2023/09/27: Continued Adventures in Space Part 5 Report
General Summary
Buzz, Lillith, Johann, Kal'vus, Union, Sith, Zaran
The party investigated numerous materials and scrying options to try to find any safe paths through or past the death field.
Johann found one record of a man with a pocket watch, where the man would click the pocket watch before saying something intelligent, particularly giving the odds of their survival. The record gives surprisingly precise directions to where the watch was dropped when monsters dragged the man off. Corridor J, Deck 2. Just underneath and a ways down from an officer's quarters area on Deck 1.
The transporter room was still active, near where the shuttles are.
Stay away from the red dish on the front of the ship. It causes bad things to people who stay near it too long. Also, it's very hard to steal.
Eventually the party cast a set of powerful defensive spells and headed in a counterclockwise course through the asteroids to reach the ship. It appears to be an Oberth-class starship from Star Trek, but with a silvery exterior. The party didn't notice anything when they entered the death field, though the smoke around Zeltheon's sword kept shifting slightly in color, apparently because it was repeatedly parrying the effect against him. (It had also deflected the attempts to put defensive spells on him, so this was very much a good thing.)
The party landed the X-wing Buzz made in one of the shuttle bays of the ship. The place was extremely clean, with no smell of death. The interior was dark, but some light was reflecting in from outside and illuminating to some extent. Lillith tried to detect magic, and she didn't even pick up the <i>party's</i> equipment. The equipment still worked, so something must have been deadening the auras.
The party soon discovered an interface with the ship's computer. The computer was active, running what seemed to be "Snake". The party tried to check for emotions, but got terror and panic from everywhere around them. The party tried to contact the computer telepathically, but they only got "burn, burn, destroy, burn," with an intermittent "escape". The party decided to leave it alone.
The party started climbing up a ladder inside one of the deactivated turbolifts to get closer to the bridge. Johann was going first, and he found himself under attack from a pair of those little rock golems dropping from above. Kal'vus dealt with them quickly, then kept climbing over Sith and Kal'vus to get to the next floor. There he found himself faced with an angrily glowing red blob about eight feet across. It was moving towards him at the speed of a speeding tortoise. Johann climbed up, looked over his shoulder at the thing, and decided to just keep on going. The rest of the party followed his lead. (The thing grabbed at Zeltheon's legs as he passed, but he managed to kick it off.)
The party disembarked on Deck 1. Several apparently perfectly normal humans were walking around and working on terminals on the bridge. They were wearing original-series Star Trek outfits. The terminals they were working on were totally dead. Close inspection by Kal'vus (who is a bird and thus doesn't care about personal space) revealed that they were slightly translucent.
Sith successfully used his necromancer abilities to speak with dead, getting the name of one of the phantasmal crewmembers: Lieutenant Jensen. Her voice seemed to come from something separate from the ghost, and may not even have been the same person. She said an experiment had gone wrong. The power source was greater than they could have possibly imagined. A rift in space had opened up. "We didn't last long after they came out of the rift." All of a sudden, everything had stopped working, and physics had started going weird. They had connected the experimental power source to most of the systems in their ship. The power source was a "naked quantum singularity". The party tried to ask where it was, but she stopped answering. Then a big green slime thing started oozing out of the mess hall and lounge. The party decided discretion was the better part of valor and quickly headed back down the turbolift.
Sith stabbed the red ooze that was still trying to reach the party through the door on Deck 2. Something in his sword's dizzying mix of effects hurt it, and it retreated, leaving the party clear to descend.
Deck 4 opened with nice gold-colored carpet extending down a long hallway. The first of numerous closed metal doors, immediately to the left of the turbolift, had the label Engineering Diagnostics Workshop. When Sith and Kal'vus tried to force the door open, they were greeted with a burst of heat and the horrible sounds of people burning alive on the other side. Still, the fact that Sith could feel it at all despite his fire immunity meant it was probably an illusion, and he kept pulling the door open. The room inside was pristine, and there was even a half-eaten sandwich sitting on one workbench.
A river of those green life-eating orbs started pouring from the end of the hallway. The party took refuge inside the room, sealing the door behind them. They started investigating the blueprints and items inside.
They found the location of the experimental power source quickly enough. Below deck 6, on deck 7-ish.
The party decided not to bother with the ship's outrigger trolleys. Buzz disintegrated a hole down through the floor, planning for everyone to drop down and float to the lower section of the ship. Instead, the hole led into an endless darkness that appeared to be the negative material plane. The air was sucked out of the room through the hole. Acting fast, Buzz patched the hole with a wall of stone, and seconds later the hole was gone entirely, the ship's floor back to its pristine state.
No luck with the bypass, then. Onward to Engineering proper.
Rewards Granted
2 xp
Character(s) interacted with
Notes
Kal'vus applied the permanent war paint that he got last time. He used it to paint big red scary eyes on the insides of his wings.
Kal'vus
Sith
Johann Erstklein
Union
Zaran
Lillith
Buzz Gizmo
Report Date
27 Sep 2023
Primary Location
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