Thursday, December 12, 2019

The Ultraviolet Grasslands Episode 14: A Perfect World

The explorers re-enter the cave. This time they take a different path - and get lucky. The path winds down and down, deep into the moon. At a certain point the livingstone gives way to a weird semi transparent crystal - the walls and floors are all made of this material. 

Renko finds a towel and a mug lying on the tunnel floor - all made of this crystal. It looks like the crystal substance slowly takes over other substances and replaces them. They take the mug and towel in case they are worth something. They enter a wide tunnel that is only partially taken over by crystals - it is filled with about 20 cryogenic chambers. Inside are sleeping humanoids that they do not recognise but are not entirely human. 

They debate whether to disturb any of them but finally decide to try to wake one up. Sissy manages to interpret the controls and they open one of the caskets. The inhabitant sits up and screams - and a weird black creature leaps from its throat, killing the humanoid. They rake the little creature with fire - it dies bleeding green acid onto the floor, shrieking. They decide not to wake any more of the cryogenic chambers, and worry about the strange aliens.

They come into what looks like a loading bay - again it is partially turned into the weird pink transparent crystal. There are two industrial looking loading exoskeletons there - made entirely out of the pink crystal. 

Renko and Sissy try to get them going and with Vitreous Orange's help they manage to get both started. Sissy and Vitreous suit up and stomp along behind Renko. The bay turns into a silver torus that they clomp along - past a number of mummified figures with their dessicated brains plugged into some sort of complicated looking computers. 

Next is a large square black chamber - it looks long abandoned but somebody made their home here. There are dozens of book sized black boxes with wires and headsets attached to them. Renko puts one on his head and is hums into life. Renko sees in front of him three menu options - in an alien language that he can strangely read - 

1. Encyclopedia
2. Relaxation
3. Perfect World

He takes off the headset and puts it aside for later. 

They head down a corridor and too late, sense movement above them. Camouflaged in the transparent crystal ceiling is a transparent crystal humanoid creature with an elongated skill like head. It lunges onto Renko, and rips into his armour. The others mow at the creature with their bolters, and it explodes in a wave of acid which pour over Renko burning him badly. But luckily his porcelain armour manages to neutralise the acid and he survives with only a deeply painful bruise from where the creature landed on him. 
A crystal alien, dancing on the edge of copyright

They carry on and find a control room - with multiple weird crystal dials and levers. At the far end is a strange organic egg shaped object. Sissy has managed to find the x-ray setting on his Porcelain mask and he sees that there is some sort of spider shaped creature writhing inside. They mow it down and it dies, shrieking in a pool of its own acid. 

They examine the room, and experiment with some of the switches. There is a low hum and it looks like some sort of deep engine in the moon has been activated. They move a crystal and feel a lurch. From outside their polybodies report that the moon has shot up about another 100 meters into the air. The entire Near Moon camp is in uproar. They try to fiddle with the controls again and the moon lurches about 500 meters to the west. At this point Renko panics and quickly shuts down all the engines before something catastrophic happens.

They feel they have explored the moon but they still haven't found the mysterious Memories-Best-Left-Forgotten. Renko tries the mysterious headset - he looks at the Encyclopedia and finds a lot of information about an ancient alien civilization, looking to escape their doomed world many hundreds of light years distant, tens of thousands of years ago. 

Then Renko tries the 'Perfect World' setting and a message comes up 'Do you Wish to Enter the Perfect World?' - Renko says yes and disappears. 

The others flip out. Vitreous Orange tries the same and also disappears. His polybody immediately loses track of his other body. Sissy, somewhat shocked, now only with Orca Malificent, grabs the walker and the headsets and heads for the surface.

Meanwhile - Renko and Vitreous find themselves standing together in a weird dusty city surrounded by space suited figures. They try to ask a stranger where they are.

"Why, don't you know? This is the Spectrum Palace, my friend."

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