Week Six — The Crake & Gridslop Farm, and a Dark End

My maps have grown inscrutable. (I'm moving them below. They distract me). 

As ever, the dungeon provides something. Similarly garbled, similarly chaotic. Surprisingly satisfying. 

I maintain something like the pace of an undead pirate who's been shot by a musket in the shins, bone splintered, as pointed and plural as the sea urchin it steps across to reach the shore. 

In short, still here, still wondering as I walk slowly forward against a current, what is this thing I am, undersea.

And who will I eat when I reach land.

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs or things needing definition beyond the provided

2/8 The Gridslop Farm — Gridslop is funny stuff. It grows in cubes of clay, run through with an electrified lattice, something like a 3-dimensional version of the hatch-comb in modern concrete. Typically the stuff arises in estuary beds where the gridslop can have the necessary moisture, salts, and substrate that nurture it, but it's diasporatic—it spreads out across vast sections of territory as a single organism, hungry for the faint pulse of energy found in change, in delta, in the waves, currents, heat and cooling, all that exist quite naturally at the boundary climes. 

But no two gridslop can bound one another. Massive gridslop miles wide were found in clay basins off the Chaguare River, and meter-thin strips just as readily. But the moment they were moved adjacent, an incredible conflict ensued, one gridslop would overtake the other (usually the smaller overtaking the larger), the clay or wet stone substrate would often brittle as explosive consumption of nutrient and water would occur and the victorious gridslop would enter the space fully and spread out, other creathers therein (as well as vegetal life) suffering much as modern human civilians (collateral?) might in any war.

So the 8' x 8' cubes of gridslop here in CTV9 are electrified in blocks of clay to keep them fed. They are moved by mechanical pokers operated by the crakes, which spin them for watering.

The pokers (arms) are not robotic, only mechanical, while the currents are drawn from several huge lithium batteries brought up from the car facility on level 11. 

•

2/9 The How of Gridslop — Knowing that gridslop is done up in these electrified cubes, to be kept separate, how does it square up against CTV9's existing superstructure? 

The old agency newsroom—long partitioned desks, screens, the mounted risers up to the newscaster's dais and desk are all down in the open pit of the third floor, but here in 2/8 and /9, one can stroll around a walkway that looks down into the newsroom. 

Of course it's easy to get in the way of the diligent crakes whose forewoman and matriarch Krim Inodo-Gye will liaison any social engagement as a matter of clan culture. 

The great mechanical two-prong forks that turn or spin the gridslop cubes have mounts and controls in three adjacent rooms detailed ahead in 2/11. When a gridslop cube has reached full maturity, it is lowered to the flensing tank in 3/18 where it is pressed to a control cube containing a secondary culture of gridslop; the two engage, destroying the large cube's tenant, the cube is raked of the now-dead tenant's matter, a new control cube packed and set aside, and the bulk of the clay passed through fresh-water sluices to the rinsing tubs in 3/19. The cube is reconstituted over the course of two weeks, re-sewn with nutrient and bathed in the periodic dumps of salt-water from the overhead buckets until a new gridslop colony is introduced to its form. 

At any time, 7 great clay cubes are being nourished and an 8th is being reformed. PCs walking around this production ought to be concerned with interrupting the crakes manipulating the forks, and to a lesser extent, the forks themselves, which are relatively sedate but huge. The crakes possess a base psionic telekenesis that makes it possible to manipulate the forks and the heavy matter of the cubes with ease. Similarly, pushing a PC to a second-story fall or similar in self-defense would not be demonised in any local court. 

Treasure — a hallway, really, so the most is perhaps a cavern wrench and pipe lock left on a ledge built into one of the walls (of several).

Exits —

• to 3/18 (Newsroom) (vaulting the half-wall, climbing the forks, and scaling the farm structure) 
• to 2/11 (Fork Mounts and Controls)

NPCs —

• Krim Inodo-Gye, crake forewoman (if called for)
• 4 crake, working overhead buckets and the forks here and in 2/11

•

2/10 - Huge Gridslop Storage — the way the old newsroom has been trifurcated is new construction in the last hundred years, walls made as much by the stuff they're storing as containing the stuff they're storing—gridslop by the pallet, kept in rollable casks that vent the (initially boggish scented) off-gassing via the bornwax lids (a semi-porous hide-like filament kept in rolls in/near the casking room in 3/20). 

Individual crakes can move the hefty 50-65kg casks by themselves via the butterfly strands roped on hooks below. 

Several pump risers allow a 2nd hand to lift the carrying crake as high as the ceiling (some 10-12m) to deposit the casks higher up in the stores. As needed a cask can be dispensed via lever to be rolled from its containing turret, righted, and carried off to the dry, final room in 2/7. 

PCs might find uses for the butterfly strands which with two characters strapped on either side can be laced under heavy objects to carry triple or quadruple the combined PC weight. Too, this room does connect (and share purpose) with 3/19, via the pit. (We are still above and around the gridslop farm which is baked into two levels, much like a basketball court will be below, under, but a part of a running track). 

The gridslop too is a pliant element for magic users (rare to get any of the wormy mash so close to 'raw') and would aid or amplify any spells having to do with pliability, malleability, or flex. Take that loosely—polymorph self is a malleability of form; feather fall is a stretching of density.

•

2/11 Fork Mounts and Controls — Attached to the gridslop farm, three rooms (a pair of conference rooms and an HR rep's office on the north end (a wide office with plural doors (glass things)) have been dug into and reformed so that three seismically large brass prongs—thousands of pounds of metal—extendx either in the conference room's case, 30-50 feet, telescoping, or in the case of the much more substantive fork on the north end, nearly the entire length of the room—and that one able to rack back and forth via a long wheeled track so that it can manipulate either column of gridslop cubes.

The controls aren't unfathomable—a wheel for rotation, and a wheel for telescopy and a lever for tilt. Who knows why a PC would want to use the things but it's not beyond PCs to touch everything. 1 in 6 chance there'll be a crake at the controls and you'll see some action. And give credit to the crake's psionic powers—using the wheels would require at least two characters of above average strength.

The rooms are kept quite spare, otherwise the forks being bolted by their immense brass rolling joints to a wall within each doesn't leave room for much. 

In the case of the wider room with the tracking prong, a diligent search of the cabinetry will turn up a dusty manual on human relationships, a book on growing old that is itself suffering the same fate, and a carefully wrapped spindle of plastic cord, about 120m worth, thin gauge stuff.

Notes on the Day: Thinking, after seeing something Mr. Kemp put up about 'time to read a book vs. whats gained' that a small productive table would be worth formulating to determine value gained, time spent, difficulty of text, plus intelligence modifiers. Title of creation: Make Any Book Worth Reading and Any Shelf Worth Searching.

•

2/12 The Elevator Shafts — familiar to travelers from Floor 1, the silver sealed doors of the three deep-diving elevator shafts stand in fixed harmony, guts closed off. 

Prying them open through many means possible would find in bays 1 and 2, black gaping abyss, and in bay 3, the suspended loops hanging from the elevator car above. 

A service ladder offers a way down all three, or, a bolder PC might make the clamber to the underside entrance to the elevator above. Of course, it's possible the Milk Queen's Tread remains in the car, and would not make any effort to slip past PCs down through the hatch. Instead, there would be an undeniable pressure put upon them as soon as they entered the car, for release. (Equivalent in potency to a mid-level charm person or compulsion, likely). 

Her soft foosteps pacing might be heard by a cautious ear. 

Otherwise, a rather long fall. Take it as they might.

•

2/13 Once Bathrooms, Now Not Exactly — One of the most profound discoveries of my life as a visitor to buildings is that one can, fairly easily, determine where a bathroom is on the other floor of any building if one knows where the previous one was on other floors, because plumbers like straight lines. Also, why waste too much money on a bathroom's design or decor unless running a sauna or high-end restaurant, but even then. 

However in our case, there is a long window between the pragmatic design of CTV9 and its current inhabitants and their needs, so while the fundamental shape and structure of this bathroom might be identical to that of the bathrooms on floor 12 (or floor 1, however you're looking at it), the fact that the crakes have converted this set of 'fountains' and 'hoses' into a minor bathing palace has the possibility of surprising the predictive PC, who yes, will still pick up on the white tile and grout, but without the ceramic sinks and standard toilets of the top floor, the room may even have something of an alien delicate relaxation to it. 

Don't be surprised to find an off-duty crake scrubbing their damaged hands or peeling back molt in the ur-glass basin baths which are formed up like jelly sacs nearly to the ceiling (so offering complete immersion for the water-loving workers), and only expect to find their local treasures and pay set in simple cubbies of a fixed and sandy clay—but with a wall torn down between what were once gender-segregated restrooms, a capacious tiled room of bubbling pipes feeding the water clearly in, and somewhat less so out. 

No sign of Tessa Horn.

•

2/14 The Black Rejection — A black wall covers one half of Level 2 from the other. Polished black metal that has a glassy sheen. A thin gold stud of light is embedded every 6m, letting off apricot hues. These are screw'd in and can be removed. Something in shape and weight of a corncob, spherical, but twenty five pounds of dense liquid materia.

The wall is unscratchable. There are no obvious entrances.

A lot like graduate school.

•

Odd notes and Inspirations from the Week

• intaglial glyph
• phlogistive
• "Richard Cory"
• soft, fungating tumor deposits
• Deceptive Alignment - what a powerful fundamental tension
• Eric Hoel suggests 'the purpose of the human brain is to minimize surprise', so to be a game designer is to provide maximum surprise to drive a player's brain's sense of purpose.

•

Week Five took longer than a week to make but it's here.

 

Week 5 was a wild week, coming off The Onus in Week 4. My sense of 'television station' has blurred and my focus became decidedly on the creatures and mechanisms, rather than the -game-. I will correct for this in subsequent weeks, and saying so now. 

Obviously all this can be adjusted for in subsquent drafts but the more, better work I do upfront now, the less I will shy from the process of return.

Too, obviously, we are in the Z-wave of completers of this particular marathon, but who knows, I've been known to play catch-up. Most important is simply to round out everything appropriately and to walk the same race as the others.

I'd also like to post a 'Project Page' to organize the various elements in a different way than reverse chronologically, which is intimidating for me when I land on others' blogs; wagering its the same for those others when they come here.

Regardless: the week.

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

•

LEVEL 2 GENERAL NOTES & A MAJOR STORY POINT FOR THE FLOOR — 

This guy will show up in 2/25:

Thex Pe'Chan, Whose Brain Was Dispersed to Level 1 - arms cast out in front of it like it were in penitence, the huge body of what could be human only too large and not of flesh is bent in a locked and permanent position of supplication before an idol, a small, round cherubic and nude man with a smirk of contentment, permanently setting its smile to wry, as if the enforced worship tickled him to no end.

Huge cubes of gleaming metal the thickness of railroad ties each are paired and locked by an unseeable mechanism on wrist and ankle apiece, and the drool falling from the prisoner's mouth audibly hits the carpeted floor, along with a residual, resonant unhh which it lets out, as if periodically calling for help, but having been doing it for so long as to've lost the punch of any consonant.

Two small holes have been drilled behind its ears and the faint dust of what had been inside its skull rest on its shoulders—its clothes are tattered and unearthly, once a deep purple, but eaten through by scavengers to leave its glistening grey body—slack, weak, huge in disuse—exposed to be touched, kicked or comforted. Thex Pe'Chan, the betrayer, whose brain has been scattered so it could never plot again and whose body has been trapped so it will never love, either.

The image of the Ascendant Soiya is a candle that was to be lit, that is lit in front of any prisoner of the Tall King's prisons, whose sputtering-through-its-wax is equivalent to sand in a timer; that when melted through to its final inches, signals the prisoners release.

But Thex Pe'Chan's candle was never lit.

•

2/1 THE BUOYANCE IS A GREAT BIG MELTING MACHINE — Sat and sketched The Buoyance, whose massive bulk fills the common space made by the demolition of a wall between two offices. Both entry doors have been maintained, but are rimed with aflx, the byproduct of the great machine's manufacture. 

Much the appearance of a knight's helm and visor, The Buoyance is suspended from the ceiling and propped from the floor both so that the incredible heat coming off its massive metal underbelly doesn't torch its way down to the third floor. Several smaller exhaust pipes dribble aflx in liquid form into an angled trough that lets them slide down to where they've piled and are carted off using the wheelbarrows left and propped mostly against the wall.

Notes on the Day: 

Two prongs of questions immediately arise: 

• if aflx is a by-product of manufacture, what is the -product-; 
• who is it for; 
• who is making it. 

And secondarily—

• what is the fuel for such a machine, 
• where does the aflx go, 
• and what does it do.

Again, if we consider this level, rather than an entry-level point for adventures and instead the lowest space in a small kingdom's purview, the presence of this place as a mine's furnace or smelter has some logic. Deep down (though actually high-up) underworlders have access to certain elements that deeper underground they wouldn't—water, lighter particulate (calciums, salts, life-matter). 

I'm going to step onto a limb and offer: glass. And not just any glass (UR-GLASS). 

The gridslop farm in 2/8 provides the alien nutrition necessary to make glass as pliant as shrink wrap in extreme temperatures and under incredible force. This near the coast, the saline in the sand engorges those pulpy worms, which are then harvested and kept in casks, dried, not far from here—perhaps a heat-proof area near here [2/7] and then in 2/10 in much more significant quantities.

As to the who...

•

2/2 MEET THE TREKNIDS — Of a wavey consistency when abed (small ovuloid coves heat-blown into the plaster and sand hold dozens of these little guys), treknids are quite active in their off-time. There is a storytelling every third hour where one of the elders tells the quiet story of how they came to be. An important ritual as over the next three hours they will feed, mate, work, split, and perish.

The hell? Split? When treknids go to 'work' The Buoyance, reaching such ferocious heats causes them to replicate, growing a black nodular tumescence not unlike an edamame pod that eventually grows from what I suppose you and I would call the shoulder and the hip (though the treknids have neither, shaped as they are a bit like an elongated turnip). They also fly.

Of ur-glass, two-ply windows dot the wall between hallway and treknid living quarters, with hundreds of the flying creatures constantly at them focused intently on thin tubes punched into the interior pane. Trapped in these 'windows' (actually feeder sacs or 'schvineskins' more locally)—the ur-glass proves its miraculous ability to trap gas at incredible density, remaining vastly more pliant than glass-glass, almost like sheet-liquid in appearance, with constant, minute contractions and expansions. These schvineskins hold -a huge volume- of pure helium which the hundreds of quick-lived and high-voiced treknids have fed on via one-way valves they call 'stro' ('pass me the stro'). Each little worker takes in ten dentists worth of the gas, before going into The Buoyance to do their valorous duty, 'working' (throwing themselves onto the fire), splitting, and returning anew to suck up more helium as a fresh version of themself.

The storyteller though?

•

2/3 THE VERANDA WHERE THE STORYTELLER TELLS ABOUT THE FOUR POTS AND THE GOD WHO DOESN'T SPEAK — A long vacant corridor runs along two tremendous panes of glass, leaving behind the living quarters towards a bend, away from a veranda.

The hallway is noteable for being splintered by the huge black bulk of a sparkling mineral deposit. Its stone is wildly foreign to abovegrounders and its strata reflect light with the myriad twinkle of mica. Some dry micro-crab infest.

As for the veranda, angled plates give its roof a touch of the carnival tent, green and white, which must be awful dark—the treknids don't need light, though have no problem with it, either. There's tons of light in 2/1 (and heat, too) but that only gets down the hall here every so often, and echoes its blue and orange glow through the ur-glass windows which each wave as if in a sea current. 

To get into the veranda would require a short vault, (a very low half-wall, only shin-high, but still, there's no clear step down otherwise) and has a form of centrifugal 'seats'— more blocks in the ground much like a miniature recreation of a small city's buildings, surrounding a central circular park. In this case, the park is a stairwell down and dark, to the 3rd floor. 

It all takes the shape of an ampitheatre built for sitting and watching the sunset out a beautiful hemisphere of windows that are now drowned in dark clay. It is also, every three hours, an ampitheatre of a different kind. 

The fed treknids gather around the stairwell at the veranda's center to listen to the story of their people. From the stairwell comes the incredibly frail voice of the Storyteller who speaks from the darkness the story of the four pots and the god who doesn't speak, and then, after flying up out of the stairwell at the story's conclusion, leads spectators to The Buoyance where they fling themselves into the fire, and send their new reborn selves back to the living quarters to feed, grow, and listen to the story again.

However, one treknid is taken aside. This one is told they will not work. They will go into the stairwell and they will starve and when the three-hour alarm sounds, they will wait for the other treknids to gather, and then they will tell this story of the four pots and the god who doesn't speak exactly as it was told, and then they will lead the others to The Buoyance, choosing among those they lead one who will take their place.

•

2/4 TOILETS, AGAIN — It's a joy to have what would be the least interesting room in most institutions be a place to reconnect with, to-date and in-writing, the most likely PC-inclined NPC in Tessa Horn, the glay'id from Level 1. Her passage through the tubes gets her to most bathrooms and this set on the second floor is no exception.

There's an odd spill passing from bathroom to the hallway outside, a quarter-inch thick, viscous as oil or a well-reduced balsamic vinegar and just as sweet. It's a gran ooze that has been working its way from the mineral spar at hallway's middle towards the source of water and heat for years. 

Tessa won't go near it, respects it as one would a spider in the corner of the room, if she's here.

It could be bottled up though, with bold, thick-skinned hands.

Notes on the Day:

But this didn't get at any of my questions! And where is all the treasure!?

(I just needed a toilet tonight.)

•

Brief Sidenote - THE TOMB OF FLESH

Napping, I've been granted an image of the body of some enormous creature pressed against the wall of CTV9 whose side has been dug into (probably in death) and, as if passing into a cave, can be walked into by those with a good pinched nose. 

It would take some draw—say the bones were caked in an inch of gold—and the thing itself would need to be massive—the buried hulk of an ancient sand-dragon whose body has been prevented from decomposition by the god that slew it, or whose friend it was—ah—perhaps, as in Viking myth, the body of a rider is actually entombed in the dragon mount that bore it into battle and across the world and through some act of mummification, the whole being and burial has been preserved.

Woh: Ohan and Bos, the Holy Hero of Bin'Irk

Pretty wild.

Let's put that pressed down against the walls on level 7.

•

2/5 INTERLUDE / CRAKES — As we crawl past the toilets and see the ooze gathering the heat from the cast-offs of The Buoyance's flames, we might also run into the wan and gental crakes who number only thirty and who tend and harvest the dark fuel that permits the crafting of the ur-glass.  

The crakes are a waifish semi-humanoid species (ignoring antennae and a vestigial third-eye which is still being grown over in this current generation of the tiny clan) and actively cart shipments of the harvested material every third or fourth week. Infrequent, but they also do an occasional check on the portage between 2/9 and the dry delivered goods at the entry of The Buoyance (2/7). 

PCs will likely pass by the set of risers that descend to a pair of long arched couches caked in the black soot that seems pervasive so near The Buoyance's entrance. The couches face a webwork of glass and plaster columns containing sculptures that themselves can easily be walked amongst, appearing from the hallway not unlike a wide-spaced row of baleen.

Notes from the Day: I must admit today how tired I am of this. How far off course I feel.  

However:

Failed art is art that is constrained by shame.

I make these things because they are the things of my making. I intend as much as I intend. No foreign rubric holds me in a pact of any kind. I live and make because I live with the stuff I have lived. It is so simple as to seem obscenely easy. It is not. Clear living and clarity in art is, my God, riddled with discontinuity and marring. So we go on doing it, us and The Onus.

•

2/6 THE SLIZER GLASS COLLECTION — The pair of couches sit in observation of a long diagonal hall, the Slizer Glass Collection, an art thing into itself, a series of pillared display cases, untouched by denizens for how long; unlit now (though the display lights at least in form still exist). 

The columns run at an odd slanting pattern down a grey-tiled floor, each holding a unique creation of one 'Dane Slizer', though only one of the brass plaques screwed into the display cases says his full name. The others all say Slizer, #3, 4, whatever. There's 11 in the collection, wobbles of glass of varied hues, bubbling with internal pocket-air

Deliberate? Sure. Someone made it. Slizer and his team. And CTV9, proud supporters of the arts supported Mr. Slizer and his efforts.

•

2/7 HEAT-PROOF STORAGE OF THE UPCOMING BATCH OF GRIDSLOP, DRIED —Beyond 2/6 is the storage space of 2/7, relatively open-air (high-ceilings). The most proximal gridslop storage to The Buoyance, a series of barrels of salvaged wood are set in racks. Yes, you could open each and get gusted by a scent not far gone from the depths of an unclean chicken house, particularly there at the western edge of the storage where the barrels are most recently dropped and still drying, but the casks (big old boys) are stacked two high in metal racks of six apiece, so you won't open all of them.

It also seems that the storage racks have been pieced together rather —haphazardly? In that there's not a clear line in the mix—some press against each other, some press down on those below them. A mess. And here's Peeresh, official storage advisor who—it's a healthy warehouse, okay?—moves back and forth between his various racks, confirming contents, shoveling his outgoing cart full of the driest, oldest gridslop (when it dries, its something like a puce flour, after he's ground it in the foot pedal grinder built from the old parts of an exercise bike).

Good old Peeresh. The PC's will no doubt surprise him, wherever he is, however he is. His claws are a bit rakish but he rubs his more dangerous points to nubs doing the work that he does. Grateful for it, is Peeresh, don't get him wrong. He has a good place to sleep in 2/21, and Kila makes him happy—a blessing she is.

He keeps busy, his old body still just glad to be serviceable after all those repairs.

•

Notes on the Week

Since this both public document and effort at creative venture, I'm allowed to admit the thrill of my first guest feature, friend and poet Joseph Spece who 'requires the macabre', and has a bouncing screensaver with the word ZUGGTMOY bouncing from corner to corner. She [ZUGGTMOY] is, in old lore, Queen of the Slimes and Oozes, which is just perfect. He said levels 5 & 6, with the possibility of a fractious mineral deposit that has -really- managed to seal away some rudimetary types would suit him. (Thus this week's black metal spear of rock through a wall)

I think we'll all let out a collective gasp as we enter May and June.

A sample of the character he ran in my train-bound campaign in 2020, for the quality and step of his prose:

Zay-Luc Dax, 31, is a mysterious figure come to small repute for his skill as a beekeeper. There is abiding bourgeois interest in harvests of the so-called ‘filigree honey,’ regarded for its rich flavour and apparent immune benefits. Filigree is scarce—only Africanized (‘killer’) bees produce it, & few raise the species. Even fewer risk the hives for produce. To date, Dax never considered marketing his stock, but is moved to play waresman after word of the Bison Massacre reached the hot scrub lands past Rustaz. He’d know details: how 100 bison manage to antagonize a train, and how well-to-do passengers debark to repel them.

The rate for filigree honey is 19 gp/oz; Dax is equipped with three 32-oz jars for sale, stored securely in a drop-base sac. His contact is ‘a Parliamentary’ who has traded an audience with Dax for a few days’ secret, out-of-the-way passage. Dax boarded at a station a full day before his arranged pickup, however, paying full fare for a private (double-locked) booking so to ‘overhear the players’ anonymously for a night; his contact doesn’t know him by sight, therefore, but neither does he know the man. They are set to order mezcals mid-afternoon tomorrow.

Dax will not sell for less than 30 gp/oz; he’s keen to construct a lean complex of plein-air rooms on the mesa, and employ a few of his nomad friends in the process. He is on the La Creme mainly for information, however; the marketing is, by-and-large, subterfuge.

He’ll do his deal before Yonks, where he plans to engage Granier, Sr, to inquire about the massacre in person.

Dax cut teeth as an adventurer in a masked posse that ran through a few dozen of Yosir’s orc-and-soldier troop in the valley of what’s now Barter-Hamm Pass. He was hunted, but found the desert quickly enough to outmaneuver Yosir’s depleted retinue. Dax recognizes he’s not fit to challenge the lieutenant, but has a druid’s long-term designs; mention of Yosir or Harrad on the train will drag his ear.

Dax is 6’0,” with cropped dark hair & a visible scar on his left temple. His movements are long, balanced, and very sure, with a whiff of the predator about them—like a cat or a mantis. He is dryly charming, good-looking, & well-spoken—fit for this little intrigue. Fit, but not adjusted. He will tire of niceties and drawn-out exchanges, the meat-and-drink of these socialites, and is loath to take a planner’s position amongst the ‘big bellies.’ Nor is his estimation of what counts as ‘big bellied’ clear enough to serve him. Dax is shrewd though, and will sniff out the information he seeks, even if he must circle the carcass twice to do so.

He dresses in interesting cuts that serve mobility, preferring blacks, greens, tans, whites. For this trip, it has pleased him to coat his rondel and machete in pricey matte weaponblack, on chance he might wield them—though not even he can put together a circumstance. He carries the rondel discreetly in a coat slip-pocket when walking the cars.

•

Some Inspiration Gathered Through the Week: 

• The story of an Arctic or Antarctic explorer who when frozen in the pack told every other man stranded with him, he would never speak to them, only write. He did this to save his own life, because it was in his aloneness he could do things that he could not. Title: "With Others"
• A sailor, Tollefsen for whom the word 'chose' (French for thing, pronounced 'shows', roughly) he has taken to mean 'kill', suspecting his Belgian crew mates are out to kill him, are planning to—he sleeps in the freezing hold with the rats and no bedclothes or sheets, and keeps to the darker spaces of the ship as did Nantes the Cat before he died.
• mesothelioma
• "You are welcome in my home, so long as you bring cheer."
• [29.518 synodic days]
• dark colors associated with Life and light whitish colors with death, absence
• some canescent indigenous substance
• albescent warriors
• breadfruit
• syles
• thanatophilic
• papillot
• supernatural entelechy
• ptotic
• "the mythopoeic narratives very structure itself moves from initial unity to epitatic trinity to reconciliation and unity again in the falling action"
• "clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water from their hands."
• the wildcatting era
• literary critic H.L. Mencken
• "I hate to see you here. Guard your health. Put in writing all your memories and notes. You and I have been in hell many times before. Hell is a cold place, but the sunshine will be better because of the darkness there when you come out." Roald Amundsen to F. Cook, imprisoned.
• Eucratites
• "It's called art, friend and the fact that it has any utility gives it even wider appeal." 
• "the sleeping vanity which we all once possessed"
• a vengeful elan
• the embouchure of the treacherous Cockburn Channel
• the disappearance of the Swedish balloonist and Polar explorer S.A. Andree over the Arctic
• deictic antecdent
• prenominate
• Protasis
• adjudge
• paleolithic vs. mesolithic
• ideomatic names
• prelection
• heuristic evolution
• Coleridge - esemplasy
• putative
• the village exarchs
• catechetical school

•

Final Notes — clearly I've shifted from active consideration of actual PC's into something like storytelling. I will be correcting this, as I'm not here trying to write a story. That was largely due to becoming over-consumed with ecological features rather than interactable elements and not disguising the work of my mind in trying to understand the how of this week's particular features.

But that's what these little re-collections are good for. Understanding how to proceed! 

On we go!

Week Four while everyone else is on Week Six is fine. It's quieter back here. More congenial.

Month 1 Done

Month 1 Done

New Month Looms Empty, Thrilling, Undone

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

Still playing catch-up, so for now, can't ruminate too longly on the how and why of any particular room. 

[As I go about ruminating longly on the how and why of each room. Jesus.]

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1/22 A BIG PRINTER AND A WEDGED BODY IN OPEN SPACE — accidental dots of sketching have drawn up an enormous printer that's been properly taken apart and stripped of its metal, as well as a massive heating duct overhead (I suppose likely an air vent for AC more than heat) which has a body draped over it. 

A preserved body? A body like Poor Ceev Five, one of Engine's own? Well, one would need to climb up there to see — it wouldn't take a master thief to recognize that whoever is hanging up there got up by way of the 3/4-high walls that seem to split this 'room' from those adjacent. A leg up might do from the chair nearby — no tremendous risk outside a clumsy fall, though the body is definitely drained of its fluids well enough to be practically embalmed — brittle hair, stiffened in death, palms of crackly skin show that the skin was melted away before death — was he trying to crawl up the duct to escape something? — well the ceiling does jut up here but I wager (based on the plastic in his wallet and the lack of other potential culprits) that this is old Rob Methodical (the picture's faded but he was alive, unsmiling, in his CTV9 buzz-in card's picture, bristling moustache, eyes high, wide-set, and buggy. And he was up there doing the last thing he tried to do — stash a big packet of paper money, three diamonds worth a cool whistle, and a drive, a little plastic thing that probably explains everything to anyone who can listen to drives. (A good spot in addition to the first provided in Room 1/4 is in 3/2). He got it tucked above the duct-work pretty well; who knows where his ladder went.

Meanwhile, hundreds of years later, the guess wraiths love the ducts. They are somewhat aimless, you know, but they convene like white matrimony up that exposed tunnel — hopefully if you have a happy climber in your game, you've kept them harmless — because this duct is like, tunnel of love, two in, two out, all the way up to where the duct's roof-top exit has created an eddy, a hollow spot technically outside the CTV9 building in the ground around it. 

Yes — a spore-y stardust cluster of baby guess wraiths — choke as you might on the pollen of this particular engagement, it would be a beautiful revelation that deep underground bag-like jellyfish floaters have nests and those nests have thousands or just hundreds of tiny baby bag-like jellyfish floaters. 

Hit them with the right red-violet light and call it the magic of life.

Some salvage could probably still be got off the printer. The paper in the trays didn't go anywhere fast. Need a ream? The cabinet nearby has a box full, though the troubador bat won't cherish the intrusion, seeing as it finally got some food. Just make note of the black foot-and-hand grease where the ripped cables used to go down [this, where the bat enters] so its blasting noises aren't totally upsetting to novice PC's. 

Notes on the Day: Damn, so quick, the life and help of R. Methodical. I'm going to hope that he isn't my last treasure stasher. The Onus is nearby — 'boss?', 'illusion?' — not until the 27th. I have that long to hold my breath. I still remember his face.

Going to be reading Oblivion by DFW on this trip. It's been awhile since I've sat down with his mind. Should be engaging and hopefully I'll have the restful self capable of actually engaging the text. I've just drawn a particular room so rather than read first, I'll launch into at least a brief description of what I've seen before reading. 

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1/23 A POWER ROOM COVERED IN NEON MURAL AND A WEIRD OBJECT — It's a no-nonsense door on the back wall of 1/22 — HEFTY handle with a touchpad on it, and it looks as though the scrabblings of whichever past seekers of entry haven't got through or removed it, gallant (gouging) efforts at trying to pry it loose, but both mechanism and door are heavy. (Code is 1112—little green light). 

Don't stress though, there are alternative ways, a much simpler locked door there at the end of 1/25, an easy stairwell to elevated walkways in 1/30, and the third locked door in 1/26. (All codes and door-sizes are actually the same, minus the walkway at 1/30 which is unlocked. It's just a stairwell in.) 

(Side note: I find it silly how concerned I've become with writing entrances, as if they couldn't be found. They are outside of story and should just be encountered in a second pass-through: unless there is something of a plot to how they are opened) 

(For now and henceforth, I'll engage only with rooms and hallways occupied by interest, so's to save energy. A secondary pass on the dungeon will differentiate entrance/thresholds with an easy sub-table.)

Like so.

Writing entrances is probably a means of avoiding difficulty and finding voice. 

MEANWHILE IN 1/23: Cracking the door, the presence of confusing mass that precedes engagement with deep black caverns, massive hives, or in this case, a stranglework of pipes, tubes and wires — strikes. Above and about, at 90° angles, long yellow black and silver pipes of thickness from a finger to a pair of hands knocking together seem to form great blocks of matter in cubes, though this vantage on the scene is likely easiest understood if you popped your head in via the ductwork from the previous room, or have gained access via ladder, steps or otherwise, to the mesh-metal gangplank that's strung from roof suspension, and which walks just above the path of chattered ash snaking three easy turns to the back edge of the room, and to either of the other access doors from elsewhere.

This is where the Onus has stashed its Reason and the slim disk is set, affixed, to the metal of an old powerbox by a trunk of epoxy. It is an onyx-like stone or metal that has been carved at its outer boundary by tallies of a strange and repeating kind. Below it in fabulous pigments and spreading from its bowl-shape outwards, are figures done up in unknown paints, an incandescent-and-neon mural that, as characters recognize its focus at the Reason, become evermore obvious flowing in lines and sketches over and up the pipes and everywhere. 

Can't be too stingy and occult can we? Are there any recognizable/ decipherable truths to this mess? 

Well the Onus is an Old Survivor. There aren't many Old Survivors and so the poor thing's brain doesn't have much in the way of referant; has, over the milennia, adapted its immortality to art, art beyond record keeping. It very much believes the slips of its ratty paints provide the only instance of its reality, as compared to the rather rigid and perpetual realities of the universe. This is to say — there are the mathematics of existence and there are the slips of the flesh. Being one of the early participants in trials of immortality by citizens of Old Yurth (those days before I-ZO), it never experienced the ends of that tender galactic civilization and was, already, quite hermetic. In fact, it owned a television station, once upon a time, and even once called itself Omar Gonzales, which it reduced over time as its sense of language decomposed, to Onus, or Ones, in spelling. The Reason it pried from the satellite on top of the building and epoxied to the powerbox, finding symbol in it and symbollic comfort in maintaining the electrical and HVAC units of the long-submerged skyscraper. 

Bear in mind the world that was buried in Martian dust was one when human longevity, life longevity, had been extended to immortality, so energy, fusion energy, would not have been so far-fetched. Perhaps the building's power is failing or can fail at some point, but so is and will the sun, and the Onus is tracking both of these things. 

It only speaks in a very dusty Spanish and while PCs may encounter it here, applying its glass-and-plastic-based paints, more likely it is elsewhere, most often in 1/27.

Clever —very clever— folks might note the tallies on the Reason correspond to years since the first coming of I-ZO and also the etched Triangle that signals delta in the small staple-like forms of the Onus' calendar. As with the priests at Plebas Mons (though without the aid of anyone else) [historical write-up in the footnotes], the Onus has charted an intersection with the Eclipse, because what else do we have to look to in an immortal future but happenings in the sky?

Otherwise, the room is humming and gurgling happily. A well-labelled set of tools for electrical repair and testing are hung on the wall in two red boxes with the intials O.G. stencilled into them. 

Notes from the Day — Random NPC dialogue: 

• "The light permits me to see." 
• "My hubris was my downfall!"

Also: Vocab 

• burled walnut! 

Something strange has started to happen. I have now tried 4 different manners or orders in creating my dungeon rooms — 

1. write, then draw each room in pencil, then ink; 
2. sketch all rooms in pencil, then write each room, then ink; 
3. write the names of each room on the map, write each room, draw it in pencil, then ink; 
4. and now, sketch vague errant marks, make them permanent, and ink each room one at a time, and then write each room last. 

This final method is provoking absolutely the oddest drawings that I am forced to go back and interpret as something salvageable as a story or part of a cohesive place/whole. 

For what it's worth I find it the most exciting and terrifying because my doodling/illustrative mind forgoes context and reality almost entirely for an aesthetic, while my writerly brain — much more practiced and austere in its artistic aims — is screaming from its cage "but what the fuck is that?"

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1/24 A BATHING MEDITATION POD AND A TOWEL ROOM — Accessible only via a locked door from 1/31, this passageway appears lain since well after the original manufacture of the surrounding building, with a glassy and unmarkable flooring tile of a pale white, and a high ceiling, higher than ought to be expected. The hum of the adjacent control room is audible and soothing in its state of maintenance. 

Overhead a few rudimentary vents have nearly popped free. Is it the sticky heat of this odd corridor that expands the metal after the desert night has managed to pinch the tin of these little vents? The screws can be found further down in the cracks between tiles, so more likely something(s) has slash have pushed and slash or worked their way in slash out. 

Excessive. 

The corridor bounded by its walls moves past a simple white-lit alcove powered by a single wall stud-bar of light that if removed, maintains its glow (that'll require some work, however). Silver wall mounts hold six towels of dun and white and a pair of slippers are cheap and could slide onto a large man's feet.

The burble gives it away — six wide steps spread down into a subset black room with an ovuloid tank. Long cords run to its eggshell perimeter and jack in, and the buttons on its edge cause a crease to appear, a lid to sheer back and open, with blue radiant lighting giving form to the single step and two and a half-feet of water being calmly circulated by a pump and filter, findable in moments.

A row of buttons, of course, are along the pod's interior, 1 to 5, and a familiar set of natural sounds (see 1/21) pump out of the stippled speakers just above the water line.

This is no trap but an opportunity. The water herein is salinated and buoyant — the lid will seal automatically after a minute of investigation and insight, and a vanilla glow will emit from around a singular circular button that will invert the action and free a bather. That glow will fade after a similar minute and the pod's sensors will gently shift the temperature of the water to match the inhabitant's body. Eventually, the darkness and lack of gravity and — should the user turn off the natural sounds — soundlessness — will provoke possibility of disembodiedness that can lift the user into the upper reaches of their mind, outside of cognition. A clever or demanding DM might prompt the bather with an expansive question; a more generous and white-glove DM might reveal a re-interpretation or an understanding of a plot particular to the character. A treasure-happy DM might add a spell to a wizard's spell list or boost wisdom by a several points for awhile (though not forever). If more than one character gets in, assume a lot more frolicking, subtracting any meditative benefits and adding a bit more salt in the eyes.

The maker of the pod, a company called DINO have decal'd their trademark stegosaurus design on its exterior. Any move to unplug the machine for whatever reason should succeed with little trouble. You can likely guess who uses this thing with some frequency, to meditate on what death might actually be like.

Yes!

Notes from the Day: Some vocabulary to play with: 

• about to ululate
• its entropic converse
• gilt rococo
• acknowledge, parody, and evect
•  exaggerated bonhomie
• ricin & botulinus
• cognomen
• abrin, phytotoxin
• castor
• jequirity beans
• the tank's deltate nozzle
• Dexedrine-
• the exordial presentation
• putatitively experimental
• ptyalin
• emetic prosthesis
• retroscenic

And this wisdom, too, from Oblivion: (on being young and observing adults): 

"Barring some obvious problems or characteristc, most adults' faces were not easy to attend closely at that age — their very adultness obscured all other characteristics."

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1/25 THE PAINT PREPARATION ROOM THAT DOESNT LOOK THAT WAY — The door has been chopped to bits — clean bits though — not perfectly straight but something like the work of an amateur wood splitter out to make kindling. Sand is pressing in at the roof edges and the northern wall is bulging in places as if pressed in and long-damaged by wet matter. Light catches on broken casement glass — some sort of audio-visual equipment display rack whose locks — small keyed silver things — in being ripped off and discarded, shattered two of the six panes. That glass has been tidied and sits in six small heaps of gradually diminishing fineness on a central table, and a selection of long foreign wire casings have been stretched out across the same length. 

At table's end, a mounted mechanical device, unpowered, in whose shadow is the powdered debris of both plastic and glass. A simple wooden bowl on a shelf nearby completes the Onus's paint-making kit — relatively soft-hard materials that are thin (read: wood, pastics, glass, small ceramics) can be passed through the device (two tightly & adjustably spaced rollers); passed through, and crushed to dust. 

A trail of long passage, soiled floor that has been cleaned and cleaned but which undoubtedly shows the grooving of thousands of footsteps moves to the many active spaces in this 'territory'.

Most have come to recognize the Onus's retreat as somewhat off-limits and 1/25 -1/31 is essentially his. This makes it less likely that any jump scares will induce any horror or magical awe in the PCs, but it's likely that all of the details will be inspected with self-centered consideration ("How can I use the machine") rather than consideration that this is the space and home of something that has lived here for thousands of years and that cannot die of old age. As such, I would suggest introducing signs of the Onus's inhabitance and vivacity almost immediately. He is an avid hummer of tunes that've broken down into tones; he has a terrible shuffle and scrapes his right leg across floors; and generally he moves around the rooms of his home occupied as much by the things that have always occupied him as ever — he watches the skies, charts the rings and stars using the lone satellite still to his name in distant orbit (El Orgullo de Cielo), he paints, bathes, cleans the power room, and periodically looks out the door of 1/25 to sigh and sketch its frame with a long, slender finger. You can paint him as bumbling, wise, eccentric, but his language and communication methods are elementary at best. 

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1/26 A ROOM FOR ARTISTIC CONSIDERATION OR STUDY — The doors have been slid wide —pocket doors— slid into their pockets and blocked back almost absent-mindedly by books — Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Miller's Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, three books in Spanish by Allende and Fuentes — all of which are quite well-kept. All old things get old though. 

A shelf holds a pair of incredible glasses with a series of dials that can be rotated to magnify to microscopic detail, and the inverse, telescopic depth. They are thick as hell and weigh around ten pounds and are as wide as a small woman's shoulders — but advantage would be gained from a single eye set to their glass. They have some quality of being hand-made, too.

A stool in the center of the room, and on the wall, the original oil of The Course of Empire by Cole, ancient oils now faded to prairie-like pastels, but so what. 

A lamp sits on a corner shelf among candles, a creature-mask strung on leather beside it, and three small detail tools for picking apart metal objects. A gram-weight scale is propped up though dead of batteries, and if the light gets turned on [the lamp], it draws color from the room and sheds it all across the painting filling it back to life. Anything holding it seems the foci of its blanching power, up to a range of ten or so feet, and anything it is focused on receives a full dose of saturation. This is a potential boon for healers who could use the device to accentuate the body's bloodlines and ailments, or for those seeking discrepancies in the make of a stone wall for secret passages, etc.

Of course, the Onus simply uses it to look at paintings, and to paint. 

Notes on the Day: Only resources and some potential inspiration from various reading (Madhouse at the End of the World and Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol.

• The life of Henry Morton Stanley
• The life of Elisha Kent Kane
• peritonitis
• scarlet fever
• woodchuck was a delicacy
• "the stickly sweet stench of a sugar refinery"
• "The Flemish Jesuit Nicolas Trigault committed suicide when the Vatican rejected the term he had recommended as the official Chinese translation of God."
• barquentine (various spellings)
• Light has divine power, people's souls reside in their shadows, and with the changing of the season, spirits disappear. (Inuit folklore)
• star-crossed
• sailed broadside into
• "Three of the schooner's men caught in the tangled rigging were sucked into the ocean with her."
• The histrionic J.B. Pond
• "an isolated tribe of men, feeding and dressing from liberal sea farms"

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1/27 OLD MORDENKAIN'S PARLOR — It's mostly a six-foot sculpture of a marble and obsidian cat that holds central sway in the room, though the old kitty isn't properly central to the space and instead is, plinth and all, just bustled up against the western wall watching the door like an old-time scarecrow, poised to take out the vermin that always did come in this door and that Old Mordenkain used to dutifully eradicate as was his or her suspected duty. 

However instead now it's just eyes-on the bamboo-mat in front of the door which has been lain with its own kind of vermin control, a stankly sweet set of sticky dots that'll sure give a brief temporary pleasure to the floor's insect menace, and then will keep them quite secure. Fair warning to anybody who comes high-stepping on through without some attention to their step. Half the mat's covered in pads, the other half is clear walking. Good chance (and man is it sticky) that this tacky digesting enzyme and the mat are coming with whoever makes a misstep, and will in a couple days, make its way through their boot soles.

Good kitty.

Once in the room though, from any of its myriad entrances, like the Onus's entire 'estate', you'll find the room entirely plush and well cared-for. Everywhere there was company-owned furniture, that furniture is gone, and its removal camouflaged with a new hand-made shelving, a long instrument panel, and an incredibly bizarre seat and device that may or may not be powered on, and that likely is — that the Onus is likely stepping out of in its very slow way, ponderously large head and slow-blinking eyes adjusting to lighting outside the machine's billows and drape. It [the machine] has RAC-700X and a couple of relatively tame stripes decal'd down its side, as well as a steel ball at its end fizzed with micro metals and glass wiring. 

The RAC 700X is a stargazing machine, the surprisingly portable (for what it does) pilot-ship of its associate sister satellite in the sky (see 1/25). Small thrusters aboard the proxy craft can be used to gain mobility, gain perspective on the rings. The Onus is of late trying to gain an understanding of Pilot's increased rate of activity (speed) as well as the holes that've begun opening up around the planet (filling great cooling vats at the center of Yurth by draining several large lakes yet to be named).

He'd be open to talking about it depending on the PC's entrance. He might also decide that waltzing into his parlor with weapons raised, pilfiering and or playing with his shit, deserves immediate removal. His manner of doing so in my head has itinerantly been a simple evaporation device (and heaven forbid PCs get their hands on that), a stun & lock imprisonment device, or something equally game-breaky. He has been alive for twenty-some thousand years so some degree of survivability that keeps the various torments of that length of the time away is due. He's the Oz of the building, just not at the end of the Emerald City.

I figure there's a healthy star-chart archive against the northern wall, and a small cat-door built into a scaffolding tower that hasn't been used in years against the southern wall, but which runs to 1/31.

Notes on the Day: A world without my 03 Micron means a world with the thinner, slower 01. The fire is on digitally behind me, and I recognize that with a smaller pen, I simply need to cover less space with each stroke. An incredible birthday yesterday happily — a Sichuan restaurant (still no idea how my friend finds and familiarizes himself with these places, but he does). I haven't asked how. Last night I was introduced to boiled beef and/or beef in hot broth — outstanding, and some sort of crispy chicken with peppers. Doubly outstanding. I think I'd seen it before and not known how to take it.

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1/28 A ROOM WITH A STRANGE BENCH AND A POLYHEDRAL DARKNESS — In the eastern portion of the central CTV9 hall above the stairwell, something juts up from the floor below like a half wall. 

It pulses ever so slightly, a faint purple below the hazy greys — and on inspection, is a vaguely transparent — (30% opacity) — glassy substance that has encased an old sculpture mount, as though teak had been shorn up and polished to hold a series of friezes and been encased in rock candy — (actually its aflx, a by-product of 2/5's constant production, which has mounted through the subfloor and congealed around the nearest organic mass — in this case a beautiful trapezoidal piece of greenheart wood that had been skinned from the once-jungle of this area when it wasn't a desert, and turned into a hollow bench). 

Sitting there now would prove to have less than desirable effects for clothes especially, but even hard leather wouldn't come away unscathed.

Across, a thin set of stairs rises to a side hallway and in the room's center, a darkness retains its black hold, no matter the light. Perhaps it's some side effect of the aflx, but a lamp, torch, flame, or magic bauble can be walked from one corner to the next of this area, and not a whisper of light will reach in, nor a whisper of light reach out. The wild thing perhaps more than the impenetrability of the light though, is less its density which on certain dark nights in the desert one can at least experience close to, but more its angularity, which sits almost like a many-sided die with its slants and its flat planes up in a polyhedral hemisphere to the ceiling.

A sharp mind might pick up on the shape and thus the possibility of a radius, a circumference, and thus perhaps a center, and if they do the estimative math right, recognize that were they to crawl towards it, at this dome's center is an outstretched skeletal hand (a graceful one with the horrible —no, wait— the bugs don't fear darkness—instead: the bone meal that they left in their wake is long wetted and has grown the grassy nodules the dark deer of the moss & mushroom caverns of the fifth floor thrive on called plax curd — which, as all great below-ground decomposers do — grows on the nitrogen-dense manufacture of no-longer living bodies like that of the now-dead dark elf whose hand was outstretched in death, still holding the small onyx figurine—a stone that in the time of its use held the shape and spirit of a panther, but in long dormancy has leaked from its vessel and lost itself to original form (the stone is the vessel and the darkness its djinn).

With the right prompting though, the obscuring form could be cajoled back into its carrying stone and carried again through the world as a peculiar companion. It is sentient, but bears no common name. 

•

1/29 SOMEONE TRIED TO WORK HERE ON SALVAGING PANELS — All of the panels stacked here could not be configured to remake the square walls that they once formed and remain in this room, so the supply has clearly been dismantled from all around CTV9's 12th floor and dragged here. And sure enough scratches in the tile below the dust cleared by PC boots shows heavy damage and some broken bits — plastics, metal twists and the edge of a stone knife or near enough the panels in a neat row by the wall to paint this corner a makeshift workspace — someone got to the business of stripping something from these.

Someone with a decent memory will recall 1/2, where identical panels lay in much less controlled piles, still with their magnetic backing on.

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1/30 A WEIRD SEMI-SECRET DOOR AND BEDSPACE — The spectral lamp's light may or may not be on, absorbing color and shifting the visual landscape in curious ways [useful as it is, for the flags], but this domicile, the Onus's most common 'place of being' is bifurcated by a half wall, and a set of thin wooden stairs lead up almost to the roof before giving entrance to the tube-work of 1/23. Otherwise it seems the room ends in an abrupt thin wall.

A set of instrumentation is built into the southern edge of the room — a trio of very color-faded pennants above a set of thick-cut wires (again, the lamp will help bring back the colors). Simple felt things, yellow and blue and yellow and blue respectively, maybe as long as an elbow to hand; each hangs from a long string below a set of notches.

We're hoping for an effect here, right?  Move this flag to this position and that to another and voila, the creak of a wall tilting upwards reveals— [If you love puzzles, make one of the book's elsewhere Aberg's Concise History of Sweden and make the flags have to match the Swedish cross in twelve holes; otherwise, blue yellow blue in three notches is a fine password]—like an olden-time garage, a room within the room, richly carpeted with a mat in the corner and a pair of over-ear phones which bring a constant stream of morse in dots and dashes, signalling the current state of both fluids and power in the entire CTV9 facility as tapped off by the liberal hordes of ints down in 9/11 and 9/12 respectively (ints to be detailed at some point as very small and very logical and excellent calculators and cleaners). 

A logbook is laying on a slanted shelf mounted to the wall, with translations of the morse into numbers with percents, and with enough time on their hands and a decent eye for statistics, someone might look through the well-dated log to note the three power outages in the last 450 years (previous logbooks have been happily eradicated, but the Onus has been doing this [communicating with his tiny workers] for a very long time). These power outages happen to coincide not incidentally with a series of intrusions on the sixth floor that have been "dealt with" but not actually dealt with, if you know what I mean.

So glad for that little flag detail, eh? Makes no sense and I hate it but I learned something from it about 

1. leaving this activity behind when in the middle of digesting a particular NPC's lifestyle and habitat and 
2. drawing my rooms before writing them because while senselesness can be endearing and impenetrable in a doodle, it is not fun for me when I'm feeling 1/5 as creative as usual. 
3. So it goes.

At least the plush carpets roll on past the Onus's simple cot and pillow (who knows where he launders those sheets — perhaps his rather leathery hide doesn't drip the same oils and skin that yours and mine do and the rough hemp blanket thrown across doesn't soil as much as carpet does).

•

1/31 NEW CAT HOME — The Onus's tiny friend and its tiny house. New Mordenkain, a blessedly small cat who is in fact a simple clone of Old Mordenkain (as Old was of Prior Mordenkain) lives in this small, august-hued room with/in a model replica house of the Onus's original modern-style beachfront property in San Blas, Mexico, back when such a place existed, replete with a small infinite wave pool that the cat loves to endlessly watch, dab, and occasionally drink from. 

The Onus will visit his friend periodically, but largely leaves him to find his way to and from both the laboratory and the domestic spaces that the cat frequents in 1/26, etc, by way of a very cat-sized series of tunnels that run at the floorboards. 

•

Notes on the Week: Finishing here and loathing it [editor: now I see that my loathing was temporary; there is good in these pages]. I want to move on to February, draw the stairwells down, and never doodle first, write later again, even if it means my maps are plain and very much like maps I drew at 13. 

Just some general notes: I really hope that I start to close down some stories, or at least take a second loop back through them on Level 2, because I can feel myself opening every clown door in my fun-cart and soon it will suck the truth & reality out of the place and make it not storied, and instead just like fireworks and the thing I know about fireworks is the most amazing ones are the first ones and they get gradually less interesting, until someone says fuck it and lights them all, and at that point, if you play your timing wrong, you get labeled 'bad finale' and its all that's remembered.

I'd rather light candles, in that case, and walk with two of them through a dark mysterious space. Hopefully haunted. I'm just certain that Level One was way more than a candle. Mostly as a result of the last two weeks.

•

Stories to follow: Rob Methodical's Drive: Hopefully an Explanation Please; Why is Pilot Going Faster and Faster, Folks? There's Some Production Going on At Mass Quantities Down on Floor 2; Dark Deer, Tell Me More; How the Onus Got Hold of Information Regarding the Eclipse and How We Could Too; Old Power Outages Which Let Something Bad In; Ints: Their Lifecycles and Harmonious Work Ethic (Is It Replicable?); Engine is Draining Lakes To ... Cool Stuff?; Does DINO Still Matter To This World?; &—There Are Other Old Survivors

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PREVIEW OF THE MONTH TO COME — [because I did not have my notes typed up, it was impossible to move into a new map and thus just some comprehensive thinking about the world of the 2nd Level emerges] — Call this a brainstorm because I'm almost certain there are some level connections between the most recent entries and the area I'm writing into and I don't want to overwrite any possibilities. 

Interestingly (or difficulty+), I keyed the work I was doing in a different order than the previous month so that I won't be following the stairwells, elevators, or other passages down to this level in the first week, and thus also will not necessarily have a linear means of 'walking' through from the floor above to this one. 

If I remember correctly, the scattered nano-brain of the Irredeemable (and Indestructable) Thex Pe'Chan was going to creep down from above, to here, if the right switch was thrown. This leads me to thinking of this level as, besides the level we've just come from, the deepest level of a dungeon in a kingdom whose castle is in the depths of the earth. Only the worst miscreant would be here — the betrayer (though a betrayer of a specific mission, so as with many criminals, a hero to others). 

Her Majesty the Milk Queen's Tread might have passed through here if PC's cracked that particular elevator, and perhaps here or a level above, moisture from the clay strata this deep has permeated the walls, crumbled them more thoroughly, and given the place a skunkier vibe than the more airless upper eaves.

One step closer to the four-armed slave and the link chest, and perhaps a place to begin gaining information that could make that encounter more manageable or meaningful. I imagine a lot of blackness, and a rudimentary, transformed space, still rarely visited, but much less office-like than CTV9's upstairs headquarters; perhaps an auditorium and the newsroom (or views of the newsroom via a glass-walled walkway), a few more offices thick with shaggy overgrowth — and one or two more intelligent prisoners who describe being at the 'lowest level of the Blood King / Bronze King / Tall King's dungeon' — . 

Need to decide ultimately if these prisoners & their associated gaolers are a part of Engine's people (I think they are) and since the bulk of Engine's work is being done under Tuth [the distant and huge capital of Yaddack], how this frontier barony might actually not be organized around the same founding principals or motivational aims as the rest of the civilization.

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Also I'm including an older historical write-up of Plebas Mons from the campaign, since it's been a couple posts since I plugged in some alternative material that expands the world, and it's mentioned in room 1/23.

Plebas Mons

The convening hall of the Yaddish clergy. As old as Tuth, an ancient granite circle, simple in adornment with the four flags of the priesthood, each white with a band representing the distance and their order from Yurth in ochre, drawn from the clay flats and painted on. Most of the building is a convening hall only visited in daylight hours since no flame or magic light can pass into the sanctified space, made of walls so thick it would be impossible given the access and resources of the times to build such a thing. Even sand giants, the master craftsmen of Yaddack, have found the building impossible unseamed, and its shape—a flawless circle pitched open at the ceiling so that the light of the Quiet Sun traces along the elegant lines that guide down the building’s interior—similarly perplexing and impossible to recreate. Scaffolding was erected to study the markings, the lines, and it was discovered a calendar whose abrupt end was marked by the lone black circle of basalt, seeming like a plug high up on the wall.

Matching granite rounds elevated on thin legs bely the observer’s sense of weight and gravity and serve as the meeting halls main ‘stage’ while twelve circles, like flat trees, circle that central dais, installed by craftsmen from the south. When meetings of the Council occur weekly the floors are swept by acolytes with stiff brooms and the room is—Plebas Mons entire—is vacated. However sacrosanct the building may be when a session is called however, it is a house of the poor and homeless at all other times—overrun by the crippled and sick who sleep in the shade and sanctuary of the building.