Flesh
Your temple screaming
To be heard
To be in love
Your flesh a kingdom approaching
An ocean raging wild into the ideas surround
You are flesh

Our heroes have freed a group of young men from a tyrannical matriarchal cult, and in exchange received information about the location of a statuette similar to one that was stolen from them a year ago. They now prepare to enter the abandoned mine where the statue is hidden. The roster for this session:

 

  • Clementine, technologist
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Saqr, pilot and mystic
  • Al Hamra, captain and droid (with mystic powers)
  • Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
  • Kaarlina, mystic
  • Adam, gunner

They had been warned that something very dangerous guarded the statue, and guessed that it was a Sentinel, a portal builder remnant they had not encountered in person but had witnessed in action on some found footage from a dig in Kua. They flew to the dig site and prepared themselves for a deadly confrontation.

The abandoned mine

The statuette was located in an abandoned mine a few hours’ crawler ride from the matriarchal cult. They flew in on the Beast of Burden, taking their most powerful ship in order to have some defense should the matriarchs have some heavy weapons in reserve. They landed the Beast of Burden about 100m from the abandoned mine and left Oliver Greenstar with the energy cannon pointed at the entrance. The rest of the team took their flyer to the mine entrance and parked it there, the loading bay facing the entrance. They expected to be making a very rapid exit and wanted the flyer ready to move quickly.

The mine entrance was unblocked, a wide cutting hacked into a cliff face composed of a strange mixture of hard rock and a fine, fibrous material that wound between the rocks like sinews in some ancient beast. They followed the cutting on a slope down and into the earth, lighting their suit lamps as the cutting merged into a tunnel and curved into the ground. They followed the tunnel down into the cold dark, weapons ready, searching the walls carefully for signs of pillars or any rough texture that might indicate the sentinels they feared. All they saw were smooth stone walls and long-dead lamps.

After some distance and a drop of perhaps a few hundred metres the small entry tunnel opened into a long, dark gallery. They stumbled into the open space, suddenly submerged in darkness: their suit lamps were not powerful enough to illuminate the entire gallery, and all they could see was the vague shadow of walls and then blank emptiness.

Here is where ambushes happen. They bunched together and crept over to one side of the gallery, moving slowly along the walls in a tight group. Nothing emerged from the shadows to warp their flesh but halfway down the gallery they found two corpses, twisted and ruined by strange forces, their equipment scattered around them. They investigated the bodies enough to confirm that they had been killed by Sentinels, but their guess was that the bodies had been dragged here and not killed in this place. They moved on.

A short distance further they came to a rockfall, which was obviously blocking a tunnel entrance. They had found the room they sought.

The statuette

They took their time to open the rockfall, carefully clearing rocks away from the entrance while they guarded each others’ position and prepared themselves for the worst. Nothing attacked them, and after a few hours of heavy work they had broken a gap wide enough for two people to pass through side by side. Adam set up his machine gun on the rocky outcrop, Siladan laid some breach charges in the gap as a defensive measure, and they entered the room beyond.

The room was small, a 10m by 10m cube, with a large mosaic across the far wall, a rockfall obscuring the far corner of the room, and four pillars supporting the ceiling. The pillars, obviously, were what they needed to worry about. They fanned out across the room, covering the pillars with their weapons while Siladan investigated them.

There was nothing to see. They were simple pillars, old and weathered but not threatening in any way. Siladan could see nothing to indicate they might be alive or active, though he had no doubt they were, so he moved on to look at the statuette. It was nestled in an alcove on the bottom right corner of the mosaic, a squat, ugly little black stone thing that was exactly the same as the one they had seen in Coriolis. Above it, at the top of the mosaic, a similar alcove was empty, as if someone had stolen the statuette that sat inside it. How many of these things were there?

The sentinels

With nothing else to do here, Siladan did what obviously had to be done: he picked up the statuette and put it in his bag. The pillar nearest to him immediately came to life, warping and twisting in a disturbing preternatural fashion and attacking him with a strange rocky outcropping that whipped out of its body with incredible speed and force. He managed to dodge the blow, and then another statue on the far side of the room rippled to life, attacking the nearest member of the team. The ambush had begun.

Within seconds one of their team was down, badly injured, and they had to retreat from the room rapidly. Under the heavy, thundering roar of Adam’s machine gun they withdrew from the room, but as they ran to the door the remaining two pillars activated and began attacking people as they passed. After a tense couple of seconds of battle they were able to break out, Adam dragging their injured colleague as they fled the room. One of the sentinels rushed after them into the gallery, but Siladan was able to trigger the breach charges and bury the remaining three inside the room. They rushed down the hall with the sentinel chasing them, moving too fast for a stone pillar animated after a year of slumber. They engaged it at the point where the two bodies lay, all of them shooting it or stabbing it. Clementine’s monosword broke on the thing’s armour and most of their shots bounced off its stone skin but eventually they managed to shatter its guard and beat it down. It fell and shattered into a thousand pieces of stone. Saqr grabbed a tabula lying next to one of the bodies and they dashed out of the gallery, terrified that the remaining three sentinels would find a way through the rockfall. One of their number was nearly dead and they had only killed one of the sentinels, even with a heavy machine gun and breach charges to defend them. They piled into the flyer and rushed to the Beast of Burden as Oliver Greenstar opened fire with the energy cannon on the mining entrance. As Saqr hurled the flyer into the Beast of Burden‘s hangar the entire cliff face collapsed on the mine entrance, covering it completely. They took off immediately, and no one breathed until they were in low orbit, the sentinels far below them in the bowels of the earth.

They had the statuette, and the mining team’s tabula. The final scenes on the tabula were exactly as they expected: a mining team investigating the room, finding the statuette in the top alcove, picking it up, and being attacked by the Sentinels. Three people escaped, one carrying the statuette and one injured woman dragging another, as they collapsed the rocks on the room. When the two injured women collapsed the remaining woman carrying the statuette panicked and abandoned them, leaving them to die rather than risk facing the sentinels. The statuette had been liberated, and they guessed then the sentinels had returned to their slumber.

Saqr used his mystic powers to track the statuette, and found it in the place they all had least expected: in a spaceship near the lair of Samina’s Corsairs. He took the risk and used his scrying power to look in on the statuette. It was sitting on a control panel in the bridge of a small spaceship that was heading away from the Corsairs’ lair, which could be seen on a screen in the bridge. The ship was heading to a set of coordinates, which Saqr memorized and shared with the group. What were these statuettes, and why were they so entangled with the Corsairs?

There was only one way to find out. They returned to Presidium station, and prepared to set a course for Hamura.