2023/06/07: Arrival in Solace Report

General Summary

Buzz, Kal'vus, Knight, Lillith, Union, Zaran, Habet Our heroes have just arrived in a magicyberpunk city on Solace. As the session opens, they are standing in a smelly alley full of packing peanuts, more of which spill out into the street beyond. Enormous dragons fly through the narrow patch of sky that can be seen between sky-scraping towers. The road beyond has a cleft down the middle that contains a river of packing peanuts. There's a man outside a small shop using a leafblower to blow them away from his shop. The man looks human, but with a greyish tint to his skin and completely bald. Also sort of old. Higher levels of the city seem shinier and wealthier. There are higher levels of street, one after another going up. Rickety iron stairs lead from one level to the next. The stairs look industrially manufactured, but poorly maintained since their installation. Lillith and Union noticed sounds of squeaking from beneath the packing peanut river. Knight detected 36 small humanoids hiding down there. The party decided they weren't looking for a fight, so they headed for the nearest stairs. As they were going, Lillith suddenly noticed herself being pickpocketed by something invisible, and Union and Buzz saw the big golden sword on Knight's back vanish. Lillith grabbed the hand of the furry thing pawing at her. Knight, with his usual fast reaction times, turned and grabbed the thief that took his sword, using his control of his form to reach from ten feet away. Then he activated the fear aura on his armor. The thief, still coherent despite the fear, tried to throw the sword to another fleeing rodent before blasting himself free with what appeared to be a grenade. Union acted first. The wall of force bubble he summoned around the thief and Knight just bounced the sword back, and the explosive escape did nothing but pinball the rat-man around the inside of the unyielding dome. The rest of the fleeing rats didn't stop to help. Not all of the rats were fleeing, though. Union, Zaran, and Kal'vus were hit by a large, electrified net, paralyzing the first two. A barrage of shots came from a firing line of rat people with rod-like weapons, but their accuracy was abysmal; the only shots that didn't go over the party's heads smacked into the adventurers stuck in the net. Only then did this last group run. Lillith responded to the gunfire with fire of her own. She fired a laser down one of the alleys they were escaping down, and screams and sizzling followed. Kal'vus dextrously slipped free of the electrified net. Before being shot three times, he'd been planning to just knock the thieves out; now he had far less concern about the wellbeing of the would-be murderers. He followed a group of six rats that were trying to escape into a nearby alleyway. They didn't make it past the threshold. Buzz, for his part, pulled out his new sword and blasted a cone of space with what would normally be fire, but which the blade turned into a terrible cloud of slashing. Another ten rat-men died. Habet ran down another rat that tried a different alley, and there was the sound of whipping chains. No screams this time. When she returned, her bundle of chains and fur revealed that she'd gone for the capture rather than the kill. At the end, there were two captured and surrendering rats, one with broken legs and possibly a broken spine thanks to the failed grenade-launch. Both were veteran alley rats. Or spire rats, as the case may be. The party paused for an interrogation. The broken rat-man called himself Ik-chuk. He said he was "Very not-tasty, by the way." Knight and Zaran promptly stated that they were willing to eat pretty much anything. Ik-chuk proceeded to give much information, including an offer to guide the party to either of two fixers he knew. The party chose the fixer who knew people with money, people higher up in the spires. Apparently the other fixer Ik-chuk offered, one who knows the lower places in the city, is a slaver; it's a good thing the party didn't include anyone particularly small, or the rat-man gang would have tried to carry them off as well. The party (and especially Kal'vus) did some proper intimidation on the spare chain-bound rat-man, then set him loose, making sure he knew to tell the others that the party wasn't to be messed with. With that, the party got Ik-chuk moving and set off for the fixer that they wouldn't feel the need to kill on sight. While traveling the circuitous route up to the fixer, the party saw what looked like a couple of suits of power armor cleansing the streets with fire. Farther along, the party was surprised by a humanoid covered in machinery, who rose up in response to Ik-chuk's hiss and aimed a weapon at him. "This pile is mine." Knight interjected. "He's doing a task for us. Your pile is safe." Kal'vus similarly reassured her that her treasures were safe. She responded with "Well what if I want yours." She wasn't all that eager, fortunately; the party talked her down from violence, and some information was exchanged. Chrysalis is the corporation that took most of Necrosa's stuff in this area. The woman covered in machinery is a junk trader/tinker named Rebi. She turned out to be surprisingly helpful, as long as both sides "honestly" have guns trained on each other the whole time. The party carried on. As they got to one abandoned area, they found a 60-foot-diameter orb of scintillating light hovering along an alley. Ik-chuk shrieked and ran back the other way. Knight, deciding not to stand around and ask why the bomb disposal expert was running, dashed backwards to stay with him. Buzz just put on magic mirror shades, while Lillith stared at the orb with detect magic. Union hid. Kal'vus and Zaran joined Knight and the rat in retreating at speed. Habet stepped forward and cast a defensive spell. The orb moved forward. It was fast, almost three times an average human's walking speed. There was a flash, and all those who had held their ground seemed to wilt. Union and Buzz dropped almost immediately. Lillith, badly weakened, grabbed Buzz's collapsing body and teleported back to the rest of the group, though she felt something pulling at her during the transport. Habet quickly healed herself and Union just enough for Union to regain consciousness, but as she realized the two of them likely couldn't run fast enough to get away, she activated another of her contingency plans; Union suddenly found himself underwater along with her, apparently having been pulled to somewhere else entirely. She frantically gestured to just wait. The rest of the party fled, following the rat. They got to a safe distance and watched the orb pass by; all organic matter near it sizzled and vanished under its rays as it went, from rats to bugs to corpses. After it was gone, Union and Habet dropped back to the Prime Material plane from the Elemental Plane of Water. They safely rejoined the rest of the group, much to everyone's relief. Ik-chuk says the people down below call those orbs "bubbles". The people up above say they don't exist at all. Ik-chuk saw one only once before, and most of his clan died that day. By the time of this encounter, the party had traveled about 14-15 blocks horizontally and 90 feet vertically; a decent distance, but short enough that such frequency of deadly encounters was concerning. Knight asked if there were any other horrible threats the party should help keep an eye out for. Ik-chuk said "Yes. Many." He suggested they just look for movement, because if anything moved, it could probably eat them. Knight pulled out his lantern of magic detection and committed to checking for nearby life periodically. Farther on, the party had to follow the rat-man through a crawlspace. He stopped them at a spot where a grate led up to what seemed to be a club, with associated music. Ik-chuk squeaked a conversation to someone with a deep voice on the other side. The voice responded with "Give me a moment". After about a minute of waiting, Ik-chuk came back to ask for a spokesperson. The party elected Lillith, a princess and the most conventionally "social" of the group. She handed an orb off to Buzz, saying it would let them hear the conversation and talk to her, and then went forward. She was brought through the grate discreetly and seated at a table. Nostro, the fixer, turned out to be an eight-foot-tall electric lizard/frog person, very well dressed. Lots of neon. He offered a variety of options: several full information packages, and several mere hints for the party to follow up on their own. His prices were... extreme. After some negotiation, the party purchased the cheapest two hints for around 35,000 gold. Lillith was handed two sealed envelopes and told not to open them on the premises. Though Ik-chuk had fulfilled his promise, he chose to stick with the party; he'd been promised stuff, and he said he was probably dead to his clan now anyway. The envelopes contained a mix of articles and other information. The contents of the first envelope were centered around two corporations, Chrysalis and Thermo-Fissure, fighting over a powerful stealth field generator. An article reported that as a result, the vehicle carrying the generator fell from the top of the spires all the way to the bottom, with all hands and items of value presumed lost. The envelope also contained a set of nearby coordinates and a time, with the time being this morning. The second envelope contained three articles. The first was about a visiting lord from the Elemental Plane of Fire making a deal with the corporate conglomorate Lifetronic/Cyberlife for new enhanced magical enhancements for cyberware that should work in planes without technologic resonance. The second was about similar work the Necrosis Corp did a few years ago that did the same thing. The last was about a ruin in the old desert area (1200 miles away or so southeast) that has seen fire elemental monsters in the area as well as increased demonic gateways recently. The party decided to head to the nearby coordinates from the first hint, planning to head to the ruin in the desert afterwards. If neither panned out, they planned to return to Renedge and consult some diviners for aid in determining their next steps.