Chapter 24 - The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, part 1

[badams30]

Grimes - Fighter

Grimes starts to smile and approach one of the strange devices, but then pauses, thinks better of it and then begins to examine each cabinet carefully.

"Maybe sumthin' in these. I don't trust them box thingys."

[merias]

"Eh, what could go wrong?" Dandy says as he fiddles with any moving parts on the strange devices.

[Zhym]

Ulster takes a closer look at the cabinets.

[greyarea]

Dieter makes thorough search of the body. He finds that the colorful attachments are part some sort of silken cloth and part metal. They attach to the uniform of the deceased. He also finds a grey card in one of the disintegrating pockets.

Grimes and Ulster take a look at the cabinets. They open with some difficulty, with a squeaking sound. Inside they find boxes, some with spools of a strange material. A close look reveals images on the material itself.


Dandy fiddles with one of the strange boxes, while Algrim takes a pokier approach. The spear-tip gets stuck in a part of the box he pokes at, and he needs to wiggle the spear to wrench it free. The box is distorted where the spear slipped through a crack in the construction: apparently the boxes are made of some sort of metal.

Dandy focuses on the boxes. He tries a few that don't respond. One, with a skeleton almost directly beneath that table (perhaps it was in use so long ago?), begins flickering images, backlit somehow. He sees an images of stars, some of strange balls, some of what appear to be writings in a strange tongue, a few blueprints (but that's no structure a dwarf would build!), and so forth. Each image appears on the screen for a few heartbeats, and then is replaced by a different image. All the while, the box makes a whirring sound and a warm wind is felt coming from a slotted part of the box on the side.

Actions?

Hit points and marching order
Grimes 69/69
--Dandy 39/40 < Cure Light Wounds x6,Bless, Hold Personx2, Find Traps, Augury, Silence 15'r,Glyph of Warding, Remove Curse, Dispel Magic, Speak With the Dead,Protection from Evil 10' radius, Cure serious woundsx3,Raise dead,plane shift >
Castinus 37/39
--Furuk 75/78
Ulster 62/62 < see char sheet >
Dieter 39/42 < see char sheet >
--Algrim 60/70

[spanningtree]

Dieter - Mage

Nabs the card and steps away from the skeleton to watch what Dandy is up to.

[badams30]

Grimes - Fighter of Little Brain

Grimes makes a pained expression as he looks at the odd strip of images. "Hey Deets, you're a smart guy, what do you make of this crap?" He'll offer one of the rolls to Dieter.

[merias]

"Anyone recognize any o' these pictures?" Dandy asks, continuing to fiddle and looking for anything he recognizes.

[Craigers07]

Furuk - Fighter

Furuk watches the pictures change and tries to recognize any of the images.

[GreyWolfVT]

Algrim "I aint regonize nothin we've found in this odd place."

[greyarea]

While some of the images are recognizable (the night sky although without familiar constellations

,
obvious blueprints of something

,
images of animals or plants not yet discovered

) many of them are definitely not (multicolored balls against starry backgrounds

,
some even with rings about them

,
images of things you've never seen before

,

blueprints of strange hallways

, etc.)

Actions?

Hit points and marching order
Grimes 69/69
--Dandy 39/40 < Cure Light Wounds x6,Bless, Hold Personx2, Find Traps, Augury, Silence 15'r,Glyph of Warding, Remove Curse, Dispel Magic, Speak With the Dead,Protection from Evil 10' radius, Cure serious woundsx3,Raise dead,plane shift >
Castinus 37/39
--Furuk 75/78
Ulster 62/62 < see char sheet >
Dieter 39/42 < see char sheet >
--Algrim 60/70

[merias]

"Bah! Me head hurts. Looks like there be some maps in here, but no way I'm gonna memorize 'em," Dandy says.

[Zhym]

Ulster perks up when the unfamiliar animals and plants pop up on the screen. "Oooh! Back up! Back up! What was that—a three-eyed stalked frogopus?!"

[merias]

"If'n I could back up, I would, but yer welcome to try," Dandy says. "I've no idea how this thing works."

[Zhym]

"Well, do what you did before, but backwards—and slower!" suggests Ulster.

[GreyWolfVT]

Algrim "This by far is the strangest adventure I've been on in me life."

[spanningtree]

Dieter - Mage

Arching an eyebrow while scratching his butt: I remember seeing some things like this in that "between" place... where my eye was taken. Grimes, I have some theories about where we were then but they are just that. I think we traveled between worlds in a direct fashion. Dieter holds up one of the ends of the sash keeping his robe closed. We traveled from our world, to the "between" world and then to this world. He will point to three places along the length of the sash in turn to represent each world. We traveled direct, meaning our travel was instantaneous. He will bring the three points on the sash together for a moment. Almost, like we did not move. Stretching the sash back out. I think the vessel we are standing inside traveled between the worlds but not instantaneously. More like a ship on the ocean. I think it has seen many more worlds than we have.... I think what we are seeing is like a ships log of the journey. Oh, I think, they may be the original sailors. Gesturing at the skeleton he removed the card from. Of course, just a theory.... could be a new kind of storm giants abode with some interesting magic for all I know.

Still a dangerous place....

[tumblingdice]

Castinus, whose last post seems to have disappeared into the space between spaces (sorry, guys), looks in wonder at the various images as they flicker by. "This does look like that world we traveled to, Dieter," he says. "Keep your robe closed, though. Promise?" he adds with a wink.

The thief then starts looking around to see if there's any kind of scrolls or tomes explaining how the strange device works, in hopes of returning to one of the previous images.

OC: I deal with microfilm readers and printers all the time at work, and will say that the characters here are more gentle on the machines than some of our patrons.

[greyarea]

Castinus searches about and finds a few promising examples. One is a tome with words in a strange, harsh text on the cover. Opening the tome reveals individual pages held in place by a strange metal-loop binding. He accidentally removes a page (fragile with age), it tearing from the three metal rings that held it in place, replacing it as best he can. He also finds a few smaller coverless tomes, each a few pages in length, each with images of the boxes on the first page.

Please give me a d100 roll for reading languages and then four d10 rolls (at -4 if the read languages is successful) for figuring out how the devices work.

Actions?

Hit points and marching order
Grimes 69/69
--Dandy 39/40 < Cure Light Wounds x6,Bless, Hold Personx2, Find Traps, Augury, Silence 15'r,Glyph of Warding, Remove Curse, Dispel Magic, Speak With the Dead,Protection from Evil 10' radius, Cure serious woundsx3,Raise dead,plane shift >
Castinus 37/39
--Furuk 75/78
Ulster 62/62 < see char sheet >
Dieter 39/42 < see char sheet >
--Algrim 60/70

[tumblingdice]

Castinus winces as the front page tears loose. He rubs his eyes with his thumb and index finger, then tries to decipher the strange writing...

[1d100] = 67

Okay. It looks like this thing is called a...Minolta MS6000 something. The thief flips through a few pages. It has, or is, an...energy star!? He rears back from the machine apprehensively, as if it would burn to the touch, then regains his composure. There's a whole bunch of stuff it looks like we're not supposed to do with it. Normally it's connected to something else that inscribes parchment for you. Hmmm...there's a bunch of codes for when something goes wrong...

[1d10-4] = 3-4 = -1
[1d10-4] = 1-4 = -3
[1d10-4] = 6-4 = 2
[1d10-4] = 3-4 = -1

Bloody hells! I can make neither heads nor tails of all this.

[greyarea]

Castinus castigates himself as he pulls, prods, and attempts to follow directions which were probably translated from their original orcish into elvish, and then giant, and then brownie, and finally into the language here.

He is about to give up when he suddenly, and without warning, finds the right button to slow the advancement of images, and fiddles with it until he can scroll back to the image that the druid requested. Other images of creatures that flickered by appear as well.

Actions?

Hit points and marching order
Grimes 69/69
--Dandy 39/40 < Cure Light Wounds x6,Bless, Hold Personx2, Find Traps, Augury, Silence 15'r,Glyph of Warding, Remove Curse, Dispel Magic, Speak With the Dead,Protection from Evil 10' radius, Cure serious woundsx3,Raise dead,plane shift >
Castinus 37/39
--Furuk 75/78
Ulster 62/62 < see char sheet >
Dieter 39/42 < see char sheet >
--Algrim 60/70

Lower numbers are better on the "figure out the technology chart"