Starting back at Numenera! Our third game in the Ninth World is a continuation of the game we were playing when COVID struck. It was a pretty good time to take a break, and if it had been a planned break, it probably would have gone smoothly. Restarting the game, not the global pandemic.
We come back, with a case of the Brain Scramblies, players and characters alike. The segue between last time we played (swaggering around at 90 degrees in the shade of the city of Tilt) and this session (back in Lone, in pretty rough condition) is abrupt, with little to explain it. Essentially: the person whose job it was to rotate the Pletbird eggs in the incubatory hall beneath the Inert Cylinder found the valley explorers amidst a building aura of danger.
Field collapse, one of the many dangers of putting too many cyphers in one small area, occurs when one cypher’s power source interacts badly with another power source, eventually causing both power sources to implode/explode/replode/unplode/intraplode/transplode/deplode,all of which are bad and only some made up. The chamber in which the unconscious bodies of the explorers were discovered were full of that: so their rescuer brushed the cyphers off them and dragged them clear. The room continues to be a catastrophe, so they’ve had to make do without their cyphers. Larger pieces of equipment and belongings stowed at their lodgings in Tilt did not reappear with them in Lone.
It took a few days in the small building used for injury treatment – I wouldn’t call it a hospital – before they were able to move around again. When they did, they found themselves very slightly different from how they remember. Not only that, but Lone was slightly different than they remember: a large black obelisk, banded with copper verdegris nameplates, hovered in the air above the central area of Lone, a monument to those taken by the Bright Ones. It had been there since shortly after that calamity and bore the names of the ascended/taken/abducted (depending on your religious view), but none of the returning travellers remembered it at all.
Tsuro/Bazzuro came to see them as did delegation of the town’s councillors. Everyone was surprised by their sudden return, but delighted that the Glawvians had arrived a few days ahead of them and discussions about how to work together had been going just smashing. The Lonnais (the demonym for people and things from Lone, I just decided by GM fiat) were very excited about this malleable amber yellow glass and the Glawvians were very excited about the Pletbird eggs they were about to eat.
On the final day of their recuperation, now mostly back on their feet and moving about, Father Bazzuro visited again, this time on a stretcher. Something terrible had happened that had killed the man who occupied the other stretcher and crushed Tsuro’s leg.
The next day, and with Fr Bazzuro conscious and on the road to having her leg rebuilt, they learned what had happened.
The Probites were not too happy that the Glawvians could be given access to the Ruin Under The Water, a place they regarded as unclean or spiritually polluted at best. Meanwhile, half of the Glawvians were keen to see the ruin (the other half keen to keep drinking gyroberry schnapps in Sham and generally having a good time on their trade junket) as Bazzuro had discovered Petroglyphs in an area of damaged tunnels. These tunnels, however, were smugglers tunnels that ran from Torberts to the Ruin, because no-one gives a shit less what the Probies think than Torberts. Shortly after they all went down to take a look, boom, some sort of explosive was hits Bazzuro and Jimmy Enpeecee and requires hauling out of there. The Glawvian – someone who has seen petroglyphs before and her son – remain down the tunnel.
A new job had materialized for the explorers.
After getting out of their hospital gowns and preparing themselves they circuitously sailed over to Yolshead to meet up with Strabo’s family for a decent feed and catch-up. Then they sneak-boated over to Torberts. Down the tunnel that led to the Ruin, they found a shimmering orange wall of energy that repelled anything that tried to enter it with many times more force than was put in. When they finally tried making a lot of noise (I can’t remember what the noise was or how they made it) they were hailed by a very weak and scared woman on the other side of the energy wall.
She let them through and they found her at the bottom of a fissure in the tunnel, pretty badly beaten up. She was somewhat delirious, but told them that she and her son had come down to take notes of the petroglyphs when they were attacked by some sort of slithering terror from the deeps. They were then protected and rescued by a yellow plated automaton, before lastly, being attacked by some sort of metal killing machine – she’d activated the shield cypher as a last resort, unfortunately just as Bazzuro and Jimmy Enpeecee rushed to their aid. Tsuro and Jimmy were caught in the suddenly expanding wall and it hit them extremely hard. She does not know where the terrifying machine went, but she believes it has her son, McGuffin.
Okay, his name isn’t McGuffin, I can’t remember what it is. But she is Rufra of Glawv and they lifted her out and to safety. She spilled her collection of cyphers for them to use to rescue her son. And so now they’re about to head back down and see what can be done…
