Starforged Solo: Session 9

Doubled gravity between the tranquil glass pillars

From the Journal of Zaramirra Wolfe

Entering the Sanctum

We need to keep moving, and quickly. There’s no telling when the Keepers will make their sweep. I’’ve almost started to believe it’s happened already. The song and the glowing mushrooms were too incongruent for a place so old and alien as this. But then I ask myself: how old is this place, really? Those markings I’d just taken, they looked almost hand scrawled into the hardened walls — metal? what is this place made of? On second thought, it’s definitely not metal. The fungal glue proves it, though I don’t exactly know how yet. Either way, somebody or something made those marks. Do I dare cast these shadows over my mind while I press on into the darkness? It’s already eerie enough without my own speculative phantoms joining the party.

I move ahead, stepping around the lighted fungus as best as I can. RIA spots me the whole way with her narrow spotlight. (roll: altered gravity) All of my concentration is on my feet when I finally reach the vault’s core that I hardly realize it. It’s the feeling in my abdomen that tips me off first, a heavy tug, as though something had filled me with sand and pressed me down into the floor with a doubled weight. The pressure makes my ears pop. I feel a slight trickle of fluid in my nostrils. I ignore the thought of blood at this moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised. (roll: conservation of living specimens) Looking up, I’m greeted with a new mystery: the energy source of the precursor vault, where I’d imagine the engines, or other means of propulsion would be housed. The doubled gravity tipped me off to this fact. Any kind of warp or fold-based stellar drive would be a symptom of such a device. But this is different, something’s not quite right in here.

The circular chamber is wide. There are glass tubes — capsules? — set in pillared rows. Beyond the glass of each pillar, some kind of amniotic plasma — a yellowish, putrid, green color — and it appears recycled, and functioning as any other common cryo-type filtering system. The doubled gravity means this structure is putting off a large amount of energy, or perhaps storing it somewhere in the bowels of this machine. I check the floor again. The glowing fungus leads in all directions, on the walls and the floor. It makes a chaotic path through the glass pillars. I take a step forward to get a closer look. RIA follows, but she’s turned up her guard under the doubled gravity.

Getting close to the nearest pillar, I’m shocked to find something floating inside. A living alien body. The tubes that feed it in the yellow-green liquid make little bubbles in the ethere as I press my face closer to the glass. What the hell this is? And why are the Keepers trying to destroy it? Pressing my face closer to study the floating figure — almost in a trance against the glass — a sudden twitch in the musculature of the elongated body. Another twitch, and something opens — an eye, or what could pass for an eye on this alien body, I have no real way of knowing. I flinch. I’m used to such things in my line of work. But I have to admit this whole place is pretty fucking creepy.

I listen for any new sign of the Keepers. So far I’m in the clear. I check RIA’s Xeno-scanners and prepare for a full sweep of the place while there’s still time. Thank the galaxy we made it before the Keepers cleared it. But I have to ask myself, while I make my scans of the glass pillars and other strange gravity phenomena in the sanctum engine room — how the hell am I getting out of here? And can I simply walk away, simply let the Keepers obliterate such an important find like this?