ꙮ There’s a lookout tower, a short walk up into the hills into which Rifton is nestled; it’s got a good view of the surrounding areas, so it’s been used to try and catch monster hordes before they’re anywhere near the city walls, when necessary. It’s also a remarkably convenient location for mad science, and has a few fascinating scorch-marks on the sheet-metal floor as a consequence.
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- The Dragon
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← Active ScenesA Lookout Tower, Near Rifton
#hunter
#ck
has a tendency to wind up in these sorts of places, it turns out, and probably isn’t particularly hard to find. Especially if you asked Salme before hand, or were messing around with the Find A Friend function in preparation.
has searched low for Aurelius, and now searches high. Thinking back on it, they should have started with the tower and the walls.
ꙮ High places, the natural habitat of the wild Aurelius.
: “Friend-Aurelius!” Luĉja waves, “I have questions about Tomestones and Farcasters. Up for a bit of science?”
: “Sure, what’s up?”
: “Saranzaya mentioned that Xi had been by Queenstown recently. My assumption that where he has gone, Tasna is likely somewhere near. Since we know they use farcasters to speak…intermittently with Tsem, I wondered if we might be able to build one of our own or use the Tomestones to search for where signals might come from.”
: “Oh, is Xi someone you’re familiar with and it’s not Tasna taking a new form…?” Aurelius pauses and scratches at his chin. “… Not sure? I think the farcasters use some kind of bizarre crystal resonance to communicate, where as the Tomestones work off the… uh… what’s it called. Aurichalcum that connects pearls together…?”
: “No harm in trying though, not like anyone has a good grasp on what aurichalcum is anyway.”
: “Xi is Xilai. They also appear all over descriptions of the Rite. Particularly in the more defensive options. Does Aurichalcum also connect Pearls? Fascinating. I had half a mind to attempt making some crystals before finding you, but decided to check in first.”
: “Oh the uh…” Aurelius squints, trying to remember a word he definitely has no reason to know but has used before. “big Kin guy? Right. Wait he’s here too? Does that mean Khejvard is too?”
a pause, realizing he’s getting distracted even if the topics are related. “Not confirmed, but I’m pretty sure the same stuff inside the endjinn is the same stuff gluing pearls together, yeah.”
: “I…have not heard mention of Khejvard in many years. Not that I ever spoke with Xilai or Tasna directly. Or, if I did, it is a memory I have mysteriously not recovered. If we find Xilai and Tasna, they may be able to elucidate.”
: “Then Synthesis and I are cousins, of a sort.”
nods slowly. “Fair enough.”
: “If the Farcasters work off a completely different technology, perhaps our best chance of success lies with crafting some crystals of our own? Or do you think the Tomestones able of detecting a signal?”
: “Hmm. On the one hand I don’t think it would. On the other hand, clearly a couple of weirdos have been able to locate and utilize the signal, so maybe? They are kind of special though.”
pulls out his tomestone and begins messing around with some settings as they talk.
ꙮ Beep, boop.
attempts to watch for the barest hint of what might be happening, but they’re pretty lost when it comes to these devices.
ꙮ What’re you tryin’?
is… trying to adjust the ‘Find A Friend’ settings to look for any potential signals that might be in the air, rather than homing in on specific pearls like it does by default.
ꙮ Interesting. So, here’s the thing - it’s definitely picking up fluctuations. There’s some kind of background static here that you definitely don’t recall existing on Samudra? Caion did a good-enough job on the tomestones’ error-correction capabilities that it’s not interfering with the devices’ function. Not even throwing any errors!
ꙮ But there’s something it keeps vaguely trying to lock on to.
: “…This is actually going to be easier than I thought? We hadn’t invented radios here yet, right?”
: “I do not know any radio. Though I have spent most of the last couple decades hiding in the wilderness.”
ꙮ Aurelius - dredged-up memories of attempts at creating something like a radio, here. They never worked, despite the theory behind them being sound, and nobody’d figured out why.
: “…Right… the interference… that prevented the… hm.”
: “Okay Lucja, I think we’re going to go exploring. We’re probably either going to find what we’re looking for, or something very weird.”
: “Adventure! Where to, Friend-Aurelius?”
hands Lucja his tomestone, then asks for theirs so that Aurelius can do similar adjustments to the tracking program, so that having two things trying to lock onto the rogue signal might help a bit, then trying trying to figure out what direction it’s coming from.
hands it over, being very careful with Aurelius’ device in the meantime.
ꙮ To get a confident lock on the signal’s source, you’d usually need three measurements at least, spread quite some distance apart from each other… but the direction of the signal is actually remarkably easy to locate. It’s coming from below you.
: “Uh… down.”
: “Odds on ‘something odd’ increasing.”
: “Odd odds. Down we go.” Luĉja climbs down the Lookout Tower, following the signal and following Aurelius.
ꙮ It’s a reasonably tall lookout tower. (That’s why you found Aurelius up there, after all!) So the fact that climbing down it makes no real measurable, appreciable difference in the readings you’re getting…
: “Yeah, this is probably ‘deep forge’ down.”
: “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
: “Which… we probably need to be in Queenstown for, right?”
: “Unfortunately, no. We’d need to be much further afield. I know several entrances to the Deepforge, but none that are particularly close to the railroad. They’re all well off the beaten path. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, lousy with hungry fiends.”
: “So I guess the static stays for now.”
: “Hmm. Okay. Well, I guess that explains why the radio experiments never worked, if they couldn’t cut through the interference and were getting overpowered by the signal coming from… whatever’s down there.”
ꙮ Stands to reason.
: “Which means the tomestones aren’t going to help, but we could try building a farcaster.”
: “You spent a fair bit of time with Tsemdruluk’s farcaster. I accidentally collapsed a ludicrous amount of gnosis into a crystal once. I wonder if with intent, we might be able to do it again.”
: “Heh. Only one way to find out.”
ꙮ Indeed there is.
ꙮ How are you going about this?
: “Would that I had a better understanding of what I had done on Samudra. It seems unlikely that radiant gnosis is the only one that forms crystals. But since I’ve only done it once, I have no way of knowing. Burning could also be reasonable, in a world full of it.”
ꙮ A crystal has a focus. What is your focus?
: “To find the hidden in places far-flung.”
: “Honestly, anything could probably work? Especially if we start with a base, instead of 100% raw gnosis. Either a stone we compress the hell out of, or… I think you can make them with salt and hot water, too?”
takes a stone out of their satchel and holds it tightly.
ꙮ You’ve done this bit before, as a party trick - Endjinn are good at it. Press on it hard enough, and apply some gnosis, and…! Radiant DC6, Luĉja?
- Luĉja, The Clockwork Knight invoked their 🟡radiant gnosis [d12] -> 1.
Guess I'll take half.
ꙮ That’ll be a [Take Half] - you’ve done this before, do when it starts to go wrong, your gears just start spinning faster and you let out a little puff of steam!
- Luĉja, The Clockwork Knight has gained 1 Arete, and now has 5.
ꙮ Something between your hands starts to glow, brightly, and then when you move your hands apart, the stone’s become a brightly-shimmering crystal.
: “Much simpler to do purposefully.”
ꙮ Indeed it is. Now, Aurelius, it’s not quite a blank slate. It’s better than that.
thinks back… there was some kind of thing wrapped around the crystal, right? He takes out a length of cord and begins to inscribe runes into it - one for boosting the effects of other things, and ones for focus and clarity. He then takes the crystal and inscribes different runes into that - for sending, for receiving, for detecting - before wrapping the cord around the crystal a few times.
ꙮ You immediately feel it begin to pick up on… something. Liminal, DC 1/7, please?
- Aurelius invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d6] -> 6! It ✨explodes!
- Aurelius invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d6] -> 1.
ꙮ Perfect.
- Aurelius used their techné Reality Glitch (When a Liminal die explodes, something impossible briefly occurs—describe it.)
(The interference in the air is gone, for a while.)
ꙮ You wire-wrap the crystal in a pattern that suggests itself to your intuition; you are certain, without knowing how or why, that it is Correct.
ꙮ And, so, here’s the thing -
ꙮ You realise, with the focus the crystal in your hand gives you, that the ‘noise’ isn’t noise. The static isn’t static. It’s a signal.
ꙮ (And if you isolate the signal, you can, with some effort, construct a proper workaround, you think. But, first:)
ꙮ You have built a device, here, in order to emit a signal which it receives, and as Luĉja and Aurelius’ gnosis flows through it, it begins to resonate.
- You hear — and your Star hears — a song, echoing from the stillness: The Signal
: “…Wait we were supposed to figure this out? I wonder if we skipped ahead. We probably skipped ahead. That’s real interesting. … Uh, anyway, turns out that wasn’t as hard to make as expected?”
ꙮ Sometimes… something impossible briefly occurs. Long enough. Long enough.
: “Your skills remain unparalleled, friend-Aurelius. I…did not expect a song.”
listens, and listens… and… starts laughing.
: “you wish that you could understand what’s being sung, here* *but you cannot”
ꙮ Well, it’s true.
: “Sometimes, the Song is… very silly.”
ꙮ …anyways, it’d be a bit of a project, but you could probably compensate for the local– well. You can’t call it ‘background noise’ any more, can you?
: “Something to chew on for a few days, for sure.”
: “Perhaps some sort of shielding…”
: “For now though.” Aurelius gently taps out a message upon the crystals surface, before seeing where the signal from the crystal goes, then starts to follow it.
HELLO, WORLD
ꙮ The message is tapped out, and the crystal dutifully broadcasts it – the gnosis-wave shaping itself according to ill-understood laws. Going in the direction of the far hills towards-ish Queenstown… and going directly down, into the ground beneath your feet. It’s impossible to get a clearer reading than that - but it would seem that someone, or something, might receive your message.
: “This is the song of the Deepforge, Aurelius.”
: “The one you mentioned being able to hear before, like Wolf hears other… locations?”
: “Yes. This is the song I can hear. I have always heard.”
: “It seems a trip below lies in our future.”
: “Yeah, it was picking up the signal from the farcasted in addition to our hill-friends.” Aurelius squints out into the distance. “…Might be easier to try and get there from Queenstown rather than here, though.”
: “Very much so. We’ll need supplies and access to one of the other rail lines.”
nods. “Yeah makes sense. Hm. Well, didn’t quite get what wanted, but learned a couple of interesting other things along the way so… science successful?”
: “A good start to a new project!”
ꙮ Sometimes, you learn something completely different than what you set out to learn!
: “Thank you for your assistance, friend-Aurelius. The nuances of these things are lost on me.” Luĉja’s gears turn to the song still playing in their mind. “I hope you are faring well returning, friend-Aurelius. If you ever require company in the high places, I am always happy to spend time with a friend.”
: “I’ll be okay. I think having something new and weird and interesting to focus my mind on will help with that to, so… thanks for seeking me out with that idea, Lucja.”
: “Double success!” Luĉja raises a celebratory fist into the air. “I can think of no one more suited, friend. I will continue to ponder while I go buff out the new scorch marks on my chest plate.”
returns the gesture. “Right on, and take care.”