The South Facing Passage and the Umberlands

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.  

A perfect chair!

Actual Play: https://youtu.be/FDfT960ilOc