Rbz1: Cerberus in the Clouds
General Summary
The Rubezahl arrived at the cloud city colony of Cerberus. Floating above the golden clouds of hydrogen and helium, Cerberus so named for the cluster of enigmatic alien structures that drifted effortlessly through the gas giant's upper atmosphere. Each looked like piece of crystalline metal from a distance, connected by a web of bridges, each large enough to drive a train through. Despite the immensity of the construction, it was sparsely inhabited.
The crew were primarily explorers, but here they were invited at the behest of one of their contacts. Her name was Wynne and the crew knew her to be something of an outcast that had been established in the budding secretive colony. Her missive had been cryptic -- something about a disturbing discovery. It was enough to entice the crew.
After a brief meeting, the crew set off to the far side of the station. The alien architecture was dizzying. The original inhabitants were immensely tall but possibly disproportionately thin; as a result, rooms were often taller than they were wide, lending them both a sense of claustrophobia and vertigo simultaneously. The room Wynne directed them too was no exception. She was using it as a meditation chamber of sorts, and a dazzling view of the clouds through a transparent force field made it easy to imagine why. As the group searched through the room, we found something vastly unusual. Sprouting from one of the corners was some kind of growth. "Filamentous," Benesh von Lawick, the resident explorer, called it. More disturbingly, the growth seems to be sprouting right out of the alien alloy of the station.
As the crew try to investigate the fungus, the room itself seemed to react. The tall, thin doorway folded itself close like an origami pattern, and the force field at the end of the room flickered and began to constrict. Sensing imminent danger, the blademaster Reinhard, immediately began hacking at the doorway. When that proved no use, he turned his fury to a nearby power conduit. Hacking the conduit only made things worse as power to the room winks out and the force field shrinks in like plastic wrap, cutting the crew off from each other. In a last desperate effort, the Healer Quinn
turned to prayer. In a stroke of divine inspiration, he finds the circuitry to be some kind of nerve-like network and, applying his Healing knowledge to it, manages to mend the damage and restore power to the room.
Shaken by the encounter, the crew make their way back to the habitat, now with a sample of the fungus in tow.
After breaking for the night, the crew split up to continue their investigation. Quinn visits the habitat's gardens to replenish the crew's supplies. Benesh convinces Wynne to lend them the use of their medical lab. The latter begrudgingly agrees, possibly because said "medical lab" was a repurposed science rover that was long past is 'roving' days. The others -- the headstrong Reinhard, the courier Saskia, and the cybernetic Echo -- visit a local pub to see what they can learn. It was Benesh that made the disturbing discovery. As a first step to investigate what seemed to be a infection of the alien structure, he created a detector. He first tested the detector on the sample, and then as a control, on himself. Both lit up. When he tried a few more trials, he found that the fungus had dispersed itself through the station, and likely everyone in it. The crew at the pub also found this out, in their own way. The locals rebuffed their questions. But as time passed, more and more colonists arrived at the pub, surrounding the group. Soon it became difficult for them to move about in the press of the crowd, whose body language was much more familiar than their replies. As the trio threatened to be overwhelmed, Echo uses his cybernetic implants to take a recording of the unfolding throng and sends it to the others.
Alerted, Benesh and Quinn hatch a plan. They concocted an improvized sleeping gas and planned to pipe it in through the ventilation at the pub. This way, they could get their friends out without hurting any of the presumably-fungus-controlled colonists.
After a brief meeting, the crew set off to the far side of the station. The alien architecture was dizzying. The original inhabitants were immensely tall but possibly disproportionately thin; as a result, rooms were often taller than they were wide, lending them both a sense of claustrophobia and vertigo simultaneously. The room Wynne directed them too was no exception. She was using it as a meditation chamber of sorts, and a dazzling view of the clouds through a transparent force field made it easy to imagine why. As the group searched through the room, we found something vastly unusual. Sprouting from one of the corners was some kind of growth. "Filamentous," Benesh von Lawick, the resident explorer, called it. More disturbingly, the growth seems to be sprouting right out of the alien alloy of the station.
After breaking for the night, the crew split up to continue their investigation. Quinn visits the habitat's gardens to replenish the crew's supplies. Benesh convinces Wynne to lend them the use of their medical lab. The latter begrudgingly agrees, possibly because said "medical lab" was a repurposed science rover that was long past is 'roving' days. The others -- the headstrong Reinhard, the courier Saskia, and the cybernetic Echo -- visit a local pub to see what they can learn. It was Benesh that made the disturbing discovery. As a first step to investigate what seemed to be a infection of the alien structure, he created a detector. He first tested the detector on the sample, and then as a control, on himself. Both lit up. When he tried a few more trials, he found that the fungus had dispersed itself through the station, and likely everyone in it. The crew at the pub also found this out, in their own way. The locals rebuffed their questions. But as time passed, more and more colonists arrived at the pub, surrounding the group. Soon it became difficult for them to move about in the press of the crowd, whose body language was much more familiar than their replies. As the trio threatened to be overwhelmed, Echo uses his cybernetic implants to take a recording of the unfolding throng and sends it to the others.
Alerted, Benesh and Quinn hatch a plan. They concocted an improvized sleeping gas and planned to pipe it in through the ventilation at the pub. This way, they could get their friends out without hurting any of the presumably-fungus-controlled colonists.
Report Date
22 May 2021
Primary Location
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