Session 53 — The Sun Is Not Your Friend

Session Recap

The whole first half of the session is a tour of a workplace, and it is one of the strangest the campaign has run. Still inside the hidden research facility under the Middle Tor at 6:11 PM on the 22nd of New Summer, the party wanders a lab of seventeen scientists who have been sealed in for one year studying a Foredweller ruin: a locked control window where Rosa has spent months charting a lever she believes controls the sun; a raccoon-fox tinkerer, Tink, whose great contribution is that the Ancients had toilets, and therefore mouths; a storeroom of Foredweller clothing cut for hooved, tailed creatures far taller than men; a library of ten thousand books in a language nobody can read; and the Long Walk, a corridor running at least 28 miles southwest toward what they think is another facility like this one. Lash turns the tour into a personal quest: the sun-symbol burned into her brain by the entity she once reached for turns up in a library book and again above Rosa's lever, so she signs up for a library card (minted "Secret Underground Bunker"), borrows the book, and gets the chief translator to burn a 5th-level sunlight scroll on her. Her sun-eyes read the truth — the lever isn't a lever at all, but a magically disguised sun-thing marked with the glyph for dawn — and the sun itself sends her a second message: it is not her friend, not her enemy, and completely indifferent to her.

The second half stops being funny. A masked, stilted figure called Malaika — who Dr. Xiao Li does not remember hiring — hands out rebreather masks, walks the party past a double airlock, and shows them what the facility is really guarding: a room-sized communal pool of the green liquid, hundreds of gallons deep, fed one drop at a time by Foredweller machinery that has been running for several hundred thousand years. This is the stuff The Autarch put in the God-Emperor's neck 1,396 years ago, and the same stuff as the everliving serum — unending life for some, rotting flesh for the rest. Fenric's magic-sight registers nothing at all in that room, not even his own party's spellcasters: the field is so enormous he is standing inside it. The DM lays a formal, optional deal on the table — steal it, replace your blood with it — and, one by one, every player declines. The session ends with Dr. Xiao Li admitting she has no idea what to do: her scientists are oath-bound to report to Laewendas, she cannot let them out and cannot keep them forever, and she grabbed the party's offer of help "with both hands." She agrees to call a general meeting and travel out with them to meet the resistance — keeping Magra behind as the guarantee they come back. Out in the caves, the party sneaks into the bone dragon's lair through the hole Lash blew open, and finds a +2 dragon-slaying short sword driven up through its jaw and out its forehead — the weapon that killed it, still there for whoever can kill it again. 23rd of New Summer, ~1 AM. Still level 7 — one pip short of 8.

Key Events

• The tour of a sealed workplace. Magra leads off through the facility's back rooms and gets the numbers out of Dr. Xiao Li: the team has been down here no longer than one year, the diggers and machinists who cut their tunnel were dismissed before anyone went in, and since then "no one has come and no one has left" — until "seven newcomers." Every door in the ruin opens to a reverse-engineered key the scientists refuse to explain: "Our control of the doors is the only reason you cannot harm any of us."
• The immortals, reclassified. Over the introductions, the party debriefs Dr. Xiao Li on the under-prison: Fenric reads back from his notes that the nice one, Viana, gave her age as 400,000-500,000 years — "that would put them firmly into Prehistoric." Dr. Lee's correction is flat. The inmates were never Ancients: "They are thieves that have stolen from the ancients", jailed for taking the immortality elixirs. And she names what she actually fears for a ruin like this one — looters. "They will rip the metal off the walls and fashion it into swords. They will rip the lights out of the walls and eat them… given enough time, this will just be a cave which is vaguely square-shaped and nothing more."
• The Ancients had toilets. Tink — a half-raccoon, half-fox tinkerer with a goggle set on his eyes and another on his head — leads the party pointedly to two Foredweller lavatories, complete with handles, seats and footrests, and lets them draw the conclusion: "It means the Ancients ate food. And processed it into waste, it means they probably had some kind of mouth." Magra gets an approving point for knowing why a footrest helps.
• Clothes cut for hooves and tails. The facility's Foredweller storeroom — a storeroom for them, still one for the scientists — holds the Ancients' day-to-day belongings, all of it described by Dr. Xiao Li in the corridor and never actually entered; when Lash asks later whether it is "ancient fashion time now," Lee and Malaika exchange a nod and steer the party elsewhere. The trousers are reverse-tapered at the ankle (implying a hoof), almost everything has a tail hole, and all of it is made for creatures standing well taller than any race of man — matching the horned fisherman the party spoke with under Gwyndinas.
• Rosa and the lever that controls the sun. Behind a locked half-door, Rosa logs two lights (green on, red off) and a lever position minute by minute. Her theory, offered braced for laughter: the lever controls the sun. Her evidence is real — every watch the team brought down averages 6:11 PM, the lever sits at 31% up, leaving 30% of the day until the witching hour at 2 AM, and it has risen and fallen with the sun for months. The only glyph the translator has cracked over the lever means something like light or dawn. Two people have run at the lever to pull it; both were too weak to move it, which Rosa counts as a mercy — "the tides would flow in the wrong directions." The chief translator quietly demolishes that later in the tour: she snuck into the room and pulled on it herself, and reports that "it's not even a real lever. It doesn't move." — the same conclusion Lash reaches independently with her sun-sight an hour afterwards.
• A library card in the deep. In a library of ~10,000 oversized vellum books, Lash asks the chief librarian for a spine bearing the alligator-mouth sideways-V the sun burned into her head. The librarian — who catalogues by leaving glowing illusory duplicates in the gaps so she can re-shelve what she drops — pulls one from a random shelf: three lines of text on the cover page, one symbol engraved 2 mm deep and scorched black inside. Because she's a member of the Librarians Guild, the loan requires paperwork, next of kin, and a minted card reading "Secret Underground Bunker." (Thalia, postmaster of an outlawed mail service, seethes: librarian is a banned profession, which is proof this one isn't one of Laewendas's.)
• The sunlight scroll. Lash's sun-sight needs actual sunlight, twenty to thirty miles underground. Rosa — whose interest in the sun "was nonexistent until we came down here" — burns the spell scroll of sunlight she has been studying all year, and the translator casts it: a cone of daylight blasted point-blank into Lash's face (1 fire damage, absorbed by her blacksmith goggles, plus a tinge of sunburn). The book does not translate. But the symbol in the book flickers with distant sunlight, and so does the symbol above Rosa's lever — and the lever itself reads as something magical hidden inside an ordinary-looking lever. Lash's conclusion, pitched to Dr. Lee afterwards, is that it cannot be pulled by anyone at any strength because there is nothing there to pull — the GM confirmed the disguise, not the mechanism. Rosa is vindicated and wrong at the same time.
• The sun's second message. For the effort, the sun sends Lash a wordless meaning: it is not her friend, it does not like her, it is not hostile, and it is entirely indifferent to her as an individual. The last time she reached for it, it burned her until she passed out. Nothing has changed.
• Depth is meaning. Silithane hands the facility's chief translator his charcoal tracings of the Ankley Island runes — ultimate authority / warning / door / do not open / prison of our enemies — translated back in Session 13 by the horned fisherman's skeleton. She takes them apart in seconds: the depth of an engraving encodes its magnitude (half a millimetre deep, paired with the "put something inside" glyph, means cupboard; deep enough, the same pair means prison), and the fisherman's "door" actually reads "door with hinges" — "Whoever you spoke to was uneducated, which is funny to say because he was a fisherman." She keeps the tracings, has him mark Ankley Island on her map, and promises to go measure the depths herself when her contract ends. She also hands him her personal rune to inscribe when he Sends to her, so the message isn't auto-filtered as spam.
• The Ascension was a funeral. Asked about the inland Shrine of the Immortals where "no one is buried because they ascended," the translator rolls high and pulls Silithane back by the sleeve: the runes around the Ascension are about mourning, loss and leaving behind. "I do not think many people survived the Ascension." She gestures at the empty ruin around them — which would explain it.
• Twenty identical books. Silithane and Magra sweep the shelves for his traced runes (Investigation 23) and find a run of twenty uniform books, spine to spine, all carrying his prison/warning glyph in the same place at the same depth. Either a global record of prisons, or twenty copies of a workplace safety manual — with a handful of symbols and no grammar, there is no telling which.
• A wheelbarrow of undelivered mail. Dr. Xiao Li shows Thalia a year's worth of post nobody has been allowed to send: letters home, research findings addressed to mage towers and schools, and a normal-sized journal on top — "Excerpts from Dr. Xiao Li's memoirs and studies, one year underground." Thalia, whose entire profession is illegal, cannot touch it: "Legally, until I'm contracted to actually send the mail, I can't really touch it."
• Masks on. Malaika — concealed head to foot in trench coat, pinstripe shirt and tie, plague-doctor mask, hat and an enormous wig, on trousers so long the party suspects stilts — knuckles the corrugated wall for silence: "If you breathe in what's in there, you might die. If you touch what's in there, you might die. If you try to drink what's in there, you might die." Eight rebreather masks on the table; Salamandine is left outside with Dr. Lee, who pats him on the head and shuts the door.
• The Autarch's reservoir. Past the changing room and a long double-doored corridor: a room of tiered steps descending into hundreds of gallons of bright green liquid, about ten steps' worth of space left to fill, with two tanks that rumble every few minutes and a central tap that drips one drop every ten to twenty minutes. It is stiflingly hot — "you can see why they had to water-cool the place." By Malaika's telling, this reservoir has been filling for several hundred thousand years, and it is the source of the shard of green glass The Autarch put into the God-Emperor's neck 1,396 years ago, ending an era in which every beast-person was chained and only humans walked free. Afterwards, out in the corridor, it is Dr. Xiao Li who supplies the shards' arithmetic: perhaps a hundred loose ones exist across the globe — a child digging in beach sand might turn one up.
• Immortality is the same tap. Silithane asks the obvious question and Malaika nods slowly: this is the everliving serum. "It is said that for some, this serum will provide unending life, that is a curse in my mind. For others, decay of the flesh, rot of the organs, but life persists regardless" — no better than a necromancer's pet skeleton. The party's own evidence from the under-prison says purity decides which; Malaika offers the darker reading: "perhaps it is all the same stuff and they were too imperfect to have it."
• The eye of the storm. Fenric turns on his magic-sight (Arcana 18) and sees nothing magical anywhere — not the fluid, not the party's spellcasters, not his own magic items. The GM's frame: detection runs 0 to 10 and he is standing in a room reading four billion, so far inside the field that its edge is "two miles to your left." A whole party of casters reads as mundane because the panache oversaturates the sense entirely — which quietly explains why the facility read as non-magical last session.
• The deal, offered and refused. With the party staring into the pool, the GM formally puts the campaign's standing offer on the table: steal the green liquid and replace your blood with it (see Steal Power from the Autarch). He frames the mechanic openly — deals can come from gods, demigods, patrons or whole domains of magic, a character may take up to two, Magra's old blood curse was one, and the other group has already found three. He also notes the grim logic of it: taking it proves the Autarch survived doing exactly this, and if you drained the reservoir entirely you might have technically killed her — or she arrives in about ten seconds. Fenric refuses on the record, Magra refuses flatly, Silithane calls it too risky, and Lash does the maths on a hundred-day life expectancy at Jex — a d100 every time you sleep averages out at a third of a year — before passing herself: "doesn't seem worthwhile." Jex argues back that an already-old character gets the better end of that trade, and declines anyway, because the benefits "don't seem like it's actually worth it worth it." Nobody takes it.
• The symbiote gambit. Lash floats sending one of the party's grafting-gland symbiotes into the pool instead — either it melts, or it takes the effect and the party shares its blood. The GM allows that a grafted symbiote could theoretically absorb the entire reservoir (as the under-prison woman absorbed ten thousand hands) — and notes that Malaika would move to stop an alien making a run at the pool, which is as far as the idea gets in the room. When Lash pitches it to Dr. Xiao Li outright an hour later, she refuses flatly: thousands of gallons of an important substance disappearing under her watch gets her tortured to death. Jex points out they have no blood; the GM adds that with no skeleton either, failing the coin flip leaves nothing behind at all.
• Dr. Lee's impossible position. Out of the masks, Dr. Xiao Li lays out her problem: the facility is under scientific lockdown and has been since before the party arrived, because if one person walks out and says where the green stuff is, someone comes and does something unforgivable with it. But her scientists are expected to report their findings to Laewendas, some of them under oath, and in Rivalon an oath is binding. She can't release them, can't hold them, and can't destroy the thing. "You said you were adventurers and you were here to help, and you were 5 out of 5 on impulse, and either I let you in or you were going to drill the fucking wall open — so I let you in and I've showed you my problem and now I need your help."
• The Laewendas meter. Lash invents a 0-to-5 scale of Laewendas loyalty on the spot and gets Dr. Lee to place herself at 3.5 — then talks her down to 2 with the village whose children were taken and killed for thirty years, the quarter-share taxes, the forest of zombies, and commanders who pillage rather than police. Dr. Lee's read on her own staff: everyone is a 1 to 1.5 — "apart from Malaika. She unsettles me."
• The plan, and the hostage. Dr. Xiao Li agrees to call a general meeting tomorrow night, announce that she and one other are travelling out with the party "to check in on something," and leave the rest to squabble over the coffee machine. She wants to meet this resistance before she trusts seventeen lives to it. Her insurance is Magra, who stays behind at the facility — "if she hangs out with Magra, then you guys are more likely to come back."
• Out through the airlock, quietly. The party cycles out one door at a time (still no way to have both open at once). Silithane knocks on the second sealed deep door — nothing answers — and fires off a Message that lands on Long Tim before he cuts himself off mid-sentence, remembering they weren't telling anyone they were leaving.
• Into the bone dragon's lair. The party sneaks down through the hole Lash blew in the old cave-in: a stair of 15-to-20-foot drops, deep water, then a horror-movie stomach-crawl through a flooded tunnel. Thalia — for whom this is a stack of her worst fears — shuts her eyes, breathes water and is dragged through by the foot. With Pass Without Trace, the worst roll is a 19. The dragon has gone back to sleep, and the crawl is far too narrow for it to follow.
• The sword in its skull. Driven up through the soft of the dragon's lower jaw and out through the middle of its forehead is a magic sword — the weapon that killed it, left where it landed. Fenric curls "the tiniest little tip of his tiniest little pinky claw" around the grip (Sleight of Hand 16 with advantage and one of Lash's d6s, against the dragon's 6) and uses his Spellbreaker instant Identify: a +2 dragon-slaying short sword, double damage against dragons and draconids. It is fully embedded — nobody is pulling it while the thing is, air quotes, alive. The party leaves it and plans to come back and fight for it.
• Finishing the water tunnels. Three dead ends: the southernmost explained by a partial collapse, and two more beyond it with, waiting among the debris, two giant spiders phased into the ethereal — visible only as silhouettes, invisible to Fenric's magic-sight, sitting on bodies and possible loot. One phases in to snap at Silithane's bat and gets nothing: he dismisses the familiar out of existence inside its closing jaws. The party leaves that fight for another day.
• The shade that wanted them to dig. In the last unexplored passage, a shade stands holding a spectral mining pick, trying and failing to dig through a blocked wall — the first of the mine's shades to show what to do rather than what not to. Two convenient pickaxes lie nearby. A 16 on the die means the dig doesn't collapse the room, and past the rubble is a miners' meeting room: furniture, a chest of drawers, a large table, letters, journals, instructions, meeting notes — and one of the union meeting agendas (snacks and tea). These miners died in a rockfall trying to tunnel from here toward the lab in the south; they had got as far as the first bricks of the water tunnels before it came down on them. The GM explains the shade's rule afterwards: if nobody is near and nobody is digging, he drops to his knees and screams; if you dig, he digs with you.
• The date rolls over. The party crosses into the 23rd of New Summer at around 1 AM, roughly 25-30 hours underground without sleep. Still level 7 — one pip short.

Combat & Encounters

• No combat this session. Not a single roll for initiative — the closest thing to a fight is a bat being eaten.
• The bone dragon (scouted, not fought). The party reaches the Deep Skeleton Dragon's lair from the far side and finds it dormant after ~6-10 hours; it stays asleep. Group stealth 19-28 with Thalia's Pass Without Trace. Key tactical facts learned: the flooded crawl-tunnel is too small for the dragon to fit through, so the approach doubles as an escape route, and the step-drops down are easy to descend and very hard to climb in a panic. Fenric risks a touch-Identify on the sword in its skull rather than wake it. The GM's assessment: killing it would take "a couple hours next week" and is possibly doable for a mid-level group with preparation — and it is worth a pip.
• The two phased spiders (avoided). Two giant spiders, ethereal and phased out among the rubble of the collapsed water tunnels, waiting in an ambush spot. They cannot be seen properly, don't register to magic-sight, and there are bodies in the debris around them. One phases in to lunge at Silithane's bat familiar; he snaps the familiar out of existence mid-bite, and the spider chews twice on nothing and shuffles back to its perch. Left alive and unfought — very likely the GM's "another fight here that's worth a pip."
• The hazard that wasn't. Digging out the shade's blocked wall carried a rockfall risk in the exact room where a rockfall had already killed a crew; a flat d20 = 16 meant the party did not bring it down on themselves.

NPCs & Factions

• Dr. Xiao Li (central) — the facility's overseer, and this session the character with the worst problem in the room. She admits she let the party in on impulse rather than have them drill through her wall, that she has kept seventeen people under lockdown for a year, and that she has no plan: her staff owe Laewendas reports (some by oath), the green room can't be released or destroyed, and she can't jail her colleagues forever. She rates herself 3.5 of 5 on loyalty to Laewendas and drops to 2 by the end of the conversation. She agrees to meet the party's resistance in person, travelling out with one assistant — and keeps Magra behind as collateral.
• Malaika (new — the session's mystery) — the masked, wigged, possibly stilt-walking keeper of the green pool, who tells the Autarch's story like scripture and believes the facility's true job is to "protect it for her until she needs it." She calls Dr. Xiao Li "naive" and "foolish" for trusting the party. Dr. Xiao Li trusts her judgement on the goop absolutely and, in the same breath, admits she does not remember her being on the science team — and that she is the one person here who unsettles her.
• Rosa (new) — the sun-obsessed observer at the control window, isolated from her colleagues by a year of chasing one theory. Openly braced for ridicule, and half-right: the lever is genuinely a sun-thing bearing the glyph for dawn, and genuinely cannot be pulled — because it isn't a lever. She spends her hoarded sunlight scroll on a stranger's hunch without hesitation, and ends the session pinning red string with Lash.
• Minimika (new — the chief translator) — the facility's chief translator and librarian, a tiny, four-strength, glasses-shoving bookworm who catalogues ten thousand unreadable books by leaving glowing illusion-copies in their slots. She cracks the depth-equals-magnitude rule of Foredweller writing on sight, keeps Silithane's Ankley Island tracings, marks the island on her map for a future visit, and gives him a contact rune for Sending. Her verdict on the Ascension is the session's coldest line of lore.
• Tink (met) — the half-raccoon, half-fox tinkerer, twin-goggled, forever disassembling a lever handle that came off something. Deduced flight was impossible for the Ancients from the footwear in the changing room; his other great finding is the toilets. Dr. Xiao Li on his portfolio: "I trust Tink on — I don't even know what he does. Mostly toilets, I guess." (Almost certainly the Dr. Martin Tinker referenced in Session 52.)
• Marge (revisited) — the facility's water specialist confirms from the party's description of the mine's coloured lever bank that the green lever being lit means the system is running correctly, then declines the invitation to come and read the Foredweller waterways in person: she's under lockdown, and the party mentioned being chased by a dragon. "I'm not particularly interested. Been risking my life." Silithane's workaround — a relay of people shouting lever readings back down the tunnels so the party can throw the problem levers on her instructions — she kills outright: "I cannot begin to say how bad of an idea that is."
• Long Tim (revisited) — his stated specialty is the hallucinatory effects of the goop residue. He is also the unlucky recipient of Silithane's aborted Message on the way out.
• The Autarch (lore) — told properly for the first time, by someone who reveres her. 1,396 years ago she stabbed a man who had killed every god, made himself the only one, and put every beast-person in chains; the weapon was a piece of green glass. Malaika treats her as the world's absent guardian, whose reserve the facility must "protect for her until she needs it"; the GM's own framing of what draining it would cost is blunter — "you've killed the Autarch, and now the world doesn't have like its Superman." Dr. Xiao Li raises the question nobody can answer: if the Autarch was first seen 1,390-odd years ago, why is the machinery that makes her power half a million years old? Did she steal it exactly the way the party was just invited to?
• Laewendas (referenced) — the shadow over every conversation in the lab. Some of the scientists are oath-bound to report their findings to her, and some are "very enthusiastic" to tell her what the green room could make her. Dr. Lee's fear, from someone nominally on her side: "even if she was good now, it is too long. 10,000 years can change things." Lash's counter-evidence — the murdered children, the taxes, the zombie forest, the pillaging commanders — moves her by a point and a half.
• BAWMU (referenced) — a union meeting agenda turns up among the papers in the buried miners' meeting room, with snacks and tea on it.

Locations

• The Foredweller Research Facility (fully toured) — the rest of the lab is mapped this session: Rosa's locked control window, the open theory room, Tink's bench, a supply cupboard and two Foredweller toilets, the storeroom of Ancient clothing and belongings (described by Dr. Lee, never entered), the library of ~10,000 books, a changing/locker airlock stocked with rebreather masks, the green pool room behind two sets of doors, and the southern protective doors the team originally tunnelled in through — south on the facility's own map, though the bored tunnel beyond them runs out to the mountain's north face, which is the way the party intends to leave. Plus the Long Walk: an empty corridor running at least 28 miles — the furthest anyone has gone and come back — heading roughly seven hexes southwest, believed to lead to another facility like this one.
• The green pool room (within the facility) — a tiered communal bath of the panache in liquid form, hundreds of gallons deep with about ten steps left to fill, dripping one drop every ten to twenty minutes from machinery hundreds of thousands of years old. Lethal to breathe, touch or drink without a mask. It is the reason the facility exists, the reason nobody is allowed to leave, and the reason Fenric's magic-sight is useless within it.
• The Menagoles Mines (the deep, finished) — the party closes out the mine's flooded water tunnels (three dead ends, the southernmost a partial collapse, and two ethereal spiders), reaches the bone dragon's lair from the far side through the blown cave-in, and digs open a sealed miners' meeting room where a crew died in a rockfall trying to tunnel south toward the lab — stopping a few feet short of the water tunnels' first bricks.

Loot, Items & Rewards

• A +2 dragon-slaying short sword (found, identified, not taken) — embedded through the bone dragon's jaw and forehead, the blade that originally killed it. +2 to hit and damage against anything, and double damage against dragons and draconids; normal short-sword size, usable by Silithane or Fenric. Immovable while the dragon still animates. Lash can eventually upgrade it toward legendary. See Dragon-Slaying Short Sword.
• A library card — minted, one of a kind, issued to Lash by the facility's Librarians Guild member and stamped on return. Place of issue: "Secret Underground Bunker." The borrowed book proved useless; the card is the loot.
• A contact rune — Minimika's personal sigil, scribbled on paper and handed to Silithane, to be drawn in chalk whenever he Sends to her so the message isn't auto-filtered.
• Two mining pickaxes — picked up from the digging shade's passage and used to open the buried meeting room.
• The buried meeting room's papers — letters, journals, instructions, meeting notes and a BAWMU union meeting agenda, recovered from the rockfall room. Unread on screen.
• Spent: Rosa's spell scroll of sunlight (5th-level, destroyed in the casting) and Silithane's bat familiar (dismissed to save it from a spider; re-summonable). No level, no pip — still level 7.

Decisions & Open Threads

• The deal is on the table and nobody took it. The Autarch's power was formally offered and unanimously declined (Steal Power from the Autarch). The offer does not expire, the reservoir is not going anywhere, and the party now knows the terms in full — including that draining it entirely might kill the Autarch outright, and that failing the coin flip would erase Jex rather than skeletonise them.
• What does the facility do now? Dr. Xiao Li has asked the party for a plan she can't produce herself. The live options raised at the table: turn the scientists against Laewendas and fold them into the resistance; stage a collapse at the north tunnel so the facility "disappears"; parse the exact wording of each oath (report findings, or report to Laewendas?) to see who is actually bound; or shut the machinery off — which might cut off the Autarch's own power supply. Nothing is decided. The general meeting is tomorrow night.
• Magra is the hostage. Magra stays at the facility while the rest of the party finishes the mine, guaranteeing their return. The deal is friendly, but she is nonetheless the collateral.
• Who is Malaika? She is not on Dr. Xiao Li's memory of the science team, she conceals every identifying feature, she may be standing on stilts, she knows more about the green substance than anyone, and she guards it in the Autarch's name. Lash wants her unmasked; Dr. Lee calls it a bee's nest best left unpoked. Silithane's guess: an Ancient — which Dr. Xiao Li shoots down on the party's own evidence, since stilts would mean the wearer is small and "the ancients are very large." (Lash's illusion-piercing sun-sight had already lapsed by the time they met her.)
• The party is carrying a Rosetta Stone and never mentioned it. The table spent a full scene concluding that cracking the Foredweller language needs a bilingual tablet like the real Rosetta Stone — while holding The Deciphering Tablet, exactly that, claimed in Session 42 and studied by Jex for 20 of its 365 days. A chief translator who has spent a year on ten thousand unreadable books is standing in front of them.
• The Long Walk. At least 28 miles of Foredweller corridor heading southwest from the lab, believed to run to a sister facility. Nobody has walked it to the end; the party's map-guessing put it beyond anything they recognise, possibly under the sea.
• The Ascension was a catastrophe. The Foredweller "ascension" the horned fisherman described as an honour — "no one is buried there, they have ascended" — reads in the ruin's own runes as mourning, loss and leaving behind, with few survivors. The Shrine of the Immortals is now a much darker destination.
• Rosa's lever. Not a lever: a disguised, magical sun-thing marked dawn, that tracks the sun's position and cannot be pulled by strength. Whether it reads the sun or runs it, and whether some other means (a spell, one of the books) could operate it, is wide open — and both Dr. Lee and Rosa now regard it as a reason nobody may ever come down here.
• The sword in the dragon. A +2 dragon-slaying short sword is sitting in a boss-tier undead dragon's skull, in a lair the party can enter and escape through a crawl the dragon cannot follow. The GM rates the fight as doable with preparation and worth a pip.
• Three pips left in the mountain. The GM names the remaining rewards: the bone dragon, another fight down here (the phased spiders), and the boss of the mining camp up top — the party noting the noble himself is trivial and the real threat is his Queensguard. Any one of them takes the party to level 8.
• Getting out. The plan is now to finish the mine, return through the facility, and leave by the scientists' north tunnel — which nobody has used in a year, has no checkpoint at the top, and may or may not have collapsed or grown its own tenants.
• Carryover: the report owed to Eldrich the Elder on the mine disaster (the actual job); the strike on Knucklebones at Lambert's Crossing; the two unopened deep doors; the mine's underwater city; the captive alchemist Snuffles and the sleeping angelborn; the fifty-plus waiting dead; Thalia's undelivered druid tomes; the Grey Man; the held soul candles, cursed mask and the two grafting-gland symbiotes; Jex's legal non-existence; the imprisoned Caressa; and the eventual siege of Cathalon.
• Roster. Fenric (Fantom), Thalia (Cara), Lash (Kadie), Jex (Nat) and Silithane (Johan) for the full session; Mia left partway, which the GM handled in-fiction by leaving Magra at the facility as Dr. Lee's guarantee. Neko has no active PC (Valmora left in Session 44); Ashlyn's player and Draak remain away. Still level 7.

Memorable Moments

• "I believe that that lever controls the sun." Rosa laying out a year of minute-by-minute charts, watch averages and one translated glyph to a room of strangers, fully expecting to be laughed at — and Silithane answering "Go ahead, I'm in."
• The alligator. Lash describing the sun's symbol by making an alligator mouth with her arms, then with her whole body, one leg in the air — and, per the table, never actually stopping.
• A library card from the Secret Underground Bunker. Filling in next-of-kin paperwork with an illegal librarian twenty to thirty miles underground, borrowing a book the size of a torso, and having the card stamped on return for books that were already free.
• "If you breathe in what's in there, you might die." Malaika's three-part warning, Fenric's reply — "That's like half our job" — and the GM's aside: "you've gone into this room, but it's the next room you'll die in."
• Four billion. Fenric switching on the magic-sight he uses three times a day and seeing nothing at all, then realising the reading isn't zero — it's off the scale, and he is standing in the middle of it.
• The sun's reply. Lash getting exactly what she asked for and finding it is a being that does not care that she exists. Not an enemy. Not a friend. Just busy.
• "Whoever you spoke to was uneducated — which is funny to say, because he was a fisherman." A chief translator correcting a five-hundred-year-dead skeleton's grammar from a charcoal rubbing.
• The shade with a pickaxe. After a whole mine of ghosts screaming don't, one finally kneels at a wall and mimes dig — and digs alongside the party when they pick up the picks.
• Thalia, eyes shut, dragged through a flooded crawl by one foot. Cave-ins and drowning, both at once, handled by breathing water and refusing to look.

SUMMARY: The party tours the deep Foredweller lab — Rosa's sun-lever, a 10,000-book library, the Ancients' toilets and the 28-mile Long Walk — and Lash burns a sunlight scroll to learn the lever is a disguised sun-glyph and that the sun is indifferent to her; the masked Malaika then shows them the reservoir of green panache that armed the Autarch 1,396 years ago and every player declines the DM's offer to mainline it, leaving Dr. Xiao Li begging for a way out of her own lockdown (Magra stays as collateral) before the party sneaks into the bone dragon's lair and finds a +2 dragon-slaying short sword buried in its skull. Still level 7, one pip short, 23rd of New Summer.