Gruesome Gearworks
Tenth Day of the Seventh Month 293 AC
As you wait in the chamber, looking between the lady still in the grip of unquiet sleep and the door through which the fiend had just passed, a sort of pervasive revulsion washes over you, of playing these games and stepping carefully around the festering pits of corruption, of allowing this madness to endure one moment more than is necessary. You could watch and learn, you could parse out meaning and dates, but at the day's end that is not why you are here, either in the particular or general. Your plans were tangled and now you know who by. Fiends are walking the world with impunity, and now you can end them. You wait...
The tanar'ri sweeps into the chamber, rage glittering in its many-faceted eyes. Its arm twitches in the direction of the sleeping woman, dark urges struggling against the bindings of its master. Oh how it would wish to slay that master... and to kill, one must first be in the presence of the thing despised. With unseen motions you weave power into a spell to cloud its mind, not to compel or command, for its master would sense both, but rather to make louder that impulse.
Seek your master...
In response the thing twitches, the motion unpleasantly insect-like even in the guise of humankind before turning right around into the corridor, the hard soles of its shoes making an echoing clicking sound.
Following it unseen and unheard still you call out to Mereth and Leto, explaining that there are demons about. You almost add a reminder that their task is to be preserving the lives of their charges first and fighting pit-spawn second but refrain from it. Trust must first be given before it can be earned, and you have certainly gained ever more respect for the Furies' wits these past few days.
Ahead you notice your unwitting guide, now in one of the manse's narrow servant stairways, skipping a step on the way down, a trap likely as not. Not having the time or the inclination to check you simply copy the gesture. You feel as much as hear the click beneath your heel...
Fuck, two of them... timed.
For the briefest of instant your vision doubles. In one iteration spinning sedate blades two hand-spans wide fly from the walls fly, too many and too quick for you to stop them, and in the other fate is bent in a reflex you had never before possessed.
Such is not your path. Time
flexes at your command, a familiar disjunction, and in that frozen instant you
pull the trigger you had depressed upwards. The blades do not emerge, the alarm is not sounded, and you become much more cautious in your approach.
By long and twisting ways you follow the demon as the dark stone closes all around you, the air grows musty with the stink of old death as the faint crimson lights that are the eyes of the lesser dead kindle all around you.
This then is where at least some of the sick and maimed slaves went, you realize.
Twice more you encounter a staggered trap as you descend into the bowels of the manse, though now that you are looking for them the mechanisms are much easier to spot, and rather than a danger they prove a source of inspiration. The web of razor sharp invisible wires would certainly be a nightmare for petty fiends adept at shrouding themselves in simple glamours but unable to see through such trickery themselves. The curtain of fine sand is also an ingenious trick for sifting out glamours of all sorts as sand has no eyes and would stick to the true form rather than the false. A pity whoever designed this place is a demon-calling madman. You would have used a mind like that.
Finally you come to a door that seems to have been poured of rippling liquid lead, though it is not nearly hot enough to keep the metal so by any mundane means. A face forms out of it, like a swimmer emerging from water: "What do you seek?," the construct asks of the demon, its eyes seemingly blind to you also.
"To see the master," the fiend replies, its voice echoing with an unearthly buzzing sound, perhaps seeing no purpose to keeping the charade in this realm of horror.
"Why?" comes the answer sharp and cold.
To that the demon has no answer, and so it is your time to act.
What do you do?
[] Blast the 'door', offering a challenge
[] Try to teleport past the cascade of lead
-[] Write in how far
[] Write in
OOC: Not getting hit by the trap took making a DC 15 initiative check so you would not be considered flat footed and could use celerity. You had to use mythic power for that.
