LogApocalypse World: Black Rain-Jason-2

Game log for the 2021/03/14 session of AW: Black Rain, as taken by Jason

Captain Maxwell and Xander Carthen pull Fisher back out of the abyss, which he finds very reassuring.

Sybil makes it to the top of the roof. A guard named Deadeye (named because of his milky-white dead eye) sees her going over the parapet and shouts out to ask if she's crazy. She makes her way down and into the room in time to see Fisher's recovery. Fisher sees her poking her way in and immediately intuits that there's another way in, but also suspects that she might have had something to do with it.

Outside the office, Bento's still beating on the stuck door, calling out, "Boss!? Boss!?" String opens the door with her left hand, and it opens into absolute nothingness. In the office, Captain Maxwell sees the door open, and through it, sees 30 feet of utter blackness, then the door with String and Bento looking through it. Across the chasm, Maxwell asks if String did this, and she assures him she did not.

String opens her brain to the maelstrom to try to understand what's happening. Normally, when she does this, it's a region of perpetual storm, but in this black space, it's clear... but still completely black. She gets the idea that she ought to be able to let go of the handle and just walk through the door, but her hand won't obey her will. She reaches over with her right hand to try to pull her fingers off the knob.

Sybil, outside under a clear blue sky, hears thunder. That's weird. She comes into the room and sees the room's fascinating new abyss. That's weirder. She opens her mind to see where this void is coming from. She sees a spot, on the same wall as the door, that seems to be pulsing. She walks over to the spot and stares at it. Fisher notices it's the spot where the apparition walked out, and asks if there's something she'd like to share with the class. The brainer's surprised that everyone else can't see that the pulsing, and compares it to a heartbeat. Fisher volunteers that he knows some ways to get rid of heartbeats.

Bento asks String what to do, and she sends him off for ladders and rope. She finishes peeling her hand off the doorknob, and calls out to Sybil to make sure that she made it in. String has no ideas about the problems but suggests that Sybil might study things more. All she can think of is that she might be able to escape by going out the window, but that doesn't help everyone else. She tries to grab something off the Captain's desk to see if she can throw it across the chasm, but he grabs her hand and orders her not to make free of his stuff. She grabs the bread left over from Maxwell's previous meal and throws that through the door to String, who is able to catch it. It follows an arc as though the doors are thirty feet apart.

Bento returns with the goods to make a rope ladder, and the guards rig it up so people can leave the office via the window and up to the roof. The Captain wants to inspect the holding to see what else is going on. The water's still coming up clean, and the guards will look over the rest. Maxwell clears out the area and locks the parapet down. He reflects that he needs String and Sybil to figure this out, but String tries to deflect this off on to Xander.

Outside the office, Fisher wants to try shooting the pulsating spot, but String really leans into the idea that doing so might result in his doom, and Fisher backs down. Xander walks over to the door and opens it, trying to see what might be controlling this weird effect, but he can't get any sense of it. The abyss seems to be only five feet away now, which is a clear improvement. He closes the door. He thinks about building a bridge, but when he opens the door again, the other side is a football field away. No bridge. He opens it again and tries throwing some rain dust in. Nothing special seems to happen.

A few minutes later, Captain Maxwell and Fisher are talking in a small storeroom, which is being turned into a new office. They talk about Fisher's plan to steal some gas, and it devolves fast. Maxwell's trying to hint that he'll make it worthwhile for the violent lad, but misplays his hand, and Fisher walks out determined to steal the gas but then force the hardholder to pay top dollar for it.

Xander thinks about his windpower project and anticipates that if nobody brings in gas, it won't be more than another week until the fuel runs out, at which point maybe he can cannibalize the generators. String, Sybil, and Aster come visiting to talk about the exciting new chasm inside the walls of the tower. As they talk, Xander mentions the thing that came out of the wall, which detail is news to his visitors. String tries to question him but Xander didn't really try to look at the apparition in the spiritual way that the cult would like, and Aster says the cult should commute on it (commutation being a cult ritual), and gives Xander a look of mixed contempt and pity. She stands up and tells the savvyhead, "Just work on it, OK?" Sybil decides to stay and help Xander while the cultists do their thing, though she asks String to tell her how their ritual goes.

Xander's not real delighted to have an assistant. Sybil gets the impression that Xander will be focused on something else and will put the chasm on the back burner. She tells him that she's heard the whispers from his trailer, and asks how he explains that. He ignores the question and tells her that if he needs help, she'll be the first one he calls. Sybil goes back to the tower to investigate.

String and Aster go back to their temple. String announces that they need to commute on the chasm in the tower, and the cult's definitely interested. Some of them think that the rift must be closed, others that it might be, or be connected to, something useful and/or important. Opinion settles around the idea that the cult should push the authorities to wall up the door to the breach and never, ever interact with the chasm again. A small minority do think someone should step into the void and look around with a third eye, though.

Sybil returns to the keep, and finds Deadeye unwilling to let her approach the door. She plants her brain relay where it can see the door, and then tells Deadeye she'll be back when she gets permission.

Fisher tries to follow the merchants who he knows have gas. It takes a couple days for them to conclude all their business, so he's forced to simulate patience for that long, and then when they leave, he follows. His plan is to strike before dawn and take their stuff. He finds them camped at the edge of some bandlands, a chasm a couple hundred yards wide and many yards deep. Camping right at the edge reduces the perimeter they have to guard. Fisher's proned out on a ruined slab of concrete, looking through the tall grass at this encampment. They're carrying gas using tricycles configured as bowsers. He can see their sentries and also that they've put out booby traps. When the sentries' pattern draws them close together, Fisher uses his suppressed assault weapon to drop them both. He then begins sneaking in, working his way around the booby traps he spotted, when someone who'd gotten up to relieve himself happens to spot Fisher and lock eyes on him. There's a muffled crack as Fisher shoots him in the face. Nobody seems to wake up. Fisher then examines the way the camp is set up, realizes he couldn't possibly get out with more than one trike before people began stirring, and decides to kill them all so he can take all their stuff. Then he finds a spot to hide twof the three trikes. When he goes back for the third, something has changed. There was a stack of backpacks, four tall including a bright red one, and now it's just a bright red pack by itself. He looks around and sees some fresh turf that's slid partway into the ravine. It would be foolish to try to chase potentially armed foes into the ravine, so he removes the grenade booby trap on the third bowser, rides it to within a couple miles of Running Rock, and then walks the restof the way in, feeling quite proud of his work.

Sybil's in the cult temple (also referred to as their crackhouse) and becomes aware of someone approaching her brain relay. It seems to be Bento, guarding the door, and to Sybil, she feels nervous. Sybil touches her brain and realizes that Bento intends to open the door. She goes running toward the tower. String does find it odd to have someone bolt out of services like that, but whatever. She's more interested in talking to the Captain, who she thus seeks out. Sleaze complains to String that Sybil just ran right past her and ignored all attempts to slow her down, which is the sort of thing that will frustrate a hard-working guard. String declines all responsibility for Sybil and asks for the Captain.

Sybil gets to the hallway and finds the door open. Bento's standing there with a coiled rope in her hand, ready to toss it through the gate to Cadbury. She calls out, "Wait, what are you doing?" Bento tells her to shut up while she gets on with her bridge-building. Sybil pleads with her to stop but Bento's determined. The guard throws the rope, and Cadbury catches it and begins anchoring it to a spike in the floor. They do the same with a second rope, which they anchor higher.

Captain Maxwell's having a nice breakfast, or would be if people would stop interrupting him. One of the guards leads String in, and she advises the leader to seal the door up forever and to either build an alternate door to the office or find a new office. He warns Maxwell that this has happened before and it will happen again, according to her hand. Maxwell asks whether the hand also agrees that the door needs to be walled up, and she confirms. The cook, Butters, asks whether "this has happened before" refers to the bricked-up door in the cellar. What now? When they leave the new office and approach the staircase, they hear the sound of pounding, like a pickaxe on stone. The Captain tells Butters to wait while she investigates that noise. String asks Butters where he gets butter, and he admits that it's actually margarine.

In the hallway, Deadeye accosts the Captain and tells him how glad they are to see him, very loudly. The pounding stops once this loud conversation starts. As they approach Bento's project, Maxwell tells Deadeye that if he's covering for someone, he'll share their punishment. As they get closer to the door, Bento points her hammer at Sybil and says, "It was her idea!" Sybil glares at her.

The Captain asks why his minions thought this was a good idea, and they explain that it's his office, it's got all the nice things, and they want it to be good for him. They're sad that he doesn't like their bridge. Sybil says that she thought it was a good idea to test out the properties of the void. Maxwell's not amused and tells her to get out of the keep. Deadeye enforces that order roughly. String's coming in as Sybil gets frogmarched out. String says "give my regards to Sleaze" as she passes the brainer. Sleaze and Deadeye have a weird spat about whether Sleaze did or did not screw up by letting Sybil in.

Captain Maxwell talks to the guards and they explain that they kept opening and closing the door until they got a bridgeable gap. Their idea is that since the distance doesn't change when the doors are open, the logical thing is to keep the doors open, spanned with the rope bridge, and thus hold the distance constant. The hardholder authorizes this experiment, at least until dinner, and mutters something about maybe not kicking both bridge-builders into the abyss.

Butters leads Maxwell and String down to the basement, near the room containing the Source. They go to a storeroom that's being used as a root cellar and pantry, and Butters shows where behind a big pile of stuff, there's a bricked-up arch doorway. String puts her left hand on it, tries to sense what's beyond it, and realizes that there's absolutely nothing there. If there's something there, it's very far away, but also not far at all. Her hand tells her that this has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Butters says that the door's been bricked up for as long as he can remember, which goes back almost 40 years. He doesn't know of any other bricked-up doors into nothingness.

Back in his airstream, Xander goes to town researching the dust left behind when the apparition vanished. He tries to consult the maelstrom for more data. His sonic screwdriver tells him the dust is radioactive, though not very, like carbon-14. Based on plotted decay rate of the radioactivity, it's about a decade older than the local norm. That would line up with the date of Chester's death pretty well. Xander then tries to communicate with Chester through the maelstrom, and makes a deep and stable connection using AM radio on his lab gear. He gets words screaming, "Get me out! Get me out of here!" Chester wants Xander to get him out, to undo what Xander and Alphonse did to him, and warns that if they don't, it will just keep happening. Chester says that he's in between. The conversation keeps restarting, like Chester keeps forgetting that he was talking to someone. The oscilliscope seems to have locked up, because the wave form isn't moving. Then the connection ends and the waveform begins moving again.

Xander and String bump into one another as Xander goes into the keep, and String tells him that he's third-eye blind. Fisher also turns up about this time. Maxwell receives them both in his new office. He changed out of that storeroom because it didn't have a window. The guards send Fisher in first and Xander shoves his way past, so he can tell the hardholder that he had a visit from Chester. The boss wants to dispense with Fisher's insanity first, so they settle their hash. Fisher tries to talk tough about burning the gas before he sells it so cheap, but then Maxwell points out that Fisher has no way of moving it, the gunlugger hesitates, and Maxwell pounces. He sends Paradox out in a proper truck to retrieve the fuel.

Fisher leaves and Captain Maxwell tells Xander to close the door. Xander quite reasonably suggests that they need to get rope and escape equipment before they close it, so he goes to the old office, where he knows there was rope, and finds the bridge experiment instead. He snarks a bit at Bento, then brings some rope back down and closes the door. When they're private, Xander begins explaining the results to the hardholder. Maxwell isn't real thrilled with the news. He tells Xander that tomorrow, he needs to work on sealing up the door from both ends. The boss also tells Xander that they have gas to keep the generators running a bit longer.