Maintenance and Preservation - Session Five

A surly middle aged man in a track suit stormed into the Clearmountain Central Services building. He cornered a pair of maintenance workers in the lobby and read them the riot act. His name was John "Johnny Boy" Benson, and they were responsible for the death of his nephew John Benson. Maintenance workers Pepper and Eddie patiently explained that Benson's soul was just fine in the jar where they stored it, and they had a plan to bring him back. Johnny Boy wasn't having it, but the one legged supervisor interrupted him before the situation turned violent.

 

Johnny Boy tried to flex his authority as a Costa Nostra hood, but Kurta wasn't intimidated. If John Benson was under the protection of a Sicilian family, it was that family's responsibility to protect him from the depredations of a rival crime syndicate. And Johnny Boy was far from home, if he wanted to cause trouble in Clearmountain then the Ponda Ray family would be happy to take care of him.

 

Fortunately cooler heads prevailed, and the maintenance workers explained their plan: they would take John Benson's body and the jar containing his soul down to the crypt beneath the Serpent Ruins and resurrect him. Johnny Boy insisted on coming with them, to make sure they didn't fuck it up.

 

The group decided to resurrect the Death Knight Hildegrin while they were at it. It was another bag of bones to carry with them into the undercity, but Benson had been obsessed with the idea of resurrecting the Blessed Saint for a while. So the wise guy went to Benson's apartment and shoveled the skeleton into a sack. He hefted his nephew's corpse and the bag of bones.

The group debated heading to the Tree Park in the center of town, where the locate object scroll cast by Eddie said the Death Knight's armor was located. The city's website said the park was reserved by the local SCA chapter for the next three hours, suggesting someone was using it for reenactment or LARPing.

The group decided against going to the park to get the armor back. They'd just have to carry it into the underworld along with the pair of corpses.

The route to the Serpent Ruins would take the work crew down through the entrance in the suburbs, through the bomb shelter and underworld frontier, down to the second layer of the underworld. On arrival outside the house, they immediately noticed a warning sign for the security system that now protected the house. Apparently the realtors trying to sell the place were sick of hoodlums using it as a highway to the undercity. Pepper and Eddie wrote up an emergency entry notice, pasted it to the door, and ignored the alarm that went off when they broke in.

The group encountered no resistance in the old bomb shelter or the underworld frontier. The latest graffiti in the tagged room depicted a man in a red hat with a long blade, skewering an earing-wearing gangster, a Man in Black, and an Aboleth with a single thrust. The improvised gun turret was dismantled and the rifle was missing. The hatch leading down to the next level swirled with a dusting of gas. Eddie and Pepper donned their respirators, Johnny Boy had neglected to draw one from stores. He dropped through the hatch after them and bent over to vomit a lungful of spiraling worms, nearly dropping the two corpses he carried with ease (up to that point).

The sewer gator was nowhere to be found in the water room, and the path to the Serpent Ruins was clear.

The tunnels through the serpent ruins had low ceilings, made for beings which could crawl on the ground with ease. The crew crouched and crawled and almost got stuck a couple times when Benson's corpse scraped against the ceiling. The first chamber was full of cages and the cages were full of bones, from australopithecines or other ancestral protohumans. Eddie searched the desiccated bodies and found a dried heart, which he stuffed in his coveralls for later use.

Then came the room whose walls were covered in murals, depicting Serpent Men and their evil machines maltreating the humanoid beings of prehistoric earth. Pepper entered the room ahead of the group to scout, and triggered the emergence of a robot from the wall carvings: an enormous bronze crab with glittering crystal tubes along its back, waving its bladed limbs like they were sense organs. The crew tried to cross the chamber without engaging it and the Pain Engine rushed toward them. Johnny Boy fired a gun at it and became the target of its ire - it slashed away at his legs and cut his hamstring while the others beat it with wrenches and blades. The fight stopped abruptly when the robot drank its fill of blood from the mobster's wounds, scuttling back into the wall with its crystal tanks full of vitae. Johnny Boy had to hand off the corpses, which felt a lot heavier with a mangled leg.

 

One of the branching tunnels from the Pain Engine room led to a shallow pit of snakes, which filled an  entire room. The gang didn't want to wade across it, so they looked for another route. The other way was full of bones, human humanoid and animal. Pepper scouted ahead of the group and peered into a chamber full of rubble, where a strange creature picked through the debris: a bird-faced humanoid that probed the heaped junk with its long fingers. It yelped and withdrew its hand, revealing a Serpent Man mousetrap clamped down on its finger. The trap squeezed until it severed the digit at the knuckle. The bird went back to searching the ruins, like it learned nothing.

Bosch

The group tried to cross the chamber discreetly and the beast spotted them. Eddie threw a spare battery across the room and it was immediately distracted. The way out was blocked by a larger version of the mousetrap, a triangular bar of razor sharp metal that could easily sever a limb. A thrown piece of rubble set it off, and the group easily escaped the room before it could reset. The next passage was blocked by rubble, but clearing the junk by hand didn't summon any beasts

There was a hole in the floor. A light shone from inside. And there was music, two dozen voices crying out in Aramaic and Greek and Latin, endlessly praising the Celestial Throne. The maintenance crew was afraid. They descended into the pit.

The caves on the third level were brightly lit, hot and dry - dryer even than the geothermal caves on level two. The candles burned red and yellow and gold. The walls were painted with eyes. The metal and rock was half-melted as though by a great heat. Eddie unfurled Benson's scroll of Augery and cast the spell, asking what would happen if they proceeded to the room where the singing was coming from. The spirit divulged to him that the room was incredibly dangerous, but also contained what they sought.

Pepper snuck ahead to take a look. In the chamber was a choir of Angels, printed all over with eyes, endlessly spinning in a pair of concentric hoops as they sang. Johnny Boy fell to his knees at the sight, Catholic guilt bulldozing his other senses. In the center of the ring, a two-headed bird appeared, bristling with wings. It asked if he had ever stood by while another came to harm. He answered truthfully that he had. The bird embraced him with its wings and disappeared.

Blake

John Benson felt something wrong. He reached up and grabbed his own severed head, sticking it back on his body. He stood up in time for the apparition of five humanoid figures, bristling with extra limbs, transparent. They asked him if he had ever done nothing while another came to harm. He said he had never done such a thing. They called him a liar and raised their million limbs to smite him.

Saint Hildegrin the Death Knight caught the blow on his sword. He parried and raised his blade in a high-guard - not the blade that John Benson tossed away to the river hag, a blade of shimmering light like the coat of plates that now covered his body. The Angels told Hildegrin to stand down and let them erase this man from existence. Hildegrin refused. His soul was his own and nobody could command him to commit an evil act, not even the servants of the Throne.

John Benson rushed forward to help the Death Knight. Hildegrin told him to get the fuck out. He was going to die protecting his friends, and if his friends denied him that luxuriant pleasure by dying themselves it would all have been a waste of time. The maintenance crew fled the scene before the wave of energy that washed over the skeleton could annihilate them too.

With John Benson resurrected, the group decided to search the remaining chambers of the Serpent Ruins, to see if they could find another way back to the surface. They explored the adjacent tunnels and found a huge machine of unknown function, moving parts scorched and melted by an explosion. Unable to divine its purpose, let alone reactivate it, Eddie opened up one of the laser mountings and took a handful of gemstones from the focusing lens.

Loic Muzy

The room beyond that was a half-flooded sphere. The crystal clear water was full of corpses chained to the bottom of the pool, dangling upside down just below the surface. At the center was an enormous snake, whose jaws almost came up to the surface. Poking one of the corpses with a tool immediately prompted the snake to attack, but it bounced off the surface of the water like a pane of plexiglass, imprisoned underneath. 

 

The team went back the way they came, but in exiting the rubble filled room (which the bird creature had since vacated) they were set upon by a writhing tide of snakes, migrating from the room with the pit. Everyone held still and the snakes ignored them, except for a single viper that fixated on Eddie. He hit it with his wrench before it could bite him. The remaining unexplored passages of the Serpent Ruins didn't yield treasure or useful information, except a cracked floor that shone with light from the Angel zone below, suggesting an alternate route down.

 

The team used their climbing gear to sling a rope up from the flooded room to the first floor, like they did last time. A voice up above warned them to drop the heart they carried. Eddie reluctantly tossed the withered organ up into the opening, and a hand reached out to snatch it. There was a sound like a dozen bare feet scampering away into the darkness.

On the first level, the dungeon apes had scraped their own writing into the graffiti. Eddie translated the script: if the Red Caps wanted to bring ruin to the underworld, as they had in Coal City, the Morlocks would happily return it to the dark.

 

The team exited the undercity through the suburban house and were stopped by the police, responding to the alarm. Law enforcement accepted the offered excuse of emergency maintenance, but asked why the crew had brought a mobster with them into the underworld - whose face the property management company had captured on the surveillance cameras in the house. The team patiently explained that the third member of their party was not the Sicilian hoodlum Johnny Boy Benson, but the maintenance technician John Benson, a fact the police could clearly observe. They shared a certain family resemblance, but it wasn't Central Services' responsibility to deconflict cases of mistaken identity on behalf of suburban property owners. The cops were suspicious, but couldn't find cause to hold the group after taking their statements.

 

Back at headquarters, the group explained the situation to their one-legged boss. He was happy to have John Benson back, which saved him a lot of work and a full workplace safety audit. He wasn't worried about retribution from Johnny Boy's paisanos against anyone on the team personally, though if they wanted to join the war against the Ponda Rays that wasn't his problem.

 

The group engaged in various personal pursuits.

• Pepper investigated the Red Caps' gang war with the other underworld factions of their hometown. They took over Coal City and made incursions into Cow Town, a nearby farming community that had almost been destroyed by a "meat god" growing in a slaughterhouse offal pit before being destroyed by a coalition of occultists. The Red Caps were led by the Kimeras, a group of mages and treasure hunters who married their way into the gang after helping them win an underground war against an Abboleth. Now the peace between the Red Caps, the Ponda Rays and the MIBs was breaking down.
• Eddie decided to open a museum of cool stuff he found in the underworld. He had a handful of treasures and many photographs of interesting monsters and locations. He was able to set some stuff up through Professor Boule at Clearmountain College, without attracting attention from antiquities authorities that might object to his private collection of ancient treasures from Clearmountain's historic (and geologic) past.
• John Benson was visited by a couple uncles/cousins from Da Old Country. The pair of greaseballs took him out for a late night lakeside dinner at Arno's Freshwater Clams and asked what happened to Johnny Boy. He told them the full truth about what happened in the underworld. They told him he didn't need to protect anyone, he could tell them what really happened to his uncle. He stuck with his true but highly improbable story, which frustrated them to no end but did convince them he wasn't holding anything back.