WttSS session 55: 'A Home in the Trees'

General Summary

We ran a shorter session here through everyone, including the GM, being a little under the weather. We got some things usefully tidied up however, before leaving it at the next encounter site for next session.  

Legion inbound

  Caliban woke the party in the early Ghodar morning as the Legion beachhead began. Keeping themselves concealed, the party interfered with it a little but not in any way that would stop it happening, just slowing it down.

• 11 antique drones came through the portal - 2 stayed at the portal as relays to send information back through the portal whilst the others flew out to investigate the two kharatuk locations and the Portal Builder sphere, palace and monolith
• Zarzur overrode the signal of one of the portal drones - hacking not being possible, as the drones have no computers, just responding to pre-arranged signals
• She commanded it to fly towards its fellow and activate the onboard WWII-like grenades (designed to be dropped as a bomber would), destroying both drones - given the distance to the other areas of the valley, the other 9 drones had a long way to fly to adjust their network of communications compensate
• The Legion sent another device through the portal, presumably ballistically, and the portals caught it and set it down as they did the Caliban Crow
• It was a silver object shaped like an egg stretched out almost to a surfboard shape
• Scanning from orbit - that should be impossible - commenced shortly after the device appeared and the party surmised that that the device allows the Harir to scan the valley
• After the party finished the rest of their business and moved off to the waterfall, Youtab class assault ships started to come through the portal releasing Legionaries armed with primitive weapons such as crossbows, bolas and Saladin grape canons

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Locking down the ship

  The party took their time to safely and completely lockdown the Caliban Crow. Khalil set the anti-scanning fields up to prevent the ship being found. At the same time, the rest of the party investigated an intrusion revealed by Caliban. He had been prevented from revealing it before but claimed that under recent developments he could now use his safety protocols to reveal a location for the party to investigate. He made sure to highlight the matter to Kerman, Murad and Masruq - Khalil being busy and Caliban not wanting to let Zarzur overhear.

• 5 successes for Khalil: we'll agree on both the anti-life scanning and the Xingur anti-EM scanning to be used in conjunction, with a tight projection placed around the ship such that the canopy above still registers if and when the Legion scan the area
• The ship will still be visible to plain sight, as the PCs don't have draconite chameleon tech, but the tree canopy covers that too
• Caliban revealed that the intrusion was relevant to Murad, as it contained information about him
• The party found an area of Caliban's databanks physically disconnected to his systems and pulled it out safely for inspection
• It contained scans of Murad's brain activity - pertinent to his usage of kharatuk technology
• Caliban confirmed that the data bank had been secured for this purpose since the episode at the Crossroads
• The timeframes of the scanning confirmed the most likely culprit was Zarzur's headpiece

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Legionaries released

  The party decided to take the marmosets with them as they headed to the waterfall. The urgency to get there was increased by the kharatuk monitoring AI confirming that it really couldn’t do much about the Legion beachhead, as the waterfall controls the Portal-Builder valley experiment. Only the captured Legionaries remained as a problem if they were left onboard the Caliban Crow and in a roundabout way the party safely released them.

• Heading to the cargo hold, where the party had left the 3 Legionaries tied up they discovered 10 djanna feeding off the Legionary that had been driven mad by Khalil's Orb of Ghodar attack - he was easily the person onboard with the strongest negative emotions
• With Zarzur holding the Messenger's calm, she could easily have used it to burn up the djanna as Kerman had done but chose to try and treat the Legionary medically, surrendering the Icon calm in the hope of not deteriorating further the party's already bad relations with the djinn of the valley
• Unfortunately the djanna attacked her for trying to take away their food source - and for the damage the PCs had done to their world previously
• As they were about to overwhelm her psyche (she failed her resistance roll to their Lure) she called on the Messenger (for a standard reroll) who answered, bringing His calm and consuming the djanna in holy fire
• This display convinced the insane Legionary that Zarzur was not a demon like Masruq but rather the Lady of Tears
• As no rational communication had been working with the Legionary, Zarzur fed into his delusion and spoke as if she were the Lady: she apologised that she could not accede to the man's request to take him with her and instead tasked him with safely watching over his comrades until the Legion could pick them all up
• Accepting his task, he allowed Zarzur to sedate him
• They the party then snuck the unconscious Legionaries out of the forest and onto the ramp leading up to the ledge and Legion beachhead, hoping that they would safely wake and get rescued before trouble found them
• Fearing she had committed sacrilege by pretending to be the Lady, Zarzur gave the Icon an apology - Kerman suggested though, that she had only done the work of a preacher helping to safeguard her flock
• The party then took two grav-bikes to the waterfall, overloading one of them but using Kerman's pilot skill to safely get them there anyway
• As he left, Murad responded to a request from the kharatuk AI at monitoring: keep up constant reporting and if and when the Legion make a move on the monitoring station Murad would make a call on what to do

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