Occasionally mods will be allowing a set number of characters to schedule an involved conversation with a mod regarding the discovery of something in game, as announced on the OOC community or on a mod log. Characters who have signed up for the option will be selected via RNG (with preference given to characters who have not yet had a thread like this), and the thread will be conducted on this page.
You can see a sample thread in the comments below, but in essence, this thread is meant to mimic the conversation a tabletop player might have with their DM. The mod will establish the setting, and you may describe your character's actions and decisions. The mod will respond with reactions and any particular consequences, and the mod and player will move throughout the scenario together, until all questions are satisfied and all actions are taken.
After this informational thread is complete, it's assumed that anything learned within is now common knowledge for the rest of the game. You're still welcome to thread out discussion or discovery of this ICly, but if you'd like to skip ahead to any fallout or follow-up action, that's also fine.
As a note, these threads do not have to be limited to one character in the scene. For the ease of moving threads along quickly, we ask that one player take the reins in terms of writing out the actions of all characters involved in the scene. We have a channel reserved in the Discord channel limited to current thread participants to facilitate OOC discussion of who's doing what for this purpose.
The pile at the door resolves itself into a pile of clothing, shredded, ragged, and dirty, but without any stains that would suggest blood. There is something hard and plastic buried within them.
The door’s lock will take some doing, and quite a bit of strength, to undo. Whoever designed this door intended it to do its job very well, but some investigation will uncover a level toward the side that, when pulled, slowly churns the gears into place to lift the latch. It opens inward, so Jester will need some assistance to get the heavy stone to budge.
in that case, it's time to yell to open the door!! which presumably julian and trevor will hear and push the door open.
( if the party is reunited, julian freaks the fuck out and jester gets to talk about how COOL her magic is and shuzo gets to check out what the hard plastic thing under the pile of clothes are )
Working together, they will just manage to push the door inwards and enter. Even with the light from the cavern, it’s still very, very dark down here, and all Shuzo would be able to see is that it seems to be a device shaped for a wrist. Do any of them have a light?
trevor decides to strip his clothes to make a torch, the party encourages it because they're all useless & definitely do not mention about the pile of clothes off to the side. trevor is now shirtless and fashions his shirt into a torch
julian reluctantly lights the torch. jester casts thaumaturgy to make the torch EXTRA BRIGHT ( trevor now sees the clothes ).
By the light of Trevor’s brave sacrifice they can see a ways down the tunnel (and the mouths of several branches as it goes), and that the device has a small screen and a collection of buttons down the length of it.
The screen turns on with the third button press, and the next one activates a quiet, automated voice: “Playback initiated.”
The voice that comes next is pitched lower, sounding male to their ears, as well as young and optimistic. It cheerfully greets someone named Sola, and introduces this report as something he’ll be sending as a batch update, since apparently “the signal this high in the mountains doesn’t allow realtime relays.”
The voice eventually gets around to identifying itself as Marti, and does a lot of talking. It seems to be Marti’s first day on his new job, something he’s evidently excited about. His first log is about four minutes in all, and covers anything he thought worth telling Sola about, which includes loving description of someone he considered good-looking, someone who was mean to him, and an anxious summary of his new boss. There’s a brief silence after he says his goodbye to Sola, and then immediately the next log begins.
jester demands they all hold hands so that they don't get lost ftr. julian and trevor will hold hands and shuzo and jester will hold hands once shuzo puts on his new apple watch.
julian and jester are immediately invested in the day to day of marti, and trevor gets his turn to use his braincells, and decide that they should explore each tunnel systematically. so on to the first one ( from the left i guess )! while they listen to the recordings like a podcast. nothing can possibly go wrong.
trevor then suggests some type of marking. jester offers her paint and paintbrush ( the regular kind ) so they can draw arrows to mark which way they came from.
The first tunnel they turn down looks largely the same as this one: smooth, featureless, and unlit. Here and there is discarded mining equipment: carts, mechanic tools, more bits of clothing. It’s all synthetic in some way, as the metal has been very thoroughly stripped here.
Marti’s voice floats along with them. He happily describes the first time someone was nice to him, a few logs later excitedly letting Sola know that they’re now seeing each other. He reports a few mining accidents (it’s okay, no one was hurt), how the decoration of his new apartment is coming along, asks Sola how things are going over in Balance, and then sadly reports his new romance has dumped him. About ten logs in, the tone changes a little. He says that he heard about the attacks in Balance, and anxiously hopes that Sola is alright. He says he’ll be sending this report to her soon, and hopes she’ll consider leaving Balance after she gets it.
It’s around then that a very, very faint and indistinct sound can be heard. It seems to be a long way off, with several fading echoes, coming from the tunnel they’ve left behind.
with GREAT RELUCTANCE they pause the podcast bc poor marti 8( . they'll start heading their way back to the noise ( stealthly ) + a pass without a trace from jester to up their stealth game. trevor picks up a heavy mechanical tool as a weapon. jester takes out her axe.
Hall 2 is, once again, more of the same. The only sound is their footsteps and the only light is their torch. This one does seem to be angling downward, though.
Or does he? Maybe Shuzo brushed a button, or maybe it’s some function of the device, but that same automated voice comes back: ”Playback resumed.”
Marti’s voice is back again, mid-sentence about how the person he used to date dropped their lunch tray today and spattered noodles everywhere, and it made him feel a little better.
jester suggests it's a ghost that turned on the podcast, jester and shuzo swap stories about ghosts from home, scares the shit out of julian. they keep moving down the same tunnel with marti on.
trevor is above ghost stories and is on the lookout for any signs of Suspicious Activity.
Everything seems to be above board at the moment, for an abandoned mine; it's a fairly monotonous, downward sloping tunnel.
Another of Marti's logs ends, and when his voice resumes the next one it sounds very different. It's the same speaker, but he's lost any of that cheery enthusiasm he previously had. He says that he knows Balance has fallen, and he knows Sola is dead, he got the news last month. But he's decided to continue recording this log for her, because it makes him feel close to her. He goes on to describe the recent troubles the mine has had: miners are beginning to disappear, and there are rumors that "things are starting to come up." The next log mentions "contamination concerns", and that miners have been beginning to be detained in the mines. He says he hasn't been back to his apartment in a week, but the supervisors are trying to make their on-site accomodations comfortable.
a hush falls over the group because that's... sketchy??? shuzo will suggest that maybe they stop for a while and listen to the rest of the logs — jester & trevor thinks this is boring but agree, julian's lowkey on the hunt for the "comfortable accommodations", but won't actually be leaving the group.
jester's gonna be on High Alert for anything moving since she has dark vision.
They stop near an intersection, and one of the branches has four notches dug into the stone walls, as if something was once mounted on either side. Marti's voice goes on. In a fearful, shaken voice he describes the thing he saw today: he never got a clear look, but it was fast and silvery, and very sharp. He says it carved through five of his coworkers, and he's only alive because he dove into one of the track carts, pulled it closed, and stayed silent until long after the screaming stopped. He says he's sorry, Sola always told him to be brave, but he wasn't brave today.
His next log sounds tentatively optimistic: today they found the source of the contaminant! It was in tunnel 2-E-21, and a team installed a locking mechanism to seal it up tight. Sounding relieved, he says he thinks he might get to go home soon where he can finally water his plants, if any of them are still alive.
Marti's next log is recorded in a low, quiet voice. He says that the containment didn't work; they think it was installed hastily and incorrectly. He says the mines are flooding with a black, viscous substance, and anyone who falls into it doesn't come out of it again. No one can find a way to drain it, it seems to have a life of its own, and so no one can reach the mechanism to correct it. He says the only solution is to seal off the entire mines, even though it will cost them all the resources from them. It's for the sake of all of Bastion, so it's worth it. The other miners are all leaving, he says, because Marti decided to be the one to close the door. He says, with words that sound much braver than his voice, that he has no family left, so he knew it had to be him. He says he hopes Sola will be proud.
Ahead of them, set into the shaft wall, is a complex, mounted thing of interlocking plastic and stone, not unlike the locked door at the entrance. It's bolted into the wall on four sides, leaving grooves similar to the mouth of the tunnel they've just entered. That same black goop that's throughout the city leaks in a thin stream from one corner of it, pooling on the floor and draining into small cracks from there.
The playback ends with a click, and the automated voice sounds again: "Playback complete. Replay?"
jester is going to whip out her marvelous pigments, and paint what is essentially stone floors to cover all the cracks she can see. she'll try her best to avoid the goop but if she has to step in it she'll do it for marti 8(
The pool is relatively small, and she should be able to make the reach without doing more than possibly dipping the toe of a boot. The stone forms over the leaks, and the flow along the wall seems to taper off, and then stop entirely.
They make it almost to the entrance of this particular tunnel, and another of those earthquakes comes. This one doesn't feel quite as subtle as the others have, perhaps it's enhanced by being down in the mines. It strengthens rather than fading out, and in a few seconds it's strong enough to make footing difficult.
Behind them comes a heavy clank sound, followed by a viscous, fluid sound, like thick liquid sloshing and splashing over itself.
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The door’s lock will take some doing, and quite a bit of strength, to undo. Whoever designed this door intended it to do its job very well, but some investigation will uncover a level toward the side that, when pulled, slowly churns the gears into place to lift the latch. It opens inward, so Jester will need some assistance to get the heavy stone to budge.
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( if the party is reunited, julian freaks the fuck out and jester gets to talk about how COOL her magic is and shuzo gets to check out what the hard plastic thing under the pile of clothes are )
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julian reluctantly lights the torch. jester casts thaumaturgy to make the torch EXTRA BRIGHT ( trevor now sees the clothes ).
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shuzo ( while jester, julian, and eventually trevor huddle to watch ) will try to press every button until the screen turns on.
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The voice that comes next is pitched lower, sounding male to their ears, as well as young and optimistic. It cheerfully greets someone named Sola, and introduces this report as something he’ll be sending as a batch update, since apparently “the signal this high in the mountains doesn’t allow realtime relays.”
The voice eventually gets around to identifying itself as Marti, and does a lot of talking. It seems to be Marti’s first day on his new job, something he’s evidently excited about. His first log is about four minutes in all, and covers anything he thought worth telling Sola about, which includes loving description of someone he considered good-looking, someone who was mean to him, and an anxious summary of his new boss. There’s a brief silence after he says his goodbye to Sola, and then immediately the next log begins.
It seems this might go for a while.
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julian and jester are immediately invested in the day to day of marti, and trevor gets his turn to use his braincells, and decide that they should explore each tunnel systematically. so on to the first one ( from the left i guess )! while they listen to the recordings like a podcast. nothing can possibly go wrong.
trevor then suggests some type of marking. jester offers her paint and paintbrush ( the regular kind ) so they can draw arrows to mark which way they came from.
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Marti’s voice floats along with them. He happily describes the first time someone was nice to him, a few logs later excitedly letting Sola know that they’re now seeing each other. He reports a few mining accidents (it’s okay, no one was hurt), how the decoration of his new apartment is coming along, asks Sola how things are going over in Balance, and then sadly reports his new romance has dumped him. About ten logs in, the tone changes a little. He says that he heard about the attacks in Balance, and anxiously hopes that Sola is alright. He says he’ll be sending this report to her soon, and hopes she’ll consider leaving Balance after she gets it.
It’s around then that a very, very faint and indistinct sound can be heard. It seems to be a long way off, with several fading echoes, coming from the tunnel they’ve left behind.
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off to the sound they go. . . . .
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Marti’s voice is back again, mid-sentence about how the person he used to date dropped their lunch tray today and spattered noodles everywhere, and it made him feel a little better.
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trevor is above ghost stories and is on the lookout for any signs of Suspicious Activity.
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Another of Marti's logs ends, and when his voice resumes the next one it sounds very different. It's the same speaker, but he's lost any of that cheery enthusiasm he previously had. He says that he knows Balance has fallen, and he knows Sola is dead, he got the news last month. But he's decided to continue recording this log for her, because it makes him feel close to her. He goes on to describe the recent troubles the mine has had: miners are beginning to disappear, and there are rumors that "things are starting to come up." The next log mentions "contamination concerns", and that miners have been beginning to be detained in the mines. He says he hasn't been back to his apartment in a week, but the supervisors are trying to make their on-site accomodations comfortable.
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jester's gonna be on High Alert for anything moving since she has dark vision.
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His next log sounds tentatively optimistic: today they found the source of the contaminant! It was in tunnel 2-E-21, and a team installed a locking mechanism to seal it up tight. Sounding relieved, he says he thinks he might get to go home soon where he can finally water his plants, if any of them are still alive.
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julian's still on the hunt for accommodations, jester's on the hunt for "fast silvery things".
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Ahead of them, set into the shaft wall, is a complex, mounted thing of interlocking plastic and stone, not unlike the locked door at the entrance. It's bolted into the wall on four sides, leaving grooves similar to the mouth of the tunnel they've just entered. That same black goop that's throughout the city leaks in a thin stream from one corner of it, pooling on the floor and draining into small cracks from there.
The playback ends with a click, and the automated voice sounds again: "Playback complete. Replay?"
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jester is going to whip out her marvelous pigments, and paint what is essentially stone floors to cover all the cracks she can see. she'll try her best to avoid the goop but if she has to step in it she'll do it for marti 8(
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that said when jester shakes the goop off of her boots it's landing on trevor's pants. trevor will take off his pants now.
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Behind them comes a heavy clank sound, followed by a viscous, fluid sound, like thick liquid sloshing and splashing over itself.
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