VAARN ACTUAL PLAY: EPISODE 28

Last time the players fought some rustaceans and evaded the attentions of the Hydra, a tentacled monster. They then discovered a secret room that contained a gravity manipulator, and managed to shut down a malfunctioning magnet. However, the objects stuck to the ceiling of the magnetised room creating a lot of noise when they fell, attracting the attention of the tentacles.

Our cast:

• Flim-Flam, a two-headed cacogen. Proficient cook. Fights with twin pistols. Owns a cyborg hawk named Midnight.
• Findus, a newbeast. Horse-man with mystical powers. Inhabited by a parasitic spirit entity. 
• Crunk, a true-kin warrior. Taciturn, impulsive. A lover and a fighter. Has a big sword.
• Karak, a gaunt cyborg. Robed and hideous, machine supremacist.
• Nephew (NPC), a mute and enthusiastic fungus-man. Able to fuse his flesh with dead creatures and take on their abilities.
• Jo Nah Thon (NPC), an odd man who wears unusual clothes and speaks a strange language. Has a talking wristwatch.
• Fiddy (NPC), a large tame aphid.

We jumped right into the action: Karak and Jo Nah Thon were in the entranceway of the magnetised room when the magnet was de-activated, causing a lot of rusted metal to fall from the walls and ceiling onto the floor, including the rusted, insane synth Karak had previously failed to befriend. This created a large noise, attracting the attention of the Hydra’s tentacles. Thinking quickly, Karak grabbed Jo Nah Thon and used his grappling hook gun to descend through the hole in the room’s floor, into the lair of the rustaceans. As they descended, the pair saw the rusted synth battling the Hydra, using an axe that extended out of its chassis.

Karak and Jo Nah Thon found themselves out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they were now dangling above an enraged rustacean, which had already been injured by Findus’s laser eyes. Hearing the noises of the Hydra’s tentacles in the shaft above them, the cyborg elected to drop onto the rustacean and commence battle. He was almost immediately pinched by the rustacean, inflicting heavy damage on his mechanical legs. At this point Findus, Flim-Flam, and Crunk joined the battle, running through from the room where they had turned off the magnets. En-route they passed a row of cryogenic pods, containing mummified true-kin corpses.

The battle with the rustacean was short and brutal. The PCs scoured the creature with eye-lasers, and Flim-Flam fired off a barrage of bullets, alerting the Hydra tentacles to their presence. Karak managed to get free of the rustacean’s claws, and leapt to safety just as the Hydra reached down into the rustacean’s lair and grabbed the unfortunate creature, pulling it up through the duct in the ceiling. The party ran back into the room full of cryogenic pods and hid inside them, pressed up against the mummified corpses in some unlucky cases. The Hydra tentacles felt around the cryogenic room, but couldn’t find any prey to grab onto, only the inert shapes of the pods (this was a really nice escape by the PCs). Eventually the tentacles withdrew back into the main shaft.

The party searched the cryogenics room, finding more jumpsuits and wrist-watches like the ones Jo Nah Thon wore. They decided the bodies in the tubes must be more of his people, although how he had survived while these others died they did not know. The PCs debated where to head next. Karak inspected parts of the mechanism in the switch room, and deduced that the machinery that would drain the water from the flooded central shaft of the complex (their current overall goal) was in the next sub-complex down. The players re-traced their steps, crossing the central shaft on a rusty gantry. The Hydra seemed to be busy devouring the rustacean and the crazed, rusted synth, judging by the frothing disturbance of the water below.

The party returned to the insect corral where they had first encountered Fiddy the aphid, and descended into another deep, dark shaft using the grappling-hook gun. They found themselves in a flooded room that seemed to be used as a shriek-man cemetery. There were several exits to this troglodyte mausoleum, but the PCs elected to head deeper into the complex, using another vent set into the wall. They descended into another flooded room, this one full up to chest-height with stagnant, oily water. A vile, immobile mass of pale, putrid jelly was growing on the far wall. Reacting to the movement and light the PCs brought with them, it shot a dart-like tendril at Findus, piercing his skin but dealing no damage. The tendril retracted and the jelly blob began to pulsate, red veins blossoming within its translucent flesh. To Findus’s horror, the blob rapidly gave birth to two jelly-clones of the New-Horse, naked homunculi with pallid, shiny flesh and an insatiable desire to kill the original Findus! On this cliffhanger we ended the session.