It really isn’t long at all before Athyfer departs again.
Sparrow takes it into her head to do something productive with her time.
She looks up old mining maps, and locates a distant adamant veing that had been obstructed by an encroaching Blight zone for many years.
Recruiting the rest of the PC’s into this, she requisitions some equipment and the Exalted (and some of their Mortal crew) begin their journey into the great black underbelly of Autochthon.
It isn’t long at all before a couple of the characters begin to hear something. It’s very, very distant, but to Lion, it’s not wholly unfamiliar…
Time passes. Days, even. The characters scale a great metal mountain. The noise gets louder. More of the PC’s hear it.
Several days of crossing the metallic landscape later, damn near everyone’s heard that awful, grating, tearing metallic sound. But it’s not the first thing on their minds; that would be the Blight Zone they’ve come to. A custodian beetle-god with evident corruption lumbers across its borders.
Our heroes decide to subdue it, hoping to cure it and use its assistance.
This does not go well, starting with Dusk’s accidental activation of the explosive charges for his sling, and ending with the death of the big bad beetleborg rather than its capture.
Along the way, Unari is badly hurt.
In the aftermath, Lion and Dusk wander off separately to fume. Sparrow’s frustration reaches a breaking point, and she begins methodically picking apart the fallen deity as the fauna of Autochthon begin to digest it.
Hours later, Lion returns, bearing news: the noise—whatever it is—is drawing closer. It’s still near a hundred miles away, and approaching slowly enough to be outpaced, but it’s coming, and toward Hatiq to boot.
Seeking further reconaissance, the Exalted send off Precious to scope out the source of the noise.
This goes…poorly. Sending the one solitary mechanical entity in the group into the zone of corrupted and infectious mechanical things was poorly considered. Of course, Sparrow could always just build another Precious.
Sparrow comes out of her Limit Break and realizes that this may in fact still be horrific just in time for a gremlinized Precious to attack.
Sparrow tearfully deactivates her Familiar, and realizes that the corruption is too endemic to her Essence to cure with her current skills and tools.
Erryl, on the other hand, is a Lunar who specializes in moving fast and being undetected. She flies away into the dark, promising to catch up to the others.
Several hours later, she does just that, as a galloping yeddim. What’s coming is really, REALLY big.
Making their way back to Hatiq, the Exalted demand to speak to who’s in charge.
Who’s In charge seem to be currently arguing about labor laws and can’t be disturbed.
Oh, Yes They Can. This is big.
Before they can effectively protest, Lion employs Solar Illusion-magic and convinces them that oh yes, this is important.
The city itself gets involved. Hatiq appears at the gathering, in a humaniform body, and calmly acknowledges the danger. He presents an option—“Operation Tumbleweed”, it seems, a mechanism to remove the city from the Great Maker’s Body—and suggests the populace get to work on that.
The PC’s begin to plan where Hatiq might want to place himself, only for Sparrow to realize that the city, falling from so great a height, will cause great damage wherever it lands…
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