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.
056 - 251117 -Duct Duty - Tower Descent II
Date:
446 PC, Highflare 29
Players:
Die-Anna (Kate)
Raven (Danielle)
Donk
Dev the Wizard (Paul)
Draylor
Loot:
Magical carving tool [Dev]
After Actions:
Dev
High Flare 29
Was I this annoying? Actually, don’t answer that – I’m sure I was worse. Merry hasn’t set anything on fire yet. They’ve found a new experiment – tea brewed from rhinuffalo wool. I haven’t tasted it, but it smells like boiled socks. More to the point, everything in my tent also smells of boiled socks. Including me.
So I was out early this morning – I made it to the mess tent in time for breakfast and a show. Draylor was trying to keep a low profile – literally lurking on the floor in hopes that Cook wouldn’t notice him from behind the counter. Raven and Die-Anna got him a breakfast sandwich, and then kept asking him questions. They got louder every time he shushed them. I figured I’d join in the fun, and placed a big blinking arrow right above Draylor’s head. Cook must be mellowing, though. When he finally noticed Draylor, he just glared… no thrown vegetables today.
Die-Anna suggested we could go on a Tower repair mission. There are still hundreds of uncorrected faults after our last trip. Who knows? Maybe if we can get the Tower’s brain working well enough, it can help me figure out a way to get out of the Rift and back home.
We stopped by Sarna’s tent for supplies before we left camp. The fairy was still in a very mellow mood today. She supplied Draylor with three headbands enchanted with a light spell that had been found in some forgotten temple, gave Donk a dolly and a lot of shea butter, and even loaned me her set of amulets of psychic resistance.
When we got to the Tower, we noticed Rector-9’s goons were conspicuously absent. Donk mentioned seeing something about preparations for him to leave the Rift tomorrow for the rest of the month. I’d love to know whether he’s finished with his fact-finding mission and he’s going home for good, or if he’s just leaving to perform some dark ritual for his patron and will be back worse than ever. It’s probably just some bureaucratic nonsense – but when have I let the truth get in the way of a good story?
We approached the access point to the sublevels, only to be stopped by an elderly Tabaxi named Six Bull. He’s a friend of Nettie – a very concerned friend of Nettie. She went exploring into the sublevels yesterday, and hadn’t re-emerged almost a full day later. We promised that we would look for her.
Draylor said he saw a weird green lizard on the wall that looked directly at him and then evaporated. No one else saw it. I can think of a few possibilities: 1) more weird shit happening because the Rift is where weird shit goes to happen; 2) Draylor wants attention; 3) Draylor is going insane; 4) Draylor is god-touched. Really, after writing them down, I suppose any or all of them could be true.
I really need to learn a spell to shrink if we’re going to keep exploring the sub-levels of the Tower – they were designed for the gnome engineers, not humans and especially not Goliaths. At least I had a better time of it than Donk. I cast Tenser’s Floating Disc and rode that around – he greased up and we pulled him on the dolly. But I’m glad he came along – we wouldn’t have been able to open several doors that had swollen shut without him.
Nettie accidentally discovered a teleportation device and inadvertently trapped herself in a recycling room. She was famished when we found her.
Draylor performed our one actual repair of the mission. We found a room with a rune carved into the floor, partially filled in with powdered quartz. In a storage cabinet, we found a small bag with more powdered quartz (and a magical carving tool that I added to my collection). It was just enough to fill in the rune and complete the engineers’ project that had gone unfinished for decades.
The rune’s faint glow turned into a thick syrupy light that rose up into a glowing blue ball. There was a smell of sandalwood and a click, and we heard a voice say “System memory restored.”
We noticed a plinth panel that had activated. Die-Anna poked at it and triggered another memo. It mentioned enrollments on the rise even as suitable faculty was on the decline, but the most unsettling thing was the way the Tower system talked about itself – like it was aware and capable of independent action.
We explored a little more, and Draylor almost got us stuck in a permanent deep freeze. The gnome engineers or the wizards or somebody had used elementals to power a cooling system for the Tower. The containment unit had cracked some time ago, letting them escape – but they were just chilling in the room. Until Draylor decided to catch one in his sleeping bag – then the others started moving towards us to attack.
Raven sliced the sleeping bag open to free the sprite, and we made our escape. But Nettie said she saw them join together as one entity as we fled.Unresolved Threads:
item 1
item 2