~ start bedbea7a-10ae-48f9-8748-c62e18410763 if is_quest_accepted if are_quest_requirements_met Wren: *She glances at the rope and hardware hanging off your pack, and something in her shoulders lets go.* [#end] You've got the gear. Then there's nothing left for me to plan. East range (location 15,14). You walk in at ground level. The going down starts once you're inside. else Wren: *She looks at your hands, then back at the map.* [#end] Not without gear. I'm not sending you off a cliff on good intentions. Prosperity's market (location 30,10). Ask for [Old Climbing Gear] - rope, webbing, clips. It's salvage, but it holds. else Wren: *The map goes down weighted at the corners - a wrench, a coffee tin - and then she has no further use for you at all.* *Pencil, straight edge, coordinate pages against the lamp. You watch her work for the better part of an hour.* Wren: *She talks while she works, mostly to herself.* The coordinates are in a grid nobody here uses. No datum, no reference marks. Useless alone. Wesley's survey shares three points with them. Three is enough. The rest reduces. Wren: *She sets the pencil down, east of everything.* Here. The east range (location 15,14). A cave. No road, no water line, no rail spur. Nothing you'd put a laboratory near. - Then the numbers are wrong Wren: *She shakes her head, still working.* It reduced clean, twice. Wrong numbers don't do that. And the Ranger survey marks that exact point. Shelter. Annotated "no access." - What's actually there? Wren: A cave mouth with a big drop inside. The survey crew logged it and moved on. They looked down it. They never went in. Wren: *She finally looks up at you.* I can't make that descent. I'd fall. And if I file for a field team, Keahi authorizes it, Sentinels secure it, and whatever's down there belongs to the Institute. Wren: You'll need gear - rope, webbing, clips. Prosperity's market (location 30,10). Search for [Old Climbing Gear]. Keep it. I doubt that's the last hole we go down. Wren: [#quest_info=c91b61c9-5019-474f-98be-18c022675e42] if is_quest_accepted: Wren: [quest: accepted] [#end] *She's already folding the tracing sheet small enough to carry.* Test every anchor twice before you weight it. That gear is older than both of us. else: Wren: [quest: declined] [#end] *She weights the map back down and goes on working.* It'll keep. It's kept this long. => END ~ start a1f2793e-c09a-4764-9f10-624228b37d46 if is_quest_accepted and are_quest_requirements_met Narrator: *The cave is wide enough to walk into. Twenty paces of dry floor, and then the floor isn't there.* *You set the anchors back from the edge and go over backwards. Forty feet of sandstone, cold through the gloves, the rope humming where it crosses the lip.* *The dark takes you feet first.* Narrator: *A chamber about the size of a small room. Dust. Bat leavings gone to powder. Loose rock underfoot, lying the way rock lies when it falls.* [#complete_quest] *No crates. No cable. No stencilled numbers on anything.* *Wren's laboratory is a cave a goat could have found.* Narrator: *You're most of the way back to the rope when the air moves against your face.* *Caves that end don't breathe.* Narrator: *At the back, under a slope of rubble, the wall is flat. You put a hand on it - cold, smooth, and it doesn't take the lamp the way stone does.* *The ceiling came down across it in one piece. That takes charges, set properly, by someone who knew the rock.* *Set from the inside.* - Start moving rock Narrator: [#load_quest=e923ecb8-4f91-4021-8238-373bd6a4456d] else Narrator: *You walk in as far as the floor goes. Past the edge the lamp finds nothing but more dark. Without rope you're a person standing at the top of a hole.* [#end] => END