facing the wall of her cell, but was alerted by the lights the players brought into this otherwise dark space. She immediately stood and started shouting at the players in a strange language. A dark, unholy speech that Ronnina had encountered only by perusing the darkest and most evil tomes of forbidden knowledge, and which Achernar also knew somehow.
She demanded they get out, to which the party responded cooly, as if it wasn’t a big deal, despite her intense distress. She mentioned that they were intruding upon and desecrating the temple of “The Goddess,” Ronnina snarked that she hadn’t seen a sign, and the woman replied that a closed door on a dead world was hardly an invitation. Achernar insisted that the woman at least reveal her name. She called herself “The Third,” and repeated her command to leave.
The party agreed to leave, and she marched behind them the whole way out towards the door. As they were passing the green skull, The Third began to mutter. Ronnina and Achernar were befuddled for a moment, which is exactly how long it took for the black skull to open its mouth with a grinding screech sound, and begin to suck air into itself. The hallway began to glow with a green light that arced into the mouth, and Ronnina and Achernar both felt themselves being drained of vitality.
The party attacked the woman, but had only the most modest success. Particularly distressing was Ronnina’s attempt to cast Fire Cloak, which failed with a snap of the woman’s fingers.
The party fled, and only just made it out the door before another utterance from the woman snapped the doors shut. The party didn’t stop running until they were back up the rope, and out of the cavern entirely. And even once free, they marched themselves straight back to the dome to get some rest.
As they trekked back, Ronnina asked The Hangman if she’d ever been outside the dome, and if she knew anything about the temple. She answered that she hadn’t really been outside much (maybe a few times), but that Mr. Burns (another Internet council member) spent quite a bit of time out there, and might know more. Although she’d never heard anything about a temple located outside. All in all, though, she didn’t seem particularly interested or concerned. After all, the problems of Mars should soon be behind them, right?
Curious to try and learn more, the party got in touch with Spanner, a technopriest they had once adventured with. He was not surprised to learn that there was an evil cult outside the dome. (After all, evil flees from the light of the past gods, the light of technology!) and suggested that the priestess may have refused to utter her god’s name because it was secret. This lit a bulb in Ronnina’s mind, and she rushed home to study her copy The Inscrutable Machinations of Neve Canri.
Meanwhile, Achernar became curious how much he could sell the eye he had stolen for. Local shopkeeps offered him paltry sums he wasn’t interested in accepting. Shortly, though, a man approached him, and offered to buy the eye for 30,000cc. David asked why, and who he worked for, and Spooky laid on all of her charms. The man held up his smart phone, confessing that he was an Internet Operative, like them. When pressed further, though, he said he couldn’t reveal the specific identity of his Internet contact, or he’d be killed.
As Achernar turned to go, the man offered 50,000cc, which Achernar also refused, citing the whole thing as too suspicious. He returned to Trumpquatia, and had the eye locked up in Ronnina’s tower.
Thus ended January, 2519.