2025/09/12: A Bridge in the Sky

Buzz, Kelsey, Knight, Malakai, Nimbus, Everett, Othar, Union   Noon-ish on the 4th day of travel. Knight returned from the noodle incident in New Hallownest. (Details will be figured out later.) The rest of the party filled them in on what had happened. The afternoon was uneventful; Othar was on paranoid watch duty, Knight was meditating on the Void, Kelsey was guarding and working her crew shift, Union observed the secrets of the universe.   Then multiple bursts of lightning struck ahead of them simultaneously. The sky seemed to darken. No hostile was visible, but the cloud seemed to have gathered quickly. Sensors confirmed that there was something in the storm. It looked like a ship. A mass reading marked it at 2200 tons, about four times the size of the Ragnarok.   And then the reading disappeared.   The storm was still growing. Malakai tried to turn the ship to head around it, but it grew and approached too fast, and soon it was upon them. Wind, rain, and hail that sounded like machine gun fire.   The ship spun out and almost ran into the sea, but the pilot managed to pull out of it with Malakai's aid. Then the ship exited into a patch of sunlight in the center of the storm. The ship came to a dead stop in front of and below a strange vessel.   The new ship looked like a silvery bridge with several sets of wings on either end. Four wings out the front, six out the back, towers at either end. cubic boxes and tubes were positioned like weapons in open bays along the flanks of the ship.   Malakai looked for signs of movement or communication, but there was nothing. Only the flapping of stray guide wires. Othar offered to use Dark Mirror to scry on the ship. It should have worked; it was an artifact-level effect. Instead, all he got was sparks.   Knight casually walked over to the exit hatch and looked at the rest of the party. They agreed; time to go exploring. Othar asked how destructive he was allowed to be if the ship was hostile; Malakai said there were no limits if that proved to be the case.   Knight climbed out and checked if magic worked. It did. As the rest of the group was climbing out, Knight went shade form to try to fly up without wind being a problem; they were nearly blown off the back end of the ship, revealing that the wind also affected ethereal creatures.   Malakai led the way to one of the balconies on the silver ship. The wind seemed to like him; it practically guided him right to it without effort. Knight, following, had no such favor; it seemed to be picking on them specifically, possibly because they were so light relative to their size. The rest of the party did their best to follow.   The party landed in one of the ship's weapon bays. There were two hwacha inside, though they looked like they'd been crossed with a CIWS, with lever controls and little boxes next to them. Malakai recognized controls for people to operate them.   Knight spotted what looked like small semi-solid shadows fluttering madly in the wind around the external weapon bay. They appeared innocuous at first glance, but were definitely unnatural.   Malakai opened the next hatch and called out a greeting. The response was an otherworldly screech that lasted for a full 15 seconds before fading. Everett detected evil all around them, and Knight detected spirits to back that up. While Knight was busy trying to figure out if these fragments of evil emotion and darkness were related to him, they descended on the party.   Strange, slimy lamprey/leech creatures with clawed arms dove in from all directions. Roughly a dozen of them in the initial assault. Composed out of darkness and shadow or perhaps composed of void.   Othar, taking full advantage of being told there would be no holds barred, flew back out of the ship and tried to blow it in half with a Darkfire Sunburst. He didn't quite manage it, but the blast certainly felt like it penetrated. The backlash left him with a level of exhaustion and his vision going dark at the edges. The ship looked slightly melted.   The leeches piled onto the party, the swarm growing. They weren't very dangerous individually, but there were plenty. Othar saw some of them come for him outside the ship, but the wind blocked them; it seemed designed to drive them back and contain them.   Knight, still bewildered by their first encounter with (semi-)Void things outside Hallownest, decided it was time to experiment with them. By eating them. They weren't attacking him, or at least were reaching him and having no idea what they were supposed to do after that. Rather than wading into the melee, Knight opted to use his elasticity to grab one of the things and try to take a bite out of it. It didn't make it to his mouth; his body absorbed it before it could get there. It felt very strange. It was like it had ended up in a spot in his inventory he wasn't familiar with.   While Knight was doing science, the rest of the party was up to their waists in shadow-leech things. Buzz decided this was the right time for a light grenade. As that charged, Othar came back and informed the rest of the party that the wind didn't agree with these things. A bit more violence ensued before the last of the shadow creatures were blasted apart.   After the party finished disposing of the creatures, Knight focused on trying to connect to the one he caught. The rest of the party debated preparing more, but Buzz detected no incoming encounters, so they decided to venture onward. They found sigils and magic conduits along the walls while trying to look for the engine room. The sigils were holy sigils and were accompanied by angelic script.   The party found some Angerious force rods in an armory, along with uniforms. This seemed to have been a military ship. There were no clear signs of what god this ship was dedicated to.   The uniform colors: white with blue piping (common), silver with blue piping (uncommon), white with silver piping (rare).   While Knight was busy soothing and subduing the captured leech-thing in the background, the party found their way to the aft tower of the ship. They located a ladder leading up and down through the floors. Based on what little Buzz's tricorder could detect, the party decided to go down.   They passed through living quarters and mess halls and weapon rooms and more. Eventually they reached a section with powerful magic that was well-sealed against extraplanar creatures and other dangers. Knight and Union felt... restrained. Like their caster levels were diminished and they'd been forced to sign the guest book as they went down.   The group came to a network of glowing crystals of different colors, like a Simon Says but 3D and all the crystals are complex interlinked polygons and Platonic solids. With his knowledge of crystalomancy, Union deduced that this was a way to manipulate the power flow within the ship.   After some inspection, the party headed up to the bridge of the ship to see if the controls there were understandable. It turned out to be a military-style bridge with lots of windows.   Buzz used Legend Lore to see if he could get the history of the ship. He got a full documentary history of the ship's construction and deployment, which he displayed to the rest of the group via magic. The ship is the Totenkreuz, the last surviving battleship of the Angerious Empire. During the empire's last stand, the ship conducted a noble delaying action to hold off the evil magma dwarves and then led a distraction. They drew in a large fleet and then destroyed them with an angelic storm, but a curse was laid on the ship, forcing the crew to evacuate while some held the line against the invading creatures. They crew had been hoping to fight on solo as a lone, stateless ship, but that plan didn't work out. The ship has since been flying for three years by itself, controlled by the ghosts of those who fell in its last moments.   Buzz put on an item that let him see and be seen by spirits. He was immediately face to face with the ship's captain. The captain was a tall, stately man with a longish buzz-cut, but it looked like someone had hacked off half his face. Very ghoulish-looking. There was only him and one other ghost on the bridge. If there were other ghosts, they were elsewhere in the ship.   Buzz asked what the best way to help them was. The captain directed him to a console, which Nimbus translated. At first it seemed like it needed handprint authentication, but it turned out to be the console that handled promotions and demotions, and this was letting one of the party members be promoted to be a member of the crew.   Buzz turned out to be an invalid target. It was suspected that it was because he had no celestial blood. That left Nimbus as the candidate. She made it through the process and came out with the rank of "workman" in the crew.