Joe B.

Troika Tu(wedn)esday 3: The Iron Rot

Refereed by Chaoclypse

Players:

The following was downloaded from the brain of a space-carrier-pigeon, formerly belonging to the probability mage, superhero, and Chicago native, Dennis Fêteman, a.k.a Fateman. RIP, go Bears.

It had flown multiple space-leagues out of an uncharted section of the Hump-Backed Sky and showed evidence significant damage from starvation, anoxic brain injury, and other unidentifiable sources. The bird was euthanized shortly after download.

Mayday, mayday. Wallopus the Seen still lives in the IRON ROT.

It sounded like a simple curiosity at first. A planet where all ferrous material gains sentience. How quaint! They journeyed there by Golden Barge. The paranoid barge captain set them down far from the outside world and gave them a code to the airlock doors. He thought scavengers might come after the vessel's golden sails.

They walked down a long corridor for twenty minutes or more before they emerged into city streets. Its citizens appeared to be protean xenoforms with soft bones. On initial contact with 4 of them, a scuffle occurred and they beat a retreat in order to summon reenforcements.

That's when it all went wrong.

Fateman wielded a powerful artefact known as the Icosahedron, capable of bending reality. He attempted to use it to greatly inflate the power levels of himself and his allies, render all citizens of the xenoform city friendly, and make Wallopus the Seen's physical form 8 times larger. Instead, the exact opposite happened. They all lost several IQ points, Wallopus became 9 inches tall, and the entire population of the city became enraged towards them. It is highly likely the device malfunctioned due to having ferric components.

Weakened, shrunken, and now being chased by an incensed horde of soft-skulled barbarians, the party attempted to flee to the east. They discovered that the city was walled off to the east and west, and beyond it were swamps, hills, and large swathes of moving metallic wire.

A myconid creature greeted them at the wall and assisted their escape after being befriended by Abirongian "Abi" Blue. The following day, it guided them to the possible location of a "bio-weapon" that would be useful and profitable back in Troika City.

Having learned nothing from his first ill-advised attempt to shape reality using the Icosahedron, Fateman offered to grant the Myconid a 'wish'. It asked for 3 large, organic corpses to be placed at crucial 'junction points' in the swamp. These would theoretically provide fuel at important nodal junctions, allowing the saprotrophic myconid society to extend and improve their network of information-transmitting hyphae.

The Icosahedron failed once again. instead of dead bodies, it summoned living statues. These life forms proved to be nigh-indestructible and incredibly dangerous, moving at a small percentage of lightspeed whenever not observed. Later intelligence revealed these creatures' designation to be the Clay Progeny.

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In escaping from this new threat, the party made their way inside of an abandoned hospital, where a sapient, amorphous creature designated as a 'meat-sponge' aided them in barricading the doors and directed them to a deeper chamber within the hospital where the fabled bio-weapon resided. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), Fateman was eviscerated by the Clay Progeny, and the Icosahedron lost.

note: What happened next is largely speculative, due to the extreme violence of the following events, the space-pigeon's expedited departure afterwards, and the data corruption caused by the pigeon's anoxic brain injury at a later date.

Abi and Wallopus the Seen headed further into the complex and eventually found some kind of experimental chamber. They found a test subject strapped to a table and surrounded by the desolated corpses of numerous soldiers and researchers. As they tried to investigate further, an aberrant lifeform attacked and killed Abi. Wallopus, however, managed to evade the creature. By engaging with experimental materials within the compound, it is believed that he was then transmuted into a bio-mechanical weapon-organism, capable of transforming into a powerful projectile weapon at will.

At this moment in time, it is believed that both Wallopus and the Icosahedron remain in the IRON ROT, awaiting recovery.