Buried (Part 1)
Wren Harper reduced the journal's coordinates against the Ranger survey. There is a cave (location 15,14). You need Old Climbing Gear for the descent; the market in Prosperity (location 30,10) sells those tools.
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~ start Wren
She glances at the rope and hardware hanging off your pack, and something in her shoulders lets go.
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.
finShe looks at your hands, then back at the map.
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.
finThe 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.
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.
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.
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."
A cave mouth with a big drop inside. The survey crew logged it and moved on.
They looked down it. They never went in.
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.
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.
quest: accepted
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.
finquest: declined
She weights the map back down and goes on working.
It'll keep. It's kept this long.
fin~ start a1f2793e…
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.
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.
No crates. No cable. No stencilled numbers on anything.
Wren's laboratory is a cave a goat could have found.
completa la misiónYou're most of the way back to the rope when the air moves against your face.
Caves that end don't breathe.
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.
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.
fin