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| A Windswept Habitation | |
|---|---|
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| Category | Story Event |
| Type | Story |
| Data ID | 315960 |
A Windswept Habitation is a Sunless Skies Story Event.
Story description[]
The enterprise of Albion does not rest. Its skies are littered with abandoned construction: derelict factories from its earliest foundation; homes that have yet to be lived in; workshops for industries that proved irrelevant in the heavens.
Trigger conditions[]
Area: Limbo
Frequency: Always (100%)
Interactions[]
| Actions | Requirements | Effects | Notes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Take your leave
You have no business here. Best not to linger.
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Back to the sky
You leave the vacant buildings behind and head back to the high winds and the misty gulfs.
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| Rest and recover
Stay a while. The crew could use a rest.
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The comforts of home
For a night, the crew can forget that they live on a cramped engine amidst the stars. Instead they enjoy some small luxuries: the fact that they don't have to stoop to get through doors, and having enough rooms that they needn't share. They light fires in the grates and pretend, for a while, that they live ordinary lives.
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| Search for something of value
You begin a thorough exploration; a lamp in one hand, a pistol in the other.
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Failed event | |||
| Bare
Despite your efforts, you find nothing in the habitations besides an infestation of white, spindly spiders. Your crew find the spidery houses eery, and wish to be gone.
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| Successful event | |||||
| Construction supplies
In the parlour of a half-finished house, stacks of bronzewood planks lean against the wall. They still gleam as brassily as the day they were cored.
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| Search for something of value
You begin a thorough exploration; a lamp in one hand, a pistol in the other.
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Failed event | |||
| Bare
Despite your efforts, you find nothing in the habitations besides an infestation of white, spindly spiders. Your crew find the spidery houses eery, and wish to be gone.
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| Successful event | |||||
| An empty chapel
A chapel stands amongst the vacant houses. Its altar is bare; its pews are unoccupied. No prayer has ever been spoken here.
Beneath the dust, the stained glass in its windows is the rose-and-yellow of the New Sequence creed that has spread so widely in Albion. You have it removed, and stored in the hold for future sale.
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| Search for something of value
You begin a thorough exploration; a lamp in one hand, a pistol in the other.
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Failed event | |||
| Bare
Despite your efforts, you find nothing in the habitations besides an infestation of white, spindly spiders. Your crew find the spidery houses eery, and wish to be gone.
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| Successful event | |||||
| Cups and saucers. Bowls and plates. A butter-dish
You discover a house where the cupboards are full of crockery, every cup, saucer and jug bearing Her Majesty's unforgiving profile. Florid text around the edge commemorates the date that London first arrived in the sky.
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| Swap stories with the skylarks
The skylarks have seen more of the heavens than most.
Game note: Trade a Sky-Story for a Vision of the Heavens. |
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Lies, libation and liberties
They pass around flasks of something bitter and fiery, while regaling you with stories.
They speak of the windy Ormswald and its intransigent, rebellious inhabitants. Of the long-necked beings that wait within the frosty stones of Skyhenge. Of a plain wooden post that stands at the Avid Horizon, pinned with messages for smiling, heartless gentlemen.
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| Share your food with them
Enjoy an impromptu supper on the bare wooden floors.
Game note: Trade Supplies to reduce Terror and gain Sky-Stories. |
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Breaking bread
Your crew enjoy both the skylarks' company and their tall tales of racing cantankeri across the sky. As the meal comes to a close, one of the skylarks sings the Ballad of Old Tom, who found a century in hours beneath the slopes of the Mother of Mountains, but squandered every penny it brought him within a year and a day.
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| Offer them positions on your crew
Most skylarks would rather starve than serve, but a few of them – wearied by their endless wandering – might appreciate an offer of a respectable job.
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New recruits
A few of them accept your offer and shuffle sheepishly aboard, avoiding their ex-compatriots' eyes. The other skylarks remove their hats and bow their heads, as if watching a funeral procession go by.
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Advanced query needs investigation
Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.
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| Trade with them
They have came into possession of a barrel of unseasoned hours. It's yours for a single sack of fuel. It gets cold in the skies.
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A fair trade
The exchange is amicable; the handshake grubby, but sincere.
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| Trade with them
Somehow, they've managed to capture and cage a beast of the heavens: a thing aflame with iridescent feathers and dappled with eyes. They will part with it for two barrels of fuel.
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A sad parting
One of the skylarks has struck up a rapport with the creature. He sobs into a dirty handkerchief as it is carried onto your engine. The others are happy to see it go. When it bites a fingers off the first person to feed it, you understand why.
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| Rest and recover
Stay a while. The crew could use a little rest.
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A quiet corner
The factory is sooty from an old fire that once swept through it. It still smells, damply, of smoke. Some of its floors are flooded with stagnant puddles; others piled with boxes of unidentifiable, rusting components. You find a dry, brick-pillared chamber and settle in. A stoker breaks out her harmonica.
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| Make repairs to your engine
There may be parts you can salvage from the factory's old equipment.
Game note: Repair your Hull. |
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Failed event | Advanced query needs investigation | ||
| Spare parts
Your engineers search the factory for useful components. They return with several boxes of spare parts and an injury – one of them mangled his hand while extracting a part from a machine that proved less broken than he thought. He'll live, but he'll never hold a spanner again.
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| Successful event | |||||
| "A number three, you say? Good, good."
Your engineers return from the recesses of the factory with boxes of obscure replacement parts. "See this?" one of them asks, excitedly. " That's a number three gasket, that is! Can't get them for blood nor money!" You nod and smile, supportively.
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| Organise a search party
Most of the factory has been picked clean by scavengers, but something of value may remain behind locked doors or beneath fallen rubble.
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Failed event | |||
| Empty handed
The scavengers that preceded you have done their work well. You find nothing in the factory but echoing corridors, draughty workshops, and cobwebs.
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| Successful event | |||||
| A discovery
Bashing your way into a locked storage room, you find crates of old munitions stamped with the symbol of the Crown & Misery Company. Some of the boxes have been spoiled by a persistent leak in the ceiling, but a couple remain intact.
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| Organise a search party
Most of the factory has been picked clean by scavengers, but something of value may remain behind locked doors or beneath fallen rubble.
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Failed event | |||
| Empty handed
The scavengers that preceded you have done their work well. You find nothing in the factory but echoing corridors, draughty workshops, and cobwebs.
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| Successful event | |||||
| A discovery
You find a hall filled with unidentifiable machinery and peppered with rat droppings. Below it is a cellar. Descending a crooked staircase, you find the now-cold furnace that powered the machines. Behind it is a store of fuel.
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| Organise a search party
Most of the factory has been picked clean by scavengers, but something of value may remain behind locked doors or beneath fallen rubble.
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Failed event | |||
| Empty handed
The scavengers that preceded you have done their work well. You find nothing in the factory but echoing corridors, draughty workshops, and cobwebs.
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| Successful event | |||||
| A discovery
What's this? Hidden beneath a tarpaulin in a dripping cellar is a smuggler's cache. Firkins of red honey, stamped with the mark of the Midnight Rose.
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Take the red honey
[Be warned: carrying contraband across regions or into a central station risks attracting the attention of the Revenue Men.]
Game note: Be warned: carrying contraband across regions or into a central station risks attracting the attention of the Revenue Men. |
You haul it to your locomotive and beat a hasty retreat. Who knows when the smugglers that stored it here might return to reclaim it.
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| Leave it
You don't need that kind of trouble.
Game note: Gain experience instead. |
You adjust the tarpaulin to leave it exactly as you found it, close the cellar door, and repair the lock as best you can. No one should knew you were here.
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| Rest and recover
The factory, half vitrified, is unsettling. The sky, seen through its glass walls, is stretched and distorted. But the crew need rest.
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Failed event | |||
| The gathering glass
You build a makeshift camp in an empty hall, away from your engine. The light of the Clockwork Sun burns a bleached yellow in the glass. You eat, you drink, you sleep.
But in the morning, one of your crew – the one who slept in the brightest part of the hall, near the vitrified wall – wakes you with hysterical screams. He has woken to discover that the skin of his hands has turned to hard, brittle glass.
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| Successful event | |||||
| Respite
You find a row of small offices at the back of the factory. The glassy encroachment has yet to reach them, and the crew settle in, singing sky-songs, telling tales, and making the most of their ration of whisky.
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| Salvage panes of glass
You'll need to cut them loose separately. One careless move could result in a cloud of razored glass.
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Failed event | Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.
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| Lost
Your crew are chiselling a wide sheet of glass from the factory's structure when a butter-fingered engineer slips. The pane smashes into the ground. The impact causes fractures to spread like bolts of black lightning through the glassy structure.
Then, with a noise like a dying iceberg, the vitrified walls of the factory's facade shear away. The air is suddenly full of sharp fragments and ribbons of blood.
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| Successful event | |||||
| Gently does it
You select the most light-fingered and habitually cautious members of your crew. With chisels and prybars they sheer away several large sheets of glass from the vitreous mass.
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