Session 15: Zero Esscape Part 2: Penalties

General Summary

Circe's Choice

-We go back to Circe drawing cards from her penalty game. She draws one that would age her but instead chooses the more difficult route and ends up having two cards, making her lose her resistance to charms as well as decreasing her charisma and charisma saves

Entrance

-The large door opens. Beyond is a long staircase going down. It opens into a hallway that turns right and left from there. There are 3 doors with cells.
-One of the cell doors is open. The others are locked but we can see through the bars and they are the same. Inside this cell, there is a bet, desk, etc.
-Del finds a date scratched under the desk 14208/09/21 (5 weeks post-capture). Sees someone has scratched it with nails. Ezre looks at everyone's hands. Sieg's look rough, Liam's look rougher. Everyone else's hands look normal
-Within the three cells, there totals six beds. Del suggests that they were maybe in those cells and maybe Liam scratched the date

Infirmary

-We go into a different door than the cells. It is an infirmary
-Ezre finds a finger in the waste bin
-Ezre uses her barcode to open a scanner door attached the infirmary. It leads into a storeroom
-Liam finds some unlabeled potions and a satchel
-Circe finds some files, a periodic table of elements, and a notebook. The files are medical ones and there is one on Liam. It has basic info but also the text: "Wins: 97. Losses: 12. Reconstructions: 4". There are parts of the files in Celestial, which Del is able to read. They talk about specific body parts being useful or good matches for other bodies. The part in Celestial on Liams says that he is more physically developed than most of the other subjects and does not need additional optimization/augmentation, just training his mind
-The other files also list crimes that the subjects have done, ranging from petty theft to murder, but Liam's does not list a crime
-Circe also finds a list with a bunch of names on it. Sieg's name is there near the bottom, but Liam's is closer to the middle
-The notebook is written in Celestial and is about how to put together body parts to create new creatures
-Liam suggests they split into two groups and each group searching a remaining room

The Pantry

-Cuculus, Del, and Circe go into a door that leads to a pantry. Some of the food is rotting but most is preserved. There are lots of canned fish
-Del casts Speak with Dead on a canned fish and she remembers something

Del's memory

-Del remembers her first day on Mendor. She washes up on the beach, eats some fruits and berries, and follows arrangements of bones to an old dusty shack.
-In there, there are books in a language that Del cannot read but when she focuses very hard, she can understand. She stays up late trying to read but gets VERY sick.
-She crawls outside for fresh air and her vision starts fading. She sees the blurry outlines of animal skeletons approaching her as well as a large hooded glowing woman (Susan) before she passes out. She wakes up later having been revived by the woman. She tells Del that she has a long way to grow but that the dead animals will help her

The Pantry

-Back in the present, Del asks the fish questions, but it doesn't know much

The Showers

-In the showers, Liam tells Sieg and Ezre that he was actually on a mission investigating Operation Breach
-Ezre asks a leading question and is forced to play a Penalty Game (in her mind; the others don't know this)
-Liam basically says he wants to ally with Ezre and Sieg and that he doesn't trust the others
-Seig says he was part of the team who sealed Alquam but they were betrayed. He seems uneasy and is somewhat hostile towards Ezre
-Liam also tells them about his party (Orcs and Snow Elves) and about the bullets. Ezre knows about the bullets
-Liam stresses that he doesn't really like Cuculus and Ezre says she doesn't like Circe
-They then search the room. It's a large shower room with nothing of interest, just a dead dermestid beetle

Cells

-The group rejoins and go to the end of the hall. It turns left again and there is a long hall of cells like the three earlier
-As Del looks in the cells, Liam gets a weird feeling as she approaches one, as if something is there that he doesn't want her to discover
-He searches the room and finds his thieve's tools hidden in the toilet
-They look through all the cells because now they can unlock them but find little of interest

The Man in the Hall

-They continue to the end of the hall which turns left again. Ezre looks around the corner and sees a man shambling down the hall.
-She starts casting a spell but it hears her and rushes to attack
-We fight. The monster is a weird stitched together man whose limbs enhance when hit, but then explode into beetles when he attacks. The beetles scatter after
-We win with Circe incinerating it, leaving behind only ashes and melted beetle shells
-Liam confronts Del. He wants his sword back. Del still says no but Liam just takes the sword back. When he touches it, he gets a memory

Liam's Memory

-Liam is in the war, back at level 1. He is on a mission to retrieve an important document left in a safehouse
-He is on this mission with a goblin names Nils. She is an alchemist.
-They get the documents in the basement of the building but are surrounded by Snelves
-Nils says that they need to run and shows off her new potions
-Liam peaks outside the door and sees Snelves casting spells
-BOOM. The house detonates
-Liam is okay but Nils is out. One of the potions is still there
-Liam drinks the potion, takes the documents and runs
-He dodges through Snelves, barely making it away alive
-He has this weird rush of power, an understanding that he could take this whole army apart, but he resists
-He returns to his army. He is congratulated for his effort (and this does go a long way in the war) but no one knows who Nils is. Even Nils' supposed aunt who makes Liam's equipment has no idea what Liam is talking about. According to them all, she doesn't exist

The Lounge

-We find two doors with scanners (one larger) at the very end of the hallway
-There is also a locked door back near the cells that leads to a bloodied and torn up lounge
-Sieg uses his barcode to open a door in the lounge and is forced to play a Penalty Game. The barcodes can only be used for free once
-Inside the room is an armoury with mundane weapons and two sets of armor (Sieg and Ezre take them)
-We arm up and take a short rest but Cuculus wanders off
-Liam later sees Cuculus through a broken window in the lounge. She is on a platform in a large room (sealed by the smaller of the two scanner doors from before) and it is descending
-Liam tells the others but they don't act quickly enough. Everyone decides to finish the rest and at the end, they hear six sets of footsteps outside
-Everyone hides except for Ezre who gets ready to battle
-Cuculus opens the door, accompanied by five delightful skeleton companions
-Cuculus has Liam's other sword. She says that the platforms descend into a fight pit with dozens of bodies below. She says she thinks Liam killed them
-They try to find Liam but he is gone

The Search

-Everyone looks for Liam but they can't find him. But the scanner door Cuculus opened to get to the room with the platforms is now closed. They think Liam is behind it
-Cuculus reveals that she opened the door using the hand cut off from the Earth Genasi Del had found murdered last session, but that once she used the barcode on it, it crumbled to dust. Since the door is now closed and locked, they understand that in order to open it again, they will need to use another barcode. So far only Del and Circe haven't used theirs
-Ezre, Sieg, Circe, and two skeletons go back to the lounge to try to fit through the small window so they can get to the platforms and see if Liam is there. They remember that Cuculus said that she was only able to go out of the fight pit after she defeated someone who was still partially alive there, so they infer that if Liam was there, whomever went down would have to pvp him. So they decide against this and go back
-While they are gone, Cuculus and Del stand watch between the two scanner doors in case Liam comes back
-Cuculus asks Del how she understood the Celestial in the files and books and Del says that she just knows
-Cuculus reveals that the handwriting from the files was hers
-Cuculus asks Del if she can trust her to keep this a secret, but when Del says yes, Cuculus can tell that she's lying
-Cuculus casts Modify Memory on Del so that she does not remember the conversation
-The others return and the 10 of them (Ezre, Del, Sieg, Circe, Cuculus, and the five skeletons) decide to go through the big scanner door. Del draws the short finger so uses her barcode and they make their way through

The Escape

-When Cuculus returned with Liam's sword, Liam was hiding in the lounge and overheard Cuculus' accusation. Knowing he was already under suspicion and not wanting to risk getting stuck, Liam ran
-He went through the window to the platform room and out the door Cuculus had opened, closing it behind him and discovering that it locked
-He then risked a Penalty Game when he scanned his barcode on the big door but was instead granted the choice to receive two boons and give out three penalties, just like Ezre had. He chooses the latter and gives all three penalties to Cuculus, decreasing her Wisdom by 3, Charisma by 1, and cursing her
-Liam closes the door behind him and finds himself in a long room with a menacing black door at the end with the words "LIFE DRAIN" on it. There is a moment of "Oh fuck" before the doors swing open. He hears Dr. Ghesh's voice in his head saying that this is more interesting
-Liam finds a hallway that leads to a big white door but also what appears to be an alchemy lab
-He does a quick scan through the lab and finds the corpse of a Tabaxi which he recognizes as Yurell Rey. She is propped up against the wall but most of her upper half is gone, as if it was eaten away or disintegrated. Dozens of small black beetles crawl in and out of her carcass. In one hand there is an opened vial with a tiny bit of thick black liquid in the bottom. Some of that liquid is crusted onto what's left of her jaw. In her other hand is a piece of paper
-The paper has a long list of numbers but most are crossed out, leaving three lines of numbers

• Line 1: 73, 19, 53, 7, 31, 6, 1, 11 (the 11 has editors notes indicating that the order should be flipped), 58
• Line 2: 9, 53, 60, 42, 53
• Line 3: 9, 53, 54, 42, 53

-Liam takes the paper
-He wraps Yurell's body up in some labcoats, pays his respect, then goes through the doors

The Chase

-About 20 minutes behind Liam, the rest of the party opens the big scanner door and enter the room with the "LIFE DRAIN" doors, but for them, they are closed
-Dr. Ghesh explains in their head that in order to get through this door, they are going to have to satisfy it by giving it enough of their vitality. The twists are that they do not know how much of it it needs, and that they will choose anonymously for each other



Session ends

Report Date

19 Jun 2019