The Last Call

Karst grunts by way of agreeing at your individual tactical summations while Kareftis nods sagely, pausing to take a few sips of her drink in between. Liz and SLATE keep staring at each other, breaking eye-screen contact to share a mutual look at Lupo before resuming their staring contest. The Old Man uncrosses his arms and lays his hands palm down on the table. He looks at Rowen. "Unsure about numbers, though it'd be easy enough to outfit your rig with a one-off deep analysis scanner to give you some more informational capabilities prior to the job, eh?" He punctuates what turns out to be a question to Liz with a nod of his head, with the young woman offering an uncharacteristically terse nod in return. Then she breaks out into an easy smile and the tension in her face is gone as she looks at the rest of you. Lady Kareftis clears her throat and the air.

"We have a lift here. Well." She takes a sip of the fizzy drink in her glass and the same man who showed you in brings a tray filled with each of your preferred drinks. "A chute really. It is one way-too much power draw risks the OVERSEER's attention as I-as we-have come to understand it. Still." There is a clatter of metal as the glasses are set down on the table. Liz reaches for one and her grasp is promptly smacked away by Irimloza's hand. The young worker deposits SLATE onto the ground and takes an energized gulp from her water before refilling the glass with an offloaded pitcher. "It will get you most of the way. Safely and, anonymously." The Lady gives you time to finish your drinks and ask any other questions you may have, offering each of you a polite smile as she rises to see each of you off. Karst does his best to do the same, but theres a nervous sort of energy to the man that makes him seem both older and younger at the same time. Like he's ready to take flight. He finishes the rest of his drink, pausing to clink glasses with anyone else that offers their own. The Old Man rises as you do, offering each of you a shake of the hand or mutual grip of the forearm and a good "Good luck." before sitting once more as you take your leave, SLATE in tow. It's hard to tell if Liz is waving at you, her NHP or all of you.

Questions finished and drinks answered your shown to the end of the upper hallways to a nondiscript room with a "do not disturb" signage rotating around an orb that floats to the inbuilt frame's right side. SLATE leads the way in the wake of the nondescript man-the man who'd shown you here. Opening the door, the man beckons you in. The room is small, cramped and dimly illuminated by a stablight lodged in the ceiling above. It paints the waiter's bald pate in a haunted glow that highlights the gauntness of his features and his lack of any hair whatsoever. The man is quick to remove a section of stone from the wall farthest from the door, revealing a simple series of buttons and nobs. He fiddles with ones such nob and the large hunk of slate parts, sliding into the wall leftwards with a small hiss of hydraulics. Your lift down is a glass cylinder. Cabling tracks around it in microfilament circuitwork, widening, expanding then enlarging into full power cables the further the engineering and systems get from the shaft. Whatever powers your way down sits above it, the actual vessel made of metal that is proofed against the rough hew of the tunnel through which it will travel.

Kareftis did not lie. It is a chute more than an elevator, tight for housing all five of you and your personal gear in reinforced crash seats. Hastily welded storage lockers contain what you cant hold onto. The man from the Last Call hands out ear protection to each of you. SLATE's tiny frame retracts its legs, the little ports flipping to reveal hover modules that place it dead center in the middle of the lift. Their display screen spins in time with the thrusters, displaying a ";>l " face to each of you. "Going down? Please keep all hands arms feet and legs inside the compartment. Your patience is appreaciated." The NHP begins tunelessly humming an old mining song. Between the dulled sound of their tune and the other occupants, it is a cramped affair. But there is enough room to press the button on a pad that takes you-

Downward.

What the chute lacks in asethetics and comfort it more than makes up for in practicality, rumbling you towards the printer a speed devoid of grace. There is an initial cosmic tugging sensation associated with takeoff, then an increasing shriek of acceleration as the lift hurtles, what little light there is outside flickering through the slits to animate the interior like an old Cradle cinematic. Stutter-stop motion, cut through with the odd flash of sparks from the outside as the lift shudders in flight. Yet for all the theatrics the elevator does its job. The scream of its acceleration peaks, momentarily breaking through your ear protection before dulling as it peaks, sustains, then wanes as the travel finishes near quick as it started. From the high-wall structure all the way down to:

The Penultimate Stratums

From the elevator built into the wall it is out of a small cavern that-perhaps rightly given the lobby's sole occupant-smells a bit too much like generator fuel byproducts, and onto the beginning of a wide, wide path. One of the main ones used for travel at these depths, and seldom at that for how the wending of the track lies unmarked by recent vehicles. Mechs included. Above, Golgotha's lights and sounds drift downwards to fill your ears. Mostly dull, but sometimes punctuated by the odd squeal of metal on stone or siren from the guard's side of things. Its not just sounds and light. Occasionally the odd bit of caste off or loosened sediment falls down as a particulate around you, and on at least one turn 'round the spiral of the main path shouts alert you to where a day's haul has fallen to clot an upward pathway. You descend further, the daily toil of working more important, more rich earth veins serving as effective cover much as where you pass through does.

Patrols dont come down this far. Not anymore. Instead the only thing your watched by are the derelict and the abandoned: old rusted-out hulls that once passed for vehicles of mining convenience serve as sentinels to not just your passage, but over old prison work-camps, desiccated precursors to the stability of the ghetto above above. Little embankments that once tried and failed to make lives for themselves down deep, when the ores ran plentiful. More Golgothan casualties. Small wonder the Warden does not have these strata worked. If the laborers were to gaze upon the bones amidst the old camp's tarps and primitive bivouacs in their current temperaments, rebellion would have long ago occurred. To say nothing of the injustices the Loyal wing would perceive. Looking up, you can see that half finished paths and traversal line the walls at this level like collateral circulations, trailing upward to where they flourish into truth paths to the prison proper or into atrophied dead ends. Enough that travelling back up by mech should be easy.

The road you take wends deeper, taking you two hours and deep so as to make the lights from the ghetto and prison side pins in the sky. Little artificial stars. The noise becomes indistinct but constant, a sort of dull ebb and flow of percussions as the accumulation of whats ringing out above is caste down to your ears. The mining machines that lined the roadways become more sparse, but grander in scale for their rarity. Some are even unrusted. Where a lack of light from above fails, the flesh of the pit provides in the form of minerals that glow, maybe by virtue of their chemical compositions, perhaps as reflections of the light above. It would certainly account for the strange taste in the air. Too much alkaline. And, growing in small furtive clutches to add to the stink: mushrooms, shining with a swathe of neons all their own as reinforcements to bolster against the dark. SLATE begins to tunelessly hum the same music they did in the elevator going down. A few inbuilt LEDs perk up and bolster what is rapidly becoming just cavelight.

"This'll take us where we want to go." SLATE's voice sounds heavy. Laden with something not so much like guilt as it is simplly worn down. Like a too blunted drill. The tunnel the little frame "sits" in front of is easily wide enough to accommodate any of your mechs upon exit or entry. This, and the relative depth the passage is situated at, would indicate that it is a very, very old tunnel, its anonymity resting on this factor and, as a consequence of its age, its vacancy as a viable shaft to work. The NHP turns left into the tunnel, the bustle and noise of Golgotha steadily fading in time with the progress of your descent downwards.

The Printer

Its another Shotoran hour through the same tunnel SLATE banked left through, then a slowly widening pathway that kicks into another abrupt turn. Right this time, the perpendicular narrowing slightly but noticeably as your lead through it by the NHP. Small islet lights burn the same stale white as the glow-lamp used to, studded across the black carapace of the NHP's current hull as lambent boils. The air becomes cleaner to the taste. Someone has stationed a purifier near the printer. Layers of sediment reveals themselves in the glow, heaped upon one another by age. Occasionally in your travels, you see fossils: many jumbled but a few clear precursors to the current Shotoran fauna: the forepaw and lower jaw of what can only be a direwolf from the woods. The mammals jaws look like they could rip a Sagarmatha's arms off. The imprint of a now extinct fern species. An entire spinal column and skull of what can only be a bull-salamander-large enough to fit several of the direwolf jaw-pieces in its mouth. The amphibian skeleton is missing all but one of its limbs and clearly a victim of later mammals pack tactics. Yet for all the time on display-easily going back as far as Karrakis itself, probably more besides-the passage reeks of artifice, a fact made all the more apparent by the shear nature of the tunnel's make much as it is by the odd strut or support that braces the passageway's spine. Tracts of glowing minerals shine phosphorescent, bolstering the tunnels light as you go downward.

There is a keen downward slope to your traversal, a sense of getting deeper as the lights staked into the walls decrease as the heat increases. The stablights allotted to your pathway become more haphazard in their placement even as SLATE's become brighter to compensate. Thick cabling narrows the duggout to a width of three men, and a tunnel that was equal parts proportion to the largest of your mechs becomes narrowed, barely sized for Sargarmathan proportions. There is an absence of stablights, but the NHP's frame helps to illuminate the different colored cabling: greens and browns, like the rooting to some titanic tree. The tunnel opens into a massive plateau, the massive jut of rock descending like a staircase into more and more layers of sediment. The cavern yawns tall over this descent. Below, rocks glow with mineral deposits, lighting your way where human artifice cannot. A veritable survivalist's paradise to be explored.

The area with the printer is center on the plateau, surrounded by a swathe of crates containing print material, munitions and mech scale weapons for those munitions. Reserves lie perched and sequestered amongst the the other boxes, ready for the taking. And human supplies too: water and a strange mix of Union & House Guard rations mixed in with SSC preMealsTM. There's even a bit of the good stuff: colonist meal packages that self-heat to full readiness at the push of a button and a set of meals that, given the purple bar across each one, probably belonged to an Armory acquisitions team.

The printer itself-a scale two model-looks like a full body spaceport scanner for how the main geometry is composed of a cylinder and series of inbuilt rings. The whole thing stretches to barely under the ceiling above the plateua, a feat that would be more impressive if the cavern didnt achieve new heights further on. Six arms break up the silhouette: while the printer can print larger sized mechs, it must do so piecemeal, then assemble the full mech afterwards. Each arm ends in a different type of tool: rivet gun, welding torch, holding clamp. And so on. A terminal for human convenience sits by the doors to the printer while small fingerling venioles siphon geothermal energey via a convergence of the cablings built into the wall. The tracts web the area around the printer except for the exit doors and the port for more printer material. The entire assemblage stands ready and loaded with matter for it's first use, queing up with a faint whine that echoes about the cavern as SLATE deploys some sort of signal for it to begin. More lambency bleeds from floodlights mounted on the printer. The tiny-framed NHP turns around expectantly, a vacant emoji smeared across his display.

"-_-. Well. Who'll be first? "

Spoiler: OOC
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Ok so I figure we can go back to the Last Call on the way to the jammer station if people want to do more RP with Karst, Kareftis or Liz and to the Penultimate Stratum if folks want to do more interparty RP On that note, let me know if things are progressing too quickly for your tastes and I can definitely slow the pacing down a bit-figure everyone's ready to get to the first combat

Tried to make things seemed as lived in as possible WRT the lower depths, but it might raise more questions that answers so feel free to ask OOC if you have any and I can answer them/edit the fiction if it doesnt make much sense.