Quick facts
Campaign: Campaign 2 · Session: 78 of 83 · Arc: Coghaven · Where: Coghaven, the research station below the forge
Captain Teft checked in by sending stone: the ship was now airborne and heading for the Saline Coast, and the Velvet Truffle Company seemed to have taken the bait. Below the forge, the party found a large metal-and-glass vat labeled “expired,” holding a shriveled gnome, and a hatch leading to a research station. The gnome was Goric, Wilbur’s father, who had been captured on a raid years before and taken to the forge. The notes there described experiments on many subjects, including research on keeping a brain alive after the body dies and implanting it into a new biological body. One name kept appearing: Dr. Wheelo.
Behind a line of skittering droids, the party found a cowering gnome scientist in a lab coat guarding two vats. The assistant, Dr. Kochin, claimed he held a dead man’s switch that would kill thousands of gnomes if he let go, and demanded clemency and the right to keep his research. The switch was mounted on a stick, so Kip cast sticks to snakes, turning it into a snake he named Reginald. The threat turned out to be a bluff. From one vat the party freed a fire genasi named Masha, whose last memory was being in Beerlia, possibly setting something on fire, and then being transported. The assistant insisted she had been legally delivered by one of their trade partners.
In the next room the party met Dr. Wheelo himself, a giant brain floating in a vat. He welcomed them and noted they had delivered another new power source. He boasted that the one he already had had far outperformed expectations. A metallic figure with spiky hair and a tail walked in, the CabbAutomaton, a mechanical copy of Cabba, and through the open door the party glimpsed seven vats, one of them holding Cabba. When the party reached for a pressure valve, Wheelo’s tank rose from the floor on mechanical legs and the fight began. Wilbur hasted Ellery, saying this fight mattered to her, while Wheelo blasted the room with a cone of psychic force. Reginald the snake was splattered. The mechanical Cabba used Cabba’s own moves against Ellery, knocked her down, and stomped her to the very edge of death, where only her Saiyan endurance kept her conscious. As it raised its foot for the killing blow, water rushed out of the next room, and Cabba himself, now free, struck the machine across the face and told it to step away from her.
Kip restored Ellery with heal, and Wilbur loaded the salvaged parts into the pistol Bulma had given him and slowed Wheelo. The slow helped blunt Wheelo’s attempt to compel them, and Masha, finally with something to aim twenty years of rage at, told the brain to “dodge this” and burned it to ash inside its boiling tank. The CabbAutomaton froze mid-punch and toppled to the floor, and Ellery looked up to meet Cabba’s eyes.
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