Moon's Haunted/Session 4

The session opened with the exploration of the ATC mining camp’s administration building by Gaston, le Fou, Lockheart, and Abbey. Outside the office of the administrator himself, the building held little information except for within the logs of the administrator’s assistant. These, however, offered an interesting look into the final days of the camp. The logs explained that the administrator began to show signs of deepening madness early on, but refused to seek treatment, in part to put on a brave face for the camp but more relevantly because he too was afraid of being disappeared by Gant. Apparently, Gant had been assigned to every mining rotation since the second (the one after first contact with Kamens’ strange phenomena) and was not a camp asset, but sent straight from ATC headquarters as a separate entity—as such, the administrator did not have any authority over Gant or his resources, and suspected Gant might in fact have more power than himself. In any case, according to the assistant, the administrator was largely unaware of what was actually inside Gant’s office.

Because of this, the assistant gradually noticed strange obsessions take the administrator. The assistant was given orders first to shred all the camp’s personnel files, then all records of how deep the mines actually were, then any files about the scientific and geologic discoveries made on Kamens (the assistant couldn’t execute the final, as he found all those files were kept in Gant’s office out of the administrative office’s reach.) The final order the administrator issued to the miners was apparently to stop mining the quicksilver inside the tunnels, but instead just to dig down as deep as possible to prepare for “future infrastructure.” He assigned all security personnel to watch over the front of these mining operations to prevent dissent. Presumably, this meant they were all killed first when the final attack on the camp happened.
After reading these logs, the team entered cautiously into the office of the administrator himself, finding a very similar scene to the quarantined bunk — the shredded body of the administrator, alongside three concentric circles painted on the wall in the administrator’s blood. Few files remained within his office. Gaston uncovered only pages of nothing but the strange word found earlier, until finally discovering a cache of heavily redacted documents on Gant. These papers, though offering little new information, did provide the party with a picture of Gant and a crude map of the general area of his office, which appeared to be in the tunnels to enable quick access for wounded miners.

More spookily, Lockheart sensed that the entire room’s etheric energy had been wholly drained and had been turned into a null space. Lockheart guessed that based on the vague curvature of space and gravity around the symbol on the wall, the local etheric energy drain had been caused by a sort of hypergravitation of energy towards the symbol as a vortex. This struck Lockheart as strange, as it was not a traditional power of any deities. More importantly, it was perhaps a microcosm of the slow etheric drain throughout the planet and even the system. Lockheart pondered what the source of this huge gravitational pull could be. Armed with information about Gant, the camp team rejoined the tunnel team to report their findings and face the tunnels together.

Meanwhile, aboard the freighter, Nolwen noticed something during her patrols. The great spider which had overturned La Petite Mort had damaged numerous parts of the hull, and shredded arrays from the communications systems spilled out from the broken windows. But hanging from one of these arrays, likely previously hidden but now visible, was what appeared to be a listening device paired with a transponder not of ATC make. Wary of the potential security implications, Nolwen did not report the finding by radio to the ground team, but instead waited for their return to inform them in person.

The party began its trek down Tunnel B, hoping to reach the connector to Tunnel A which would allow it to investigate the human etheric signatures near Tunnel A’s cave-in. It was not long before the party encountered the sinkhole down which the spiders appeared to be taking the bodies of the ATC miners it had not destroyed via emergences. Wary of an ambush, the party dropped a grenade down it. O’Clery noted that the sinkhole appeared bottomless, and that the grenade was swallowed up by near-tangible darkness and non-Euclidian geometries before it could ever detonate. Moirin covered the hole with claymore tripwires before progressing.

Moving kilometers deeper into the tunnels, the party eventually came upon sections whose quicksilver had gone unmined, and noted that despite the day cycle the crystals’ absorbed etheric charge from the air around them was far weaker than it ought to be. These tunnels were also gradually more perforated with a number of 1-to-2 ft wide vents along sides and ceilings, just the right size for spiders. The party readied its weapons and moved de Vranne and Kesdis to the front. De Vranne, however, began to have a Very Bad Time. De Vranne’s eardrums swelled with the sound of thousands of spider legs skittering inside the walls and vents though none could be seen, and realized that he had finally experienced what all the miners had called the Chittering. Meanwhile, the party watched him tense and start at nothing visible. Explaining what he heard and finding no one else had heard it, de Vranne argued that others in the party had been hearing strange things that not everyone could. However, when called out, no one in the party was willing to fess up to this to Kesdis.

Confidence in de Vranne a bit shaken, but still accepting the likelihood of contact (noises or not), Kesdis kept de Vranne at the front and prepared for a fight. But as de Vranne took point underneath a particularly large vent in the ceiling, he alone saw a spider laying in wait to drop. Stumbling on the draw, de Vranne took the brunt of the spider pouncing on him and beginning to grapple him. Seeing de Vranne fall, but strangely, appear to struggle against something invisible on top of him, O’Clery whipped the space above him but found no target. The whip’s crack, however, roused de Vranne from what was an apparent hallucination. De Vranne pleaded he had been tackled and attacked, and asked whether it looked like he had fallen because of some force or his own accord. The clumsiness of his pivot to shoot towards the vent, however, made it unclear whether he had just accidentally tripped. By now, some in the party wondered if de Vranne was beginning to lose it, and Lockheart asked Kesdis to check him for black masses on his body. De Vranne argued against stripping his armor in a combat zone, and the party warily agreed to table the issue until they were back on the ship.

The party’s arguing, however, offered cover for a few spiders to emerge from their vents and sneak toward the party. Vigilance by Abbey allowed the party to slay them without much incident, but some made an interesting observation about how far the noise of their gunfire carried—sound in the tunnels was somehow being dampened, possibly to allow the spiders to hunt more effectively. This was to Lockheart even more evidence of some planet-wide hypergravitation of energy, as the dampening meant sound waves were being sapped from the environment just as much as the air’s own etheric charge. Scans of the air in the tunnels found that it did not have as much etheric charge as it ought to, and that its charge was even weaker in the vent from which de Vranne had supposedly been attacked.

After about three kilometers of marching, the party finally came upon the junction into Tunnel A, but was faced with an unexpected stimulus, the smell of a cooking fire further down Tunnel B. Gaston smelled burning paper and heated ATC MREs, and correctly intuited that whoever was cooking, they were using camp records as kindling to cook food taken from the camp cafeteria. This meant that whoever was down there was probably also whoever had cleaned the camp out of all of its food, and that it could be the small Celestials, or even ATC survivors. Most of the party wanted to check this out before crossing into the junction, but Kesdis alone argued that investigating Gant was the mission priority and that he was probably through the junction. The party agreed to cross through the junction just to see what was immediately on the other side. Coming out of the connector, a sealed airlock door was indeed visible in the opposite wall of Tunnel A. A reference to the administrator’s map confirmed this was probably the door to Gant’s clinic and lab. But as the party approached, it noticed cart rails lined the floor of Tunnel A, and about 100 meters towards the cave-in, two living, sane ATC miners spotted the party and took cover behind a railed mining laser.

Demanding the party’s identities, the miners readied weapons and charged the mining laser, which the party could now see had crisped scores of spiders in the other direction. A failed attempt by de Vranne to intimidate the miners into submission only gave the miners cause to call for backup and to fully charge the laser. There would be no crossing Tunnel A towards Gant’s office until the situation was defused. Gaston, however, realized the miners were likely starving, and offered the sentry team rations of beans from his own supply; the sentries dropped their suspicion long enough to allow Gaston and Lockheart to walk food over to them, and Gaston convinced them that the party meant them no harm and knew as little as they did.

Satisfied the party was neither possessed nor an ATC hit team (at least, not for them), the miners explained that there were other survivors holed up against the Tunnel A cave-in three kilometers back, which they had caused in order to leave only one possible way into their hiding spot. The team of two were acting as sentries against spiders heading in that direction, but also as a kind of bait. They reasoned that if they were overwhelmed far enough away from the camp, then the spiders might not realize there were more survivors to kill at the end of Tunnel A, which would buy time for the camp to reestablish defenses. The sentries further explained that the spiders seemed to have a hive mind, and what one could see, all could—so if they were ever spotted leaving or returning their post, it could lead the spiders into the camp. The sentries also corroborated that the airlock door was Gant’s office, and that some great battle had happened inside after the final attack on the ATC facility had already taken place, but no one had been seen leaving. Concluding that if the door was sealed now, it could stay that way for a while longer, the party agreed to evacuate the miners back to the freighter, and sent Moirin, Lockheart and Abbey to the camp at the end of Tunnel A to blow open a hole in the cave-in and escort them.

Arriving at the hideout, while Moirin prepared charges Lockheart noted that for humans that had spent nearly two months on Kamens, the miners were comparatively very sane. Examining the area, she realized why: the miners had been sleeping and sheltering in etherically-shielded mining equipment that had been originally meant to deflect energy released by lasering and cutting of quicksilver crystals. The mining equipment had apparently had the reverse effect as well—the miners had not been subject to absorption of their own energy by the planet so long as they stayed in the cabins of the equipment. Moirin blew open the cave-in and the team brought the dozen survivors to the freight elevator up out of the crater and towards the freighter LZ.

During the painfully slow ascent of the elevator, however, the team came under sniper fire by the small Celestials, a group of which had popped from their vents on the crater’s rim and were now shooting blindly into the crowd. With none on the team possessing a gun to return fire, two miners were cut down and one was grievously wounded before Lockheart could prepare a rune to shield the group as it disembarked and sprinted to the safety of the ship. As the Celestials withdrew back into their holes, the team finally got its first good view of the figures—small, hunched, very pale, and by all accounts looking like the inhabitants of Nocturne. The team concluded that these small Celestial figures were in fact the descendants of the original Nocturnals which had become stranded on Kamens a thousand years ago—but how could they have been surviving?

The evac team radioed its findings to the rest of the party as it decided next to investigate the fire smell, and found that their current distance away (about four kilometers between the ship and the junction) was about as far as radios would work; any further, and communications could fail. Approaching the fire, Gaston was surprised to hear voices speak not in Celestial, but in Vedlys. The voices were apparently aware both of the spiders and the Tunnel A survivors, and ambivalent towards the latter. Gaston called out to them, shocking them, but quickly followed with offerings of peace. Not yet able to see the party, the voices argued amongst themselves about how to answer, apparently thinking they were talking to the Tunnel A survivors; one was concerned that it was "Evrikson’s trick," but the other thought it was worth the risk if the speakers had supplies and guns.

Accepting an offer to parley with Gaston, two figures walked into view. Gaston was amazed to see that these individuals did not fit the description of the small Celestials the evac team had given, but instead appeared healthier and were covered in the ceremonial tattoos and brandings associated with servants of Perfect Princes. Gaston realized that these were not Nocturnals, but the descendants of the Perfect Prince raiding party which had occupied Nocturne and disappeared on Kamens about 200 years ago. De Vranne noted to himself that if it had been that long and they were still using the Prince’s markings, some maintenance of hierarchy must still be happening.

With ten traumatized miners on its ship and the new knowledge that Kamens hosts not one, but two intelligent populations, the party prepared to negotiate with the Prince’s servants…