phantasmalrift | DUNGEON LOG

The day dawns bright and early - the same as most every expedition. The only difference is that you'll need to take the teleportation pad to Lodestone as a starting point - the gliders and drones are already there. There's clouds on the horizon, though, so if you're going to take a glider and go, you'd better get going.

There's some new additions, though, to the usual group of androids seeing you off. Tau is checking over the drones ready to carry those who can't or won't use the gliders, and Muon is practicing opening and collapsing the wings of a glider with bright yellow sails. She grins at anyone who approaches, shooting them a thumbs up.

"Don't worry about getting lost or falling behind! As long as Tau's here, they'll keep us all together."

And with that bit of bright cheer, it's off towards the mountains you go...

----

From the air, the remains of the mining town are almost impossible to tell from any other part of the forest. The trees - especially the old ones - are much thinner, and that's really the only sign of what's below.

But Muon's bright yellow glider, leading the way, dips down into the treeline before landing in an open space, and anyone who isn't paying enough attention to follow will feel their glider being herded in the same direction by Tau's power - control not outright taken, but more of a nudge, like, hey buddy it's this way. The group lands just beyond the border of the Fissure - a tiny stable spot in whatever's left of this world.

And a good thing, too, because landing in the Fissure itself could prove quite difficult...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

When I got back to camp I was instantly slammed with several hours' worth of hunger.

Oh. ...Inconvenient. Sorry. But you can still fight?

Um... no? I've had some practice but that's never exactly been something I considered in my skillset.

[Maybe later that won't be the case, but...]

Oh. Then... Investigation. That makes sense. I shouldn't have assumed.

More or less.

[She's still eating in between sentences.]

...

[She looks back into the cave and gives a small sigh.]

Fissures are getting more difficult. It makes sense. The home base would be closer to safer ones.

Hmm...

[That's got her thinking.]

That itself is pretty strange, if it's true. I don't have the whole timetable of when the stations were set up, but if they were pre-existing structures the fact that "easier" Fissures popped up nearby later is more evidence that the cause is intelligent.

You mean that we'd start intentionally closer to things a small and inexperienced group could defeat. And then face stronger and more challenging things later. Because they... want us to get better?

Something like that.

...It does make sense. But I still don't know why. Do they need a defender? Or do they just want to help us?

Things come back to that question more often than not.

[And usually the answer is both entirely unexpected and also horrible.]

But there's definitely some kind of "center".

A core to the world?

There's one of those, too, but I mean in a magical sense. Kind of like matter bends nearby spacetime, the "center", whatever it is, distorts the magical environment.