Maintenance and Preservation - Session Seven

Hairy Joe the one armed secretary introduced John Benson, Eddie and Pepper to their two new colleagues: Hank Dredger and Vinny. Kurta the one legged supervisor wasn't available to brief them, he was dealing with some suits from Central Central Services - weirdos with face masks and eye-dagger cufflinks. That made the three veteran members of the maintenance team pretty nervous. Either way, the crew had a job to do: the detectors placed by the maintenance team on a previous delve had pinpointed the source of the seismic disturbances causing the earthquakes. Central Services knew how to get down there, but the path was blocked. The mission was simple: go to the geothermal caves on level two of the undercity, find a path to the hatch east of the old research base, and mark it with signal flags. That would set the stage for subsequent operations to clear the path downward and solve the problem.

Hank wasn't comfortable going into the undercity with just a wrench. He wanted some real firepower. Thanks to the contacts made by the team on previous digs, Loyd the Bartender at the BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD club hooked him up. The barkeep passed him a .380 pocket gun in exchange for a nip of blood, sucked out of Hank's arm and into the massive neon cylinder above the bar counter. Pepper gave Vinny her shotgun because she wasn't interested in hauling it around, and he similarly gave up a little blood for a fistful of shotshells.

Thus equipped, the group went to the old railyard to use the derelict subway entrance. It was the closest one to their objective and the workers wouldn't bother them on the way down.

 

The group went the same way as the last time they visited the limestone cave. The living lamp was where they left it, still leeching electricity from the old power substation. Eddie and Benson carried out a conversation in sign language with the weird furniture. It warned them that the lithics were on a rampage on level 2 of the undercity. Something pissed them off.

 

The cave entrance was scribed with a fresh warning from the morlocks" WE'RE NOT GIVING ANY MORE WARNINGS". The caves were oddly denuded of hazards, the living fossil and the strange crocodile thing they encountered last time were gone. The first sign of trouble was in the shaft leading down to the geothermal caves below. Pepper and Vinny peered sneakily down into the hole and spotted four vampires arguing in sign language, unable to speak because of their horrible lamprey mouths. One was Loyd the Bartender, the group didn't recognize the other three. The three were very unhappy about Tombherd the Lich and his antics, they considered him an unwelcome interloper hunting in a place that belonged to them. Loyd disagreed, the lich only converted dead bodies to undead servitors, and the Lipless Ones didn't drink blood from corpses.

John Benson yelled a greeting. The three unknown vampires disappeared immediately. Loyd told him to get down from there. The group descended into the pit. Loyd was concerned that Benson was now a corpse, but noted that he clearly wasn't a brainless servitor of Tombherd. Benson said he wanted to learn Tombherd's secrets, Loyd warned him that Tombherd was insane and had no useful information to teach. "There are but four ways to die! Imagine all the flesh that has ever been eaten!" Absolute drivel. He warned Benson that his three colleagues wouldn't be so understanding, if they encountered him in the dungeon they would attack and kill him for being a zombie.

The geothermal caves were as hot as ever, but the earthquakes had filled some of the passages with rubble. The gang had to dig out the stones to progress, and on the other side of the rockpile they found an enormous stone worm with auger teeth of glowing magma, lounging on a chair of sculpted stone. The beast grew a mouth from the molten lava inside its mouth, and challenged John Benson to a passe d'armes. He was a Death Knight and if he was going to pass through the chamber he needed to engage the Seismic Knight in monomachy. John Benson agreed and the combat began. He hit the giant worm on the tail with his wrench. The giant worm engulfed him in its maw and melted the revenant's tongue out of his mouth. Benson fell to the ground clutching his jaw and the Seismic Knight judged him unfit to continue combat. With honor satisfied, he rolled lazily to one side and allowed the group to pass through the room.

Benson couldn't speak with his mouth cooked, he needed a new tongue. He was also horribly injured and his dead flesh couldn't regenerate itself, but Vinny and Hank stapled him back together as best they could with the first aid kit. The rest of the magma caves were easy to traverse. The deep chasm was humid and the sound of rushing water was audible from far below. They had to dodge a radiation vampire as it snuffled along the inside surface of a spherical black granite chamber, slurping up loose radionuclides from the stone. Pepper worried that the radiation trident she stole from Gunnie might attract its attention, and wrapped up the head in a layer of cloth to conceal the alpha particles it emitted. 

The abandoned mine didn't spawn any petroleum elementals like last time. The flooded chambers weren't infested with monsters either, not at first. Most of the water was murky with dissolved sediments, but one shaft was crystal clear and beautiful blue. A wicker chair was visible at the bottom, shiny and undamaged by a century of immersion in the waters of the Victorian era mine. The group clipped a cable to John Benson's fallpro harness and he jumped in to get it. There was a sensation in his head, like he was someone else falling into the water, his mind brushing up against someone else in another time or place or reality. He resisted the urge to go drowning, and to stay and to stay. He grabbed the chair and they pulled him out. The water had actually healed some of his injuries, but not mended his melted tongue. The gang bottled some of the magic water for later use as a healing agent. They couldn't figure out how to activate the special chair, which was clearly magical but whose function was opaque. They left it for later retrieval on the way out.

The room after that was filled with a thin mist that glowed green. Everyone donned their respirators, preventing the radon elemental that swirled out of the fog from flowing into their lungs. The entity did irradiate Vinny by flowing over his body, sapping his strength somewhat, but the team was easily able to outrun the cloud of gas.

The mine led into the research facility, through a route the group hadn't used before. The abandoned chemistry lab they discovered was coated floor to ceiling with shifting iridescent slime, which skated along every surface like a superfluid animated by strange energies. Eddie and Vinny were contaminated by the substance on their trip through the chamber, causing their skin to glow and gradually degrading their intellect. The mechanical room after that was full of greasy gray slime, a liquid limestone mix that calcified anything it touched. The pipes let them cross without stepping in the ooze. Hank was almost knocked off the ledge by a small, spiny manta ray that phased into the room, flying toward him and making sounds like a bird on a static-y television set. He shot at it with his handgun and it disappeared.

Hank was also able to reactivate the consoles in the control room that came next. The facility was running on emergency power after the destruction of the nuclear reactor. The diagnostics warned him that one of the creatures held in the facility had breached containment. The security monitors showed an ogre talking on the phone in the particle accelerator room, gossiping to someone on the other end about his dislike of the Red Caps and their insistence on using the magic Coal City painting as a smuggling superhighway. The camera feed of the adjacent breakroom showed a group of svartalfar, taking a break from some excavation. They smoked pipes stuffed with glowing mushrooms and played a complicated game using rocks as cards.

The maintenance team was excited to meet their dwarven counterparts, and rushed into the break room. The dwarves freaked out at the sudden intrusion of surface worlders, but calmed down when the maintenance team explained they were on the same side. John Benson couldn't lead the discussion without functioning vocal cords and the dwarves didn't understand sign language, so the rest of the team had to fill in. The svartalfar were trying to open a huge hatch in the next room, but their tools wouldn't do anything to it. It was the same hatch the Central Services workers were supposed to find, and they triumphantly planted the last of their signal flags to mark the route. The hatch itself was a black basalt slab, melded to the floor and cut with warnings in every human language and many inhuman ones: KEEP OUT KEEP OUT KEEP OUT KEEP OUT.

Lorenz Frølich

 

With their mission accomplished, the maintenance team sat down to learn the game the dwarves were playing: Microcline, which was like bullshit but with gemstones instead of cards. Players drew topazes and carnelians and tourmalines from their stash of minerals and tossed them into a pile, stating their value. Anyone who disagreed with the stated valuation of a gem could challenge the owner and closely examine it. If the bidder was lying they lost the hand, but if the challenger was wrong they lost the hand instead. Hank's keen eye for forensic detail carried the day, he won fifty dollars of semiprecious stones from the dwarves. Eddie paid the dwarves a gemstone from his private stash for one of the pipes they were smoking. It gave him a rush of energy, and he passed it around to the rest of the team.

 

The dwarves asked Pepper what she wanted for her magic trident. She didn't want gemstones, she wanted something magical. The team negotiated the following deal.

• The dwarves would receive the magic trishula, a flask of the azure water (which they treated like intoxicating liquor) and a fistful of gemstones
• Pepper would receive immunity to disease and poison, Benson would receive a new tongue, and the workers with radiation sickness and iridescent pus (the glowing sickness from the previous room) would receive a cure.
  

With the bargain struck, the group went to the Goblin Market in the Fairy Enclave to have the transaction "notarized". They passed a said fairy princess in a mothskin cloak drinking gin and a troll completely absorbed in a solo game of petanque. The market was empty of customers, the goblin merchant reached into his jar of squirming body parts and grabbed Benson a yak tongue, slightly too large for his mouth but otherwise functional.  

 

 

With their work in the underworld done and everyone cured of sickness, the group went shopping.

• Vinny gave up his firstborn son in exchange for a scroll of Polymorph Self. He didn't have a firstborn son, but what was one more debt on the pile?
• Hank gave up a little blood for a melted leather jacket that made him immune to fire damage.
• Benson aged himself a year to afford a scroll of Instant Summoning.
• Eddie paid a fistful of precious stones for The Last Stand of Zeke Ciliers, a painting of a guy with a flaming halo fighting an Aboleth in a flooded chamber as fishmen dragged him under the water.
  

With all their economic transactions in the bag, it was time to leave. The trip back to the surface was largely uneventful, they weren't attacked by monsters and the radon elemental couldn't catch them as they sprinted through the mines. They picked up the chair on the way out. It wasn't until they were back in the railyard that they got into trouble.

 

Gunnie was waiting for them by the truck, accompanied by four fairies in red hats. She asked if Pepper was ready to give the trident back. Pepper didn't have it and Gunnie rolled up her armored sleeves to administer a punishment beating. The Red Caps peeled back their coats to show both their handguns and a willingness to fight if the other maintenance employees tried to intervene. John Benson interceded on Pepper's behalf, offering a new treasure if they would leave Pepper alone. He also asked for Hildegrin's armor back, which annoyed Gunnie. Nevertheless, she agreed to let the thief off the hook if she retrieved something cool for her - she liked frightening the maintenance team and making them beg more than she actually wanted to hurt anybody. The Red Caps lost interest the second it looked like there wasn't going to be a fight, playing with their knives.

 

The supervisor was back, and really nervous. He was getting squeezed by upper management to get the mess in the undercity cleaned up, and doing his best to protect his employees. He didn't explain what their next job would be, just that they needed to take iodine and he'd do everything he could for them.

 

 

With such an ominous description of things to come, the maintenance crew occupied themselves with personal pursuits as best they could.

• Eddie took the chair to his museum and worked with Professor Boule to determine its function. An illusionist visiting the museum explained its provenance, transforming from a lizard into a goat before settling on the form of an old woman to deliver the exposition: it was made by the famous Barzini, an Italian furniture maker from the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. The chair would cure the illness of anyone who sat in it. They were lucky it had a benign effect, most of Barzini's work was dangerous.
• That same illusionist cast a spell on John Benson to conceal his withered revenant appearance. He looked like he did before he became a zombie, self-image successfully projected into reality. Unfortunately, Benson didn't have enough magic items to trade with the witch he met last time for a scroll of Permanency, an extremely valuable spell that would propel his ascent to lichdom.
  
• Pepper decided to clear her debt with Gunnie before things got out of hand. Gunnie wanted funeral coins from the Plague Pit beneath the hospital. Pepper's stealth and immunity to disease made this a trivial enterprise, and she also grabbed a fragment of jade from the mouth of a corpse before all the zombies forced her to escape.
• Hank used his coat of fireproofing to take on part time work as a firefighter.
• Vinny learned the effect of the Polymorph Self scroll: it would temporarily transform him into a creature of his choosing, provided it was of similar power level to himself. If he could find the appropriate burrowing animal, he could move freely through the undercity.