NEWS AND EVENTS

This section will have brief summaries of each shift so the other shift can learn about what's happened, as well as summaries of any side games or other events that happen relevant to the game setting.

4/19/2025 - Sylas, Hardy, Orion, and Litharge took over for the day shift. Sylas and Hardy went to market for supplies, sourcing beans and durabismuth for the Halfway House in exchange for favors. Bert and Ernie Portillon, partner blacksmith and artificer, came around again to help deal with unstable gear; after the repeated catastrophic destruction of items instead of safe deactivation, they've been banned from the Halfway House. Orion helped coordinate a cookout with locally-sourced plants which resulted in a new dish, the String Symphony Risotto, and earned rave reviews. Litharge led the shift in preparing for a storm charged with strange energy; while the Halfway House emerged relatively unscathed, large parts of Garvock-2 were damaged, and the staff did a lot to help people recover and get started rebuilding.

Developments: Garvock-2 has suffered storm damage. The tavern has sourced Many Beans. A new dish is on the menu. The shift met Edna the bean lady, Saccharine the Doberman-edit scrap dealer, Joywaters Waters the steampunk food blogger, Argo the Harbinger, and named Bert and Ernie Portillon. Dian must deliver a pie to Edna.

4/12/2025 - Bodhi, Mao Mao, Dian, and Song opened the Halfway House with a night shift. Mao Mao had a charged encounter with a patron who's now a regular, and introduced the nebulously-defined concept of "scoring." Bodhi learned about what people do in their time off by traveling with the others over the following days; he went with Mao Mao to a hotspring, Dian on an awkward social call (later reported as "scoring"), and cracked open some cold ones with Song. Dian negotiated the disposal of some old gear for the shift with a travelling blacksmith and artificer, but all items were irretrievably destroyed beyond some scraps made into keepsakes. Song started the Halfway House's garden by transplanting some of the seedlings from home and sourcing some livestock; due to shenanigans, the tavern now has infinite mint thanks to Mint 2, and dire chickens.

Developments: Met Soft Dawn the Ragdoll-edit regular pining for Mao Mao, Innocent the dire chicken who hates Bodhi regardless of form, and the disastrous blacksmith/artificer team.

3/15/2025 - The group which will eventually become the operators of the Halfway House begins to coalesce around a core of former delvers. It's an eclectic group including gene-revised people, non-humans, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, ex-priests, and stranger folk.

THE HALFWAY HOUSE

The Halfway House was formerly a minor civil disaster, where a sudden shift in platform stability around 253 SFE caused a large storage container to slide off the side. It lodged in some undergrowth, preventing the total loss of the structure, but after the platform was stabilized and the container was found to be too firmly lodged to return to its old place, settlers in Garvock-2 were at a loss for what to do with it.

Eventually, “girdles” were installed— heavy metal bands around the length of the container that were used to anchor it firmly to the platform’s side. A large family put in floors and lifts between, turning the previously single-level horizontal structure into a multilevel family home that would’ve been the tallest structure in Garvock-2 if it didn’t hang between platforms. Over time the family (and subsequent occupants), added balconies, a rooftop garden, tension wires to help with shaking during high winds, and turned the part of the container deepest beneath the platform into deep storage.

Over the following decades, as Moce debuted, the Harbingers left, and overgrowth continued to be an issue, the structure became difficult to manage. It was vacant for a long time before it was entrusted to the crew who turned it into the Halfway House, and it has a long way to go before it can honestly be called a nice local spot. As it stands, it mostly has a lot of potential: looks of nook and niches for conversation, substantial barrel storage, an access door for people living under the platforms, reinforced gangways, a museum’s worth of clutter badly needing good display, luminescent murals, and a large potential customer base in catering to delvers specifically.