[X] Interact with the obelisk - Use the bottom of your torch handle to scrape the muck off. Put it out if need be: You can relight it easily enough.
[X] If nothing horrible happens, examine the altars next.
"Give me a moment." You say as you turn back to the obelisk, stepping towards it. Your gaze settles on the scum encrusted word(s?), eyeing it with interest as your mind tries to puzzle out what the word might be. You quickly give up, however, as you realize you couldn't think of that many words that might have A, B, S, U, and T in them. Single words at least. You guess scraping it away is the only way to fight it.
"Medea," Sierra voice cuts in from behind you, her tone stern and threatening. "You are
not going to touch that."
"I won't. I'll use the torch." You say, lifting the torch for emphasis of your statement. "Or is that a problem?"
You looked over your shoulder to her, seeing her looking down and mumbling something under her breathe. She looks up, shooting a look to Lucas that said "Back me up here, man?" Lucas looked between the two of you, snuffling uncomfortably as he found himself now being drawn into this. He looks by to Sierra with a shrug and look that told her that he did want to be involved in this. Sierra glared at him in annoyance, clicking her tongue. She focuses her gaze back to you and sighs.
"No problem..." She says, waving her hand. "But please make this quick..."
You nod your head. After all, that was a reasonable request. With that settled you focus your full attention back unto the pillar and its obscured text, tightening you grip on the torch. You touch the bottom of the torch to the stone structure, being careful to not bring too close to you as you do, and begin scraping away at the grunge on it. The sound of wood grinding against stone quietly echos through the chamber, pieces of dead barnacles are scraped off their positions and fall to the floor, thick slime is spread out on the pillar's surface and builds up on the bottom of the torch as you clear it away.
Little by little you clear away the gunk obscuring the words and soon enough, you managed to clear out enough of the grime and barnacles that the word were fully visible.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT
You read the words carved onto the stone surface, sounding them out carefully in your head. It was a futile effort of course, since it is obvious that the words are not English. Most likely Latin than anything else, but even knowing that you have no idea what they even mean. You could take a guess, but you'll never really know if you were right. By observation of everything else about the pillar you guess the words have something to do with the sea, but no real clue otherwise.
"Hey Lucas," You motion him over. "take a look at this."
"Yeah?" He mutters as he takes his place next to you. "What's up?"
"You know what that says?"
"No?" He raises an eyebrow. "Should I?"
"Didn't you take a language class?"
"Yeah.
German, not
Latin." He says, raising an eyebrow as if he couldn't honestly believe you were actually asking that. "And I wasn't that good at it.
"That's close enough, right?"
Lucas sniggers as he shakes his head. "No, Medea. It is not." He looks over the rest of he pillar, and for a moment you swear you see a twinkle in his eye as he inspects it. "I got to admit this is expertly crafted. It must have taken a long time to carve this thing and that the bas-reliefs."
"Yeah, real interesting. Can we hurry up and get the fuck out of here?" Sierra cuts. "I really
don't want to be in a place where there is some shit growing on the walls."
Well, yeah, you suppose you could leave now. By all rights you
really should.
Really, really should. But your own curiosity could not be sated. You simply had to know more about all of this. You weren't sure why, but perhaps you can gleam some sort of insight on your current situation. With that in mind you approach one of the altars, you began to speak but you were cut off by a sudden loud, crashing thud from up above you.
The sound of the thud echoed through the room and on reflex you craned your head upward as a trail of dust and dirt rained from the ceiling. You squint your eyes and see a crack developing in the stone ceiling of the chamber. Your eyes widened and another loud thud is head again, and the ceiling burst.
The broken stone of the ceiling fall towards you, everything seems to slow down momentarily as your brain processes what is happening, but soon speeds back up and you fall backwards in an attempt to avoid the falling debris, letting out a startled scream as you fall to the ground. The torch in your hand falls from you grip, clattering onto the ground and rolling away from you. Your concentration on your light breaks, causing the light to flicker and die, plunging the room to fall into darkness aside from the light from the torch.
The stone debris of the ceiling crashes to ground as a thick cloud of dust is pushed up by the impact. You take a moment to steady yourself but are soon frozen in terror as you look on to the cloud of dust. Obscured by the cloud you spy a large shape, towering over you and you
feel it looking down on you. But the moment your mind tries processing what it is looking at, it vanishes; fleeing into the darkness of the chamber.
While frozen in fear you began to hear the panicked yelling of Sierra and Lucas from behind you, but it was difficult to make out what they were saying as you stared off into the cloud of dust that gave way to the all consuming darkness of the chamber.
Quickly you get back to you feet, turning to address your panicking friends. You begin to say something, but you stop when you hear a distinct whizzing sound as if something was flying through the air. Before you can even react to this sound you feel a horrible pain in your leg, accompanied by the sound of tearing flesh and breaking bone, and you collapse to the ground again.
You catch yourself before you face plant onto the stone floor, screaming in agony as pain radiates from your shin. You look to your shin and your eyes widen.
Sticking out of shin was a large bone-like spike that had punctured your calf muscle and broke through you tibia and is now jutting out the other side. You feel the magically enchanted armband activate and you see the wound attempt to close, but with the spike in the way it can't properly heal you.
Suddenly the spike
opens up like an umbrella, producing four hook-like spurs that dig into your flesh.
For a moment your whole body goes tense and your blood runs cold. You look towards the darkness in the direction the spike came from, and you see a long rope-like string of organic material, almost like twisted together veins, stretching out from the darkness and affixed to the spike lodged into your leg.
"Oh shit."
The rope of veins tighten and start retracting, the spike hooked into your leg pulling you along with it. You hear screaming, only to soon realize that it was
your screaming. You clawed at the ground, hoping to keep yourself away from whatever was pulling you but it was of no use as whatever was pulling you was far stronger, reeling you in like a helpless fish.
Sierra and Lucas call your name and rush over to you, each grabbing an arm and pulling. They did little to help, only slowing the pulling from the darkness down as their feet slide against the stone ground. The pain was the worst part, as they pulled one way, the spike lodged in your leg was pulled the other and it felt like it threaten to rip your leg off.
Eventually you screamed at them to let you but they refused to do so. Slowly the three of you were pulled towards the darkness. Seeing this Sierra lets go of you and makes a run for the torch still lying at the base of the obelisk. She rushing back to you and Lucas and facing off into the darkness you are being pulled toward, she chucks the burning towards whatever is pulling you.
The pulling stopped and a scream was let out. It was unnatural, more like the scream of a teakettle as the water boils within than anything close to that of a living creature, your blood felt like ice when you heard it. You feel the hook-like spurs that held the spike in place retract from your flesh and the spike was
violently pulled from your leg, accompanied by the appropriate sound blood, flesh, and bone being torn away. Now free of the spike, the magic of the armband was allowed to work properly and began healing your wounding leg, regenerating flesh and bone.
You look over your shoulder towards where Sierra threw the torch and only for the briefest of moments you caught only a slightly glance at your attacker as it fled into the darkness, screaming all the while. It wasn't enough to get a properly look however, but from what you seen you knew it was nothing
natural.
The screaming of the creature continued, echoing through out the chamber as Sierra and Lucas pull you to your feet. Lucas walked over to the torch and picked it up, but once it was firmly in his hand the screaming stopped. Just
stopped. As if someone had hit a pause button.
The chamber was plunged into an eerie, tense silence as you, Sierra, and Lucas looked back and forth from each other. Your heart was beating so fast and so hard that you could heart it.
Sound soon returns however as quietly, ever so quietly, the sound of chittering can be heard. For some reason the sound called to mind the imagine of a swarm of insects. It was distant at first, but as seconds past it steadily got louder and louder. As it got louder it echoed through the chamber, making it difficult to discern just where it was coming from.
You looked to Sierra and then to Lucas, and in their eyes the three of you communicated the same thought:
Run.
You slung your arm over Sierra's shoulder, Lucas joined back up with the two of you and throws your other arm over his shoulder. The three of you quickly moved forward, pain still radiating in your leg as it was healed slowly by your magic and the sound of the chittering growing closer.
Due to the darkness you couldn't see where you were heading, the light of the torch in Lucas' hand illuminating path forward. As the three of you pressed on something large with a pink/reddish hue came into view, as you got closer you realized it was the stuff growing on walls of the chamber. The more you moved into the darkness the more the organic growths became more and more apparent, until it felt like you were inside a living creature. It felt... wrong. Something primal told you this was wrong, that you should get away from these growths.
But the chittering sound was bearing down on you at this point, so there was no where to run...
You and your friends keep rushing forward, the sound of meat squishing under your feet rose into the air as your trampled through it. By this point you leg had healed up enough that you could move on your own, so you removed your arms from your friends' shoulders and began to move at a much quicker pace.
Soon however, you find yourself coming to the end of your running as you all find yourselves faced to face with a door. The door you saw when your light illuminated the room. Quickly you all rushed to the door, flung it open and ran inside, just as the chittering sound reach a fever pitch.
Lucas slammed the door shut and the three of you braced it to keep it from being opened again.
Then something slammed into it from the other side. It was enough force you felt that you were going to be throw to the ground, but you stood firm.
Again it slammed into the door, then again, and again, and again. But each time it fail to push it open with the three of you holding it shut, each of you pushing against it with all your weight. But before it could slam into the door again, a sharp noise cut through the air, rendering everything silent.
The sound made your blood run cold when you recognized what it was.
It was the
whistle.
There was a moment of silence, then the sound of chittering again, but much slower than before and moving away.
Then the
whistling began again,
whistling a
merry tune. That horrible,
beautiful noise.
Then noise exploded from the other side of the door, very loud and rapid, but the
whistling was able to be
heard despite it. It sounding like rocks being banged together from various distance, sounding almost like Morse code. This goes on for some time, but you were too terrified to move from the door.
Then everything went silent. It was dead quiet. Your heart was in your throat and you looked to Sierra and Lucas.
Suddenly the
whistling started up again and soon the banging rock sound after. But then animal noises starting sounding from the other side of the door. Wolves and coyotes barking, birds screeching, monkeys howling, and through it all that damn
whistling.
The
whistling got closer, the noises got louder.
It continued to get closer.
Closer.
Closer.
[ ] Find something to barricade the door.
[ ] Try to find a way out.
[ ] Look for a place to hide.
[ ] Cast a spell - Write In (Secondary action may be taken)
