Stand by Eccentrica and follow her lead
You wiggle after Eccentrica's sterling example, and this seems to work well, albeit it soon becomes apparent that these frog womenfolk are not terribly well-informed or connected, being representatives of the servant class. They also seem to call you spirits for some reason. You manage to make little progress beyond that before Eccentrica's exceedingly large friend gets back from whatever business he was attending to, delighted to find his lovely charge in good condition and wiggling away.
Of course, once it is relayed to him that this is not just an impromptu dance outbreak in the crafts tent, he stops being merely amused and relieved and becomes very much intrigued, and attempts his own dance moves to try and communicate back, managing to get far enough to ask you to identify yourselves and speak your purpose.
Look deeper into the crystal. Try to determine why, when, and in what ways it reacts to things differently than "normal" ice. Use my science stat for this roll.
Only way you're doing actual honest-to-goodness Science is with three things - equipment (any kind, really, just actual equipment), a place to work and a lack of immediate distractions. The middle of a relatively busy dock offers none of these.
[Mind: 6+1]
What you
can do, however, is try to empathize with it. Ice tends to be possible, if rather bland and watery to try and work with. So a good diagnostic test would be to put it up to your ear and see if you can get it to sing for you.
[Mind: 5+1]
And what you get from this is anything but an ordinary ice signature. Instead it's like empathizing with a knife, a sharp screaming sensation of a manufactured object, shrill and terribly unnatural, the peaks of its sound sharpened to unearthly heights that drill into your head. You can't bear more than a few seconds of listening to it, in fact - the signature just goes on and on, traveling through complexities you have not the faculties or patience to fully appreciate.
Fact is, whatever this thing
is, it is absolutely, completely and definitely not ice.
Insight Gained: Shining Ice (suspicions)If I can, draw the arrow from the ice and pocket it. Regardless of whether I get the arrow or not, walk further into the crevice.
[Body: 2+1]
The arrow seems to have wedged itself deeply enough into the ice that removing it is nearly impossible. Which is a shame - it's a very nicely crafted arrow, with its extraordinarily sharp head and excellent bone shaft, a colorful set of feathers providing the fletching, the entire thing looking like it's been cut with a precision you would not at all expect from primitive folk such as these frogs. You eventually give up and head out.
It takes about a fifteen minute walk before the crevice leads you to a rather large and frankly impractically tall gate, all made of ice and covered in the most elaborate carvings you've seen yet, every inch of it featuring Frog People in one configuration or another, doing things from playing music on alien-looking instruments to deploying what seem to be weapons of mass destruction. Were you some kind of folklorist or archaeologist you'd no doubt find this far more interesting, but instead your many eyes are drawn to the sizeable contingent of warriors manning the gate on platforms clearly fashioned considerably later as the gate has been turned into a proper fortified choke point, complete with improvised parapets and frog archers looking highly suspiciously at you. You see one frog in particular squint at you from a gatehouse resembling a bone cage hanging from a part of the gate's adjacent wall - next to said cage a hole has been very elaborately cut, the ice parted to reveal a very complex-looking mechanism that the Frog People seem to have jammed with a staff made of what you're fairly sure is some kind of space age nanomaterial from the sheen alone.
"Okay, Bert, Sweetie, I'm going to need your help to shimmy this one out. Just relax your hips and follow my lead."
We explore planet for profit. You seem nervous about duties. We help you with duties. You help us with exploration. We won't touch sacred things. You tell us what sacred.
((Assuming I got 5 words with two people))
[Luck: 11]
You begin to come to some kind of agreement. And while they seem to become progressively articulate as they learn to coordinate their movements in a legible fashion, their actual ability to help you is very limited - they are womenfolk, and servants at that. What could they help a walking spirit such as you with? What would they know to be sacred that you do not? And why of all people would you ask them?
You consider this, and just as you are about to give your reply your protector returns, looking like his business took altogether far longer than it should have - he looks visibly relieved that you haven't gotten into any trouble, and the womenfolk immediately start to croak in his direction, which causes the large frog to hop back in surprise. He asks for an explanation, and after a short period of pointing hands and wiggling meaningfully at the floor on both your part and that of the womenfolk he seems to get it. He also seems really doubtful about Bert being here for a second or two, mind you, but the womenfolk seem to have a good grasp on his role in making your communication a little more legible, and this is relayed to him adequately also.
With everyone brought up to speed in this fashion, the third mate wiggles at the ice, and the familiar cycle of momentary confusion followed by dreadful intrigue ensues, and he manages to master enough of the required moves. Identify yourself, aliens. Speak your purpose.
You wisely keep yourself from snickering as a Frog Person nearly twice your size attempts to seductively wiggle. One of the womenfolk does not. The third mate glares at her, and she leaps out of the tent. You hear her feet impact wetly on the ice two or maybe three times before she's well out of earshot.
Try to find a large structure nearby to climb, then do so and take a good look around to orient myself and maybe spot one of our other crewmembers.
The complex seems to lead inwards, being more of a subterranean (subglacial?) complex than a proper vertical settlement. But you don't go for that - instead you clamber up the wall of the docking bay and get up to the actual sheer ice cliff, getting all the way up to the top of the tall glacier, where you see what seems to be the roof of the complex - a large set of shining domes and adjacent bright spires that seem to be slowly revolving and turning, connected by arches and halos of ice with a distinctly kitschy Atomic Age look. Quite a few catwalks rise above the domes, originating from and leading back into the complex beneath after twisting rather whimsically for a suboptimal, but no doubt pleasurable walking experience for any skybound pedestrians. What you notice most of all, however, is that this glacier in question towers above what you guess is the rest of the landscape, as if the complex were raised out of the ice rather than carved into it. Or maybe the rest of the landscape was cut down to make it tower like that, but even for the Ancient Frogs that seems kind of excessive.
[Luck: 2]
Luckily for you, quite a few of the domes and towers have a circular transparent band around them that lets you look into what's beneath - mostly the domes seem to hold icy chambers with a small set of buildings (also made of ice) in them while each of the towers hosts a rather prodigiously sized ice statue of a Frog Person or several in it, without a doubt the largest monuments to an actual person you've ever seen, over a hundred feet tall and almost fifty feet wide.
Four domes in particular are noteworthy in that said chambers seem to have tents arranged around them, clearly the parts that the Frog People inhabit. Where in all this your comrades could possibly be, however, you have absolutely no idea.
He Who Sees Beyond, Shiny Physicist
Stats:
Body: -1
Finesse: -1
Mind: 0
Science: 4
Wounds:
Missing Chunks
Bruised Waist
Equipment:
Wild-Grade Power Generator
Chunk of Shining Ice
Insights:
Shining Ice (suspicions)
Retainers:
Frog Observer (unfriendly)
Doctor Carnifarex, Former Spider Thug
Stats:
Body: 1
Finesse: 1
Mind: 1
Science: -1
Wounds:
None
Inventory:
Metal Helmet (worn on head)
Plasma Machete
Actual Medicine (One dose)
Bertilious "Bert" Calion, Spider Thief of Science
Stats:
Body: -1
Finesse: 1
Mind:1
Science: 1
Wounds:
None
Equipment:
Plasma Machete (confiscated)
Metal helmet
x2 single shot Thermonuclear pistol
x3 smoke bombs
x2 bargain medicine
Insights:
Ice Communication (rudimentary)
Eccentrica Gallumbits, Worm Stripper
Stats:
Body: 1
Finesse: 2
Mind: 0
Science: -1
Wounds:
None
Equipment:
Incredibly Seductive Spangly Tearaway Outfit
39 Dollars in Singles stuffed in various places of the outfit
Insights:
Ice Communication (rudimentary)
Waffels, Spider Janitor
Stats:
Body: 0
Finesse: 1
Mind: -1
Science: 1
Wounds:
None
Equipment:
Metal helmet
Fish mask
5 bargain meds
22 smoke bombs
Single shot thermonuclear pistol
tear gas grenade
Toolbox (wrench, hammer, Philips and flathead screwdriver, small crowbar, lots of duct tape, wd-40.)
Golden Long-Spined Urchin
Cyan Blunt-Spined Urchin
Cute Sea Urchin Body Paint
Insights:
Basic Frog Phrases (funny, dangerous)
I suspect ATHATH not updating his sheet properly is going to continue to deeply offend me, so I'm just going to circumvent a lot of the passive aggression I was originally planning and do them myself from now on. Look for them at the bottom of the turn posts.
Also gonna try to step up the pace a little. The game's flagging and that's a very bad sign.
Author
Topic: The Pillared Garden: A Miracle of Rare Device (Read 26000 times)