HMS Apollyon - Rumors everyone knows...

Below are the rumors that idle chit chat in the Sorrow gate Brig or around the Rust Gates will reveal to anyone who cares.

* There's a lot more manpower coming up from the sea, and the Stewards are arguing about where to expend it, though the general consensus is to push to retake the machine shops and smelter two decks above the Pool.  These were only overrun by wild automatons a few years ago and should be mostly intact.

* Boss Wugg in Frogtown pays for the residue of elemental monsters, and supposedly feeds this magical carrion to his Blackwater Elemental 'Abyss Crusher'.

More Below:
* The battle of Devil's tomb would have been lost if not for the mysterious intervention of a battalion of giant warriors armored in black boiler-mail and the sudden alliance of the froglings under Boss Wugg.  The black armored warriors left the scene of the battle and sealed their dead behind a welded vault door near the tombs (far amidships), but one of their wounded supposedly came back stern ward and lives somewhere in Pick Bone Square.     

* Cray hound packs are getting bigger, bolder and smarter lately.  Watch out for them - they've even been setting crude traps.

*The spinal rail, running from bow to stern is only a few hundred feet south of the Promenade's Southern gate, which opens directly onto the stern station.  The rail and station are haunted by demons and other outsiders that broke free from the uptown wizard's control during the retreat from the Tombs.

* Rangvar the Crowbar left on an expedition a few months ago, nothing has been heard from him, though his group was large and well armed.  His agent supplier Uptown Alethea may know more.

* One of the monkeys topside was down in the promenade the other day shirking shopping duty for a passenger and he said that flying some scouts had seen a large, strangely glistening vessel moored to the Apollyon's Starboard side recently.

* There's a big nest of crawling death to the right of the main companionway heading out of the Rust Gates.  Not sure why or how, they may have found a food source, or perhaps they're forming a hive around a site of tragedy - the crawlers are known to do that.  Either way they've taken over some chambers that old timers say contained a mostly un-plundered pipe works, full valuable of copper and bronze.

* Mapping pays almost as well as scavenging, but you need to go to the Stewards and purchase a cartographer's commission from them if you want them to certify your maps (which makes them worth more). Cartographers also get special assignments from the Stewards and even the Marines occasionally.

* The Steerage dead aren't all mindless zombies, some, maybe most can be reasoned with.  They absolutely hate the Steward's though and they're not friendly to the uptown abhuman strains either.  Still they have good reason for that <wink>.