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. 

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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