Maintenance and Preservation - Session Three

A warning light came on in an old control room at the Clearmountain Central Services headquarters. The one-legged boss didn't know what it meant, but he knew it signified something bad happening in the undercity. Someone needed to go down there and fix whatever was wrong. That someone was veteran maintenance men John Benson and Professor Ethan Boule, assisted by three new hires: Charlie, Pepper and Yana.

The group checked the approximate position of the problem sector against the underworld locations the veteran explorers had already visited. The zone in question was on level two of the undercity, which they knew how to get to through the geothermal caves. But one of the new hires heard there was also a hatch in the underground frontier which led further into the depths, which would shorten the journey significantly. The closest entrance to the frontier was the suburban house used by the mobsters. The boss told them it had been filled in. They suspected he might have been given some bad information, and decided to check it out. They got into the work truck and drove across town.

The suburban house was deserted. Professor Boule got the lock open without damaging the door. Benson checked the fridge and discovered all the mushrooms were missing. The furniture was still piled on top of the hatch to the undercity. The bunker beneath was likewise empty, allowing the team unimpaired access to the frontier beyond.

The gang tags in the abandoned tunnel were covered up with a new image: a chimera, with the snake and goat heads attacking each other - representing the conflict between the snake handlers of the church and the black goat of the druids? The dead druid and priest in the next room were completely scavenged by dungeon beings, with only the bones remaining. John Benson took the arm off the corpse to replace the one Kovie took off Hildegrin the Death Knight in the previous delve.

 

The gun turret was still guarding the cardboard box in the room where Benson got attacked by the frog. It was easy to lasso the box and drag it out of the turret's line of sight, and it was filled with a small hoard of silver coins. The five maintenance workers peered through a porthole in a sealed door, where yellow fog twisted and writhed, heavier-than-air and moving of its own accord. The low ceiling of the passage made it hard to move, which is why when the enormous flat toad entered the tunnel behind them, they weren't confident they could fight it. Fortunately, they didn't have to. They pulled on their gas masks and opened the door, letting the yellow fog out. The billowing gas overwhelmed the giant toad, melting its mucous membranes and sending amber colored worms spewing out of its mouth as its internal tissues were converted. Charlie dispatched the helpless beast with a knife. As the fog drained out of the room, a hatch in the floor became apparent, leading down to the next level of the undercity.

The room below was filled with water, access provided by duckboards that ran to the three exits. The explorers probed all three routes. One led into a stooped passage with serpent-man carvings on the wall. One led into a meeting room with discarded flower crowns, expletives carved in the morlock language, and a table made from an enormous geode. The route that led where the explorers needed to go was blocked by a sleeping cave bear, chained to the wall in such a way that it could reach any point in the room but not leave. Pepper tried to sneak past the monster and see what was on the other side, but inadvertently woke him up. She realized the beast was starving, using torpor to stretch its remaining calories as far as possible in hopes that someone would feed it - or feed themselves to it. She ran back out of the room before it could identify her as foodstuffs. The chained beast got up and began pacing the room.

 

The maintenance team decided to feed the bear. Ordinarily this was a bad idea, but the monster was already habituated to humans in some capacity, being used as a guard animal by some denizen of the undercity. If they distracted it with a treat they might be able to walk past it without a fight. They climbed back up to the first level to see if anything was left of the frog. The coiling worms had reduced it to a skeleton. Benson remembered the flooded chamber from his first day on the job, and decided to check there for animals he could feed to the bear. The water level was a lot lower with the blockage removed, but the pool of the old stepwell was still deep enough to hold some kind of creature, which he saw swimming around at the bottom. He used Pepper's climbing equipment and Yana's haligan tool to make an improvised fishing rod, using a silver coin as bait. He successfully hooked the giant electric eel in the pool, which zapped him and almost pulled him in. The team decided to find something nonconductive to harpoon the monster, which would make ideal bear food. The wood planks from the duckboards downstairs would fit the bill.

Yana was pulling up one of the two by fours when she noticed one of the floating pieces of wood in the water was moving. She stepped back and a sewer alligator launched itself out of the water, beaching itself on the boards just short of taking her head off. The whole gang attacked the beast, hitting it with wrenches and screwdrivers and survival knives. The injured creature retreated into the water before they could chop it up for bear food, dodging their thrown objects and pulling Charlie into the water when he tried to grab its tail. The gator retreated into the serpent ruins while the team retrieved their tossed tools. They didn't feel like crawling after it and potentially being ambushed, so they stuck with their original plan to pry up the boards. The nonconductive wood prevented the eel from shocking Charlie and Benson as they operated the long piece of wood like an improvised spear, hauling the eel up onto land to air-drown. 

 

 

The cave bear eagerly gobbled up the big fish, preferring a free meal over an uncertain fight against the group of humans crossing the room behind it. Ethan took the additional step of undoing the lock holding the bear's chain to the wall, freeing it to wander the underworld. He followed the rest of the group out, before the newly liberated monster decided to use its newfound freedom to attack him. The chamber beyond the bear room was dominated by the fossil bones of an enormous eurypterid, sticking out of the wall but thankfully not reanimating to attack them.

 

Next came an underground research facility where the lights still worked - perhaps indicating that this was the source of the emergency alarm they were sent to investigate. The first chamber had lockers, and one of the lockers had a garment bag inside. The suit holder was decorated with an ominous logo: an eye pierced by a dagger, indicating some secret government special access program. Inside the bag was a shiny foil hazard suit of unknown manufacture, a carbine and handgun of strange design, and a wallet full of documents. Professor Boule identified several magic spells amid the documents, which could be used as scrolls. He also identified dire warnings against use of the scrolls by anyone without the appropriate special access clearances, promising serious penalties beyond the scope of the ordinary legal system. The scariest part was that the items were left there without any traps or locks, like the owner was supremely confident nobody would be dumb enough to take them.

Ethan took the magic documents.

After the locker room came a research area, where a huge array of computers and control consoles fed into a system of tubes and cables, which all fed into a plexiglass tube the size of a shoebox. A tiny manta ray covered in spines hovered in the tube without any visible means of support, shimmering like heat haze. Nobody wanted to mess with it, and there was a blue glow coming from the next room, suggesting their destination was close at hand.

The room was filled with machines, arrayed on ledges and catwalks over a pool of water that glowed blue. Huge turbines in the walls hummed ominously, and an enormous power cable snaked out of the room. It was an abandoned nuclear reactor, which someone had reactivated and was using to steal power. Weirdly enough, whoever laid the cable wasn't the only one siphoning energy. A monstrous humanoid with a body plan like a brittle star crouched at the edge of the pond, uninterested in the maintenance technicians overhead. The whole thing looked a little over the maintenance team's pay grade, but they decided to explore a little further and figure out what was going on.

The next room had controls for a particle accelerator, which must have run somewhere beneath their feet. The power cable snaked onward into the next room, but there was also a telephone handset for communication with the surface. The phone could only make calls to two numbers: Clearmountain College and CERN. The crew called up the college and spoke with a bewildered physics TA, who heard the phone ring from under the stacked documents in an absent professor's office. They got him to relay a message to their boss, asking what to do. The one-legged man wanted them to figure out who was siphoning power from the reactor. If it was a secret government operation, as the ominous package in the locker room suggested, they needed to leave it alone. Otherwise, they should shut it down.

The cables led through a room with empty holding pens, sized for monstrous creatures larger than humans. The passage beyond was wood and stone, well decorated and inviting.

The Esoteric Enterprises corebook says this is public domain.

The first room of the fairy enclave was a fire pit. A man with coal black eyes sat on one of the stone benches ringing the fire, clad in only a bloodstained white sash with a long narrow sword, smoking from a long pipe of narwhal horn as he stared at the visitors with coal black eyes. John Benson asked if he knew anything about nuclear reactors. The man said he would take John to a quiet place. The maintenance crew decided to follow the cable rather than mess with him further. The room after that was lit by an enormous crystal, in whose light pale plants grew in strange shapes. 

 

From there, the power cord led into a goblin market. A gibbering psychic clad in six overcoats and nothing else, a masked slasher with a bandolier of knives and a handful of unruly murder-children, and an underworld librarian with a hardhat and helmet light pushing a shelving cart of tomes all shopped and haggled. The explorers checked out the market stalls, interested in picking up some magic items before solving the mystery of the cable.

Amid the mundane items, they found

• A magic battleax that was the bane of underworld creatures, on sale for a memory
• An enchanted rifle disguised as an umbrella, on sale for the buyer's luck
  
• The Book of Saint Cyprian, full of control spells, on on sale for the buyer's health
  
• The Grimorium Verum, packed with divination spells and on sale for 6 years life
• A tube of lightning incense and an magic noh mask, neither of which anyone was interested in buying and the goblins never quoted a price for.
  

Professor Boule bought the Book of Saint Cyprian, paying a bit of life essence but feeling no worse for wear. Benson wanted the Grimorium for its divination magic and aged himself 3 years to pay for it, convincing Yana, Charlie and Pepper to contribute the other 3.

The goblins told them that the cable was laid by the Red Caps, and went all the way to Coal City. That was an hour's drive away from Clearmountain, but the next room made it clear how they set it up: the cable snaked through a magic painting of the Coal City harbor. Shutting down the painting would kill the connection to the reactor complex, but would also shut down the goblin market, which was clearly using the painting to transport goods. Shutting down the reactor complex would stop the flow of power, but would also bring retaliation as the Red Caps flooded through the painting for revenge. The group came up with a plan to avoid both: Professor Boule would cast anti-magic shell on the painting using one of the magic documents, disabling it for twenty minutes. Then they'd shut down the reactor and get the hell out before the painting opened up again.

The plan worked great, at first. Nothing interrupted the crew on the mad dash back to the reactor complex. Disabling the reactor was as easy as pulling the emergency shutdown, then breaking the controls so it couldn't be reactivated without a full rebuild. The only problem was, that pissed off the radiation vampire soaking up rays at the edge of the containment pond. The beast let out a static scream as it chased the adventurers. They evaded its ten foot grasping limbs, but its radiation beam attack hit Pepper and Benson, making them sick. They all got the fuck out before it could zap them again.

 

The dash back to the hatch leading up to the first level of the dungeon was uneventful. Then the white-sashed fairy knight stepped out of the darkness and stabbed Yana in the eye, gouging the cornea. Professor Boule spent another illegal government scroll to cast Command on the knight, ordering him to stop attacking the team. He spent the scroll of Cloudkill he found on the previous delve to kill the massive rat swarm the knight summoned, and that left them free to ascend to the upper level. Nothing bothered them on the way out through the suburban house, back to the car.

 

The group dropped Yana off at the hospital before meeting the boss at the Burgerdrome. He ordered a Closed Casket Special for the group: a burger meal suitable for half a dozen people, served in a cardboard carton shaped like a coffin. They told him everything, except that Professor Boule stole the secret government scrolls from the locker. He told the gang they did a good job, but they needed to stay away from anything marked with the eye symbol. Then he left to visit Yana in the hospital.

 

The silver coins fetched a hundred dollars to an antiques buyer, split five ways between the team. The maintenance technicians went their separate ways to engage in personal pursuits.

• Benson unsuccessfully tried to contact the Ponda Ray family, hoping to spark a gang war between them and the Red Caps apparently muscling in on their turf. He asked Professor Boule for help casting the divination spells from his newly purchased spellbook, and learned how to resurrect the Death Knight Saint Hildegrin: take the body to the zone under the Serpent Ruins on level 2.
  
• Charlie investigated the feud between the snake preachers of the Cathedral and the Druids of the old faith. He learned that they both had secret hideouts in the underworld, sited uncomfortably close to one another. 
• Ethan Boule was visited in his shared office by a pair of black-suited agents, wearing the dagger-eye symbol as cufflinks. They asked him to return the stolen documents. He feigned ignorance. The larger agent reached out with a questing hand and erased his memory. He woke up in his office, unharmed but bereft of the illegal files, whose existence he could no longer recall.
  
• Pepper investigated the possible connection between the Red Caps and the mysterious dagger-eye government agency. The Red Caps were a Coal City gang, allied with the Men in Black after they teamed up Whitey Bulger style to take down an Aboleth that was eating its way through the city's underworld factions. The relationship was strained and it wasn't clear if they were still allies.
• She also sold the location of the hidden research facility to the Exploration Project, a faction of underworld explorers, for another hundred bucks.
  
• Yana got an emergency cornea transplant to repair her fucked up eye. She called her wife and explained that she sustained a work-related injury, which reassured her spouse that she wasn't having an affair (or if she was, it was probably broken off).