0700, Wir, 18 Jo, 4E1

    The Heroes 4 Hire awoke, ate breakfast and broke camp before removing the barricade from the door and resuming their search of the alien starship Xinced. They returned to the southern ‘lifting room’ and rose to the upper level, turning their attention to the northeastern hallway coming off the central roundabout. The doors slid open easily at their approach, and after a short hallway they entered a large, perfectly circular half-domed room. At the center was another all glass console, and Illyia Baham immediately went to work, tapping it alive and then perusing its displays thereafter. The console was entitled, “Stellar Cartography”, and after a few taps on the console, particularly the one that read, “Large-Format Holographic Display” in the alien script, the room suddenly sprang to life. A giant, translucent image of hundreds of points of light floating in a slowly rotating formation, keeping perfect station from each other, filled the entire space in the dome. As they tried to touch them, their fingers simply passed through the images, ethereally. After some study, Illyia discerned that this was a sort of map… a map of the stars in the night sky.

    They fiddled with the controls some more, and occasionally some alien text would appear in among the images, usually with a line drawing the eye from the text to one of the items in the image floating above. Finally, something they recognized appeared. Illyia read the text aloud, " Seles ", which they all recognized as the sun around which their world, " Gaelea ", orbits. A tap to select, and the image floating in the room changed… flew and zoomed in… until a bright yellow-orange orb of fire filled the middle of the room , yet no heat was felt. A scroll of script floated in the air beside the giant fireball giving all kinds of details on “Seles”… size, mass, energy… all in standards of measure completely foreign to Illyia’s magically-aided eye. The party marveled for a good while, this being the first time they had seen their own sun up close.

    They pulled themselves away and returned to the central roundabout corridor, then commenced their search up the northwestern hallway. The first set of doors they found they used a Knock spell to open, and found themselves in a medium-sized, amphitheater-like room with chairs and workstations centered around a sort of throne, which along with the curve of the room centered looking at a common wall. Again, they started fiddling with the consoles, having Illyia peruse each one with the Crystal Monocle. He shortly concluded that this was the main command center of the vessel, similar to the bridge of a sailing ship, and humorously plopped himself down in the central ‘throne’. This had no desk and workstation in front of it, but instead had two glass panels in up-curved extensions from the armrests. He tapped them and they came to life, giving him informational displays on the status of various ‘systems’ throughout the ship… propulsion, power, maintenance, security, weapons, defenses, fuels, sciences, sensors, ‘computer core’, navigation… all were at his fingertips to read. He did not, however, seem to be able to control anything from this seat’s mini-consoles. Although, he did find a complete map of the vessel.

    While Illyia was reading at the consoles, the rest of the team searched the room and an adjoining office to no avail, and then decided to move on while Illyia continued. Alton Beeblebrox decided to stay and stand guard over Illyia as he studied the displays, while the rest of the team continued down the hallway to the next room. There the double doors slid open at their approach, and they entered some sort of… perhaps a guard post, maybe an armory?… it was unclear, but there were several racks that looked like they were intended for some sort of personal weapons as well as recessed alcoves with dormant constructs like they had encountered elsewhere in the complex. As the team reported this new room over the Earrings of Communication to Illyia and Beeblebrox, who confirmed it was a ‘Security Office’, two of the constructs suddenly came to life in their docking equipment, the glowing blue ‘eye’ starting it’s back and forth sweep to accompanying sounds of power flowing through systems. The team retreated from the room and closed the door before the constructs had launched from their docks, and presumed they were probably safe. They then continued farther down the corridor to the very front of the complex’s upper level, they surmised, which must be over the stone temple they originally entered and had been spending their nights.

    This chamber they decided looked like some sort of Embarkation room, where passengers or crew would enter or leave this star-traveling ship. In addition to the door from the hall they entered through, there were two doors in the stepped northeastern walls, a door in the far northwestern wall, and two exceptionally large and thick doors in the southwestern wall. Those in the southwestern wall were also pressure sealed. Karraway and Lt. Diplo Norixius went to the far pressure door on the southwest wall, Alarith Degries and Smedley “Deadly” Hampton went to the near one, while Rumblebelly wandered around in the middle of the room. No sooner than as they had started inspecting their respective doors, the two constructs presumably from the ‘Security Office’ entered the room behind them from down the hallway from which they had entered, and immediately attacked.

    Smedley immediately spun on his heels, activated the Haste effect on his bow and fired four shots at the first construct… striking dead center and punching a gaping hole through its outer shell. The constructs charged into the room, gassing the party, and Alarith fell unconscious. Smedley and Rumblebelly shook off the effects of the gas, and Diplo and Karraway were unaffected, safely protected inside their alien armor suits. The constructs pressed the attack, zapping Rumblebelly with a stunner to little effect, and shooting Smedley with their other rod-weapon… a streak of red light in a perfect line striking Smedley and wounding him. Smedley managed to bark out a call for help over the Earrings, and Alton and Illyia joined hands and used Dimension Door to teleport to the Security Office… the last position they knew of their split party. They were surprised to find the chamber empty, paused a moment to listen, and heard the sound of combat coming from down the hall. They then sprinted the hallway to join the fray.

    Smedley retreated to northward toward the door there with one construct in pursuit, while the second continued to gas and stun Rumblebelly with no effect. The rest of the party came to their aid, surrounding the constructs in a melee mosh pit and pounding them incessantly. Another quad of shot from Smedley’s bow and a bevy of bashings from Diplo, Karraway and Rumblebelly, and the first construct came apart in pieces. The second construct shot Smedley again and again with the ruby-tipped rod, wounding so badly he lost consciousness and entered the {saving} throws of death. The party concentrated on eh second construct, and Alton and Illyia sprinted into the room and joined the attack with fists and a Cloud of Daggers spell. The second construct did not last long, and was shortly reduced to a crumpled mass of twisted metal. When they checked their fallen comrade, they found his Periapt of Wound Closure had closed his wounds and stabilized him, although he was still unconscious.

    The Heroes revived Smedley, and then continued their exploration of the star-traveling ship’s upper level. They found a series of smaller rooms with large, automated machines in them that vaguely resembled ballistae, and a quick check of the consoles around the Captain’s Chair in the command center confirmed that they were “Ship Defense Stations”. Their exploration then led them to the upper catwalk in the magma chamber, some thirty feet above the lower catwalk they had explored earlier. The three in the alien protective suits went out into the excessive heat while the rest watched from the safety of the doorway. Here, they found the top of the “GeoThermal Power Takeoff Core”, pulsating with the same blue light and thrumming sound, and complete with yet another glass console. Illyia tapped the console awake and studied its displays, tapping through some menus as he went and muttering the titles of things the Crystal Monocle translated for him. He stumbled upon something of interest… a sequence he watched happen on the display titled, “Level One Diagnostics Routine” with a 12-hour duration timer. The timer was counting down the last minute and seconds to completion. He stood and watched, but just as it was expiring, the display flickered several time, then turned red with a low gravely toned that sounded three times in rapid succession. A smaller rectangle popped then into view with the words, “Processing Error, Recursive Loop Detected, Diagnostic Algorithm Restarting”, stayed for about five seconds, and then it too disappeared, and the console returned to its previous display of the “Level One Diagnostics Routine”. And, the 12-hour timer was reset, and beginning again. Illyia then flipped to the next display in the menu.

    He suddenly stopped in surprised, and then reported to the group that he thought he had found a control to be able to terminate the core’s production and provision of power to the rest of the ship’s system. When the rest asked, “So, what?”, he quickly explained what he had found, and his newly hatched theory this ship’s system were somehow causing the Island’s disappearing behavior, and that if they were to turn this power supply off it should end the effect. Excitedly, the Heroes agreed and pressed him to do it.

    So, Illyia called up the proper display, pressed the command prompt to shutdown the power core, and then the following confirmation as well. The display changed several times, the ever-present thrumming from the giant column slowed to a stop as the blue pulsations of light slowed and stopped as well. Then the whole complex went dark… no light form the ceiling, no consoles operating. Just the oppressive heat and gurgling of the magma chamber and an eerie silence.

    And then it dawned on them.

    “Wait. Is it daytime or nighttime right now?” Illyia asked. Panic set through them instantly as they realized they may have trapped themselves in whatever ‘other dimension’ the ship transported the Island to every morning. The party forewent all abandon and sprinted back to the lower level, to the Stone Temple where they had been making camp every evening, and out onto the stone docks where the outrigger canoes had let them off.

    The sky was dark and filled with stars. They breathed a collective sigh of relief, but to be sure, they called for Master Kozar Ven over the Earrings of Communication. Painfully long moments passed before a Ven answered, but they were convinced they were in their correct dimension, and had ended the interdimensional hopping of the Island. They took the opportunity to give a full report to their patron.

    And once that was complete, they ate dinner with a lot of jocularity over their success in stopping the Island’s disappearing act, and then turned in for a night’s rest.

---

2200, Wir, 18 Jo, 4E1

    What will become of the Tanaroans and the Mantru, now that the Dread Isle is no longer hopping between planes of existence? What other mysteries will their exploration reveal on this giant, alien craft? Will they ever come across one of these gray aliens… these, ‘Illith’?

    Tune in next time, on “TGC: Heroes 4 Hire!!”

1200, Mol, 16 Jo, 4E1

    Lt. Diplo Norixius, Illyia Baham and Karraway stood just inside the door to the massive room while the rest of the Heroes 4 Hire waited in the hall just outside the other side of the magma chamber. Diplo and Illyia removed their helmets, now they were out of the heat, and the three slowly explored the strange machinery filling this giant room labelled, “Main Engineering.” Illyia tapped several glass panels attached to the various machines present, and used the Crystal Monocle to read the resulting displays: “Flux Capacitor”, “IDIC Motivator”, “Interdimensional Drive Core”, “Electroplasma Rectifier”, to name a few. After several minutes perusal, the three decided to head down the southeastern corridor stuffed with conduits pulsating with the same blue light as the column inside the magma chamber. While the corridor would easily be twice as wide, the conduits and pipes narrowed the passage down to single file, and ended in a door nearly 30’ down. As they approached the door and touched the panel, two more of the floating, egg-shaped constructs approached from behind and immediately sprayed them with the white gas cloud. Diplo immediately fell unconscious, but Illyia managed to stay awake, and Karraway was unaffected inside the suit of alien ‘armor’.

    Illyia quickly scrambled to put his helmet back on, and then knelt beside the unconscious Diplo and grabbed him. Then with a flash he used Dimension Door to teleport him and Diplo all the way back to the hallway on the other side of the magma chamber where the rest of the party was waiting. Karraway now found himself alone facing two of these constructs, and began to turn to attempt to flee through the yet-unopened door behind him, when the constructs retracted their weaponry and floated away, ignoring him inside his suit. He stood there puzzling at the possibilities, and then suddenly remembered the Earrings of Communication and told the rest of the team what he just observed. He then followed the retreating constructs at a comfortable distance as they picked their way through the massive machinery, and eventually returned to a pair of strange pieces of equipment, roughly the same size as the constructs themselves, but shaped in the opposite contours. The constructs turned around in front of them and then backed in, and they fit perfectly within the recessed portion of the equipment. Then, the blue pulsating light sweeping back and forth in the small, long rectangular window near the top of the face went dark and the constructs seem to go completely dormant.

    Once Karraway relayed the rest of this new development, Illyia returned in his suit while the rest of the party kept watch over the unconscious Diplo, and helped Karraway explore the rest of this section of the complex. They returned to the previous door, opened it after reading the “Port Engine Core” label, and beyond found it emptied out onto a platform suspended over a great chamber almost completely filled with a large machine being fed by the blue pulsations coming from the conduits from the other, “Main Engineering” room. Illyia fiddled with the giant, glass console at the end of the platform facing the machinery, but found it was secured by some sort of code. They then retreated and pressed up the identical corridor exiting “Main Engineering” to the northeast, only to find an identical set up labelled, “Starboard Engine Core”.

    Illyia and Karraway returned to the hallway outside the magma chamber and their waiting party, and discussed what to do next while Diplo regained consciousness. They decided to retrace their steps all the way back to the large interior dock facility, and test their new discovery of the suits with the construct that attacked them there. The Heroes set up an ambush in the long hallway just outside the dock room, just in case, and the three with the suits entered and proceeded to the northern control room like they had done previously. Once inside, nothing seemed to happen, so they continued into the alcove in the back of the control room and found the construct, dormant, in an identical piece of equipment as the two they observed in the ‘Engineering’ room. Diplo was struck with an idea, and with his friends’ help he opened up his Portable Hole and slid it over the construct, docking equipment and all, and then cinched the Portable Hole closed and stored it safely away. They then continued south along the long hallway and explored the several doors at the far end, finding mostly large store rooms full of long-since rotted crates and stores, and another exit that led to another set of rough hewn stone docks inside a cave on the opposite side of the island as the original Temple they entered. They then doubled back to that very same Temple, barricaded themselves in, set a watch and retired for the night.

0700, Zol, 17 Jo, 4E1

    The Heroes 4 Hire awoke the next morning, ate breakfast, broke camp, un-barricaded the door and return to their exploration of the alien complex. Illyia used his Wand of Opening alongside his personal spellcasting abilities to Knock the rest of the doors open in the initial hallway they first entered. Within they found various chambers filled with all sorts of strange alien accoutrements, in what they could only assume were sets on laboratories. One such room appeared to be a botany lab, because it was filled with potted samples of plants they had seen all over the island and a few they hadn’t. However, some samples were dead, while others had thrived and overgrown their containers… even somewhat the room itself. Overall, the room at first glance looked like an overgrown jungle when the door first opened.

    Among the various labs they uncovered what appeared to be a set of offices for researchers of some type… the room subdivided into half-high cubicles, each appointed with desks, chairs and some sort of glass workstation similar to the consoles they had observed elsewhere in the complex. In yet another room, they found the room filled with large, rectangular machines, lots of the colored strings arranged in very tidy bundles running from one to the next, and when Illyia read one of the glass panels he read a title of “Library Computer Core”.

    They continued back to the hallway where they had found the guest quarters and Knocked open the other, locked door. Beyond it, the portal had also been barricaded by literally every piece of furniture in the room, and once they had cleared a way inside the Heroes found the long decayed corpse of a human, assumed to be a Mantru villager, who showed no obvious signs of trauma, seemingly having eventually succumbed to starvation. The party discussed the scene they were now observing, speculating at what could have so frightened a man he would barricade himself in his room until he starved to death. And, barricaded the door against an attack that never came.

    The team discussed the situation at length, desperate for more information on this complex and what had occured. They decided Illyia should use the Crystal Monacle and start reading through whatever he could find in those glass workstations they had come to see all over the complex. If these were indeed laboratories of some kind, there should be notes.. journals… logs… data… something.

    They returned to the cubicles and Illyia sat down in one, tapped the glass workstation and it sprang to life. The Crystal Monocle allowed him to read the alien script easily, but much of what he was looking at he had no context. There were words he could read but did not understand what they meant, units of measures that were foreign to him, and sometimes secured records that queried him for some sort of code that he did not have. He spent the rest of the day reading and searching through what records he was able to access, while the rest of the team rested nearby and maintained a watch in the hallway to ensure they were not disturbed by anything ‘wandering’. Illyia read throughout the rest of the day and well into the night, but when he considered himself finished he returned to his friends with following story:

    “We’re aboard some sort of ship… apparently named the ‘Heavy Weight Research Vessel Xinced’. This vessel is apparently capable of flying through the stars, and visiting other worlds, at great distances and unfathomable speeds. The owners and operators of this vessel are an alien race known as the ‘Illith’, and I found pictures. They are basically humanoid, gaunt, gray skinned… silver eyes, large, bulbous cranium, and four, small tendril like appendages around their mouth. These tendrils tend to lay flat, giving the impression of a mustache or goatee.”

    “So, this vessel is capable of traversing such great distances by use of something called an ‘Interdimensional Drive’. As I understand it, it works something like Dimension Door, traversing the distance by dropping into another dimensional space, and then reentering the Prime Material plane at the other location. However, for some reason I could not find in the records I could access, the ship crashed here. It was severely damaged, but whether it was the crash that was responsible for the damage or if the damage occurred before the crash, maybe even causing it… I couldn’t tell. Either way, they were stuck here until they could repair the ship, and to them, they figured they were not where they could be rescued by their kin.”

    “The damage was causing their power systems to fail, and they were going to need a LOT of power to fix their ship AND THEN power this ‘Interdimensional Drive’. The situation grew pretty desperate over time, until they discovered this island was the new cinder cone of a dormant, but viable, volcano. They excavated down the throat of the caldera to the top of the magma pocket, and then constructed a ‘Geothermal Power Takeoff Core’ to convert the heat energy from the magma into power for the ship. It worked, and the ship had an endless source of power.”

    “The ship was a mess, and they continued to affect repairs as quickly as they could with the limited material resources they had onboard. When they first crashed, the Mantru eventually overcame their initial fears and came out to investigate, but the Illith used their fear to keep them away from the ship, and the island altogether. They apparently didn’t hold any animosity toward the Mantru, but simply wanted to keep them away from the vessel, and considering how primitive the Mantru were by comparison to such a technologically advanced species as the Illith, they figured that was the best way to keep them out… keep them ‘scared of the monsters’. Best not to let the primitives get curious with the potentially dangerous technology.”

    “Well, their idea only partially worked. After a short time, the Illith noticed the Mantru were worshiping them from afar as if they were gods. The Illith thought that would work in their favor for keeping them at bay and out of their business while they affected repairs. However, they were soon running out of spare parts and raw materials to make said repairs. So, they changed their tack slightly with the Mantru, and encouraged the worship… subtly at first, with a few wondrous works and godly feats within eyeball distance of the village… and then more directly as time went on, with such measures as the ‘Stone Chief’ giving the Talking Chief direction from the gods. All in all, it was originally benevolent, them giving the Mantru godly advice appropriate to their primitive developmental level… how to increase their harvests, how to nurse fish in a fishery… that sort of thing… and in return they only requested the Mantru bring them certain raw materials easily obtained for the Mantru but potentially hazardous for the Illith to collect, who were unaccustomed to the physical characteristics of this world, its flora and fauna. The relationship proved quite beneficial for both for a long time… by my best guess, millennia.”

    “These Illith must be exceptionally long lived, if not outright immortal. They perpetrated this deception for centuries upon centuries. Their vessel’s physical damage was mostly repaired over time, but this ‘Interdimensional Drive’ -thing was giving them fits. They couldn’t seem to find the issue why it wouldn’t… um… ‘Dimension Jump’?… them out of here. They searched for problems in things they called, ‘algorithms’ and ‘subroutines’ and ‘diagnostics’. Ever time they’d think they had the problem solved, they would activate this thing and something would go wrong, and they would still be here. The captain’s journal is replete with frustrations.”

    “Over time, things got worse. The Illith started noticing changes in themselves. Their tendrils around their mouths started lengthening and became articulated… they could move them around like an appendage. Their gray skin started taking a slightly purple-ish hue. Desperate that this world might be causing some sort of slow-acting aberration in their physical bodies… something they termed a ‘mutation’… they used their godly standing with the Mantru to ‘award’ a few worthy worshipers to come live on the island with them. This was a ruse to cover the Illith commencing experiments and research on the Mantru, in an effort to ascertain what was happening to themselves. They were careful to keep their demands to the absolute minimum, but as you can guess, this was where the logs and journal I have been wading through started turning very, very dark.”

    "In fact, over time this effort turned downright sinister, as far as I can tell. They started with research into the flora and fauna, then the villagers themselves. But over time, the research turned into experiments, and the experiments turned away from discovering… uh, ‘radiation’, ‘genetics and mutations’, ‘biological agents’, ‘neurochemical pathologies’… and other things I didn’t quite get, and more into seemingly morbid and pointless attempts to see if they could manipulate the “test subject’s”… villager’s, in other words… something called ‘genetic engrams’."

    “Their record keeping was regular and methodical to the point of being almost a religion. However, over the centuries and centuries… I’m making some assumptions here, because I’m not really sure what those particular measurement units mean, other than in context I could tell they were a measurement of time, and a lot of it… centuries perhaps even millennia…anyway, over the centuries as their purpose and experimentation turned more sinister, their record-keeping discipline trailed off over time until they stopped recording their activities all together.”

    "In the last groups of their records before they stopped altogether, these Illith were obsessed with finding a way to reproduce themselves, and were focusing on something they called, “Parasitic Genetic Resequencing”. That’s what that dead thing was inside the glass jar… one of these parasite things they had made. They called in a, “Cephalomorphic Tadpole”, and… they… put it… IN… you. They had moving pictures of their experiments with it… similar to an Arcane Eye or a Scry… it was terrifying. The villagers they tested it on all died screaming."

    “And the Illith weren’t wrong, either. They had changed over the eon, and pretty drastically, too. Their mouth-tendrils were full tentacles now, articulated and strong. Their skin was gray with a touch of purple, and they were physically brawnier than original. And, they were clothed now, whereas they were originally nude. High collared robes and capes, dark colors… blacks and purples with a lot of adornment… particularly, a really creepy fascination with human skulls. And, they stopped referring to themselves as ‘Illith’, and began calling themselves ‘Illithid’.”

    “After that, the records just… stop.”

    A long, terrifying silence descended on the Heroes 4 Hire once Illyia finished recounting his discoveries. They looked at each other for long moments, each face betraying the same horrific thoughts. And then they returned to the stone temple where they had made camp the nights previously, barricaded the door, set a watch and turned in for a sleepless night’s rest.

---

2359, Zol, 17 Jo, 4E1

    Where are these “Illithid”? Why have they seemingly abandoned their amazing vessel and all its wonders? Could this “Interdimensional Drive” be connected to the mysterious behavior of the Dread Isle?

    Find out next time, on “TGC: Heroes 4 Hire!!”

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” — Arthur C. Clarke

0600, Mol, 16 Jo, 4E1

    The Heroes 4 Hire awoke, ate breakfast and began their day of exploration by returning to the southern corridor and sneaking past the large chamber with the docks and the gas cloud spewing construct. When they reached the first door past the aforementioned dock-room, Illyia Baham pressed the glass panel beside the door, which slid open to reveal an identical circular room to the one discovered at the center of the complex. They stepped in, bear and all, and Illyia pushed the panel where it said, “Upper Deck”. The door slid shut quickly, they felt themselves rise though they could not see it, and then the door slid back open revealing an identically-constructed-but-differently-laid-out hallway. This one continued to the right, just like below, but it also turned ninety degrees and proceed straight out from this lifting room.

    They proceeded straight out of the room and down the hallway presenting itself ahead. After 30 or so feet, they opened a door that revealed a huge chamber with three large vehicles that vaguely resembled birds. On one large flat wall of the chamber was a massive set of double doors, two normal sized doors in the north wall beside where they entered, and a set of stairs leading to another door and set of windows in the southwestern corner of the chamber the team recognized as another control room for this particular sub-complex. They first checked the nearest door in the north wall and found beyond a medium sized room with odd appointments… what looked to be benches and armoires. Inside the armoire like enclosures, they found what appeared to be strange suits of armor with helmets that were fully enclosed with glass around the faces.

    Lt. Diplo Norixius was the first to decide to try one on. The armor had an undergarment of odd construction, some sort of heavy cloth material of unknown type and origin, and with much struggling, frustration and assistance from his friends, Diplo manage to don it. The cuirass was surprising lightweight and strangely shaped, appearing to only cover the upper torso and leaving much of the midriff unprotected. It was adorned with odd greebling, ports and vents and symbols, one could only assume to be magical runes of some kind. The struggles continued, nothing working until Alton Beeblebrox suggested that they may have it on backwards, and then with a quick flip around the thing latched into place… mating perfectly with matching ports and connections on the undergarment. They then looked around, but did not find, anything resembling greaves, so it was decided that the armor must not include them.

    The helmet proved just as alien and frustrating. A large, dome-shaped monstrosity seemingly more of glass than of the strange metal that everything else in this complex was constructed, they finally discovered that the helmet actually didn’t sit directly on the head, instead being attached to a matching ring-shaped device built into the cuirass. After much fiddling, they figured out how to slide a small lip on the neck of the helmet into the neck-ring on the cuirass, twist it about 15 degrees, and then with a click and a whoosh and a flicker, the dome-helmet latched into place. The glass in front of Diplo’s face immediately sprung to life with light, forming symbols of alien design in front of his eyes that he discovered, if he did not focus on them directly but instead looked through the glass at the outer world as he would normally, they were perfectly in focus and legible… although he did not understand them. Illyia tried to decipher them from the outside-looking-in, found that it was an exceptionally arduous task, and then scrambled to get into one of the two remaining suits. Once safely inside and with his Crystal Monocle on underneath the helmet, he read out the various displays:

    “External Atmospheric Conditions, 96 centons, 1.3 rabs, 98% radums… Suit Diagnostics, nominal, 100% oxygen remaining, 95% battery remaining… IFF Transponder, automatic, 1200… Navigation, STBY… I have no idea what this means,” droned Illyia monotonously.

    Karraway donned the third suit, noting that while the suit fit Diplo fairly well, whomever these were built for must be quite tall, as the suits draped of Illyia and himself. With three of them suited up in the alien ‘armor’, the party then went to explore the larger room they came from, eventually heading toward the control room they saw in the southwest corner. Wary of their experience in the other large docking room on the lower level, the team set up something of an ambush at the bottom of the stair, and then Alarith Degries and Smedley “Deadly” Hampton eased their way inside the door to investigate. They found an identical room to the control room on the level below, and as expected a silvery-white egg-shaped construct floated out of the back alcove and approached them, making the same demands in the same alien language they had experienced before. The two retreated quickly and the construct followed, spewing the same white gas at them as during their previous encounter. The two reached the bottom of the short staircase post haste, and as the construct descended the team engaged it with everything they had. The fight was brief; the construct shocked several folks with its twin-pronged zapper, but was ultimately smashed to pieces by the seven Heroes and a pissed off grizzly. With a sigh of relief, the party realized that while these constructs were exceedingly dangerous and sturdy, they were not, in fact, invincible.

    They searched the remaining rooms and found virtually nothing different than they had found in the previous control room and docking hangar, save the three large, bird-like vehicles parked in this one. A short discussion ensued, and it was quickly decided that these interesting suits of armor should be tested… perhaps in the excruciating heat of the magma chamber below. They retraced their steps back to the magma chamber, and gathered just outside the door. It was decided that Diplo would be the guinea pig, and with that he entered the chamber fully clad in the alien armor.

    Some sort of meter in the helmet display immediately spiked up to the edge between a yellow and a red region, and an audible alarm beep start sounding itself at a slow, regular interval inside his ear; however, inside the suit the temperature remained at a comfortable level as he proceeded across the catwalk. The rest of the party observed him from the doorway, and when he made it to the central column of the construction in the middle of the chamber, he turned at mentioned over the Earring of Communication that he was perfectly fine. Illyia and Karraway proceeded to follow him out to the central ring of the walkway, and the rest of the party stayed in the hallway and wished they had cool new suits that protected them from the harsh environment of a caldera.

    In the center of the chamber, the catwalk encircled a massive metal column of unknown construction, that extended down and into the lava pool several hundred feet below. The column also extended far above their heads, and as they traced it upward with their eyes they saw a second set of similar catwalks above them, roughly at a height that would make sense for the upper level of the complex. The column was massive, nearly fifteen feet in diameter, and there were glass windows inset throughout its exterior, giving vision to a rhythmic, pulsating blue light that seemed to travel from below to above, up the inside of the column. There were metal panels that were inset into the surface of the column at regular intervals around the perimeter and even with the catwalk, but it was unclear how or even if they opened in some fashion. They observed and noted what they could, but being unable to open anything here, they proceed down the southern exit from the catwalk and through the door.

    There they found the first door opened into a small antechamber with another door beyond, which they opened by use of the glass panel beside it and entered into a huge roomed filled with alien machinery. The machines were massive and filled the giant room, and there were conduits thrumming with the same blue energy as the column in the magma chamber criss-crossing all over the room… into and out of the machines at various places. Illyia stepped back and tapped the glass panel that controlled the door into this room again, and when it sprang to back to life he read the titling at the top of the panel with the monocle, seeing a word in the alien language he actually understood… although this context was extremely strange to him:

    “Main Engineering”

---

1200, Mol, 16 Jo, 4E1

    What is this strange place the Heroes have discovered on Taboo Island? What other mysteries will their exploration reveal? How is it connected to the mysterious disappearing act of the Dread Isle?

    Tune in next time, on “TGC: Heroes 4 Hire!!”