New character: Brother Methuselah, Deft Metropolitan
accountant monk, exploring clues to the great forgetting. He is an Ultra
currently inhabiting the body of a Greenlander. He has a Thinking Machine and
can summon his ghostly brothers.
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| An ancient thinking machine |
On the mountain road
to the South Facing Passage Vigo suddenly cries out: “They are coming!”. A
group of ultra-possessed skinchangers charges down the hills.
Brother Methuselah recognizes his kind and persuades them
to spare the mules that the skinchangers eye hungrily. He will leave food behind if
they don’t reveal his true nature to the others. The Ultra agrees.
High in the mountains they rest in a flowery glen. Brother
Methuselah discovers “The Puce House” a queer distillery run by two unlikely
friends: Satrap 202 Delta – or Fredi in short - and Pineas 3 – drum, a
porcelain prince, wearing goat hides and no shoes. After a tasting of Soma and
Black Lotus Schnapps they get down to business: For a fortune they sell the Black Lotus they harvested in the oasis of peace and beauty.
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| A Soma tasting |
Fearing further deterioration of Johnny-7 they set out. After a couple of days they leave the high steppe and enter the Umberlands: a quiet, desolate plain cut by
dried up canals. A resting place is found in an abandoned plantation. The
emptiness of the landscape wears on Azure Dee and Brother Methuselah who both
lose a cherished memory of their childhood.
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| The tunnels of the positronic library |
They locate the Halls of the Umber King where Johnny-7 hopes
to find production blueprints stored on punch cards. Between crumbling arches
and colossi overgrown by chitinous fungi they find a stairway leading
underground ignoring the warning signs which advice against it. Through neon
tunnels filled with fungal spores and smell ghosts they enter a control room with several exits,
one of which is barred with a laser grid, another leads to a golem workshop and
an exhibition room of religious artifacts. Azure Dee spots a Vile liver stored
in a glass jar. Among the rusted filing cabinet drawers of the positronic
library they finally find still readable punch cards.
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| Technology indistinguishable from magic |
Upon returning to the sourcefac they enter the cards into a
sorting machine that translates the data onto the last two working magnetic tapes.
The machines vibrate and hum in delight. For the first time in ages Johnny-7
again produces pristine untainted objects.
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| A perfect chair! |
Actual Play: https://youtu.be/FDfT960ilOc
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