Into the dark

In the middle of our dinner our dataslates light up: we have all received emergency messages from Lorelei Decanta: "HELP". That is all it contains, so of course we run of, pack up our gear, and hail a taxi for the only viable starting point, her apartment.

We approach carefully, Rupert hacks her door, and we enter. No trace of anything but normal life. We comb her apartment, and Alpha finds a well hidden secret compartment in a wall. It contains a slate, a box, a holy book and some credits. Rupert manages to convince the machine spirit of the slate to talk to him.

The spirit has a lot to tell, mostly normal inquisition material, and cases she has worked. Currently she seems to be working on infiltrating the Beast House, in disguise and under an alias. Her alias Dalia, was supposed to meet some Lothar about 24 hrs ago, at a warehouse called 134A6. She has also requested 6 imperial guards from Cpt Leviticus. Some checking reveals that these 6 also are missing.

We rent a van, and set out to 134A6. En route I write up a message of where we are and what we are doing for Inquisitor Whitlock, an queue it up for transfer at an astropath.

The warehouse looks worn and long abandoned, but we still enter very carefully, scanning for everything and anything. If what is here could take out Lorelei, we sure have to watch our step. Inside the warehouse looks every bit as bad as the outside, but in the middle there is a large, sturdy steel cage built over a deep pit with rafters on all sides. The Beast House stages fights with all kinds of beasts, and this looks like such a place. It smells horribly of death, both new and old. The new death comes from 3 bodies carelessly dumped into the pit. All executed by headshot.

We find a door, and proceed inward, avoiding a simple trap. Then we arrive a a 4-way intersection, into a torture room, a room with a dataslate and a stair down. We postpone the torture room, Rupert starts investigating the slate, that needs to have all entries closed to work. The rest of us head down, into the animal pens we find out. Here the stench is unbearable. We find more bodies. At the end of the room is something more interesting, a large tank recessed into the wall, and struggling on the surface is Lorelei. The tank seems to be filling...

We run like madmen, up the stairs, through the torture room, barely noticing the horrifically tortured corpse placed there, and into the room above the tank. Both waterflow and door to the tank is controlled by another slate. This one is trapped. We decide to get Rupert, and Dar rushes off to fetch him.

Rupert, Alpha and Potter succeeds at unlocking the door and turning off the flow, while Dar and I stand guard. Lorelei is also severly tortured, and in very bad shape. While we fix her up, a fairly large party of men in carapace armor, with masks of all kinds of beasts approach. We escape into the complex, as a voice hails us over loudspeakers 'Welcome to my little mace'!

In the next room we all eventually fall prey to a sleeping agent that is released, probably because we failed to appease the machine spirit at the slate in the room. Sometime later Rupert told me that he managed to get away from that room, but that he turned himself in at the threat of all of us being shot.

---time passes with horrible dreams in the dark and cold---

We wake up, with many others, chained half naked, standing to the thigs in cold water. We watch some creature with a gilded jackal mask with purple (something). A human (?) in a box does something horrible by magic to someone else, and this person is taken away.

---time passes with horrible dreams in the dark and cold---

We wake in a pit, with nothing, about 20 people all together. Judging from the growth on our faces I say that we has about a month and a half of facial hair. Everyone looks disoriented and worse for wear. Again a pit, smelling of death and decay. No points for guessing some connect to the beast house again. We hear a sound of metal against metal, and watch as a character with a heron mask pulls a lever, and a gate into the pit opens.

A few disgusting creatures appear, Rupert calls them spindle maws. In the beginning a few, which we kill easily, then more and more. Then heron face pulls another lever, and a ladder falls into the pit. We escape up it, while everyone else in the pit is killed.

At the top of the ladder we find a control terminal with the carcass of a very fat man hunched over it. He is so throat cut his head is practically falling off. Protruding from the desk a finely decorated dagger, piercing a note. The body also has a handcannon with 4 shots, and a meat hook. We take everything. (Haaken har glemt note, noe om en 'venn' i hallene over, men også noe om at ingen av oss kan stole på noen).

We set off, into huge halls, devoid of life. Going down some stairs we find a cave in with a skeleton partly buried. We manage to salvage an autopistol with some ammo and a flak vest of the skeleton. If just Potter could start functioning again we'd all be armed.

Proceeding we find another dead person, more recently dead. He lies on a small ledge above some underground lake, or waste repository, more like. This person has cut his own throat in front of some idol made from bone.  He has a slate with some text (denne har også Haaken glemt hva inneholdt).