Shadows - Part 2

Where the adventurers explore a pyramidal structure on a planet with a hostile atmosphere in the hope of disarming the beam weapon that has their ship pinned down.

This session was played on Sunday, September 16, 2012.

This note is based on Carl's writeup and the photos are his too. The computer renderings are mine, drawn with Sketchup and rendered in Kerkythea.

The story of how they got there is here.

Location: Yorbund in the Regina Subsector.

Imperial Date: 012-1102
 

On Yorbund, in a gully near an alien pyramid structure. 

    We started fitting our selves out for a more thorough reconnoitering of the inside.  Lights, comm relays, rope and climbing gear, sample bags for both solids and biologicals, scanners, flares left over from the Haunting Thunder visit, and whatever else we could think of that might be useful.

The Away Team

    Before we left the Skylark, Yorbund showed  us that the rumors of seismic activity were more than  just rumors, as a  substantial quake shook us all up.  Fortunately no  injuries or damage  occurred to us or the ship. 

    Our main goal in the search was to locate the controls  for the  weapons(s) and disable them so we can fly out and repair our  ship.  Anything beyond that was in the 'bonus round' class.  We really,  really,  really did not want to have to try and make a dash for it and  risk  getting shot down again.

    As the away team trekked  over toward the pyramids, Sam started in-depth research on the laws  pertaining to what we find to see if we can make a legal claim to  anything useful we find.

    We headed out into the unknown, or at least poorly known.  We had taken some time to view the video from the camera we had lowered last time, and noted that the passages were all round, as were all the doorways we could see.  There were two door configurations, one high and one low, with the higher having steps inset into the passageway that led up to the doors. These steps were interesting in that they were not consistently spaced, and were in some cases nearly a meter high, implying long legs for whatever used the place.  Medicus noted all of this, as well as the biological readings we had gotten, in preparation for his next ground-breaking treatise on new life forms of the Spinward Marches.

    Roping up for safety (we all too clearly recalled Leon's near fall into the shaft) we secured a pair of ropes to the statue at the top and blocked off the rails the statue sat on so it would not close on us as we descended, and lowered the camera for another look.  The rounded door(?) we had noted to the East last time, which had life signs detected behind it, was now open and no life form was detectable.  The rest of the way to the bottom of the shaft was identical the way it was on our first trip.

The Lower Passageway.  In the upper right is smaller tunnel, about a meter in diameter.  These generally had some vapor seeping out of them. 

    Leon was the first one down the rope, swinging over to the ledge about 10 meters down and providing an anchor for Kipenzi and Fig to come along. The inner surfaces of the pyramid was granite-like, and Kipenzi had no trouble placing an anchor bolt for our rappel down to the bottom, and to tie off the ropes that would get us back up if we needed them.

The basic layout of the interior at this point. 

  The short passageway (at top) that led to the curved door (now open) was our first look-see.  It appeared that the doorway slid up to open, out into the passageway, and the room was spherical with a platform as the floor, with a small gap between it and the wall.  Our first hope was that it would be an elevator, but if so we were unable to get it to go anyplace. A slot outside the room may have been a control, but it needed either a remote control or some actuator mechanism/lever, and we could not get any movement.

  Lighting in the room was from a red light panel on the ceiling, as it had been in the passageways we had seen so far. The platform, as Kipenzi discovered, would move a little bit when stepped on, and appeared to be levitating using some magnetic-type flotation.

  Our next look was the short dead-end passage (right on the picture)  Since it led out to the face of the pyramid, we were very hopeful that we would find a door, and for a wonder we found a lever at the end of the passage which actually did open a doorway at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the statue. MUCH easier access for us at that point.

  The floors in the passages were also apparently magnetic-type floatation, in segments of varying lengths.  They settled slightly with our combined weights but never very much.

  The longer passageway, at bottom of picture, had what appeared to be a seismically caused shift some ways down.  We all reminded ourselves to stay roped up and be ready for any further quakes.
 

The red lines show the floor plates. The green text are life form indicators. The doors on the right have steps leading up to them.

    As we progressed down the passageway, most of the doors were closed. Medicus was able to amplify the suit audio and help confirm that several life forms were behind the doorways, not all giving the same readings on the scanner that Kipenzi carried. These were NOT any of the known Yorbund fauna.

  The one doorway (on left at bottom of picture) that was open had a soil-like floor instead of the floating plate with fungus-like plants growing in it.
 
 

Down past the open doorway we came to another shaft going down.

    The dot at the center was a cable descending to the bottom, oscillating slightly and with a regularly applied push to it from the box at the top of the domed room. (Planetary rotational indicator? Earthquake tracker?) To confirm our orientation we lowered a light all the way down and the Skylark crew could see it on the camera that we had lowered down the first shaft. Lest we seem to have been careless, know that we also left a camera showing this passageway, so the Skylark (Sam and Medicus) team could warn us if any of the doors opened and unknown life forms came out behind us.

    The passageways shown all led to hemispherical rooms. These rooms all had pits and small floating plates just inside the doorways.

    On the left we detected 8 - 12 small life forms, 1-3 kg weight, in a fog/mist filled pit. This was a DO NOT TOUCH room for us.

    The bottom room in the picture had a mist-filled pit but no life signs.  On the walls, visible in infrared light, was a mural of a flock of flying creatures, being fired on by the pyramid that shot at us. More that one beam was shown in the mural, lowering even further our likely chances of making a run for it. The creatures were bat-like (consistent with the stories of a Yorbund fauna) and about 1m across. In the pit were several skeletons of smaller creatures, and considerable debris.

    The room to the right was the same as to the bottom, with a mural that (to our best recollection) depicted Yorbund's landscape around the pyramid as if the walls were transparent. However, some differences made us think the mural was OLD.  Some geological features of the landscape were not present in the mural. There were crowds of intelligent-looking (at least organized in some attentive fashion) reptilian creatures that roughly matched the statues on the pyramid and platform.  Our guess was that it depicted a clan gathering or ritual of some sort.

    Sadly, no controls of any kind were found on this level, so we were forced to rappel down to the bottom and continue our search.

    Before we went down, however, Kipenzi and Leon lifted up one of the small floor plates to see if it were perhaps an antigravity device we could use as an elevator. Pushing it over to the large pit with the pendulum (wow, great title for a short story!) we learned that no, it is not an antigravity unit, but once near a floor it will float.  That last part we learned from the Skylark team as they watched the plate bounce around the bottom and then settle.

    Beneath the floor panel we found pipes/passages about a meter in diameter, running below the floating floor and in the pyramid structure itself.  They ran along the corridor.  No real theory as to the purpose was forwarded

    Back to the first shaft we went, and reviewed with the Skylark team that there are life signs on the lower level, and the cable does in fact go to the bottom, with what appears to be a black sphere attached at the end.  We really hoped this was NOT one of the Ancient black globes we had heard of.  Mist was in the lower level about as it had been in the upper.  At this point we had been on planet about 3 1/2 hours, we still had plenty of suit time and oxygen.

    Rappelling past the seismic shift about half way down, we noted some organic material, a few bones and what appeared to be a coin and the remains of a pouch.  Good thing we brought sample bags, and Medicus made sure we collected samples. The coin was of a reddish/gold material, a flame on one side and blank on the other.

   The bottom (so far as we knew at that point) level looked initially like this:
 

...with the long corridor extending down as far as the second shaft we encountered on the upper level.

    The small room at the top of the picture had life indications of 20-30 smallish (1-2 kg) beasties under the platform, and we left them alone.

    The room to the right appeared completely empty, devoid even of the mist we had seen in many of the other rooms.

    The room to the left was full of mist. It was flowing down the doorway to the floor, our first room like that. This room was the coldest one we had encountered, below freezing.  As Kipenzi edged up to the room and saw a dead flyer on the floor and she crossed the threshold.

Zap!

She was hit by a strong electrical discharge from both sides as she crossed the threshold. It fried her radio, killed suit gyro, fused the servos in both arms and gave her some serious electrical burns where she was touching the inside of the suit.

    Kipenzi was able to walk after getting assistance getting up, but both of her arm servos were disabled and she needed to be pulled up the rope after Leon and Fig had climbed back up.  Without the VACC suit's damage mitigation, she could have died there, and though we had been really cautious before, we redoubled the slow and patient factor.

  As we prepared to climb back up to the upper level, there was another earthquake, and there was a lot clanging and crashing sounds to be heard coming from above.  Leon sprained his knee when he lost his balance.

The clanking they heard earlier was some of the doors opening, releasing about a dozen white bat-like creatures.

  Fig went up first, and while Leon was climbing up the rope, one flyer came over and threatened to attack.  We had wanted to avoid encounters, and didn't want to fire the lasers at all if we could avoid it, but this casualty of peace was unavoidable. The bat-like creature was turned into more samples for Medicus' study.

  After that one encounter, all three of the away team got back to the ship safely.  Medicus dealt with Kipenzi's fairly extensive burns and looked at Leon's knee. 

    The VACC suit that protected Kipenzi was, fortunately, reparable.  Meticulous work by Sam and Leon put it back into commission in a few hours.

    The coin appeared to be a Droyne artifact, perhaps a religious artifact and likely part of a set. It does NOT match any known coins of that type in the ship's database, so is likely very old.

   The bio samples we got indicate there are three separate life forms in the pyramid, one snake-like, one bat-like, and one about the size of a cat but so far unseen and unsampled.

    At that point, we had been on Yorbund about 7 hours, and while the repairs and healing were going on we talked a lot.  It looked like we might be trying a completely different approach next time, cutting the bars across one of the two holes (vents, we speculated) Our best guess is that it will take about 8 or so hours to get a clean and smooth removal, maximizing our safety as we crawl through to see what is inside.  At least we knew it would be in the right pyramid, better than we managed to do up to that point.

Continued in Shadows - Conclusion. 

See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde.