The Necropolis by Eric He
Three technicians met the one-legged boss on the roof of the Clearmountain Central Services building, under the arched glass that enclosed the grimy tiled roof.
- Professor Ethan Boule, disgruntled lecturer at Clearmountain College
- John Benso, experienced maintenance worker from a long line of cowardly adventurers
- Kovie Fauxer, nonverbal engineering student at Clearmountain College
The mission was this: Tectonic activity in the tunnels beneath
the university had severed a fiber optic cable. The maintenance crew had
to find the damaged cable in the limestone caves, descend into the next
level of the undercity and link it up to the other end of the cable.
Based on the zones Benson explored on the last job, the closest underworld entrance to the caves was the necropolis. There was a mausoleum with a staircase leading down into the tombs. They tossed their gear in the work truck and set off across town.
No sooner had the crew parked the truck, then Kovie's keen ears detected conversation from within the walls of the necropolis. Peering through the door revealed a group of old people - older than the tracksuited mafia hoods Benson encountered on the previous dig - wearing formal wear, body armor and firearms. Benson and Ethan greeted them with arms raised, explaining that they were maintenance workers and not plotting anything nefarious. The leader of the militia, an old lady in a fur coat, demanded that the workers seal off the entrance to the undercity in her family crypt, which hoodlums were using as an entrance to the undercity so they could loot things. Ethan promised the city was working on it, which was enough to satisfy her.
The mausoleum in question was charged with the DeCavalier family crest: a duck, close, carven above the entrance. The heavy lead doors were peeled open, bent and impossible to close. A crack in the floor revealed the staircase from last time. The staircase led down into the undercity.
The skeleton of Saint Hildegrin the Death Knight was where Benson left it, but someone had stripped the gold damascened plate armor off the body, leaving only the withered corpse. Kovie took one of the forearms off the body as a relic. The rest of the tomb had also been despoiled by looters, the cage holding the Knight's body was stripped of its gold wire. Further exploration revealed some loot that hadn't been pilfered: a case of four magic scrolls, slipped between the stacked bones of an ossuary.
- Cloudkill
- Spider Climb
- Flatten
- Mist Form
A breach in one of the tomb walls led into an abandoned subway system, relic of a bygone era of public infrastructure spending. Professor Boule found a pair of functioning night vision goggles deliberately hidden in a heap of fabricated parts, but nothing worth stealing in the adjacent room filled with disused CNC machines. The crew opened the door out to the platform and were blinded by a brilliant flash of light. Then an angry shout.
"DOWN! LEAVE IT!"
A lizard man pulled on a glittering string, connected to a burning light that pulsed with excitement at the presence of the adventurers. It gave another flash and he pulled on the leash, leading it out of the chamber, apologizing to the gang but otherwise paying them no more attention. The gang followed the train tracks and looted a couple more chambers, scoring some antique serial bus connectors and a jug of incredibly dangerous flammable chemicals. Benson's physical strength and Ethan's lockpicking acumen proved more than equal to the locked doors dividing the disused rooms.
The only way into the caves was through a mechanical room that sparked electricity, illuminating a sheen of water on the floor. Kovie spotted a strange lamp crouched at the base of a transformer, drinking electricity through a cable. It blinked its eye-bulb and signed at the group with its fan-shaped hands, saying there was enough electricity for everyone and there was no need to fight - but if they wanted to fight they would lose. Kovie and Professor Boule signed back to it that they weren't interested in fighting, only passing through the chamber.
The electrified water on the floor posed a problem. There was a breaker box to turn off the power, but doing so would antagonize the living lamp, along with the dangerous looking shadows hovering around it. Ethan convinced the lamp to hop over and open a door at the end of the chamber, allowing the water to drain out. They went into the caves.
The technicians quickly located the mustard-orange fiber optic cable in the first chamber they explored, dangling from the wall and gnawed through by some beast of the undercity. They clipped the end, stripped it, stuffed it into the barrel, crimped it, loaded it into the terminal and connected it to the spool of cable they brought with them. Then they set off looking for a shaft leading downward to the next level of the underworld, where the corresponding connector was supposed to be.
The caves were filled with geologic hazards. Dangerous tight squeezes that had to be scraped clear with chisels, picks and hammers. Billowing gas that clogged the filters of their respirators and ate away at their clothing and skin. A quicksand pit that almost swallowed them up, forcing Ethan to read a scroll of Flatten and become two-dimensional so he could flit along the wall like animated graffiti and string up a rope from Kovie's climbing gear.
The passage opened up into a tilted gallery. For a moment, the explorers' headlamps illuminated a pack of cavemen - pale, tattooed beings with stooped postures and heavy jaws. Then they were gone, disappeared into the adjoining tunnels. The walls of the cave were smeared with pictograms and etched with writing, cut deep enough into the stone it could be read with the hand in total darkness. Ethan interpreted the text as instructions for a spell, written in a prehuman language. A teleportation ritual was forced into his memory. A voice spoke to him in the dark, warning him to take care with the ritual. The tattooed cavemen were back, watching the crew from every angle, grinning. Licking their lips.
The voice forgave them for stealing the spell, but warned them not to interfere with the heaped bones of the ancestor. The cavemen would know, and would kill them if they did.
The workers' search did indeed take them through the caveman bone room. The piled skulls had narrow domes and wide cheekbones like an australopithecus, indicating the cave dwellers' descent from some ancestral protohuman. The explorers were far more concerned with what lurked in the next chamber: an enormous rubbery crocodile-looking thing, which clicked as it sensed them via echolocation. It whistled excitedly, eager to chew them up where they lay in the two foot high passage. Kovie tossed a couple bones from the Death Knight's severed hand and the Child of the Abyss eagerly snapped them up, crunching away at the ancient calcium - and giving the explorers a chance to scuttle through the room to the other side.
It didn't get easier. The next room was filled with a red slime, coating all surfaces. Benson tossed a piece of scrap metal from the abandoned subway and watched as the mold's hyphae slowly covered it, searching for nutrients. The team debated leading the blind crocodile-thing from the previous chamber into the red muck, but they didn't have a good way to get it into the chamber without it going after them instead. Even if they could, they all agreed they didn't want to kill a wild animal that wasn't attacking them.
Professor Boule poured some flammable solvent on the slime, hoping to scrub it off the rocks. The slime eagerly slurped up the hydrocarbons, distributing them throughout its vesciles and turning it from a slime mold into an extremely flammable slime mold. The team thought about setting it on fire, but decided against starting an out-of-control fire in a confined space that they couldn't easily flee without being bitten by a blind underworld beast. In the end, Boule cast the teleportation spell from the wall carving and relocated the slime to another room of the underworld - as a single distributed organism it could all be teleported with a single casting.
Removing the red slime revealed the remains of a previous visitor to the room: a handful of indigestible metal components that once made up the dead victim's clothing, and a handful of sapphires polished into perfect round cabochons by the endless questing mouths of the mold.
The exit from the formerly-slimed room was narrow enough that the explorers preferred to enlarge it than risk getting stuck. This took long enough for a fight to erupt in the previous chamber - the abyssal crocodile got attacked by an enormous fossil dinosaur. The technicians hastily crawled through the narrow tunnel, away from the dead bones and living beast, before either creature got the idea to go after easier prey.
The narrow squeeze opened up into a deep shaft, leading down to the next level of the underworld. A dead caver dangled from a nylon rope, harness still clipped onto the cable. The explorers searched the dangling body, removing a melted smartphone, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Dr Boule extracted the sim and SD cards and got some basic info about the owner: the guy was a member of the "Exploration Project", but anything more than that would require a password cracker to get through the dude's lock screen.
The cause of death was hyperthermia - the man was cooked to death by convection, boiled alive in his own sweat.
Lava Cave by Jan Wah-Li
The geothermal caves were much hotter than the "dead" limestone ones above. The first room the explorers entered was ominous for a different reason: the native stone of the chamber had been sculpted into furniture by a great heat, melted tables and chairs sized for something much larger than a human being. The passage leading out was a lava tube, likewise carved by something very large and very hot. The massive tubes led to equally massive bridges over vast chasms that glowed red. The abstract threat of death-by-convection became very real when the maintenance technicians came upon a magma-fall, superheated rock bubbling out of one wall and seeping into a vent in the ground. Leaping across would be risky, and leave the problem of laying the cable so it didn't just get melted. They decided to go the long way around.
The detour meant leaving the beaten path of huge lava tubes and squeezing down some narrower passages. They had to scrape open yet another tight squeeze, and that delay left them vulnerable to the approach of a strange dungeon creature which illuminated the tunnel with a rumbling sound as it approached. The cavers fled down a side passage, out of the caves and into the flooded tunnels of an abandoned mine. The oily water came up to their necks, but the rumbling beast of the earth didn't follow them down, content to continue toward some other objective.
The explorers emerged dripping from the flooded room, to find the passage they were excavating bored out into another lava tube. The rock was still molten and they decided to wait before heading down it. The stone was mostly cooled when a bubbling sound came from the abandoned mine tunnel, like gas forcing its way up through hot tar. A huge dripping petroleum elemental lurched out of the passage toward the maintenance techs. Kovie ran away. Professor Boule dropped his heavy toolbox to speed his egress. John Benson threw the dead caver's lighter at the lurching mass of petrochemicals. Instead of outrunning a living heap of oil, he barely managed to outrun the massive plume of flaming oil from the explosion.
The explorers followed the cooling magma tunnels through rooms choked with black smog and vapors of cooling magma, laying cable and counting on their respirators to keep the worst contaminants out of their lungs. They caught up with the huge monster in a magma filled room, with only a thin ledge of walkable stone around its edge. They hid and watched the enormous crystal squid as it went about its business. A lump of molten rock rose out of the superheated goo. It jiggled excitedly, like a dog anticipating a thrown ball. The lumbering squid chased it around the room, which only made the magma beast more eager to play. The stone cephalopod tired of the game and unleashed a swarm of flint songbirds, which flitted around the lava blob. The lava blob tried to catch the jagged pieces of stone and the squid grabbed it with its tentacles, hoisting it onto its back and turning to depart. The mechanics wisely hid again as the rock monster went back the way it came, lava-pet in tow.
Old art by me, recycled
The journey back to the surface was mercifully uneventful. The angry fossil and the crocodile had either mutually annihilated, or the victor decided to vacate the limestone caves. Professor Boule wanted to read another copy of the teleport spell off the wall of the morlock cave, but the cave dwellers had already sanded it out by the time he got back. They caught the living lamp from earlier staring at the newly laid cable, bulb flickering rapidly as it somehow "read" messages off the photons inside. One of the tunnels from the abandoned subway led up to the railyard on the surface. The mechanics walked back through the industrial zone, to the necropolis where they left the truck.
In the boneyard, John Benson went back into the mausoleum and took the skeleton of Saint Hildegrin the Death Knight off the spike. He took it back to the work truck and the militia stopped him, demanding to know why he felt so comfortable looting the tomb of their ancestors. The gang successfully convinced the old lady that they were taking the remains of the blessed saint to protect and restore the corpse, preventing vandals from further looting the body for trinkets - the sword, armor and hand were already missing. They dropped the skeleton off at Benson's apartment before returning to Central Services for a debrief. Their one-legged boss congratulated them on a job well done, though they kept back a couple or three facts from him. Like the sixteen hundred dollars in gemstones and old computer parts they looted from the underworld.
After work, the maintenance workers dispersed to engage in personal pursuits.
- Benson asked his criminal relatives if they knew anything about resurrection magic that would let him bring a Death Knight back to life. He learned of two places in the Clearmountain undercity that might have what he was after: the church crypt on level 1 of the dungeon, and the serpent man ruins on level 2.
- Kovie checked in with their mysterious handler at the Burgerdrome, a popular late night stop where nobody would notice or care about them meeting. On learning about the morlocks of the undercity, the case officer instructed them to forge an alliance with the cavemen.
- Professor Boule sent a public comment to the Clearmountain City Council, expressing concern about the use of underground fiber optic cables in a geothermally active zone where they would just get destroyed again and again. He also cracked the password on the cell phone he found. He got a contact list from the Exploration Project, and learned that the dead caver was looking for something called the "Lithic Court". He recovered a couple photos off the phone, of the strange squid and an even larger monster that
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