time for some history. Maybe I should have written everything, but then what would I write during other turns? feel free to use the golem as your walking history book anytime you feel the need to know more about why you are in that building, why you were killed and resurrected and so on.
"1... 2... 3... 4... AAAAAAAARGH."
*Runs Through the facility screaming and shouting for help, encounters golem, and gets burned.*
|have any of you ever been on fire? Probably not, but it is easy to imagine what it is like. Great pain, hot. But this kind of fire is different, no pain can be felt, you still keep healthy muscles and bones, you can run, speak and the fire will do nothing to your body. But the feeling you have inside you is something that can’t be imagined by those who never felt it; to use more familiar words, it is like if you had a dot, a small dot more black than pure darkness, inside your chest. Of course you can’t see it, so “black” isn’t the correct word, but there is nothing better in our limited dictionary to describe it. You can feel it there, eating little bits of your life, of your soul, growing continuously. And when the darkness finally grow to take your whole body, you will be dead, forever, your soul will never be able to rest in the heavens, with the Gods.
Now, you might think that the best thing to do would be calming down and trying to find a way to fix the problem, but when you feel such a new, unexplainable and eventually deadly force inside you, there isn’t much else you can do other than panic. Screaming in fear, RAM could be seen running in the corridor and hitting the walls, falling on the floor in the vat room sweating and exhausted.
( I blame C.S. Lewis for me speaking to the readers instead of the usual form)
Well, I'll lead the golem to the nearest team mate and hope he isn't a) doing something stupid b) on fire or c) both.
|While you still haven’t understood well what happened, is happening and/or will happen, you think it is your duty to tell the golem about your other team mates. Whoever he is, he seems to be friendly (keeping in mind that friendly, for a golem, is quite different from polite when they awaken from a long sleep. Even worse if the sleep was years long, and he had to get awake because of people poking his bed) and he could be very useful for your team, because he seems to remember more about everything than you do ; also, he is a rocky giant and you always need these in a savage world like this one.
But when you want to ask the golem to follow you to other team mates, Jetsquirrel ask a question to the golem
Ask the being if he knows anything about the monolith
| “ Mr. golem, what do you know about the monolith we found in the other room?”
“
That monolith, little people, is the source of all modern technology, from electricity to fusion engines. It is a so amazing wonder of technology that we all thought they were magic creatures before we found that one. Don’t you remember anything about the monoliths?”
“no, I am sorry “
“
Yes, I understand. Memory damage was big. This means that either all the tests were wrong, or power wasn’t enough to restore you fully. I’ll go for the second. My memory is also damaged, for different reasons I can’t remember well, but I still remember the history lessons when I was a young golem. ”
“
The monoliths have always inhabited the central hills of our continent, the least understood of all the races of this planet. They were black, , they all looked the same and they couldn’t speak, unlike the other sentient beings. But they could fly and manipulate the environment and the people without using hands, words or wings. There was no doubt about their sentience but there was also no doubt that whatever they were, they were different and more powerful. Few people ever tried to live among them and the central regions were usually avoided, until they disappeared. That was one of the most interesting, and worst, periods in our history.
in the thirteenth century from the coming of gods, standard calendar, your race and mine fought a big war against the people of the east, the Xenopross, a deceitful race experienced in the ways of treason against other races, they thought they were the rightful owners of the world, and all other races were inferior. This is what history tells at least; since we won the war and they can’t defend themselves now it might not be totally true. During this war thousands, hundreds of thousands people died on both sides, painting red, the legends says, every plain between your land and their until the last battle, in which all of them, all the males who could lift a weapon, fought and were defeated; before the end of the battle the survivors killed themselves to avoid the shame of losing a fight against inferior races. They used their fire magic with unparalleled power, burning a whole forest and creating a perpetual burning fire, the source of which still can’t be understood. The death of the Xenopross army doomed the whole race to extinction, the last of them dying less than a century later. That was called the ‘Year of Endren’s tears’, for the heavy rains following the last battle which cleaned the ground from the blood of the mortals.
The following year, for the first time since the awakening of our race as sentient beings, in the deep caves of the central mountain we couldn’t find Urist the dwarf, the God which taught us all our magic and the protector of all the golems. Tales says that he was grumpy , but deep inside benevolent. The golems needing his help waited a day, then another hoping that he would come back, but from your race rumors arrived that your Gods didn’t answer prayers and were no more seen in the temples, their statues immobile and mute. Later, we discovered that at the same time the same thing happened in all the lands, the God left this world. Today some people say that the Gods are just a legend, or poorly understood natural events but the golems can live for a long, long time and there are people alive whose builders ( fathers you would say, fleshy beings) lived in the period when Gods walked on the land among mortals. And they were really Gods.
Not much time after we realized that the Gods left us, another event happened : the monoliths, mostly ignored by the other races till then, increased in number greatly, becoming millions maybe; then they flew high in the sky, above all the continent, casting a dark shadow above all the land. People thought that was the doomsday, but after some time, day or weeks, nobody can tell, they flew away into space. Many think that they followed the Gods in their travel. And we thought it was the end of an age of the world, that monoliths and Gods were to be never seen again. About the Gods , till now, we were right. Monoliths however had still a last surprise, a gift for us.
More than 200 years ago, in the 17th century an explorer , member of a project to create a map of the continent, found a black rock in a small desert in the central hills. Black, with perfectly sharp angles and completely unnatural. He started digging out the rock, discovering that it was big, rectangular, and identical to things he studied on the books : the last monolith on this planet. The same you saw in that room. But the biggest surprise for him wasn’t this discovery, enough by itself to get his name on history books : the monolith had an hole in it, revealing the interiors of the ancient being… a machine! For centuries people thought that monoliths were some kind of powerful magical entity, and then we saw they were machines, incredibly complex machines.
As soon as he finished his mapping duty he organized an expedition to take the monolith back to the Academy, where it could be studied. A closed monolith would have been exceptional, but open it was unique. The hard shell of these machines can’t be broken by any known mean, not even the most powerful magic, laser or both combined. It was the beginning of modern age. At the time we were primitive, we still used sails and were just beginning to use gunpowder, but the monolith was a great source of new ideas and materials, some people say that it even helped the scientists in their work; it was like a textbook and many think that it was not left here for an accident, but rather as a way to allow us to grow more quickly. Soon, we had electricity, light bulbs , combustion engines; lasers, computers; nuclear fission and fusion. It took 2 centuries to reach the technological level we have now, but it surely is much less than we could have ever achieved without that help and we only understand a small part of it at the present time.
The monolith stayed at the Academy until recently when during the war government decided to keep it in a safer place, hoping to find ways to build a weapon powerful enough to save us all. That is when the monolith was moved to this bunker, in this town. Unluckily, we couldn’t find that new weapon but your specie was developing a new device of its own technology. But the time wasn’t enough and it had to be used before it was ready. And that is why we are here. This fact suggests that the device actually worked and They are still afraid of this place.
I am still a bit confused by some details, but I think that is all I can say about the monolith. Feel free to ask more if you need, I still remember most things.”
look for more digging equipment
|You are looking for some digging equipment in the storage room but while doing so you hit a crate with a shoulder, causing the whole pile to fall on you!
| your instinct makes you raise you steel hand to protect the head from the heavy weight falling on you, but the impact is too much for you and you fall on the ground heavily. The steel hand is fine, but the arm isn’t, the elbow is sprained and it hurts. Furthermore, you are blocked by a small mountain of crates and can’t move. Air is not a problem, but you fear a crate could move and fall directly on you, which could be deadly.
First: I use the residual Caffeine in my system to wake up. Again.
Second: With my mind I will find the damage in my ankles and knees, and reknit the bones together, healing them.
| Despite your best efforts, you can’t force yourself to think lucidly, your caffeine being suppressed by the sleep toxins. You look at the ceiling however, and see some dancing elves, singing.
“hello, do you want to be my friends?” The elves start dancing on your body, then move to your face , still singing. They are dancing in a circle, on your eyes, nose and mouth.
“ stop, please”. They start dancing faster and faster, till your skin is erased.
“stop, it hurts!”. They finally stop dancing, they enter in the hole in your skin and start burrowing in your muscles, eating them.
“ no, no, stop!”. Touching your face you don’t see any hole, your skin intact.
I will attempt to upgrade the “fun” device!
| you try again to understand what it does and try to find ways to improve it. With a bit of effort, you can find some lenses, power sources and lasers that could be improved, but you are missing the correct materials. The Fun device shoots some sparkles. Maybe it liked what you wanted to do?
Background roll :4 Flintus sees the fourth door in the control room, the only one you haven’t opened yet.
STATUS
Location: Vat room, unknown building
Equipment: XClothesX , flashlight(5/20, off), bandage kit (19/20), pain killer(gel, 18/20)
Health: unharmed
Abilities:thermal magic
Special Status:spiritual fire (2/6)
Location: Sphere room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes ,flashlight(0/20),needlegun,diary
Health:
Abilities: .
Special Status: stone arms
Location: storage room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes, crowbar, flashlight(1/20)
Health: unknown hand health, sprained elbow(4/6)
Abilities: steel hand fighting .
Special Status:hulk hand
Location: Sphere room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes ,2 fuel tanks
Health: Unharmed
Abilities: none
Special Status:suicide bomber
Location: Generator room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes , flashlight (0/20), flashlight (2/20), cup, rough steel mabàli harpoon
Health: sprained knees and ankles (3/6)
Abilities: .
Special Status: Drowsy, caffeine(3/20), unconscious
Location: Control room, unknown building
Equipment: Clothes, funnel, flashlight(2/20),string, Odd device(Fun)
Health: Broken nose
Abilities: .
Special Status:cheater
NPCs
Location: Kashyyk’s mind
Equipment: Clothes, 3 coffee cups
Health: Unharmed
Abilities: none
Special Status:caffeine powered, asleep
LOCATIONS
The building in which you started
Vat room : the room you started in. it has several vats and machinery connected to them. Only your ones are empty, the other have dead and rotten corpses in them. On the ground there are some flashlights, -1 to moving until removed.
Corridor : a corridor leading from a door in the Vat room toward the exit, it has 4 doors on the sides, one of which open
exit stairs: some stairs at the end of the corridor which go upward to the exit. At the end of them there is a sturdy steel door, few centimeters open but blocked. There is some light coming from the door
Storage room: a largish room with several crates in it. It looks like it was meant to hold more than that
Lounge: it is some kind of a lounge, that was probably also used as dining room. It has some tables, chairs, a TV, some computers in the opposite wall, probably for personal use, and a coffee selling machine in a corner.
Generator room: a big room with a ceiling higher than that of the other rooms you have seen till now. There are cables everywhere on the floor, there are shelves, tools, the floor is dirty but the first thing you see is the machine that fills the room from the center to the back. It is made of turbines and graphite chambers, it is a nuclear power plant, very small actually. there is a smaller generator in the room, that should be able to partially power the building. there are 4 fuel tanks on the floor. Some wires are exposed and the room is covered by fuel.
bedroom: There are 6 beds on each side of the room, for a total of 24 beds, everything in perfect order: blankets, pillows… for whatever reason they abandoned this place, it was planned. Or somebody wanted to cancel any proof or fight… there is no way to know. The air is moist, there is some water on the floor. The people who lived there probably had a way to humidify the air underground, and during the years a pipe must have broken, releasing some water; the piping must be broken in some other places since it didn’t flood the place: probably the pumps stopped working, or the water tanks evaporated. Why would people live here? This place must have been either very secret or very important to force workers to live in their workplace, possibly using work shifts to keep people working all the day and night, or were they prisoners? You can only guess what this place was, but maybe people left something behind them that could help you to understand. there is a diary on a bed, damaged by the (years?) and moist air
Control room: A big room with computers on all the sides, maps on the walls, blueprints, desks, notes and chairs ,paper bins that were never emptied, even some chewing gum on the floor(maybe RAM would like it?) a control room of some kind. There are 4 doors, including the one you entered from.
On a wall, the map of the building
Monolith dissection: At the center there is a … thing, a black, extremely flat, non-reflective cuboid whose dimensions are in the precise ratio 1:4:9. On its side it has a surprisingly neat and clean hole, much better than anything you could do with standard methods on standard materials. Inside, there is a great mass of electronic devices, the functions of most of them unknown not only by even the brightest minds on this world. It is put on some kind of huge operatory table, with wires connecting both inside and outside the black monolith. There are many computers on the wall, but all powered down, of course. Above the hole in the monolith, magnifying lenses, robotic arms with various tools and several other measuring instruments can be seen, used in the past to examine the monolith’s interiors, in an attempt to reduce danger of humans damaging something, despite it having shown to be nearly indestructible when needed.
sphere room You See, at the center of this room, a big steel sphere, raised by 4 steel pillars. There is a line in the middle, as if it was 2 hemispheres just pushed together. There is strange machinery on the sides, computer near the walls and wires everywhere. The computers are active.
The sphere was opened in turn 19, leaving many broken wires and bending the metal. Inside of it, a golem was found
the special roll in jetsquirrel action means that for that action, overshots and epic fails are impossible and that it is easier to succeed. 1 and 2 fail, 3 is partial, 4,5,6 are good.
Sorry but speaking would be a free action like switching on and off the flashlights, if it wasn't for the time involved in writing the answers to questions or discussions.
Poll
1 (20%)
Author
Topic: Rebirth RTD Chapter 2- turn 3: Ready to go (Read 53557 times)