166. PI-253 Entrance
Overriding the door, you are greeted with a single hexagonal room, maybe 10m to each side with no additional doors.
Scanning with your Focus, an otherwise-nondescript conduit running down the wall by the door is labeled ELEVATOR CONTROL.
Activating the control, the floor for the entire room begins to drop straight down, moving fast enough to make your stomach flop.
On and on you continue to drop, marking your progress against the shiny crystalline walls, descending several hundred meters. The walls eventually give way to stone for another hundred meters, before disappearing entirely, yielding to a dark emptiness. Characters brave enough to try to get a look below would see that the floor floats on dozens of the glowing lightning discs seen in other cauldrons.
The end of the ride, some seven or eight minutes later, is as surprising as it is gentle, coming to a rest with a whisper of escaping air as the floor settles into a space carved out of the floor which precisely fits it. No machines can be seen here, and only a few sparse lights dot the walls, sections of natural stone interspersed with the unnatural crystalline of a Cauldron. A short hallway as wide as the room opens into a single cavernous space, easily a hundred meters to a side.
An idle assembly line dominates the space, more than a dozen Snapmaws in various stages of completion. Observant characters would notice light dust covering each — the line has not moved in what could be years. Scanning with a Focus shows no active machines here. Moving around the room also reveals no additional exits — the entire Cauldron is the elevator and this area.
The south end of the room is a tangle of pipes, each labeled by your Focus with inscrutable names, and divided into labeled groups: Organics Processing, Inorganics Processing, Inorganics Storage.
The latter shows its pipes leading to dozens of storage tanks embedded deep in the walls.
Several of the storage tanks have warning labels about being at or near capacity.
While you’re looking at this, a flash of light from the entrance draws your attention to the elevator returning to the surface. Should anyone attempt to override the elevator controls, they would find it’s not a very sophisticated system, and there’s no way to stop it or reverse it, only to call it back once it has reached the surface. You can, however, track its progress along its path. Once it’s started its return trip, you can get a sensor reading of what’s on its way down: a pair of Snapmaws.
The Control Pylon for the Cauldron stands in the center of the room, dormant, Focus-labeled as (UNPOWERED).
Tracing with your Focus, you find the problem: a thick cable, running beneath the floor to the west side of the room where it runs up the wall alongside the elevator before disappearing into the ceiling.
A meter off the ground, the cable has been torn through and wrenched away from the wall and its other half.
A thorough investigation of the room reveals a second, similar break, to another thick conduit leading to the assembly line.
As the descending pair of Snapmaws gets into range of your Focus, you can see they are already alert. Use your System Adapter to resolve an encounter with the Snapmaws — they will not deescalate from alert and aggressive status.
These Snapmaws are interesting: they look much older than you’re used to seeing. Some well-known machines can get quite battle-scarred, but most seem to regularly heal and clean their wounds, presumably via repairs in Cauldrons like this one. These two have not seen such repairs in years, and the yellow-brown of the lake water has permanently stained many of their components.
Characters with a proficiency in machines, engineering, or similar may attempt to restore power to the Control Pylon against Moderate difficulty.
If you restore power to the pylon, go to entry 167. Otherwise, return to the surface with entry 169.