Maintenance and Preservation - Session One

In the basement of the Clearmountain Central Services building, the sweaty one-legged head of the Maintenance & Preservation laid out a job for his newest hire: a drain in the undercity had become clogged. The new guy needed to go down there and unblock the flooded chamber before the whole storm system backed up. He warned the new hire to be careful of deadly traps, wild animals and unfriendly underworld denizens - he wasn't a police officer or social worker, he had a job to do and an important part of that was not getting killed.

The closest entrance to the undercity was in the garbage dump in the northwest. The new hire locked and tagged out the trash mincer and climbed inside the machine, slithering down the handholds into the depths below.

The caverns beneath the landfill were stacked with compacted waste - cubes of household garbage, scrap, paper and rotting organic matter. The technician pulled on his respirator and set off in search of the flooded room. The map given by the boss was not exactly precise and he had to navigate through a lot of trash. He spotted a brand new shotgun discarded on the floor amid the banana peels and plastic packaging, but remembered the bossman's warning about dangerous traps.

The sound of an argument in the chamber ahead prompted the worker to flick off his helmet light before whoever it was could spot him. Without the LED bulb, he could see a pinkish glow at the end of the tunnel. His eyes adjusted to the dark and revealed a grisly tableaux: a chamber full of corpses, overgrown with black fungi that glowed pink in the gloom of the undercity. Men in tracksuits and gas masks moved from body to body, clipping the growths and shoving them into bags. They had pistols on their belts. The worker slipped off his hi-vis and stuffed it in his bag, then snuck past the strange mobsters.

 

 

Avoiding the mobsters was the right move, there was another corpse in the adjacent trash chamber awaiting introduction to the pile. The new hire followed the first passage out of the landfill, into an ancient tomb. The chambers were heaped with bones and coffins, which he wisely ignored. He hid behind the heaped sarcophaguses as a sinister blue skull floated by, wreathed in evil mist and glaring at its surroundings through cold blue eyes. Everything had already been looted, probably by the mobsters whose footprints passed through the tomb to an unknown zone to the south. Only a chained coffin remained unopened, and it rattled ominously when the new guy approached it. He decided to open it, but wasn't strong enough to peel the chains off the box with his bare hands. He turned his lamp off and hid in a nearby hallway when the mobsters came back, passing through the tomb to an unknown realm in the south. 

The quest for a crowbar took him to a domed room with a skeleton in a gilded display cage, clad in plate armor and armed with a two handed sword. The maintenance man reached for the sword and the skeleton struck him with the pommel. It assumed a high guard and the new guy stepped back, apologizing for the intrusion and explaining his problem: he needed a metal bar to help free someone from a chained coffin, and he needed to unclog a drain so the city didn't flood.

Saint Hildegrin the Death Knight hefted his sword and accepted the quest.

The Death Knight smashed the chains on the coffin with a well placed blow. The coffin burst open and a revenant sprang out. It leaped at the maintenance worker with claws at the ready and the Death Knight grabbed it, pinning its arms as it wheezed and thrashed around. The restless dead guy realized that neither of them were the ones he wanted revenge against and stopped struggling. The Death Knight put him down and he scuttled away. The maintenance guy took an artifact out of the now-unoccupied coffin, a severed hand with a silver base.

 

The new guy was hesitant to follow the mobsters into the unknown realm to the south. He took the Death Knight to search the rest of the tomb, to give the gang a comfortable lead. A trap nearly killed him and Saint Hildegrin stepped into the path of the protruding spike. The iron point slipped between his gorget and breastplate, killing the Death Knight instantly. The maintenance man probed the path ahead of him with the dead skeleton's sword, triggering another trap harmlessly before reaching the end of the tunnel, where a spiral staircase led up to the surface - to the necropolis south of the landfill. The new guy peeked out of the tomb, oriented himself and went back under in search of the flooded room.

 

The path taken by the mobsters led into an abandoned bomb shelter, filled with moldering furniture from the fifties. The riches were long gone, and fussing over the various infrastructure almost let a zombie from the tomb get a drop on the maintenance guy. Almost. The zombie was missing several pieces and could only crawl slowly on the ground. He kept ahead of it by walking.

The infrastructure in the bunker was mostly nonfunctional. A water purifier. A generator with no gas to power it. A stove connected to an active natural gas line. The new guy made it through without incident, following the tracks left by the gangsters. They led to another staircase up to the surface, this one sealed from above, which he had no interest in opening. According to the map, he was practically on top of the objective.

A hole crudely knocked in the bunker wall led out of the bunker and into a series of filthy concrete rooms. A chamber tagged with gang graffiti from the "Ponda Rays". A room with a dead man in priestly vestments, flayed, and another in an animal skin, burned. A yellow eyed cat snuck up on the new guy as he wormed his way through the passage. It told him the Druids and the Priests had fought in the chamber and had both killed each other. It laughed at his discomfort and fled into the underworld to avoid answering more questions. Then there was an abandoned summoning circle. A mysterious package watched by a gun turret connected to a motion sensor. A room full of glittering spores that his gas mask protected him from, though the dead cave hyena on the floor wasn't so lucky. 

 

The sound of rushing water led him through a half-submerged passage to the flooded room, where a fatberg prevented the water from draining properly. The water pouring in from a sluice in the ceiling filled the room almost to the ceiling. The new guy waded forward, then realized he didn't have a good way of breaking up the blob before the water covered his head.

 

A woman with enormous eyes and a wide mouth packed with fangs demanded to know his business, peering at him from the scummy water. He said he didn't want trouble, he was from Central Services and he just wanted to fix the drain. The river hag wanted his sword and wasn't shy about asking. He told her he needed it to unclog the drain. She said she'd take care of that. He held out the blade. She grabbed it, shook it and pulled it under the surface. There was a vile squelching sound like slime forced through a tube. The water swirled as it swiftly drained through the newly unblocked pipe.

Now all he had to do was make it back to the surface.

There were a couple routes out of the underground - if he made it back to the tomb he could leave through the necropolis, but he wanted to try his luck with the staircase the mobsters left through in the bunker.

He made it to the room with the gun turret before he almost stepped on the toad. It was very large and very flat, and its back was covered with pulsing nodules. It made an ominous clicking sound and waddled forward. The only way around it was to pass through the gun turret's field of view.

The maintenance man wasn't interested in being food for a giant toad, and he wasn't interested in being shot. He dashed past the thing and a pair of giant tadpoles burst out the back, squirming toward him. He had to drop his first aid kit, his wrench and the silver banded hand, but he made it out alive. The beast clicked with displeasure, denied a meal.

The ceiling hatch in the bunker wasn't actually locked, it was just held down with something heavy. By slamming his body against the hatch, the new guy jostled a piece of furniture off it and climbed out. It was a house in the suburbs and it was empty. He did he a quick search to figure out what the gang was doing. The fridge was full of the weird mushrooms from the corpses in the landfill. He stuffed a couple in a plastic bag and left before the gangsters came back. He waited until he was a few blocks away before calling the boss and telling him it was done.

 

The boss picked up his new hire in the work truck and congratulated him on a job well done. The lost equipment was a shame, but if tossing the first aid kit saved his life then it wasn't any different then if he had used it up. He was less happy about the mushrooms, and told him to burn them right away. They had already started to blossom in the plastic bag, filling it with dangerous spores. He'd take talk to some people and take care of the mobsters farming corpses underground.