Ajakstu carefully accepted the jar from Kalsk and then even more carefully scooped up the heart.

"We can exchange money for goods and services. Like a lock for the food cooler. Like some armor and weapons for the vehicle. Possibly a smaller, quite fashionable hat for Rake."

Kalsk sighs and nods. "Y'gotta just expect that monsters are gonna come out of the darkness, out here, if you wait long enough. Locks and armor and weapons sound like good ideas."

Alyn gets a strange hint of clairvoyance off of one of the corpses... an image of a different kind of creature than the dead brain-things... a leathery sort of biped standing on two limbs, but with lower legs that just taper into two prongs at the end of each leg... and six wings, and six arms-- no, four arms, but the bottom two attached to one of the sets of wings... The upper arms seem to have three fingers and a thumb each... the lower hands, two fingers and a thumb each... the bottom set just two digits, no thumb as such...

The wings hang down from the top sets of arms... except for the bottom wings, which seem almost more like maple-seed wings... All the wings have that texture...

The head is just a curved, tapered cone or beak, no eyes nor mouth visible... not much of a neck, either...

This, the mental impression Alyn gets, is... the brain-things' ...creator? Or... herder? Or... owner? Or... master? Or... some combination of these? Or... none of the above?

Either way, the creature is... dangerous. Powerful. More so than the brain-things...

Alyn frowned.

"Well I just saw something...disturbing to say the least. And that's relatively speaking mind you, because this world and people are all super weird." he said, as if he were somehow not a part of the weirdness that was daily life here even though he totally was a part of it.

"So...you know how Jak noticed their glowing heart thingies? I jist got a glimps of the things behind the things. The monsters behind the monsters." he continued.

"Kalsk? Vukt? Companions? Any of you ever hear of a creature that has siz wings, six arms, and taped off bidelal legs with a weird-ass head that's just one beak or cone without much else for definition? Has 4 fingers on upper limbs and 3 on lower limbs?" he asked.

"Because one of those things was the maker of these mutants."

"It sounds like a woman I met once," Ajakstu begins, but then he takes stock of his audience.

"Actually, I feel like I do recall something from my countless hours spent in libraries reading many books. Many, many books."

21:12, Today: Ajakstu Gul rolled 10 using 2d6+1 with rolls of 3,6.  Insightful.

Ajakstu recalls that according to the records of the Ziggurat:
--such creatures were named the Surai
--they are basically biological robots-- made of organic matter, but created artificially
--they were part of some sort of experiment by some ancient artificial intelligence now (presumably) long gone
--that the Surai themselves are a part of, and also the executors of, a series of millennia-running experiments of some mysterious sort
--that the Surai have greater-than-human-level intelligence
--that the Surai sometimes create monsters as part of their experiments
--that the Surai may have psychic abilities

Ajakstu relates the information to "The A-Team" but in prose that makes it seems like he performed deep scholarly research in musty libraries tended by liches of great power whom he had to defeat in feats of personal combat such as

- Arm wrestling
- Chess
- Tiddlywinks, round robin, and avbsolutely no rustling of food wrappers
- Lawn darts, with many extra points granted for points to the head

And having granted such information, he will now sit back in his driver's seat of the walker and await the others to devise a plan to perform whatever task it is that they have agreed to.

The Duke takes this information dump as the ideal moment to fall asleep hunched over his cooler in the backseat of the skimmer.

"Wait a second!" Ajakstu exclaims, sitting up.

"Kalsk, back when The Duke and I were liberating our water which your people had stolen in their underground lair, there was a computer that made mention of experiments and artifical intelligences. Indeed, the whole place might have been a laboratory before your mangy relatives moved in. Perhaps you know more about this?"

"...No, not really," says Kalsk. "I mean, after I left, I figured out that Onsu was just a computer, and not the super-smart kind, and that we were all living next to a big science facility... but I presumed that it was originally made by humans. Honestly, you guys seem to know more about that stuff than I do."

"Humans were very cool," Vult gurgles. "They used to rule this planet, billions of years ago... I mean... you guys did..." Now that Vult thinks about it, he seems a little skeptical that the beings of non-mind-bending coolness in front of him are really humans...
This message was last edited by the player at 19:48, Fri 22 Oct 2021.

Alyn nodded.

Humans definitely ruled the world in the past. Although I'm not sure what happened to get things to be the way they are today. Although we are pretty cool...the humans from before weren't perfect by any means. And they weren't quite like us with our...abilities. They were like more boring versions of us I guess you could say." he said.

"But these Surai...I've never seen or felt anything like them before. I don't actually know if they are malicious or simply alien and experimental but otherwise workable. If they are psychic I'd like to talk to one some day." he continued.

"But for now our plans remain unchanged. We go to the fallen titan, do our spelunking, and get our first pick of the scene before the robot seekers get there, and then we head to that town...what's it's name...the one with the doctors where we can try and deal with the parasite and get info about the Cloisture."

"Tell you what... you guys go back to sleep. Me and Vult'll keep watch for a while longer."

"Not necessary!" Ajakstu retorts. "I find that the attack has invigorated me and I am fully aware, my senses finely tuned. Also, I have personal experience with being watched over by your people, and after due consideration, I must say their social graces and meal preparation were lacking."

"Yeah, well, I didn't love the getting-partially-frozen-by-a-freeze-grenade thing, personally, so I'm callin' it a tie, man," says Vult. He flows over to a shallow depression in the ground, ready to get some more rest of his own.

Ajakstu turns to Rake, nods at Vult, and whispers, "Sic 'im."

Rake appears to get suddenly interested in a bit of lint on Ajakstu's sleeve.

"I don't know if I'll fully be able to recover and clear my head after all these interruptions. But I suppose we could try resting a bit longer till daybreak anyway." Reed said.

"Go ahead, you most certainly need your beauty sleep," Ajakstu tells Alyn.

Then he tinkers with the controls of his vehicle.

The vehicle's autonomous capabilities are incredibly limited, but it can be set to follow Alyn's vehicle.

The half-a-mountain is passed with only a small amount of trouble. Kalsk wants to head toward it like a drunk wanting a bottle, but he is restrained, and his instinct to go there eases the farther he gets from it.

It helps that Vult has assumed a solid form-- his solid form is that of a sort of orange-ish rock-crystal man... except short (about five foot six-ish) and scrawny, like the teenager he sounds like. He's strong enough to help restrain Kalsk, though, speaking soothing words the whole time ("Naw, you don't wanna go there, man, there's nothin' for you there, even though it feels like it... You wanna stay with us, and go to Gnost-- remember Gnost? How cool it was? Think about Gnost... Or if that upsets you, don't think about Gnost... tell me the story about the pig-men on the motorcycles again, Kalsk, I wanna hear the pig-men story again...")

Kalsk never quite tries to violently break loose, and as the half-a-mountain slowly shrinks in the distance, he seems more and more like his old self...

About the time Kalsk doesn't need to be restrained anymore, there's something new to look at-- the huge robot.

It's about 40 stories high, thinks Alyn. Bigger than the Statue of Liberty, anyway. Each of its two legs are twice as thick as a sturdy lighthouse... It's humanoid, with two arms coming off of a humanoid torso, and a vaguely human-shaped head... vaguely... in a very art-deco-meets-futurist way.

It is, more or less, gun-metal black.

The Duke looks at the massive construct and then at his destructor gloves remarking dryly.

"Well i think that one might be a little to big to bring down with a few slaps."

Alyn looked on at the large titan bot in awe.

"Wow this must be the bot we're looking for!" he exclaimed excitedly.

"And look! The thing is huge! I've never seen anything like it. I can't wait to explore it!" he continued.

He turned to Kalsk.

"Are you doing ok Kalsk?"

Ajakstu piloted his vehicle around the monstrosity, looking for a door, service port, pr even an exhaust pipe.

"Yeah. Yeah, good enough, I think, for the moment. Thanks for asking."




(Roll Insightful, please...)

"Why thank you, Rake!" Ajakstu exclaimed, gently stroking his best friend. "Looks and brains IS what I possess!"


19:38, Today: Ajakstu Gul rolled 9 using 2d6+1 with rolls of 6,2.  Insightful.

"That overe there," he pointed. "Looks like it's worth investigating."