Tower Descent

Hook:

The tower stirs as repairs begin again. Floors above and below may unlock, if the recruits can avoid the eyes of Rector 9

040 - 250811 - Level By Level - Tower Descent I

Date:

446 PC, Brightwane 39

Players:

  • Die-Anna (Kate)

  • Raven (Danielle)

  • Sorrel (Blu)

  • Dev the Wizard (Paul)

  • Odett (Nadia)

Loot:

  • NA

After Actions:

Die-Anna

Brightwane 39 Report for the higher ups, Me, Dev, Raven, Sorrell, and Odett decided to go to the tower. And we definitely HAD A PLAN…. Well we mostly did but luckily Dev spotted a to do list of sorts by the maintenance hatch on the first floor. So we set about aligning the attunement crystals. The tunnels were prettyyyy tight, but not for me and Raven! Shorty squad forever

So we set about looking for the crystals. We found this cart corral of sorts with 4 carts… which would have been helpful with going down the tunnels but unfortunately they were all pretty rusted! so we had to go by root. After crawling the right tunnel about twenty feet on our stomachs we had a nice short walk of about two hours… we really wished that those carts were working. But if they had maybe we wouldn’t have spotted this little trinket on the side of the tunnel.

It was some strange frame with glass panels that was in the shape of a poly-poly-… uhh like a 3D octagon. I thought it was a cool paper weight but after I showed it to dev (idk he could use it for tomes) but he spotted that there were runes on the frame, ones for mending, light, and communication I’m pretty sure. Sorrel also spotted that the area we found it in there has been a scuffle, like someone ambushing this poor paper weight. As we went down the tunnel we found another one, a little worse in condition but we picked it up anyway. (I’ll make sure to leave these with the egg heads). So anyway we kept our pace and finally we ended up in this larger area where poor odett, Dev, and Sorrell could finally stand up. There was a ledge and when we looked down there were a bunch of these giant crystals! They were all different colors and these octo-guys we found down the tunnel were floating around the crystals. They were floating around and bumping into said crystals.

Luckily we didn’t have to scale down as someone before made a ladder going down the ledge, there were tunnels in the cliff as we went down, more access points from different parts of the tunnel. There was a plinth at the bottom of the cave which Sorrell was able to make work. It gave us a strange message (I WILL POST LATER I AM AT A DRIVE IN) and let us know we had 1,530 tasks left after we aligned the crystals with a stunning rendition from the bard William of Joel. All in all it seems like we’re gonna need to work more at this tower.

Dev the wizard:

Die-Anna had an idea to go back to the Tower’s sublevels to see if we could get it working a little bit better. I’m fascinated by the knowledge that the Tower represents – the old magic of the past still feels alive to me there – but I feel like I’m in over my head when it comes to understanding exactly how all of its systems are supposed to work. Fortunately, Sorrel was planning to tag along – and our artificer has skills that don’t involve pyrotechnics. Blokk and Glokk only presented a minor impediment. They’re just bullies that wouldn’t be worth anyone’s notice if they didn’t have the threat of Rector-9’s authority backing them up. We also ran into Nettie, who seems to be friends with Odett. I don’t think I’ve met her before, but she had the most beautifully braided beard and the soul of a poet. She pissed someone off badly enough to get stuck on guard duty to monitor anyone who visited the revivification chamber. She clearly wanted to ditch the boring job to tag along with us, but duty (or more likely fear) won out.

I forgot just how cramped the access tunnels are in the sublevels. Raven had no difficulty with them, of course, and Die-Anna decided to copy Raven so she could easily pass through them as well. For Odett, Sorrel and myself, they proved to be much less accommodating. Maybe I’ll get the crick out of my neck before my curiosity convinces me to do the next damn fool thing… I remember the old work orders and notes near the access point and pointed them out to Sorrel. He felt that they indicated that the Tower systems could use some work. We continued onward in hopes of a more concrete plan of action. Instead, we found tunnels that required most of us to literally crawl through. There were tracks for some kind of cart system, but working carts were in short supply. And nothing was designed for tall people, anyway. On the bright side? We didn’t run into any of the memory-eating eels that attacked us the last time we were here. So, at least there was that. Something was attacking the magical-mechanical drones that were responsible for maintaining the place, though. We found a couple of destroyed ones during our travels.

Eventually, we found a large chamber filled with crystals – green, teal, opal, and violet. There were a lot more of the magical-mechanical drones, but these were working – flitting around and bumping into the crystals. It was quite beautiful – I wish I could share it with you, Sophia. We descended to the bottom level of the chamber and found a plinth, which seemed more vibrant than the ones that we had interacted with before. Die-Anna (I think… it might have been Raven) started to interact with it and I suggested that she check to see if it could tell us what it wanted to be fixed. And it had quite the list – 1,536 open tickets. Sorrel took over, and got some kind of cryptic recording to play and there was a code. Hopefully he remembers it, because by that point, my brain was fried. He managed to figure out that none of the crystals should be violet. I climbed up to take a better look at the closest violet one, and it sounded wrong when the drones bumped it.

Die-Anna thought the power of the songs of the famed bard William Joel could re-align the crystal harmonics. None of us had any better ideas, so we let her try. Her harmonica rendition of “Piano Man” did something, but it wasn’t working. She passed her harmonica up to Raven, who also played. The rest of us joined in, singing in hopes that the power of song and friendship might heal the discordance in the crystals. And it worked! We closed six tickets, and left the place working a little bit better than when we found it. It almost made it easier to slog back through the cramped tunnels to get out of the Tower and go back to camp. Almost. I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything else, though.

Unresolved Threads:

  • item 1

  • item 2