The Foredweller Research Facility

A hidden research facility of seventeen scientists, buried deep beneath the Middle Tor and reached only through three sealed Foredweller metal doors at the very end of the mine's boring-machine tracks. Unlike Laewendas's mining operation — which drilled in from the mountain's south side — this team tunnelled in from the north face, far from settlements, to reach and study the Foredwellers (the Ancients / Elder race) without disturbing their ruin. They live inside an intact Foredweller structure of corrugated yellow metal, careful to preserve it rather than scrap it, powered by Foredweller machines that make pure water from fire.

Its scientists are a mixed bag of allegiances — some sent by Laewendas (willingly or not), some independent, some "in it for the love of the game" — which is exactly why they refuse to talk politics underground: "like the Antarctic… you don't argue about the bases while you're on the bases." Their running theory, and the mine's true secret, is that this facility sits where the Foredwellers refined the green shards — the "panache" — that the Autarch used to arm herself against the god-killing Emperor.

(The seventeen is itself a casualty. The team should number eighteen: the Void Stone test in Session 55 erased Anita's wife, the second gemologist, out of having ever existed — so the count everyone down here works from is wrong, and none of them can know it.)

Layout & tech (Session 52)

• The airlock. A one-door-at-a-time decontamination chamber between the mine and the labs; a floor grate blasts a Prestidigitation-like wind that cleans anything (and anyone) passing through.
• Water from fire. Three Foredweller "fire canisters" — cylinders of pure flame — that generate sterile, clean drinking water as their true function (the team first mistook them for room-heaters). Fenric identifies the principle as "basically burning hydrogen." The water fills three self-refilling drinking tubs.
• The gemologist's desk. Where Anita studies the refined green panache — the pure, "good-stuff" form of the substance Dr. Provostinalkov fails to reproduce in a sewer for want of the Foredwellers' cooling canals.

Layout & tech (Session 53)

• The control window. A locked, half-door office where Rosa charts two Foredweller lights and a lever that tracks the sun — revealed by Lash's sun-sight to be a magical illusion disguised as a lever, marked with the glyph for dawn, that cannot be pulled by any strength because there is nothing there to pull.
• The library. Roughly 10,000 oversized vellum-and-ink books on six floor-to-ceiling metal shelves in ~70 square feet, spines variously blank, symbolled, or written in the Ancients' glyphs. Catalogued by Minimika with glowing illusion-duplicates left in every gap.
• The storeroom — described, not seen. Dr. Xiao Li pointed down the corridor toward it and talked about it there; the party never went in, so everything the vault holds on it is her account rather than their own eyes. A Foredweller storeroom the team still uses as one, holding the Ancients' day-to-day belongings — most usefully their clothes: reverse-tapered at the ankle (implying hooves), almost all with tail holes, cut for creatures far taller than any race of man. The changing room's footwear is what convinced Tink the Foredwellers couldn't fly. Lash later asked for "ancient fashion time" and got the mail wheelbarrow and the masked Malaika instead — the visit is still owed.
• Two Foredweller toilets — with handles, seats and footrests, in a room with no dividing wall. Proof, per Tink, that the Ancients ate, and had mouths.
• The green pool room. Behind a locker/changing room stocked with rebreather masks and a long double-doored corridor: tiered steps down into a communal pool of hundreds of gallons of liquid panache, about ten steps' worth from full, topped up by a central tap at one drop every 10–20 minutes from machinery that has run for several hundred thousand years. Lethal to breathe, touch or drink. Stiflingly hot — the reason the ruin needed its water-cooling canals. Fenric's magic-sight registers nothing at all inside it: the field is so vast that everything, including the party's own casters and magic items, reads as mundane.
• The Long Walk. An empty corridor running at least 28 miles — the furthest anyone has walked and returned — heading roughly seven hexes south-west, believed to lead to another facility like this one. No transit system, no tracks, no end in sight.
• The doors. Every door in the ruin opens to a reverse-engineered key the team refuses to describe: "Our control of the doors is the only reason you cannot harm any of us."

The team (named)

• Dr. Xiao Li ("Dr. Lee") — half-elven facility manager and overseer; rates herself 3.5-of-5 loyal to Laewendas, then 2.
• Polos — friendly door-greeter; has "been to the Acropolis in summer"; gives Thalia a surfer's "call me" wave.
• Minimika — chief translator and librarian; cracked the depth-equals-magnitude rule of Foredweller writing. (Recorded in Session 52 as "Dr. Rusalaim" — almost certainly the same person.)
• Rosa — the sun-watcher at the control window; spent her only sunlight scroll on Lash's hunch.
• Malaika — the masked, possibly stilt-walking keeper of the green pool, who Dr. Xiao Li does not remember hiring.
• Tink — half-raccoon, half-fox tinkerer, twin-goggled; toilets, footwear and lever handles. Not a scientist — the team's hired handyman and engineer (Session 55). Almost certainly the Dr. Martin Tinker referenced in Session 52.
• Long Tim — 7'7", arms to the ankles; "reaches the books on the top shelf." A doctor of the physical body who studies the hallucinatory effects of the goop residue, and who gives his name as Timothy Leisten (Session 55).
• Marge — water purifier, obsessed with the mine's waterways; interrogates Lash on temperature, depth and flow, but won't leave the lab to see them.
• Anita — gnomish chief gemologist (beret, science-badge jacket, zoom monocle); holds the panache reveal, and the person to ask about the crystal form. Widowed by the Void Stone before the party ever met her, and the giver of their shard (Session 55).
• The second gemologist — Anita's wife, and the expedition's other crystal specialist. Erased from existence by the Void Stone; only her desk, her chair, her half of every duplicated tool and a locket remain (Session 55).
• Dr. Ysolde — a distracted researcher "working on something." (Name collides with Queen Ysolde — GM reuse, distinct.)
• Plus ~8 unnamed assistants and scientists in leather-and-linen masks. Species are mixed — elves, a cat-person, a raccoon-person.

Session 52 (reached)

• The party opens the deep doors after a wary door-side vetting (personality quizzes, small talk), and Dr. Xiao Li walks them in as "mine-disaster investigators."
• They learn the facility dug in from the north to study the Foredwellers, is politically mixed (some scientists Laewendas-sent), and runs on Foredweller water-from-fire tech.
• The panache revealed. At Anita's desk, the green crystal is named the "panache": the substance that both grants immortality and slays gods — the Shard of the Autarch material — refined here as the Ancients once refined the shards the Autarch wielded against the Emperor who killed all the gods. Session ends mid-tour, deep in the mine, on the 22nd of New Summer.

Session 53 (the rest of the tour, and the lockdown)

• One year, sealed. Dr. Xiao Li gives the facility's history: down here no longer than one year, most of it spent tunnelling in; the diggers and machinists were dismissed before anyone entered; and since then "no one has come and no one has left." The team is under a scientific lockdown that predates the party's arrival — because if one person walks out and says where the green room is, someone comes for it.
• The green pool. Malaika masks the party up and shows them the reservoir the whole facility exists to guard: liquid panache by the hundreds of gallons, the source of the shard The Autarch used 1,396 years ago, and the same substance as the everliving serum. The DM's optional deal — steal it, replace your blood with it — is formally offered here and unanimously declined (see Steal Power from the Autarch).
• The sun lever cracked, halfway. Rosa's lever really is a sun-thing marked dawn, and really cannot be pulled — because Lash's sun-sight shows it is a disguised illusion, not a mechanism. Whether it reads the sun or runs it is unresolved, and both Rosa and Dr. Lee take it as one more reason nobody may ever come down here.
• The language, and the Ascension. Minimika establishes that engraving depth encodes magnitude in Foredweller writing (shallow: cupboard; deep: prison), corrects the horned fisherman's translations from Session 13, keeps Silithane's Ankley Island rubbings, and delivers the ruin's darkest lore: the Ascension the Foredwellers are remembered for was a catastrophe — mourning, loss, few survivors.
• The mail. A wheelbarrow of a year's undelivered post waits by the door: letters home, findings addressed to mage towers and schools, and "Excerpts from Dr. Xiao Li's memoirs and studies, one year underground." Thalia, postmaster of an outlawed service, may not legally touch it uncontracted.
• Dr. Lee asks for help. Her scientists owe Laewendas reports, some by oath; she cannot release them, hold them forever, or destroy what they found. She agrees to call a general meeting the following night, travel out with one assistant to meet the party's resistance, and keeps Magra at the facility as the guarantee the party returns. 23rd of New Summer.

Session 54 (the upper floor, and the manager leaves)

• The second floor. A ladder from the labs leads up to the team's living quarters — sleeping, resting, bathing and showering rooms, with hot water piped from the fire-machines below. Never mapped, because there is nothing up there worth running around in. The party is given the run of it for the night, along with first aid on the way through, and takes its first long rest in some thirty hours there.
• The general meeting happened off-screen. An hour of Dr. Xiao Li talking science at scientists, followed by "by the way, I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks, you guys have got this, and this person's in charge." The party was not needed and did not attend. A deputy is named but not to the party.
• Polos is the plus-one. Of seventeen, it is the friendly Acropolis-travelled door-greeter who leaves with her — not the water specialist Marge, who wanted nothing to do with a dragon.
• The "unopened doors" are not sealed. The team can open the far deep door; they simply have no reason to, because there is nothing there for them. It runs roughly 60 miles to another facility like this one. Discounting the two tunnels that breach the ruin from outside, the place has an in, an out, a left way and a right way, and both ways lead somewhere else. The Long Walk remains the only genuine unknown in that direction.
• The north tunnel is the way out. The facility's own bored entry tunnel, dug a year ago and unused since, becomes the party's exit route over the mountain — and the GM's standing promise is that something has moved into it: "if you leave a 60-mile bored tunnel to the Underdark, something's gonna call it home." (Its actual measured length in Session 55 is far shorter — about two hexes, or 15–20 hours of uphill walking. See Discrepancies.)

Session 55 (the party leaves)

• Anita's workshop, opened up. Behind a drawn curtain, the gemologist Anita's bench turns out to be a full machine shop — table saws, vices, anchoring points, hundreds of tools on repositionable swing-arms, welding masks with mode-switching lenses. And two desks, two chairs, and two of every piece of equipment but the shared tools: the physical record of a second gemologist the Void Stone erased from existence, whose name and face nobody in the facility can now recall.
• The library, floor-deep in books. A minor tremor in the night knocked every single book off every single shelf; Minimika spends the party's last morning re-shelving ten thousand volumes she cannot read.
• Tink is the handyman, not a scientist. Clarified on the record — engineering isn't a science as far as this team is concerned, and they hired him because they needed one. He builds a soundproof four-chamber testing enclosure in an hour and 32-foot telescoping calipers on request, and rates the ruin's self-cleaning flushing toilets above anything on the surface.
• The main exit is beside Rosa's window. The door out of the ruin sits past the sun lever, worked from a wall panel in the sun-watcher's control room — distinct from the deep door that "leads like 30 miles to nowhere" (the Long Walk). Rosa opens it; dust and loose rock crumble into the room, and beyond it is unlit cave.
• A Morkid had moved into the tunnel. The GM's promised tenant dropped from the ceiling onto the first person through the door and was killed without touching anyone. Dr. Xiao Li: "There were no creatures like this when we arrived, because we dug the cave. But it has been an empty cave for maybe a year or two now."
• The staging camp, still standing. At the mountain's north base, where the dig began: felled trees (later cut into the carts seen inside), an empty crystal-fuel refuelling station, tents in three states — standing, torn open by wildlife, and reduced to tent-shaped gaps where passers-by stole them — crates of boots and headlamps, and hundreds of mining picks. Left in place a year ago in case the scientists needed it on the way out.