Shadows - Conclusion
The adventurers finally find the pyramid complex's control room, disable the beam weapon and take off before their ship dissolves around them in the planet's corrosive atmosphere.
This story is based on Carl's and Kay's notes from our Sunday October 14, 2012 session. Carl took the photo of the board. 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
About 1700 Imperial Standard Time, just after local sunset, about 7 hours after being shot down.
While the VACC suit repairs was going on, Fig and Kipenzi (after she got fixed up by Medicus) spent some time analyzing the camera footage and came to the realization that (and we really should have noticed this while we were inside) there is a room on the lower level that definitely needed to be investigated as soon as practical. Down the hole where the pendulum hangs we detected flickering lights on one side, and we hoped it would be a control room of some kind.
A few hours of back and forth discussion led us to a plan:
Take some nuts, bolts, whatever and toss them into the rooms before walking in. Manufacture our best guess at a tool that would allow us to raise and lower the doorways, so we can lock things inside or outside as needed.
Take the hand held X-Ray scanner to look for spaces behind the walls. To facilitate this the first step was to check the known hidden door near the bottom of the stairs to the ledge with the statues so Kipenzi would recognize a similar reading if we found one. Use the X-Ray scanner to examine the area in the pit, and anywhere we can get to on the smaller pyramid, and if we can find a door open it and go in. If no door were found, check out the two rooms at the end of the passage on the upper floor (mitigated by the presence of the local fauna if need be) and see if there is a way to get to the smaller pyramid directly.Go down to the lower level and investigate the flickering light room.Our fallback plan was to cut off a set of the bars from the holes in the pit and crawl inside to examine whatever we found. Kipenzi thinks the pit and grates may be part of a coolant system, where the coolant gas goes into the pit when the gun isn’t fired and is taken into the pyramid to cool it off when the gun is fired.
The true goal was, as it had been since our 'landing', to disable the gun and let us fly away. Anything more than that would have been icing on the cake. For a change, the reality matched up pretty well with the plan.
Our away team was Fig, Leon and Kipenzi. Medicus and Sam watched the incoming video from the suit cameras from the bridge of the Skylark.
As planned, Fig and Leon went inside the door and closed it, allowing Kipenzi to get a good look at what a hollow wall readout was. Coming back out, we all went to the pit area for a full scale look at the structure from the outside. While we did not find any doorway, Kipenzi did detect a corridor running from the larger pyramid to the smaller, starting about at the end of the passageway where the pendulum shaft is located.
Inside, we were greeted by several of the flying creatures, and were forced to shoot them. Both Leon and Kipenzi took hits from the claws, but the VACC suits were not breached and no one was injured. Aside from most of the flying creatures, one ceiling light was the only casualty in the engagement, but we did a full suit integrity check on all of us to be sure.
About that time we got a call from Sam, on the bridge of the Skylark. A red light had come on on one of the control panels, indicating that the rear cargo door closing mechanism was failing. Sam checked the room and found that some of the local atmosphere had leaked in from the airlock and was causing corrosion to the equipment. He put a positive pressure on areas that he could, to try and prevent any more incursions.
The tool we had crafted earlier did in fact allow us to open and close the doors within the pyramid. It was just a simple bar the right size to fit in the holes at the bottom of the doors, but did what we needed.
Going down the passageway, Kipenzi found indications of a doorway midway between the two rooms on the end, and we then noticed there was a door actuation slot near the floor that we missed earlier. Several figurative head smacks ensued, as we wondered if we had needed to go downstairs at all...
Opening the door a little and looking in, we saw four more of the flyers. That would have been a BIG surprise if we had just pushed the door fully open. They flew off after we carefully opened the door. Being careful, no one backed up and fell down the shaft with the pendulum cable.
Our communications were getting flaky, so we moved the communications relay to the pendulum shaft area, and were able to continue talking to the Skylark.
The corridor that we found sloped down toward the smaller pyramid and we proceeded downward, seeing some lights and boxes with inscriptions on them. As always, we took full video footage of everything for later analysis and documentation.
At the end of this passage we found a large room with three small dome-shaped 'things' and what appeared to be a control panel. Off this room was a large room with a large tank in it down which mist flowed, condensing toward the bottom. The tank may have contained coolant liquid or may have been part of the power plant. A walkway around it was the only other thing. We believed that was an integral part of the cooling mechanism for the gun, but not the gun control itself.
Off to another side of the room was a door, opening onto a corridor that ended at one of the grates we had found in the pit, and a 1 meter crawlspace that led to the other. At least we knew we had been on the right track for the fallback access to this area.
However, in spite of considerable engineering and mechanical knowledge, we could not confidently conclude what to do to shut down the power from here, so we decided to investigate the lower level and the flickering lights. As we walked back toward our ropes, the static camera on the bottom level failed. We could still see the light from it by looking down the shaft of the pendulum, but no signal came through.
As we went by the room that had soil/fungus in it, we got some samples for analysis. Before we got to the shaft for descent, our communications relay failed. Kipenzi had teflon coated as much of our equipment as she could, but the Yorbund atmosphere was just too invasive.
With the failure of the lower camera, we repositioned the one that had watched our backs, hanging it down the pendulum shaft. Rotating it around confirmed that, to our best guess, there was in fact a control room on the lower floor.
On the bottom, though tossing the nuts and bolts into rooms so far had no result, the doorway which had zapped Kipenzi did spark off when one was tossed through. Memo to selves: this is a GOOD thing to do in the future.
Opposite the zapper, the room was empty. Down the hallway on the right was dark, and our suit lights showed rubble from a collapsed ceiling - no doubt seismic activity took its toll here long since. The lights revealed something metallic, and we recovered a partial helmet and some suit pieces. Considering the corrosive atmosphere, Kipenzi postulated it may have been a person who actually fired on us earlier. The suit remains look like Droyne modern manufacture. Closing doors behind us we went on to the control room area. Across from it was another dark room, whose lights appeared to have been shot out, and in that room one of our atmosphere detectors indicated green, for a breathable atmosphere. No fools we (ok, maybe sometimes) we ignored that and planned on refurbishing or replacing the atmosphere scanner too. The wall of this room was covered with pie shaped panels, like half an orange with one hundred segments. At the bottom of each segment were three buttons in a row from top to bottom. X-ray and IR revealed nothing.
X-raying the entire wall space at the pendulum juncture was similarly unrevealing. The room on the end had a raised platform rather than a floor, and one small snake-like creature slithered away when we entered.
The flickering light room was also x-rayed and IR and bio-scanned but held only panels and vertical gauges. These could be separated into three groups of 33, and one other. The first group were fluctuating up and down on the readouts, the second 33 pretty much constant (with 39, 53 and 56 at 0), and the last group were all very low except for 99, it being very high. The last one, number 100, was steady at a low level.
Showing his theoretical and analytic knowledge, Leon started pressing buttons and some trial and error led us to conclude that pressing Top + Middle turned something ON, with pressing Bottom + Middle turning it off. A little experimentation confirmed our suspicion that the middle group was associated with lighting within the pyramids.
As we experimented with these, more red lights were coming on on the bridge of the Skylark. This time indicating a laser failure, so rather that do any further analysis we started at 100 and shut them all down in order. Along the way everything in the pyramid went black, and we were left with suit lights alone.
At that point we knew we either had our problem solved or it was not going to be, so we climbed up, gathered all our gear except the ropes, and got back on board, interrupted only by another quake.
Medicus took off carefully, and no further shots came from the pyramid. We had been concerned that there would be a capacitor bank good for one last shot, but either that was not so or the entire gun was disabled by our button-pushing.
We went back to the planetary base and went through decontamination. There were comments from the locals concerning the condition of our ship, "It looks like you spent some time in the outback".
We learned that it would take about a week to make the ship space-worthy before we jumped out for more complete repairs at Kinorb, the next system over.
As for the legalities of our discovery, more research told us that the place was ours so long as we controlled it, and we began considering how best to recover some of our funds from this, since it was surely NOT an Ancient Site and we came out pretty much empty handed but for the information on the fauna, an old coin, and a few organic samples.
The most likely money-maker we sampled was the material itself. We had secured some pieces of the building on our first foray, but probably should have gotten some from the inside too. Whatever it is made from it stood up to Yorbund for thousands of years, and the poor Skylark barely held intact for a few hours. Some materials manufacturing company should really appreciate that and pay for the knowledge Kipenzi: "Also we can sell to universities what we learned of a new unknown race similar to the Droyne with high tech, our level or above."
The story continues in: The Journey from Yorbund to Jenghe.
See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde.
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