Moon's Haunted/Session 3

As night on Kamens approached, a few members of the party sought to alleviate the stresses of the day’s events with therapy sessions with Eleanor. De Vranne grudgingly accepted a bit of Eleanor’s counsel (albeit alongside a gift of stimulants and beta blockers). Dozir, on the other hand, took a great deal of comfort in Eleanor’s therapy and changed his attitude for the better towards Kesdis's apparent coldness in leadership. Seeing the positive results of the sessions, Abbey as well hinted to Eleanor at a secret which she needed support in keeping.

The party secured its new ship and left the engine running on *La Petite Mort*, hoping its remaining etheric energy would draw away any potential predators. Half of the party took up posts atop the crag, while the rest patrolled the inside of the ship. Thus the party began its first 16-hour, two-shift night cycle. The first 8 hours of night brought on a strange numbing effect, perhaps the heaviness which miners had told of on Nocturne. It subdued Dozir and Moirin to sleep, and they joined off-duty Rimm and de Vranne in a shared dream of a gigantic subterranean cavern chamber, ceiling lit by a charged quicksilver motherlode. Most of the cave’s floor was but a rim to a vast, abyssal hole, blacker than black. A select few of the dreamers bore witness to the silhouette of a massive spider, exponentially larger than any seen so far, waiting in this hole, before the dream’s abrupt end.

Observation by the party’s second shift taught a few new things about Kamens. Spotters from the Crag observed swarms of smaller spiders pour out of the ATC’s mining tunnels in the crater at night. Further, groups of the smaller Celestials from earlier joined them from their vents and appeared to pass unharmed among the spiders. The Celestials spent the night dragging bodies out of the ATC facility and leaving them at the mouth of the mining tunnels, seemingly as an offering (perhaps to make it easier for the spiders to take them deeper into the tunnel system, as the spiders were mostly not large enough to have the strength to drag bodies for long distances.)

At the end of the night, the spiders returned to their tunnels, and the Celestials, making what must have been a holy gesture, returned to their vents. Meanwhile, the ship’s spotters observed from the bridge that one of the surface’s larger spiders was indeed attracted to *La Petite Mort*, though it turned out to have no interest in the simple etheric emanations from the running engine, and instead poked around the craft looking for organics. Finding none, it demonstrated strength enough to roll the craft in its frustration.

As morning came, the party jumped on its chance to explore further, and after finding that Rimm’s "peace" letter had been taken (but went unanswered), descended down the freight elevator into the crater and finally entered the mining facility proper. The elevator ride offered the party a chance to see torn-apart miner bodies dotting a few roofs in the camp. It seemed likely that these were the shreds of miners who had climbed the buildings by hand in their final moments of possessed insanity before having a spider burst from them and leave their flesh behind to rot. Reaching the facility, the party split in two. Many of the combatants departed towards the mining tunnels leading deeper into the planet, hoping to triage any remaining spider threat from the night before.

Tunnel A had caved in at the entrance, but Tunnel B was the site of a catastrophe of gore. At least three dozen bodies lay stacked just inside the entrance, with countless blood trails leading deeper inside and indicating that this was probably just one more round of a nightly process of harvesting the miners’ bodies. (Likely, the Celestials were getting them out of buildings and tight spots for the spiders, who took them over from the tunnels. But why the Celestials couldn’t just go all the way into the tunnels themselves was unclear.) Hearing shouts and moans from deeper inside, the combat team progressed a few meters to find none other than Pete Wilson impaled to the bottom of a stalagmite, struggling and barely alive. De Vranne attempted to treat his wounds, hoping to calm him with news that Paul was alright. Upon finding that Paul was on his way off-world to spread his infection, however, Pete broke into an evil laugh as a spider emerged from his torso, bisecting him. It leapt at the team, but was promptly shredded by machine gun fire. Before heading any deeper, the team observed the cave-in of Tunnel A. A detailed scan revealed that it had been caused by explosives, and done from the inside. More interestingly, a few human figures with normal etheric signatures seemed to be idling on the other side, backs to the cave-in.

Meanwhile, Rimm, le Fou, Lockheart, and Abbey explored the camp’s barracks for clues. Among bodies killed equally by beastly violence or apparent spider emergences, they found a number of logs hinting at camp life. Though everyone felt the typical effects of the planet, much of the camp was more scared of Dr. Gant than anything else. Any workplace injuries, or reports of acute stress or “hallucination,” were taken to Gant (though strangely, none ever mentioned where Gant was actually located). Those individuals were invariably never seen again. This led the miners to stop reporting their mental problems at what was apparently a critical mass, as swaths of the camp descended into obvious hysteria. The worst affected were those miners which had worked the night shift, who commonly reported seeing things on the walls and ceilings in the deepest parts of the tunnels and hearing ominous chittering. Interestingly, Renata had apparently been the foreman of the night shift, and was responsible for pressuring workers who had experienced such things to stay on their shifts and tough it out at the risk of being "disappeared" by Gant. Also interestingly, the camp’s cafeteria and commissary were ransacked of any food whatsoever. Perhaps the Celestials had taken it? The team left a bit of food as a peace offering.

Perhaps the strangest find within the barracks, however, was a bunk room which had been locked and cordoned off by Dr. Gant as “under quarantine.” Hoping to ascertain what was on the other side of its door, Lockheart shot her etheric projection device at the door, but broke off contact suddenly after everyone present heard a deeply pained woman’s scream erupt from the device (confusing Rimm, but apparently not Lockheart.) Breaking in, the party found evidence of a spider emergence from a shredded body on the ground, and carvings all over the walls and ceiling probably made by the miner while he lived. Most prominent in the room was some sort of holy symbol, three large concentric circles. These seemed to Rimm to possibly be a callback to his dream of the cavern chamber, and the great hole within it. What the smallest, centermost circle might represent, though, was unclear.

The rest of the room’s carvings all appeared to be the same single word over and over. Strangely, Rimm and Lockheart could both deduce that it was a word, and both recognized it to be in a language that they subconsciously should be able to understand, yet both faced some sort of mental block preventing them from actually reading the word or characterizing it, almost as if they were able to see the shape of a forest without being able to pick out individual trees. Sensing a perfect opportunity to use her cryptographic device, Lockheart acquired some readings. Even the device itself was unable to fully read and translate the word, but it did gather a few things: first, the word was a sort of portmanteau of Celestial and Elder Script, and mashed together a few separate concepts in a sort of compound word (how the miner knew how to carve such a thing was unknown.) Perhaps most interestingly, the device identified one of the expressed concepts in the compound word: the term for “trapdoor.”

The soldiers prepared to press deeper into the mining tunnels as Rimm and Lockheart headed away from the barracks and towards the administration and records buildings...