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Ribbon Candy
f57349
Paprika and Natalina are tens of thousands of miles up beyond the sky, and a comparatively trifling distance to the northeast, at the local equivalent of a hotel.
>This isn't our normal operational area. Can they describe the purpose or use of these rooms, or provide a map? (Chambers devoted to providing safe shelter or amenities for sustaining organic life are of particular interest to us, for obvious reasons).
Yes, this is a flesh shelter. Rated life support capacity divided by baseline human requirements is ten, but redundancies and stockpiles mean that under crisis conditions, a thousand could be crammed in for two or three weeks with reasonable expectation the vast majority would survive, or a hundred for at least a year.
Parking garage, decontamination spiral, refreshment dispensers, business center, rest area, toilets, storage vault. Business center's topstation-interior-access door is currently barricaded due to the shelter-in-place order.
>Do they speak the Truth, or any other languages? (That is, uh, Truth the language, usually conveyed using sonic vibrations, not the veracity of statements). Her subordinate doesn't speak Light, and her own translation module will need to recharge eventually.
No direct familiarity with Truth, but recognizes some loan-words from Classical Uxphonese. Could spend 2xp to say you happen to already know Uxphonese, in which case you'll be able to converse normally - and in the actual city of Uxphon too of course, on the off chance you ever go there. (It's a rank 4 community, built in and around a canyon tangled with ancient plumbing, on the side of the Black Riage facing the Cloudcrystal Skyfields. Several hundred miles north of Cerdyn's Pass, past Legrash or the Amber Monolith, halfway to Gaian territory.) Alternatively, could spend a month learning the basics at no XP cost, in between some other long-term activity.
"Didn't want to make a fuss about it during damage control, but your Light accent is just awful - like an off-the-shelf format-conversion submodule, with barely any personal idiomatic refactor, choking on an improvised transciever with three-digit actuator ping times."
Similar options open to Paprika, though the innkeeper got a less favorable first impression.
"Oh, I'm sorry, is setting yourself on fire your culture's standard signal for 'no further service needed, everything is fine'?"
>Are there any important rules relating to this sector we should know?
Four nearly identical cylinders clustered around a mushroom-table on the ceiling, filled with liquids so colorless you initally thought they were empty:
"This is oxygen hydride. You need it to live, but too much of the pure form without correct drit will rot your teeth."
"This is a mixture of oxygen hydride and carbonyl hydride. The smell can burn, or make you sick. If you drink it you will almost certainly die."
"This is methyl hydroxide. It burns easily. The smell is adequately safe, but if you drink it you will almost certainly go blind, and perhaps die."
"This is ethyl hydroxide. It burns almost as easily, will addict, too much causes crabmeat of the liver, but adequately safe for recreational drinking."
Steel angel skitters over to the far wall, indicates a tube of red gravel.
"This is human-safe drit substitute. Crush one pellet into each bowl of pure oxygen hydride."
Finally it directs you to a cylinder which Natalina initially skipped past, based on visual similarity between the contents and raw sewage. Constellation thereon is actually a few unconnected diagrams, including one resembling a chain or ladder implied to repeat indefinitely. Heraldry is a boxy, triangle-faced ungulate with horns like the crescent moon, standing amid a field of ripe wheat. Lumpy brown sludge inside turns out to be delicious slow-cooked beef stroganoff.
Natalina and Paprika get 1xp each for discovery by exploring the dispenser installation's range of options. Once you're finished with your food and drink (one way or another), that small polished-metal room is designed for disposing of waste materials, and generally providing personal hygiene a bit more nuanced than decontamination screens. Mechanism initially interpreted as a trap is actually an automated barber.
Room with black velvet walls and ball pit https://xkcd.com/150 usually has courtesy rules against whatever might result in sensory impressions which interfere with someone else's rest, but since the two of you have nobody to annoy but each other, that's largely moot.
Storage vault is off-limits to visitors. Already retrieved materials to restock the workshop while you were building that ladder, so if you need anything else, ask.
>What information can they share about the nature and extent of the current emergency?
Biocontaminant causing hemorrhagic fever. Treatable, often survivable even without treatment, but prevention preferred. A given patient either coughs up all their blood and dies within two weeks of initial symptoms, or recovers to the point of being non-contagious and permanently immune in four. Should be an all-clear announcement soon if it's coming at all.
It started "One minute, five and a half seconds in the immediate future," which is a figure of speech those fluent in Light, particularly automata, often use when they actually mean "long enough ago that I'm not qutte sure." Unless there's some other confounding factor (incomplete secondhand reports, temporal anomalies, brain damage), that almost never refers to anything more recent than thirty-nine days (65536 minutes).
>Do they know the route to the beanstalk—the structure connecting this location to the planetary surface? Or to vehicles capable of reaching the surface?
>Are they aware of a ship docked here, or the location of ship-fabrication facilities?
Easiest route would likely be by rail, and there's a rail station just two miles away... along the exterior. Local supply vault has a selection of protective equipment, some of which could fit you with minimal modification, but the steel-angel innkeeper is somewhat puzzled how you ended up here, alive, without bringing your own.
>Paprika will ask if there's a way to communicate with their friends below.
Chainpods have a... sawtoothed azure grapevine? An invisible machine channel for chatting with each other, which by itself has very limited range. There's a farspeaking pylon near here which could easily link to such grapevines, if they're within roughly two thousand miles of the Plains of Kataru (the known world and then some) and not e.g. underground or deep underwater or tucked away in an Otherspace or something. Under normal circumstances you could seamlessly relay through that nearby pylon, with one of those chairs in the business center as the actual interface, but it's on 'priority only' bandwidth rationing due to a hardware fault, possibly space-rock-related.
That's your department, as deputies, right? Just hop over, five miles in the opposite direction from the train station, patch whatever's wrong (which, if you're lucky, might be as simple as re-socketing a loose cable), and key in the relevant pod's unique 32-character ID code.
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