[{"content":"The fifth dead fluorescent tube lay across Rufus Bilberry’s cart, among the others he had already replaced. Farther down the corridor, another light flickered.\nHe watched it, yellow gloves resting on the mop handle. There had once been enough janitors to keep Rock Bottom clean. Now there was Rufus, and apparently every bulb in the Hollow had chosen today to discover that fact.\n“Hey, buddy.”\nJack Kennedy approached in his grey suit, carrying the confidence of someone who had found the right person to give a problem to.\n“My phone’s dead. Could you take a look? We’re a team. You’re number one. Cornwell appreciates you.”\nRufus looked at his mop.\nA few minutes earlier, Jack’s boss had called to ask how many people he intended to fire. Quarter end was approaching; there were quotas. Jack had promised recommendations by Friday, then, into an ominous silence, by the end of the day. When he realised the connection had failed, he sent an email confirming Friday.\nNow it was lunchtime. He left the phone problem in capable hands.\nRufus wiped the handset thoroughly. It was the only part of the assignment he understood.\nIn her laboratory, Talisa Monroe was negotiating with an escaped rat. Swiss and Brie had both entered the discussion. Professor Whiskers watched from her shoulder as she reached beneath a machine, received a sharp bite on the finger, and lost both rat and cheese beneath a cabinet.\n“We’ve spent too much money on you,” she told the darkness.\nEventually she set a humane trap, closed the vents, and locked up. Lunch could not wait indefinitely for science.\nJerry Higgins had already brought doughnuts to the canteen. His shoulder radio had produced a burst of banging on his way in, then static. Experiments upstairs made noises. Security downstairs usually heard about things only when someone needed a door opened.\nHe handed out powdered jelly doughnuts anyway.\nRufus arrived with Jack’s spotless, disconnected desk phone. Liz Norris, presented with it next, advised calling Communications.\n“But the phone doesn’t work,” Jack said.\n“Not my department.”\nThen something heavy came down the mail chute.\nThe rumble travelled through the wall and ended in a muffled crash. Bobby B appeared in the canteen doorway, interested to know what had arrived. Sinclair Fields wasn’t expecting laboratory supplies. Maxwell Ducane watched from his lunch, looking as though deliveries ought to know better than to interrupt him.\nA second crash followed.\n“End of quarter,” Jack said, finishing his quinoa. “Bet it’s party supplies.”\nJerry gave him a pitying look as he went out.\nThe mailroom contained its usual landscape of accumulated work: piles on the floor, sorted letters on trolleys, a large receiving bag beneath the chute. The pile inside that bag was moving.\n“Annie?”\nAnnie Magee looked around a stack of mail. She had heard the deliveries, yes. She worked in a queue, not a stack. She would get to them.\nJack glanced again at the bag. For one absurd instant, his mind offered Annie’s name for the recommendations list.\n“Have you ever seen it do that?”\nShe went over and shifted some envelopes.\n“Jack, I think someone fell down the chute.”\nThere were signs against that. Jack looked at the warning on the wall, the little broken stick figure illustrating precisely why bodily transit through the pneumatic system was prohibited.\nThen Annie reached into the bag, and something pulled her headfirst inside.\nJack caught her kicking legs. He pulled until his shoulders hurt, but whatever held her was stronger.\n“Help!”\nHer scream carried into the canteen.\nJerry came down the corridor with his truncheon, as fast as his knees allowed. Rufus and Talisa followed. Before they could get Annie free, another body tumbled down the chute: yellow suit, loose limbs, a heavy landing among the mail.\nThree figures stirred in the receiving bag. One stood up.\nIts eyes were cloudy. Its face had the slack, dreadful stillness of a corpse, although its hands were working. The one holding Annie kept opening its mouth against its own protective visor, trying to reach her through the shield. Another struck her. Her legs jerked in Jack’s arms.\nJerry seized hold beside him. Together they hauled, and still she did not come free.\nTalisa studied the faces and movements. She had heard whispers about research upstairs—attempts to bring back the dead. If this was the result, there was very little person left in it. Nothing she thought they could frighten or reason with.\n“Fire,” she said. “Possibly separating the head from the body.”\nRufus swung his mop into the creature holding Annie. The impact knocked it sideways, but its flailing brought another cry from her.\nJack spotted the paper trimmer.\nHe abandoned his failing grip to wrench at its blade. The blade stayed attached. He lifted the whole machine instead, board and all, and swung it with the desperate conviction that this had been a much better idea a moment ago.\nThe cutting edge missed. The heavy base smashed through a hazmat visor and struck the face behind it.\nNow that one’s mouth was unobstructed.\nJerry planted his feet and pulled again. The creature’s grip gave way. He hauled Annie over the rim and clear of the sack. She was beside him now, still inside the mailroom, with the creatures reaching after her.\nTalisa turned to Rufus’s cart. Cleaning supplies, a bottle, a rag: familiar materials put to an unfamiliar use. She assembled her firebomb, lit it and threw it at the middle figure.\nIt missed.\nGlass broke against the wall behind the creatures. Flame spread much farther than she had expected, washing over yellow suits and catching the paper heaped below them. The receiving bag lit up. So did Annie’s clothes.\nFor a moment Talisa could only see how quickly it moved.\nRufus joined Jerry. Together they dragged the burning Annie away from the sack and through the doorway into the corridor.\n“Get the mop water!” Rufus shouted.\nAnnie still had enough sense to mistrust water on burning chemicals. She dropped and rolled, clawing off her cardigan and then her burning trousers. The flames on her went out. She lay breathing hard beside the clothes, bruised and scorched, while Maxwell stood with his mouth open.\nInside the mailroom, one of the creatures tore at its suit. Another came forward burning and hit Jack in the head.\nThat ended his attempt to improve the situation.\n“Sinclair, out! Get out!”\nHe stumbled after the scientist, one hand pressed to his scalp. Jerry hunted through his key ring as Jack pulled the doors shut. A bump came from the other side. Another. The right key finally turned.\nRufus doused the discarded clothes. Annie’s cardigan was ruined, but her trousers could still be worn. He handed them back, dripping with dirty water, then put his caution sign beside the puddle.\n“Did you get bitten?” Jerry asked her.\n“I don’t think so. It tried. Its mask was in the way.”\nHe could see blood and bruising, but no obvious bite. He tried his radio again. Every facility channel answered with static.\nJack stared at the blood on his fingers.\n“What just happened?”\n“Someone’s experiment got a little loose,” Talisa said.\n“A little loose.” Jerry looked at her.\nBehind the locked doors came another thump, seemingly from the chute.\nSmoke began slipping into the corridor. The handles were hot. No sprinklers came on.\nWhen Jack asked Maxwell for the emergency protocol, the executive recommended evacuation, quickly. Rufus pointed to the sign directing them to the stairs. Jack argued that the fire was here, away from the lift, and he would prefer to go straight to the surface.\n“That’s the only fire, huh?” Jerry said, but went with him, truncheon ready.\nRufus took the stairs. Talisa followed. As people passed the puddle, Rufus tapped the wet-floor sign to make sure they noticed.\nMaxwell pressed the lift button repeatedly. While they waited, Jack remembered the security office.\n“Your cameras can see the other floors, right?”\nSome parts of them. Jerry unlocked his little room and sat before the single monitor. Most of the Hollow lay beyond his clearance, but stairs and lift lobbies were considered suitable viewing for Rock Bottom security.\nHe found their colleagues climbing. On the next feed, the stairs above them had collapsed.\nJack ran to warn them while Jerry kept looking. The remaining stairwell views were empty. On the executive floor, people passed at the edge of a lounge camera’s image, too briefly and at too poor an angle to tell how they were moving.\nWalking, perhaps. Perhaps not.\nOn floor four, the lift doors opened onto an empty shaft.\nOutside, Maxwell demanded to know why the lift had stopped.\nJerry looked from the empty shaft on his screen to the indicator claiming the car was there.\nHe got up.\nAt the broken stairs, Rufus stood beneath a tangle of fallen structure. No obvious scorch marks explained it. Something very heavy might have fallen through, but he had heard nothing to account for this much destruction.\n“The stairs are collapsed!” Jack called from below.\nRufus looked down at him.\nTheir search produced no rope and no tall ladder. Rufus’s step stool would not bridge the gap. Smoke was spreading downstairs; standing around looking for proper equipment was becoming an expensive habit.\n“Furniture,” Jerry suggested. “We could pile it up.”\nThere was plenty of that. They carried desks, chairs and filing cabinets in pairs, passing the R\u0026amp;D door on the landing. Rufus heard slow movement somewhere beyond it and asked Jerry to lock it before anything found them busy underneath the broken stairs.\nJack called the work a team-building exercise.\nNobody seemed grateful, but when he turned his encouragement toward Talisa, it helped. She worked out the arrangement; Jerry and Rufus shifted the weight. The resulting pile looked climbable. From its top, someone could jump for the ledge.\nBobby went first at Jack’s suggestion. He caught the edge and hung there, unable to pull himself up.\n“Okay, kid. I’ve got you.”\nJerry climbed after him and gave him a powerful boost. Bobby scrambled onto the landing.\n“Now what?”\n“Help the next person.”\nHis assistance mostly consisted of holding Talisa’s lab coat while Jerry lifted her. Jerry stayed on the furniture and boosted the others until only he remained below.\nJack leaned down, determined to repay him. His effort accomplished very little. Jerry jumped, caught the ledge and hauled himself over, breathing heavily through his moustache.\nAll nine of them were still there.\nThey passed Chemical Testing, where Talisa heard only dripping beyond the door, and kept climbing. Then the stairs ended on floor three, at Biolabs.\nThe executive floor—and the lifts to the surface—was above them.\nMaxwell explained that another stairwell could be reached through this floor. He had spent plenty of time upstairs. It was where he belonged.\n“They’ll know what to do up there,” Jack said. “Right?”\n“They’re probably all dead.”\nThe answer stopped him.\nMaxwell admitted he didn’t know what had happened. But those people in hazmat suits had been trying to contain something, surely, and had failed. When pressed about why that meant the executives were dead, he retreated into clearance and need-to-know.\n“I think,” Jack said, “at this point we need to know.”\nHe could not pull a blade from a paper trimmer or lift Jerry Higgins. This, at least, was something he could do. He kept his voice steady and his attention on Maxwell until the executive’s manner began to give way.\nThere was a secret laboratory upstairs, Maxwell told them. A field team had brought something back. Not all of the team had survived. He thought the project concerned improving human performance, but he didn’t know exactly what they had recovered or what was being done with it. He was, he admitted, only a low-level executive.\nIf that laboratory had opened, it might explain where this began.\n“Thank you for sharing that, Max.”\n“Maxwell.”\n“Maxwell. They may call us Rock Bottom, but we’ve been proving ourselves today.”\nIf they escaped, Maxwell promised to file paperwork for some promotions.\n“Some of us,” Jerry repeated.\nJack opened his hands toward the group. Something to work toward. Upward and onward.\nJerry nominated him to go first.\nThey entered a long corridor under flickering lights. Maxwell believed one door led through to the other stairwell; the farthest was Security. Jerry approached that one with his keys, then stopped to listen.\nSlow footsteps. Heavy enough to sound through the door.\nHe put a finger to his lips and motioned everyone back.\nThe footsteps grew louder.\nThey tried the connecting hallway. Maxwell presented his badge. The reader showed no light, made no sound. Rufus tried the handle anyway. Locked.\nThey retreated toward a door nearer the stairs. Its reader was dead too, but it had a keyhole.\nBehind them, the security door began to open.\nJerry found the key just in time.\nBeyond lay a cosmetics laboratory, with beakers on workbenches and kennels against one wall. The kennels were empty. Two doors had been ripped open.\nA growl came from the shadows.\nThe dog approaching them was too muscular, its eyes clouded like those behind the broken visor. Cosmetics coloured its face. The absurdity offered no comfort. A second dog emerged beside it.\nJack looked back along the corridor.\nThe thing leaving Security wore a uniform Jerry recognised. Its body filled the doorway, inhumanly large; it had to duck beneath the corridor ceiling. Jack was nearest to it.\nFor a moment he could hear his own breathing between those heavy steps.\n“I don’t think Cornwell is a good company,” he said.\nJerry tightened his grip on the truncheon. The keys were still in his other hand. Behind him, claws clicked on the laboratory floor; ahead, the uniformed thing bent beneath the lights and came toward them.\nSession Notes Before lunch\nJack’s boss, Phil, called about meeting the quarter-end firing quota. Jack first promised recommendations by week’s end, then revised that to the end of the day when Phil did not respond. After the call cut out, Jack emailed Phil again promising recommendations by week’s end. Rufus replaced a failed fluorescent bulb, but another went out soon after. With the floor understaffed, he loaded spare bulbs onto his cart as his other cleaning work fell behind. The cause of the electrical problems remained unclear. Jerry’s radio deteriorated into static, and Jack found his desk phone still dead. Talisa tried to recapture an escaped experimental rat with cheese. Her failed Wit roll advanced the doom clock; the rat bit her finger without causing damage, took the cheese, and vanished under a cabinet. Talisa secured the lab, shut the vents, and left a baited live trap; whether the rat entered it remained unknown. The mail chute\nThe employees gathered for lunch with Sinclair, Liz, and Maxwell. A crash came from the mailroom, followed by another. Sinclair knew of no expected delivery, and the group could not tell what had fallen down the chute. Jack investigated and found the receiving sack and nearby mail shifting. Annie appeared from behind a pile and said she had heard the crash while sorting. She thought someone had fallen down the chute and reached into the sack; something seized her and pulled her partly inside. Jack grabbed her legs and called for help. Another hazmat-suited body fell through the chute. A figure rose among the fallen bodies, and three shamblers in yellow suits attacked. One tried to bite Annie, but its face shield blocked it; another struck her, while the third missed. Fire in the mailroom\nTalisa’s anatomical assessment linked the shamblers to rumors of an upstairs project to revive the dead. She suspected fire or decapitation might work against them, though neither weakness was confirmed. Jerry and Rufus failed to pull Annie free, advancing the doom clock by three ticks. Rufus struck the shambler holding her with his mop, and Jack damaged another with the heavy end of a paper trimmer, breaking its face shield. Talisa made an incendiary device from cleaning supplies, alcohol, a rag, and a lighter, hoping to exploit the suspected weakness to fire. She missed the shambler and hit the wall. The resulting blaze spread to the shamblers, paper piles, and mail sack, and caught Annie’s clothes. The fire advanced the doom clock; whether the creatures themselves burned through their suits was unclear. Jerry and Rufus pulled Annie free. She stopped, dropped, and rolled, then removed her burning cardigan and trousers; Rufus put the clothes out with mop water. Annie survived, battered and somewhat burned. She had no visible bite or major wound and said the mask had blocked the attempted bite. Her sweater was lost and her pants were singed but wearable. As the burning shamblers were distracted or tried to remove their suits, one struck Jack for two damage, leaving a little blood running down the side of his head; another missed. Jack got out, and Jerry locked the double doors with his key ring. Intermittent bumps came from inside, but the door held. No way up\nSmoke seeped into the hall from beneath the hot mailroom door, the sprinklers did not activate, and every radio channel returned static. Maxwell agreed the group needed to evacuate quickly. The party split between the stairs and elevator. The elevator opened at floor four onto an empty shaft and stopped responding. On the executive-level security camera, Jerry saw indistinct figures moving in a lounge; the view was too poor to tell whether they were walking or shambling. Security monitors also showed the stairs above the next level collapsed beneath the section above. There were no obvious scorch marks; it looked as if something heavy had fallen on them, but the cause was unclear. Rufus searched for a rope or ladder, but the group’s failed Luck check advanced the doom clock and they found only his medium step stool. They decided to build a pyramid from chairs, desks, tables, and filing cabinets. Jerry locked the R\u0026amp;D door while the group assembled a stable but awkward climb. Bobby could not pull himself onto the next level, so Jerry boosted him and then helped Talisa and the others up. Jack’s failed Grit check while trying to help Jerry advanced the doom clock; Jerry climbed on his own. The group reached the next level and continued toward the surface. The way through the biolabs\nTalisa listened at the Chemical Testing door and heard what sounded like dripping. The group chose to keep going toward the surface, leaving the room unexplored. On the biolab level, Maxwell said another stairwell led to the executive level through the biolabs. He said the executives were probably all dead, though he did not know what had happened to them. Jack persuaded him to share what else he knew: Maxwell claimed a secret executive lab had studied something brought back by a field team, apparently to improve human performance. He said not all of the team returned and suggested the lab might be where the outbreak began, while admitting he did not know the exact details. Jerry heard slow, heavy footsteps approaching behind the floor security-room door, so the group backed away. Another door had a dead badge reader and was locked; Jerry used a physical key to open a different door. Inside was a makeup lab with workbenches, vials, and dog-sized kennels, two of them apparently ripped open. Two large, muscular dogs with clouded eyes emerged and approached, growling. A door farther down the hall opened, and a huge creature wearing a security uniform entered, ducking beneath the ceiling. Jerry recognized the uniform, but the creature’s identity and condition were unknown. The session ended with the party between the approaching dogs and the creature; no attack had begun. ","permalink":"https://climb.zarquan.fyi/posts/session-01/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe fifth dead fluorescent tube lay across Rufus Bilberry’s cart, among the others he had already replaced. Farther down the corridor, another light flickered.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe watched it, yellow gloves resting on the mop handle. There had once been enough janitors to keep Rock Bottom clean. Now there was Rufus, and apparently every bulb in the Hollow had chosen today to discover that fact.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Hey, buddy.”\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJack Kennedy approached in his grey suit, carrying the confidence of someone who had found the right person to give a problem to.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Session 01: Fire Drill"},{"content":"Climbing the Ladder is a two-session SHIVER adventure. This site collects its session accounts and campaign information.\nSession 1: October 29, 2026. Session 2: planned for November 5, 2026, as the conclusion. Session accounts will be added after the recordings are available and processed.\n","permalink":"https://climb.zarquan.fyi/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eClimbing the Ladder is a two-session SHIVER adventure. This site collects its session accounts and campaign information.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSession 1:\u003c/strong\u003e October 29, 2026.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSession 2:\u003c/strong\u003e planned for November 5, 2026, as the conclusion.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSession accounts will be added after the recordings are available and processed.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Climbing the Ladder"},{"content":"Character details will be added once confirmed.\n","permalink":"https://climb.zarquan.fyi/player_characters/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eCharacter details will be added once confirmed.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Player Characters"}]