Roll For You: Arcane Train! Episode 5 - The Anti-Gravity Engine

After the fateful encounter with the Ripcords, the team begins their search for the bombs! And the first place to check is undoubtably the anti-gravity engine of sector 5...

As always, thank you for your support on this project. Our cast is as follows...

Game Master: Ross Bloedorn (He/Him)

Mallan Monko: Sam Maxwell (He/They)

Fern Hollinger: Katie Lynn Sinicki (She/Her)

Gor-El: Nic Mains (He/They)


All music in this episode is recorded and produced by the incredible and multi-talented Sam Maxwell


If you feel like supporting our show, check out our patreon at patreon.com/rollforyoupod for bonus content, after show talk backs, monthly live streams and download links to the original music used in this show: Patreon

Transcript

0:15

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai - Go Unlimited to remove this watermark) Previously on Arcane Train Goril, you're on the outskirts of the deep woods. My name's Agar, Agar'al. You know that the forest is dying. Out in front of you is the bodies of your captors, littered across this clearing. Where once Agar'al is, is a bloody smear. The only body not here is Agar'al. Giant redwood trees have sprouted in the center of Sector 3 and have made crossing between the two incredibly unbearable and impossible. The wall of force to get in there is hitting you at about a thousand miles an hour and will shatter your bones. I throw my entire phone on the ground and I stomp it with my giant feet. Adjusting to the plan, uh, we need schematics. You guys make your way to the stacks. You clearly see this man, by a very powerful spell, is standing guard at this door. You easily are able to take this man down. Bang your natural 20. You've gotta be kidding me. You recognize this as the bartender from a year ago. The person to her right is looking down at the ground, trying to look anywhere but you guys, but you see a glimpse of unmistakable green eyes. And she whips up. Olivia takes one look and she follows her cohorts up onto the ceiling of the roider. Furn, you feel your walkie talkie start buzzing. Would you believe that I rolled a two and a one? You hear, clear as day, a response on the other end go, my name's Norman. Oh hey. Malin, you rat bastard. Wait, what? We find you in a very lavish workshop. We're going back in time here a little bit. Deep in the heart of the Esmeralda capital, Koromira, a sturdy and state of the art room makes up your workspace. Concrete floors with white marble walls lines the space of your shared workspace at the Nimbus Center, where you have dedicated the last year or so, fresh out of college, working on, at the time, what is called the Arcane Initiative. The name given to the roider before it was given its finalized name. Damn, that sounds a whole lot cooler than like a train. I know, right? They went wrong somewhere along the way. But right now, it is called the Arcane Initiative. Malin, you are in here working on your bench you share with your colleague Norman, your friend Norman. I think it's probably a reasonable hour for you to be working. Let's say three in the morning. Coffee is everywhere. When did my, I think my shift started at like, maybe noon. I've just been rolling. The way I see it is during your actual hours of work, you are more or less doing grunt work. You're not being given important tasks. You're kind of like being told like, hey, make this part more efficient. Make this work better. Both you and Norman. And in your off hours, you are dedicated to doing what you actually give a shit about. Yeah. Would you say that this space is like me, like this is me and Norman's hour designated space? Okay, cool. Absolutely. We haven't like broken here after hours. Well, actually, here's the thing. You absolutely have work. So yes, it is your space. It is your like, if we were to do this in the classic sense of like an office worker, just because you have an office in the office building doesn't mean you're supposed to be there after hours. So you and Norman kind of jerry rigged up some hammocks. Uh, just kind of like hidden in like kind of like a like a hidden corner of the room. Norman is taking a quick power nap, a 15 minute power nap, I'd say, because he's absolutely just like you obsess. And he's put earplugs in so he can't hear you welding away in the dark of this room. This state of the art fancy as fuck facility. And you guys have to be blunt about it. You guys have trashed the place. There is trash everywhere. Bugs live here. Oh, yeah. Because of you guys. We just never throw we like keep eating Funyuns and just leaving the bags. Absolutely. Just absolutely littered. I appreciate the specificity of the Funyuns. I feel like Malin exclusively eats like Funyuns and Top Ramen. 100 hour energies, which is so much more powerful because magic are littering Norman's desk just like there's no place to work actually anymore. How did he go to sleep on a 100 hour? Well, he's been up for more than 100 hours. Yeah, this was this big crash. He hit his wall. Yeah. And you guys have completed your workload for the day during the regular hours, as said, sketches, designs, all form of motor function improvements. We have discussed in past sessions that you are here in the after hours dedicated to making a rotating kind of conveyor belt method of relaying the tracks in front of the would-be roiber train. And we know you are successful in that endeavor. So that is what you are working on right now. Yes. Yeah. But go ahead and tell me a little bit now that we're in the past about Malin's life up to this moment, like what has led you to come to work at the Arcane Initiative? Yeah. Well, Malin sort of grew up in his hometown with, you know, the rest of his family and everything far away from the city of Cromera and everything. Right. In a very rural sort of farming town, which was very common amongst his people. Right. A real Perkins situation. Yeah. Perkins, it's like a whole town of Perkins. And Malin grew up there and was very interested in like learning and a little more into like, I don't know, he was probably one of those kids that would, if had Legos, make X-Wings out of those Legos. Absolutely. Just sort of based on, was a little against, you know, the rest of the more rural sentimentalities of his area. Right. And his father worked on the original tracks for some of the original trains. He was a very big, strong for, you know, a tiny blue race of people. Right. And would go and work on literally laying the tracks and doing that hard work under the sun and left for a long time from his family working on that. Right. And while laying tracks, it's literally over nothing. Like they are kind of like just tied to the track and they're expected to work on no ground. Yeah. Just belayed underneath, but also lifting these sort of steel bars for, you know, just the most baseline sort of communications and transportations between different islands. And one day, because the work was so hard, his father had an accident and basically broke his back essentially and was sent home. Right. Which is a lucky thing, honestly, when you think about it. Most people that have an accident fall through the cloud layer and are just gone forever. Yeah. I mean, you say he probably just tried, he was, he was feeling himself and tried to pick up too many steel beams and just like fell over real quick. You know, he might have fallen down, but the rope caught him. The rope caught him. And maybe that was what hurt his, you know, hurt his spine so bad that he had to go home. And he, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Malin grew up fascinated with the work that his father left to do. Sure. And when that work essentially broke his father, he kind of made a vow to himself that he would figure out in his own way, a way to finish what work his dad started on. Right. Because the railway system that they're working on is obsolete. And the idea of constructing permanent rails over open sky is fucking ridiculous. Like in cost on, it's not cost effective. No. Right. It's, it's, it, it doesn't make sense from a fiscal standpoint or a health and safety standpoint or any standpoint, which is where you come in. Now we know already you succeed in this quest. You invent the pocket dimension technology to effectively conveyor belt tracks from the back to the front in a never ending loop. And we are here in the moments before that happens. We are about to see you succeed as you weld together various alloys and elements. You pluck from a very expensive machine, a whisk of arcane thread, and you input it into what appears to be a really old nail gun, I think. And you're just shooting away. Norman is snoring loudly in the corner, despite all of this noise. The amount of resources you have at your disposal here is ridiculous. And this is what you've been looking for, you know? Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of like him attaching, he who is not someone who grew up with magical sensibilities, really studied the runic abilities of these spells and is able to sort of imbue them and stuff and combine them in a way that is almost alchemy-like. So he's probably putting some form of like a banishment spell. Sure. With like a return sort of area on that, onto these like nails and is spiking them into like this bar. Yeah. So we already know, again, that you're successful. So what I'm about to ask of you isn't a matter of how successful you are. It's more of a matter of how much do you fuck up everything here in a moment in the process of doing this? Do you know what I'm saying? So you hopped up on coffee and like a single Funyun for sustenance. Yeah. Let's roll a little fun check. I want you to roll a tech check with only proficiency, not your expertise, because this is at least two years, probably more in the past. So I'm going to go ahead and give the benefit and say that you actually don't have as much knowledge as you do now, especially because you're working with something that you're making happen for the first time. And depending on what you roll is going to determine how big of an explosion is in this space. Okay. So just my normal check for... With your proficiency. Okay. So it would be... Because you're not an idiot, you know, like you went to college and you like, this is your passion. You are educated on the subject. I'm just saying you're not, you haven't made it happen yet. For my brain, would that be a plus six or a plus two? It'd be a plus two. Okay. That's a 13. All right. So we're going to... You begin to make this structure. Like it's kind of a circular like structure you've been weaving together. You have many discarded versions of this invention that are just kind of thrown in a waste paper bin that is overflowing at this point from failed attempts. And you are taking this arcane string from it. You're basically like sewing together while welding at the same time. Only like with your hands and like your gloves are like these weird mechanical like protectives that do everything from hammering to screwing to sewing in this moment. It truly does look like you're an insane wizard holding from the ether, just pure arcane energy. But because it's just rad ass technology that you didn't have to pay for, you're like able to do this. You know what I'm saying? I'm rolling in love here. You're rolling in dough. It must feel good to have a job. Surely you'll always have a job. I'll never be unemployed ever in my life. You'll never be unemployed in your life. Never again. And you, while sewing this together, you finish it and the structure is there. And you flip a switch on the side in the power bank from the off side of your desk begins to glow red hot, which I think you're just like, yep, that happens. That's going to happen. There's no way around that. Like when you download a really big video game, you're like, it's going to cook. It's going to cook a little bit. Yeah, that's natural. That smell is usual. I just need to buy a bigger fan. I've not gotten around to it yet. Absolutely. He hasn't gotten around to the, he's putting a work order. And as like something begins to like spin in the center of this device, you see this giant mass of energy implode in on itself. And there's just like a slight pause. And I think you just look at it for a second. Is it just kind of holds there? And then just like huge explosion in like the direct, like five feet of your desk. Like it's not exploring the whole room, but Norman definitely falls out of his hammock from like the energy of it. I'm not going to make you take damage from this on a 13, but you fucked some shit up and your desk is smoking black. Does it blow? I'm assuming it blows me backwards as well. It blows you back up against the wall. A little droid comes out of the wall and says, cleaning time, cleaning time. It's like cleaning. I feel like you've rejected this service many times. I told you it's for the, it makes the room feel more homey. Get away from me. Yeah. Norman stands up with like hair all stick to one side from the pillow. He was like on clearly having just like woke up from the loud noise, chestnut brown hair and like a kind of like a porcelain complexion, giving him an almost ghostly look to him because he's never outside. He's rather tall and lanky and has these dark bags under his eyes, which I assume you do as well from lack of time. Yeah. Just like sleeping. This is a fast friend. Like you guys have known each other for a good many years and you guys booked your dream job together. And Norman was just like, what? What did I miss? What's going on? So I think, okay, two things. I think it works. I don't think it works great right now. You think it works? Which one? The mine and not yours. No, damn it. I wasn't going to work on yours. You were asleep. You said that last time. It's fine. Listen, I think Norman like zeros in on the space, like of the charred thing. He's like, do you see that? In the center, in the center. What do I roll? What do I see? You in this very, like, it's like you have to squint, but Norman zeros in on it. And you see kind of like this. It's hard to tell. It looks like a speck of dust. This hovering there. I think Norman says, hold on. And he like runs across the room. He goes to his desk, which is singed, burnt. And he's like, throws off some like energy cans. And he grabs like this little model of like, just basically like a really huge pair of binoculars. And he like holds him up to his eyes. He takes a look. And I'm absolutely right next to him trying to stick my head as well. Give me a chance. I need a speck of dust. All right. You made the speck of dust. We are just trying to make sure it's not just a speck. OK, take a look. And he hands it off to you. And sure enough, you see hovering over your desk at the center of the explosion. The device that you use to make this is gone, right? Like it exploded. It blew up the gateway. OK, right. But what is there still remains. In the center is what is more or less this dark like speck zoomed in. It is true black. Like, you know how there's a difference between like the black of night and true, true black? Oh, yes. Vantablack, of course. No light enters this thing. Go ahead and give me either investigation or arcana or perception. Whatever you feel would be appropriate to get a read on this. And Norman will give the help action. Oh, sweet. I also hand him the binoculars back. Thank the Lord. One of them was a one, but the other one comes out with my arcana to a 17. Right on. You look into this and you get closer to it, I think. What are you before I like say anything? What do you do? Do you just look at it? Do you try touching it? Do you like to use any of your tech around you? Well, it's it's a good it's like above me, right? Like it's floating in the air above my desk. Yes, but it's not. It's like at like where your head would be at your desk. And let's just assume because you are a small man. Yeah. That you have a means of getting to the top of your desk. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. I have my little step stool. I step on it and then I get on my desk and then I think I take like a rod sort of shaped item like anything that is maybe something like a fire poker or one of the long drill nails or something, some long piece of metal. And I kind of look at Norman and I give him like a nod. Yeah. See what his response is. I think Norman and one Norman is like digging through his books that have been all blown away and he's like digging through like different arcane tomes. Norman is a wizard. Like Norman isn't a artificer like you. So he doesn't work with the tech side of things like you do. He's not much of a scientist. Like he is a scientist, but he deals much more in the world of the arcane rather than the mechanical. Do you know what I mean? Yes, yes, yes. Which is why it's basically like if you guys kind of like had the same major, but then you had a different focus for your masters. Do you know? It's kind of like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We both ended up in the same place, but we have different. Absolutely different backgrounds. So Norman is looking through books to like basically like in his like realm of gravity, which was his focus. He's obsessed with inertia and the becoming of mass over a long distance for the arcane initiative. He's working on solving that problem in his free time. Yeah, he's he's working on the gravitational situation, right? The train. Absolutely. And so Norman is going through his books and he sees you with your what your fire poker you said? Yeah, like I just have like a fire poker and I'm like looking like I'm about to touch it. Yeah, absolutely. You go to touch it and he's like kind of like kind of shrugs. He's like, this is uncharted territory. We're going to do what we're going to do, right? All right. Yeah, I'm going to poke that. Actually, wait, before I poke the thing, I want to cast fairy fire on it. Oh, right. And see what happens if I try to make like a violet light over it. Yeah, I think. Can I see like I want to specifically see if I can see any cracks in it or see anything past the black if it's illuminated closely? You can't see anything past the black. I'll say that. OK, but you do outline this thing. And I'm going to say with that fairy fire on that arcana, this thing is there for sure. There's no doubt of that. There is a new entity in this space. Whatever it is, it is there. While small, something about it is off and it gives you an unsettling feeling on an arcana check. It is deep and it is endless and it is dark and it is, dare I say, terrifying. But more importantly than all of that, it is brilliant, brilliant and yours, whatever the fuck this is. And as you ponder these things, I'm going to say with that fairy fire is actually what saves you when you didn't do an investigation, because arcane tells you a little bit that this you should maybe be a little scared of this. Yeah. You know, but with that fairy fire, I think you catch almost before it's too late that this thing, as you see outlined, is actually growing in size very slowly, but it is increasing in speed. So now it's slowly it's like the size of a marble, whereas before it was the size of a speck of dust. And Norman is looking through his books. Do you still touch it with your fire poker? I think when I noticed that it's growing, I kind of like I keep the fire poker at my side, but I'm like, I look to Norman. Norman, what's going on? Do we have any do we have any sort of like a like a like a spell box or anything like that? Do we even just like a glass box to put over this thing? I mean, we can probably make something. Let me just we need to it's it's it's getting bigger. It appears to be some sort of tear. This is insane. This is it's like a tear in the fabric of the immediate space in front of us. Oh, yeah, trust me. I know. I'm very happy about it. Yes, me too. And I don't know. Should we try and pry it open and see if it leads somewhere or or I suppose we should like no, I'm getting ahead of myself. You we should do what you said. We should try and find a way of continuing. What was the device you had earlier? Maybe now that it's in existence and I think as he's going off on this, it is actually like I think he looks down at his book and he looks up and it's now unfortunately the size of a bowling ball and expanding outwards and goes like, oh, yeah, this is what I said it was getting bigger. And as you say that it is already getting too late. Make a dexterity saving throw with me. Shit. And Norman is going to make one as well. Norman is not a dexterous dude. Yeah, neither am I. OK, but on that natural 15, he's actually going to be OK. Hey, buddy, that was a three. OK, so you I think here's what's going to happen with that. I am closer to the thing. I think Norman. Yes, you are closer to it. So that makes perfect sense. As it expands outward, it like kind of like starts to damage the room around it, splits your desk in half and it begins to dissolve it like whatever it touches. It begins to suck into it or erode whatever it touches. And this moment right before you were about to get collapsed in on and then you see Norman's book glow and he holds out his hand in like a reflex. And he this is, I think, surprising to you, Malin, because you've never seen Norman cast magic in a practical sense, I think. Yeah, it's more of like, hey, how can I imbue this object with magic kind of deal? Yeah, he's never like just like for a for a combat or a situation like that. He's not a combatic wizard. That being said, Norman reaches out his hand in a panic and casts a very powerful spell you don't recognize. And you feel gravity around this hole begin to close down on it before it just touches you. It begins to stop growing. But Norman begins bleeding from his nose and mouth from the strain of this spell. He is 11 from Stranger Things. Yeah, he is. He is a fully grown man, but he is. Is he bald? He's not bald. You said he wasn't bald. He is not doing well. This is clearly he's a fragile man. You would know Norman isn't exactly medically like he is not a muscular man. He's got many, many medical problems going on with him that makes him very fragile in nature. Because of that failure from earlier, I'm only going to give you one chance of this as opposed to my planned three chances for you to create a way of lessening this object or this this this void that is growing. So it is it is for the moment being held by Norman, but it's only going to be for one turn because you are too close to it. I'm going to give you and this is going to be an arcana check because this is truly outside of the realm of what you thought possible. But if anyone has the ability to contain something like this, it would be you with your theoretical knowledge of the subject. So go ahead and make me an arcana check. 16. Okay, on a 16. You've planned for this in the past, something of this situation, though you might not have thought of it. Yeah. In your haste, you grab the closest container within reach, an empty bag of funyuns. You mutter an extremely experimental arcane binding, running calculations in your head with the speed spurned by adrenaline, wisps of ether gather around the chip bag. Then an ungodly whirring sound begins to emanate from the bag and a vacuum like pulse sucks the black rift Ghostbusters style. I fucking Luigi's Mansion a rift in the universe. And you suck it in and the suction is so strong that I think your head goes in with it. Yeah. And like your body stays out and you're struggling with your head in this bag. And you're in there and all you see is this black and you don't feel pain. Right? You actually feel weirdly weightless. It feels like you're in this falling void, but it's just your head. And the dark that was once just in front of you is now your entire perception of reality. Give me a perception investigation arcana check. As you see into this dark void. That is a, that is a 15 and I'm using investigation. Uh, got it. In this dark void, the one thing that is hard to miss in this black void, in the distance, you see a giant white fissure. How far it's hard to say as you don't have any frame of reference for distance. And as you were here in this bag, you see this blinding white fissure glowing and expanding outwards and you feel it growing and hungering and eating its tendrils leaking out into this dark void. You see something at the heart of it, but you can't quite tell what it is on that 15 from earlier. Correct? Yeah, it's a 15. You see a speck off in the distance that looks kind of humanoid in shape, but that's all you can really see. It is a speck in this growing white void. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. As the white grows and following up from that fairy fire from earlier, within 10 feet of you, you begin to see something that you didn't against the black of this void. You begin to see the outline come into focus of a larger than life black scale dragon appear before you. I pull my head out. I pull my head out immediately. As it lets loose a white void like scream, you struggle to pull your head out, but you are stuck in place. Before it can make contact with you, a pulling sensation grabs your torso from the other end of the bag and reaches from behind you and yanks you back and the world rips into a tapestry of color as you are yanked through your workshop up against the wall and the bag closes and you see Norman passed out on the floor as you get up and standing in your workshop over an extremely beat up Norman holding a pocket watch that is letting loose wisps of arcane energy that are being sucked back into the pocket watch where the spell that pulled you out came from is old man Ebenezer Royber. As he clicks shut his pocket watch where the spell came from, he mutters an arcane binding over the chip bag and it's so shut with the wisps of energy that you got from the machine earlier, but it comes just from him. It didn't have to be made by a machine. And it closes shut and you see it expand kind of like the bag has too much air in it and then it deflates and it stills and he looks at you and says, man, yes, yes, do you have any idea what you've done? I, I, um, I created, uh, I, uh, yeah, yes, yes, I created the, the, the, the pocket dimension, the dimension that we needed comes in from behind him. He give me an insight check on this man right now.