24/12/10 - 42 - Into the Breach
Thirday, 6th Rova, 322 AG, Unknown Necrobot Facility
As a researcher with a deep personal interest in anthropology, it should stand to reason that the opportunity to be a pioneer visiting a previously unknown species’ territory would be an incredible opportunity. I believe I’ve pointed this fact out on a few previous occasions. I also believe that in each of those instances, I immediately followed that statement with the assertion that with the necrobots, it is far less exciting than it is terrifying.
There is always a risk of cultural misunderstandings on first contact, but these can usually be resolved through careful diplomacy. For that to work however, both parties must at least have a desire for peace. There have been a few instances where first context was met with an impasse, and this is one such case. The necrobots, even those that have the means to communicate, have expressed nothing but contempt and hostility for us.
With that in mind, I don’t expect them to be the most gracious of hosts.
Really, the thing that is most striking about all of this to me is that we are the excursionary force exploring a base belonging to obviously hostile aliens, rather than sending some sort of elite military squadron. I’ll acknowledge that at this stage, we are perhaps the people most familiar with fighting necrobots, but that seems like a dubious honour. It is certainly not something I would be eager to put on my hypothetical wall of accolades.
Still, being the ones best positioned to make the trip, and with the shrinking window to act after our spy drone was eliminated, we decided we’d jump into the fire once more. I anticipated something like this might happen, so I had preemptively hooked up our vitals and audio-video feeds to the Everdawn’s database so that our entire mission would be recorded. I also equipped all of us with panic buttons so that we could alert Soryn and Rasiel if we needed support. In the meantime however, they were effectively left on our side of the portal as the last line of defence, should the necrobots attempt to use it against us.
The portal thankfully had no obviously adverse effects. At least none that I could detect in the short term. I ran some quick diagnostics beforehand to ensure that the portal wasn’t only keyed to necrobot signatures and wouldn’t blast us with lethal amounts of radiation on contact, but my analysis was hardly thorough enough for me to actually be confident in the portal’s safety. I’d have to do a full medical exam on everyone once we returned, but at least I didn’t detect any anomalies in the moment, which meant we could proceed to any number of the other highly dangerous aspects of the facility.
The portal room was connected to the winding main hallway, with one side passage to the south. We opted to take this southern route, which led to a four way corridor. The door, along with every other door we found in the facility, functioned off of a unique form of detection that more closely resembled magic than pure technology. This made it very difficult to decipher even with our collective technical expertise. Fortunately, Yaro’s powerful spiritual attunement made it relatively easy for him to seize and control the mechanism.
We already knew from our scouting that the eastern door was the command console room, and the room to the south was one of the dormant necrobot chambers. Meved made the call to investigate the room on the left, so as to remove any unknown variables. In there, we found what could best be described as a substation for the facility’s power. It had some similarities to the Dolmen Stone device from the pyramid ship, but seemed to be drawing its energy from another portion of the facility rather than a stone. It was likely the generator to the north that we saw during our scouting run.
While there was nothing we could do to subtly sabotage the engine, we observed that a sufficiently large explosive payload might be enough to detonate it. Based on my chemical composition readings, doing so would produce an explosion that would rival a nuclear warhead. I suppose if nothing else, it could be a last resort to eliminate this structure if things go especially badly, though on principle I dislike the idea of such an indiscriminate attack.
We continued our investigation to the south, checking on the room with the dormant necrobots. Fearing that we might encounter a guard bot that would activate some sort of wakeup protocol, I sent out an Unseen Servant to scout ahead and inform us if there were any active necrobots in the room ahead. The thought of using that spell for such a purpose only came to me in the moment, but it proved very useful as a simple form of scouting.
The dormant necrobots were indeed still dormant and lacking in any guards. I suppose they really never expected any enemy force to get this far. The tactically sound thing to do might have been to eliminate all of them in that moment, though that seemed both unethical and risky, as there was no telling what might activate the remaining soldiers. In such a small room, it surely would have been quite a mess. Instead, Meved and Yaro sabotaged the doors exiting the room, buying us some time should reinforcements ever be called after us.
That only left the eastern exit of the junction, and the one we knew to have active necrobots patrolling. When we lost our drone, one of the lynchguards was still in there, operating the command console. There was no guarantee that it had returned to its original post in the time we had geared up. That was besides the other soldiers and swarms we saw in that room as well. When I sent my Servant spell through, it recognised three bipedal necrobots as well as the presence of swarms, which confirmed my fears. Still, sooner or later we would have to face the necrobots in this facility, so we pushed in.
The more exact count in the room was one lynchguard, two guardians (similar to the ones we found protecting the Dolmen Stone), and two swarms of scarabs. Meved, Yaro, and Vinu took the vanguard while Tibbers and I remained in the backline.
Recognising the lynchguard to likely be the biggest threat, I attempted to repeat my Hold Person spell on them, but it was regrettably unsuccessful this time. Meved and Yaro held the line, first with their area of effect weapons and then in melee once the swarms closed in. Vinu meanwhile pushed in to flank one of the guardians, keeping it distracted.
Due to the positioning of the necrobots, Tibbers and I were confined to the corridor, unable to push into the larger room without coming dangerously close to the lynchguard. That was not an issue, as I was still able to provide fire support and run interference from my position. I suppose intervening in one of the lynchguard’s strikes made me worthy of its ire, as it called in a wraith to attack me immediately afterwards.
The wraith emerged from the wall next to me and struck a critical blow that immediately put Tibbers and I on the backfoot. The circumstances were almost identical to our fight by the Dolmen Stone room on the pyramid vessel, which makes me think we will have to seriously reevaluate our positioning for future encounters. Had I not been as prepared for combat as I was, such a strike would have surely killed me on the spot. [Editor’s Note: I have been spending entirely too much time in these scenarios. I should seriously be far more concerned about how close I came to death in that moment than I am.]
The lynchguard for its part focused its own attention on Yaro, though it was unclear if it was more concerned with the fact that he was a medic or the fact that he was using a reforged lynchguard blade himself. Both facts clearly perturbed the necrobots causing them to eventually knock my partner unconscious in what I understood to be a vicious brawl. Thankfully, Meved and Vinu were able to systematically take down the other threats in the room and finally the lynchguard, giving Yaro enough time to recover.
Tibbers and I were too preoccupied with the wraith to witness much of the conflict ourselves. All I saw was the lynchguard swing an impressive blow, the sound of Yaro’s whimper, followed by the lynchguard’s decapitated head rolling into sight and the sound of Yaro’s disintegrator cannon unloading on what I assumed to be its body. Perhaps it’s for the best that I did not witness the situation, as seeing Yaro injured still affects me far more than any threat to my own life.
For our part, Tibbers and I were attempting to back up into the engine room, unable to get a good route around the wraith. My intention was to lure the assassin to me and give Tibbers an opening to get past and regroup while I would use my glitch step to follow afterwards. The ended up being unnecessary, as the combination of my and Tibbers’ gunfire was eventually enough to put the wraith down, though not without serious effort.
Tibbers punctuated the encounter by firing Vivian a few more times into the corpse. I initially assumed it to be a precaution against any regeneration protocol, but after the third round it became clear that it was a form of stress relief after having to fight yet another “ghost”. My own psyche was fragile enough that I asked to borrow Vivian and took a “stress relief” shot as well. I hate to admit it, but the catharsis was palpable. It’s certainly not something I will be doing again moving forward, but I can certainly sympathise with Tibbers’ coping mechanism.
With all of us alive, but worn down a fair bit from our first encounter in this facility, we decided to take a short break. I would take the opportunity to investigate the command console. Something told me that if I could crack their code and use it, we might just uncover something truly worthwhile.
Player's Notes: There we go, back up to speed. It was a fun session filled mostly with combat. The lynchguard is definitely scarier when he's not turned off with a Hold Person, and the wraith continues to be absolutely terrifying, if for no other reason than that's twice in a row one has shown up out of a wall and hit Astrea with a high damage crit + trick attack. Gonna have to invest in something to protect myself against crits at this rate...
That, and we need to figure out a way to make sure Yaro doesn't get himself killed. The necrobots so far seem intent on focus firing the healer when they can, and with him using life link he's not exactly helping himself. We might need to invest in making him tankier somehow. Maybe take some pages from my P1e Oradin build and find some way to turn him into an absolute monolith of raw AC and health regen. Because as it stands he'll probably be in grave danger in every single encounter...
25/01/14 - 43 - Bug Report
Thirday, 6th Rova, 322 AG, Unknown Necrobot Facility
Robotically-engineered terminals are naturally unintuitive for the organically-inclined. This is hardly a new revelation, as android computing logic has been extensively studied. However, necrobots have a particularly alien form of thinking that outdoes any of the eccentricities one might find in the Pact Worlds, even among Androids. Despite my familiarity with obscure techno-cultural interfaces, necrobot routines operate on such fundamentally different logic that standard algorithms can only scratch the surface of their computational systems.
It is fortunate then that Tibbers’ piloting wetware implants are far from standard. For whatever reason, his cerebral implant code, which my former professors would have surely evaluated as inelegant at best, adapts remarkably well to necrobot interfaces. We saw this with the piloting console on the pyramid vessel, and again with the command console in the necrobot facility. Tibber’s implants make a better interpreter than my specialised software. Still, I could not explain why that is. Maybe it’s simply that good pilots also make good vehicles. Then again, I would not dare test that hypothesis with Vinu…
In any case, the combined efforts of Tibbers and I allowed us to crack the command console. From what I could decipher, the terminal was one piece of a much larger network, the main terminal for which was located three floors above. That alone suggested the existence of stairs or an elevator in the facility. After cross-referencing with the map we generated from our drone work, there is only one doorway we didn’t check, leaving us with the likely location. The fact that there are at least three more floors in this facility that we know nothing about is concerning, but not something we can address at the moment. We will simply have to do our best to be prepared for any surprises the necrobots might have in store, which is not exactly a new situation for us.
As for the information we could gather, I was able to pull a massive database of necrobot soldiers. I could not say if it was every necrobot in existence, every necrobot in the Khalfani Dynasty, or just every necrobot in this region, but regardless, the actual count was staggering. However, only a very small portion of them seemed to be active. The vast majority of the entries were listed as dormant. Perhaps the necrobots only keep a small portion of their population active at a time for energy conservation, or there is some other factor keeping them in check. Whatever the case may be, it means the threat they pose, at least for now, is much smaller than it could be. In a sense that’s a relief, but without any knowledge as to why so many necrobots are dormant, it’s a small comfort. For all we know, the entire necrobot population could awaken and attack at any moment. Given the numbers I saw and what we already know about necrobot combat capabilities, there is no way the Pact Worlds would stand a chance against such an onslaught.
Besides the count, I was also able to determine a few other useful details. I finally learned the official necrobot designations for several of the unit types we’d encountered thus far. I’ve retroactively updated my records to use these designations, which should help for future combat and research records. Would that the terminal had more cultural information on each unit type, but extracting any information was already difficult, and even if I could retrieve that data, actually parsing it would have taken time we didn’t have, so my subsequent queries were more targeted.
The highest ranking unit on the floor we were located on was named “Aserak the Obsidian Shard”. Tibbers offered up a less flattering variation of the name that I will not repeat here, but that evoked thoughts of an unclean posterior. Assuming this individual was located in the crypt that was being watched over by two lynchguards and two “immortals”, I dread to think of the type of power Aserak might wield. If necrobot hierarchy is indeed defined by combat prowess as it seems to be, then perhaps our posteriors ought to be the unclean ones…
Next I inquired about the location of the “tomb sentinel”, which is the designation used for the giant robotic centipede we spotted with the scarab drone. It was confirmed as being in the room directly north of us, where it was when we first scouted. We collectively decided that it would be best to fight it before progressing further into the facility, lest it ambush us in an inopportune time.
Before any scholars reading this in some far future question if I had abandoned my attempts at seeking peace by this point, know that I did attempt to see if the necrobots had any record of first contact protocols or diplomatic procedures. If such protocols exist, they were not documented in the terminal.
My last action before disconnecting was to do my best to scrub our digital footprint from the system. Some of my questions seemed to be triggering scrutiny from the system, and while I do not know for certain if the necrobots could or would trace our hack back to Tibbers’ implants, it seemed wise to mitigate that risk nonetheless. I somewhat regret mentioning that to Tibbers, as he spent the next hour or so expressing fears about the necrobots “hacking and melting his brain”.
Our next steps would be to defeat the tomb sentinel, then push forward towards the location where we believed Aserak to be. A simple plan, but focusing on what’s right in front of us can be a great way to channel our motivation. The rest just comes down to not dying horribly, but that’s been our ongoing mission for the last several months anyways.
Player's Notes: I initially held off on this one since we ended abruptly in the first round of our fight with the centipede, but with the way the next session went it made more sense to just split that off and have this entry just be about the computer.
Not a whole lot to say for this one really. Gotta go catch up on the other entries.
25/01/21 - 44 - Linear Assault
Thirday, 6th Rova, 322 AG, Unknown Necrobot Facility
The tomb sentinel was absolutely terrifying to witness first hand. Given its size and ferocity, I’m very glad we opted to funnel it through a small doorway. Thanks to that, Meved was able to hold the frontline while the rest of us peppered it with shots from a distance. Admittedly the positioning made getting a clean shot difficult, let alone finding a vulnerable spot through its armour, but similarly its own attacks were limited thanks to Meved’s sturdy defensive position. Fearsome though it might have been, in a battle of attrition we simply had the greater claw and firepower.
As we pushed forward, we passed by the window that offered a glimpse into the rest of our greater location. I only got a brief look, so I couldn’t learn much more than we had from the scarab, but I could at least confirm that what we witnessed was not an anomaly from our digital imaging. Either the location had an immense canopy of some kind, or we were indeed under a starless sky.
My observations were interrupted by the vanguards of our team running into a patrol of necrobot soldiers. Meved wasted no time in charging them through the narrow corridor, forcing them to backpedal. Yaro pushed forward as well, which admittedly worried me given his recent near brush with death, but he more than demonstrated that he was able to handle himself against a simple necrobot soldier. In fact, the absolute feat of swordplay he demonstrated reminded me of the famous Sarenite whirling dervish techniques. I never knew Yaro was a practitioner of that style. It leaves me to wonder if there are some other tricks that dog might be hiding from me…
[Editor’s Note: Scrap that last line. There I go again, committing thoughts to record that are best left unwritten…]
The soldiers didn’t end up being much of a threat. We’d grown so accustomed to dealing with tougher units that they seemed weak by comparison. Still, they weren’t to be underestimated, so I disabled some of their combat capabilities for good measure while the rest of our group went in for the finishing blows.
We found ourselves with two rooms in our immediate vicinity. One we knew to be the location of the facility’s main power station, while the other was the room with the bodyguards and suspicious sarcophagus. We opted to proceed directly to the sarcophagus room, which in retrospect might have been a mistake on our part. As soon as the doors opened, the immortals in the room opened fire on us. Fortunately, I too was ready for such an ambush. I managed to scramble one of their targeting systems before it could do some serious damage to Meved.
The start of our fight followed a typical flow. Meved charged in, this time ignoring the lynchguard at the front to go after the immortals. I believe the logic was to disrupt their heavy weapons and remove the smaller threats quickly, allowing us to collectively focus on the lynchguard. Normally that would have been a sound plan, but we neglected the factor of any potential threats coming from behind. A “spyder” unit appeared from the power room, along with several swarms of hostile scarabs, effectively flanking us. I was immediately swarmed, and it was all I could do to run out of the cloud and corner myself.
I only barely managed to recover when the swarms managed to overtake the entire rest of our backline. Yaro, Vinu, and Tibbers were completely covered by the creatures, keeping them momentarily out of the fight. With no real options to deal with the swarms myself and the lynchguard far too close for comfort, I chose a very risky gambit. I tried to repeat my stasis protocol on the lynchguard, holding them in place. It almost didn’t work, but a bit of on the spot rewriting of its defence mechanisms forced the protocol into effect, allowing me to reposition and support the rest of my allies.
With the lynchguard temporarily immobilised, Meved returned his attention to the back of the room and unleashed his canon back at the lynchguard as well as the scarab swarms. Moments later Yaro recovered enough to do the same with his disintegrator. The combined blasts cleared out the swarms and forced the spyder to retreat. That gave us the opportunity we needed to focus all of our attacks on the lynchguard.
Naturally, the lynchguard didn’t go down without a fight. It was able to break its stasis and landed a decent strike on me, but its attempt to split its attention between us left it vulnerable to Meved’s claws. The spyder reappeared at that moment to revive the lynchguard, but another volley took them down again, and Yaro’s blade ensured that the spyder would not have another chance to interfere. [Editor’s Note: Again, when did he become such a capable swordsman?]
The remaining immortals stayed in the back throughout this situation, still attempting to break Meved’s necrodermic carapace with their heavy weapons. At some point when I wasn’t looking, Vinu went after one of them, which is likely why it wasn’t causing us any real trouble. The other almost managed to land a critical strike on our bear, but I recognised the targeting sequence from when we had first opened the doors to this room and applied the same interference. My active scrambling may be a significant drain on resources, but the value it brings in denying enemy capabilities makes it more than worth the cost.
Needless to say, as soon as we were done with the final immortals, it was time for another much needed rest. That being said, Aserak was still a threat. The fights we’d had so far considerably drained my spells and energy. I was uncertain if I’d have enough remaining in me to handle them and get out of there…
Player's Notes: Edit Code really came in clutch this session. First, to stop a crit from one of the immortals getting an ambush hit on Meved, then to force the lynchguard to reroll his save against Hold Person, and then finally to stop ANOTHER crit from THE SAME immortal. I may not be the damage dealer of the party, but boy am I doing work as the damage preventer hahaha.
With that, I'm once again up to date. We haven't had a session in the last few weeks. I'm down to 3 Resolve, 2 3rd level spells, and 4 1st level spells (my 2nd levels are out). I really hope that'll be enough for Aserak and whatever else is left in here...