By fate or choice, you are now in the vast plains, also known as Blugd-Tur. Vicious, verdant, and mysterious, these lands are famous for their dangerous fauna, half as dangerous flora, rustic traditions of the hardy locals, and a whole plethora of unexplainable phenomena. And if that wasn't enough, you ended up here in a tough spot in your life. Would you emerge victorious from the struggle with unfavorable circumstances, or would you become yet another forgotten victim of the Old Turan?
The dive through ashes and shadows (Fantasy black archeologist's miniquest)
- Thread starter Teloch
- Start date
- Original Mature Fantasy
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 26
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 11
-
Statistics (6 threadmarks, 13k words)
User Total Teloch 6 -
Loading…
-
Loading…
-
Loading…
1. The stargazing beginning
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
Uneasiness under the starry skies
Q: What's this?
A: A mini-quest set in the already running original setting
Q: A mini-quest?
A: Yes, this particular story, ideally, won't exceed 11-13 updates total. This story is experimental, and there won't be that much time for a build-up.
Q: What's the setting?
A: Dark fantasy with some extra blends, or if you want a more detailed answer, "Witcher, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and Disciples universes are figuring out whose child this is and what the hell did they drink on the night of the "accident".
Q: The setting of the story is not an established fictional universe?
A: No, it's an original one. There is the other campaign that I run, which has worldbuilding content, trivia, and even some media. The events of this particular quest will take place in the same universe and in the same time range, which means there might even be a chance for the stories to merge or indirectly influence one another.
Q: So the knowledge about the world and its mechanics contained in the main story is also valid here?
A: Yes. But it's not like meta knowledge would instantly give you an edge at obtaining the best ending.
Q: Is it a narrative quest or one that uses some sort of a system.
A: This quest is planned with a somewhat modified system of attribute and skill rolls used in the mainline story quest. It will have attribute rolls, skill rolls, and auxiliary rolls like Luck.
Q: What are attributes and how do they work?
A: Attributes are the innate traits of a character such as Intelligence, Strength, etc. Attribute rolls are made with d20 rolls and have a grid of "difficulties" checks that must be beaten. A d20 roll is modified by the base dice bonus and additional augmentations if there are such. Attribute value 5 is the zero point from which bonuses are added or subtracted with the step of 1 (If a character has a strength score of 14, they will get +9 to the STR attribute dice bonus, and if they roll for 8, they would pass a normal-tier STR check (17).)
Q: What are skills and how do they work?
A: Skills are the degree of proficiency of characters in certain spheres. They work in the same way as the attributes (explained above) except for three differences: their dice bonuses start with the score of 10, they have different difficulty check values, and their base aka "natural untrained" value is decided by the values of corresponding attributes. For example, characters with high strength, coordination, and speed attributes would have a higher "natural" melee skill than the others.
Q: What are auxiliary and luck rolls?
A: Auxiliary rolls are custom rolls for particular situations, which have nothing to do with characters' proficiencies. Luck rolls are the rolls that can make outcomes of characters' actions better, worse, or remain unaffected. They are conducted with 40 facet dices and have the bottom (misfortune) and top (luck) trigger ranges. For example, a character with the luck stat 4 and misfortune stat 2 rolls for 37; the windfall of their action would be improved as the dice landed in the fortunate range (37-40). Should they roll for 2, the effect would've been adverse (dice would've struck the 1-2 range).
Q: Will there be a character creation?
A: Not really: you'd pick one already designed character with backstory and whatnot, and would be able to fine-tune their archetype a little bit.
Q: Would there be shipping / romantic subplots?
A: No. That's not something one would think of in threatening situations.
Q: Any content warnings?
A: There may or may not be scenes of violence, mature language, harmful substances, injuries, death, physical or/and mental suffering, and implied sexual violence. Lots of gray morals. No detailed gore. No detailed smut. Even though not exactly grimdark, this fictional world is not a safe & happy place by the largest part. You have been warned.
Q: What's at the end of the run?
A: Epilogue or merger with the other story. A new story of the same format can be considered.
A: A mini-quest set in the already running original setting
Q: A mini-quest?
A: Yes, this particular story, ideally, won't exceed 11-13 updates total. This story is experimental, and there won't be that much time for a build-up.
Q: What's the setting?
A: Dark fantasy with some extra blends, or if you want a more detailed answer, "Witcher, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and Disciples universes are figuring out whose child this is and what the hell did they drink on the night of the "accident".
Q: The setting of the story is not an established fictional universe?
A: No, it's an original one. There is the other campaign that I run, which has worldbuilding content, trivia, and even some media. The events of this particular quest will take place in the same universe and in the same time range, which means there might even be a chance for the stories to merge or indirectly influence one another.
Q: So the knowledge about the world and its mechanics contained in the main story is also valid here?
A: Yes. But it's not like meta knowledge would instantly give you an edge at obtaining the best ending.
Q: Is it a narrative quest or one that uses some sort of a system.
A: This quest is planned with a somewhat modified system of attribute and skill rolls used in the mainline story quest. It will have attribute rolls, skill rolls, and auxiliary rolls like Luck.
Q: What are attributes and how do they work?
A: Attributes are the innate traits of a character such as Intelligence, Strength, etc. Attribute rolls are made with d20 rolls and have a grid of "difficulties" checks that must be beaten. A d20 roll is modified by the base dice bonus and additional augmentations if there are such. Attribute value 5 is the zero point from which bonuses are added or subtracted with the step of 1 (If a character has a strength score of 14, they will get +9 to the STR attribute dice bonus, and if they roll for 8, they would pass a normal-tier STR check (17).)
Nonsense - 5
Elementary - 7
Trivial - 9
Very easy - 11
Easy - 13
Normal - 17
Hard - 20
Very hard - 24
Epic - 28
Legendary - 32
Godly - 36
Elementary - 7
Trivial - 9
Very easy - 11
Easy - 13
Normal - 17
Hard - 20
Very hard - 24
Epic - 28
Legendary - 32
Godly - 36
Q: What are skills and how do they work?
A: Skills are the degree of proficiency of characters in certain spheres. They work in the same way as the attributes (explained above) except for three differences: their dice bonuses start with the score of 10, they have different difficulty check values, and their base aka "natural untrained" value is decided by the values of corresponding attributes. For example, characters with high strength, coordination, and speed attributes would have a higher "natural" melee skill than the others.
Nonsense - 5
Elementary - 8
Trivial - 11
Very easy - 14
Easy - 17
Normal - 20
Hard - 24
Very hard - 28
Epic - 32
Legendary - 36
Godly - 40
Elementary - 8
Trivial - 11
Very easy - 14
Easy - 17
Normal - 20
Hard - 24
Very hard - 28
Epic - 32
Legendary - 36
Godly - 40
Q: What are auxiliary and luck rolls?
A: Auxiliary rolls are custom rolls for particular situations, which have nothing to do with characters' proficiencies. Luck rolls are the rolls that can make outcomes of characters' actions better, worse, or remain unaffected. They are conducted with 40 facet dices and have the bottom (misfortune) and top (luck) trigger ranges. For example, a character with the luck stat 4 and misfortune stat 2 rolls for 37; the windfall of their action would be improved as the dice landed in the fortunate range (37-40). Should they roll for 2, the effect would've been adverse (dice would've struck the 1-2 range).
Q: Will there be a character creation?
A: Not really: you'd pick one already designed character with backstory and whatnot, and would be able to fine-tune their archetype a little bit.
Q: Would there be shipping / romantic subplots?
A: No. That's not something one would think of in threatening situations.
Q: Any content warnings?
A: There may or may not be scenes of violence, mature language, harmful substances, injuries, death, physical or/and mental suffering, and implied sexual violence. Lots of gray morals. No detailed gore. No detailed smut. Even though not exactly grimdark, this fictional world is not a safe & happy place by the largest part. You have been warned.
Q: What's at the end of the run?
A: Epilogue or merger with the other story. A new story of the same format can be considered.
You open your eyes, letting your gaze slink into the stars-filled dark abyss. Baudur and Sophrona - the eternally bound in celestial waltz moons - are not within your sight, entirely ceding the scene to the rich scattering of stars with their mysterious doings and the nocturnal aethers. The view is mesmerizing, and you catch yourself on the thought that it had been so long since the last time you had the time and opportunity to marvel at a night sky that it almost felt new. The lukewarm springtime air and a total absence of clouds only enhance the experience, making you wish to lift off the ground and wrap yourself into the comfy shroud of darkness, far away from earthly troubles.
But alas, an experience like this can only take place in dreams; meanwhile, the notions of escapism consequentially cast your internal limelight at the set of circumstances that made you dream of an unlikely release in the first place. First one, there is a disease raging across the planes that transfigure animals and drives them berserk, making the outdoors dangerous and hunting often fruitless. Secondly, anomalous areas began to pop up in the realm, driving insane, turning outside-out, or plainly vanishing those who enter them. Thirdly, a specific vibe that precedes wars is in the air, causing people from tribes and settlements to either flee or prepare for the upcoming chaos. And finally, there's you:
[] The eldest daughter of an ancient alvizian house stuck in even more ancient ruins in the middle of a land filled with all kinds of louts and savages.
You shift your gaze down from the skies to your servant golem, who is busy unearthing the entrance to what is presumably the precursors' vault, which you tried to locate for years. Here's hope, in this gods-forsaken hole, you will find the tool for restituting your bloodline's name and fortune, taking back what is yours by the birthright from the royal court's vultures and rivaling dynasties. And if that wasn't enough of a motivation, no longer having to eat the local muck-of-a-food would do the trick indeed.
[] One of the last surviving dragmeres from a ravaged nest.
The queen of the nest - and your brood mother - has fallen to injuries sustained from fending off her perch and eggs from plagued behemoths. The majority of your kindred were also slaughtered during the attack. Yet, not all is lost: the last egg - the one with an heir of your perished queen inside - was preserved by you and a handful of surviving kindred. You may be just a mere dragmere - an expendable worker specimen of a ruined dragon colony, but you have a purpose: to preserve your mother's dynasty and see her most precious child to this world whatever the cost may be.
[] A huntress and a daughter of a Westlander settler and a Turanian maiden.
You sit on your bed, watching with the bated breath through a window gap of a remote lodge where you were born and grew up, which was now besieged by a plagued chimera. Your mother died six cycles ago from a fever, and at the end of the previous year, you had to bury your father. Ever since then, life hadn't been the same, regardless of how desperate you were trying to cling to memories of the happier days. The supplies are running out, and with the rabies plague raging along with lack of contact with the nearest village's denizens, you fear that your home might soon become your coffin. Having to abandon everything you knew and held dear shakes you to the very core, but it is exactly what your father demanded of you on his last breath: to live. At least your falcon is still with you...
[] A hunter from the oceanside village on the western edge of Blugd-Tur.
One day, after the shaman and herbalist of your tribe fell victim to an unknown disease, the village's elder dispatched you and other younglings to seek and hunt down a thunder hind - an obscure mythical beast of the Blugd-Tur plains, the horn powder of which is believed to be able to save your tribe. You traveled far away from home, seeking for this beast, but instead of finding any hints, you ended up where you are now: beaten, malnourished, and tied like a goat on a slavers' boat. Some pitiful hunter you are, eh? You hear the oars working against the tide of Tzuh-Aran river, you hear the footsteps of a watcher, you feel the pain in the chest from previous beatdowns, and you almost slink your palms out of the bindings...
Last edited:
2. Into the ancient depths
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
You shift your gaze down from the skies to your servant golem, who is busy unearthing the entrance to what is presumably the precursors' vault, which you tried to locate for years. Here's hope, in this gods-forsaken hole, you will find the tool for restituting your bloodline's name and fortune, taking back what is yours by the birthright from the royal court's vultures and rivaling dynasties. And if that wasn't enough of a motivation, no longer having to eat the local muck-of-a-food would do the trick indeed.
But alas, the speed at which your steel servant bulldozes through the millennia-old debris blocking the vault's entrance does not inspire the confidence of the swiftest return to the comfort and civilization of Soltsveig islands. Damn, you almost feel like killing for a neat fruit tart with creme like they cook in Lorendale. As you think of it, the gastronomical recollection only makes matters worse, bringing in the memories of gentle springtime rains, neat gardens, and idyllic fields of your island homeland. While starting into the night that shrouded this savage land, you feel homesick, tired, and even a tad bit afraid.
And there indeed were a lot of reasons to be worried about: even though, after spending about the worth of a tidy little seashore hut somewhere in the Southern Soltsveig archipelago on this expedition, you located what was supposed to be the atheneum vault of Almafey, there were zero guarantees that you'd get to its sanctum in a week, less so a couple of days you hoped for. If there was anything you've learned from exploring the Ars oceanside ruins of Almafey it is that, aside from expecting nigh-guaranteed debris blockages, sporadic flood zones, and pest infestations, almost anything can end up being bottled behind the heavy obsidian walls. Anything from smugglers' hideouts to goblinoids' ritual sites dedicated to their fertility deities and filled with primitive thematic "art" can lie and wait for you in these ruins.
At this thought, you cringe. "Get a hold of yourself, Katherine," you mentally issue a command to yourself, thinking it would allay the feeling of uncertainty before what might be lying below you. And, at least this time, it works, diverting your mental spotlight from the fear of the unknown to the sacrifices and efforts you've made to get this far.
[] After all the years and fortunes spent on trinkets studying, artifacts reassembly, and dabbling into theoretical and practical engineering, including magitech, should you not find the fabled anamnestic miner here, you would strip this place clean of all the Almafey contraptions and assemble one yourself! At this thought, you straighten up under the weight of your handmade bolt repeater hanging on your back. The grenade shells on your belt clack merrily against each other as you do so.
(From the early youth, you practiced artifice and craftsmanship, eventually dabbling into the theoretical and precursors' tech. If not for the dubious reputation of your lineage, you might have been one of the most trendy mechanists of the Rosanrica kingdom. Your skillset is represented via crafting, lore, and self-defense skill groups in the fading order of prominence.)
[] Being an offspring of a pariah house is a harsh fate, so when your own society closes the doors before you for what they see as the sins of your forebearers, the workaround venues of getting the objects of your desires become all too evident. Some shady deals and services for the ever-rivaling nobility, a neat spy network, active participation in the unauthorized artifacts trade, and here you are: about to expand the "black archeology" segment of your portfolio in a chase for the artifact that could override the centuries of your family's infamy.
(Being one of the old but maligned bloodline, you had to refer to more clandestine methods and contacts to get what the Rosanrican nobility obstructed from you. You are no stranger to espionage and infiltrations, know how to pick the suitable bargains or cause advantageous situations, and are not a total slouch at self-defense either.)
[] Countless hours spent in the academy's library studying dusty history tomes to the point some students began to think of you as a ghost haunting the premises. The struggle and humiliation of seeking out archivists willing to overlook your pedigree and oblige your inquiries. Through all these hardships, you still haven't found the answer to why your ancestors acted against the crown during the latter's darkest days. But it didn't stop you: to get the answer you wanted, you delved even further into the past, seeking the clues and keys to unlocking the memories concealed within the humble piece of memorabilia that connects you to the turning point of your bloodline. Unbeknownst, you grew into one of the continent's leading historians, ready to plunge into a whole sanctuary of ancient knowledge.
(It took generations for your dynasty to rehabilitate itself to the point the Rosanrican royal academia deemed it unnecessary to bar your kind from the kingdom's knowledge anymore. If what they say about knowledge being power is true, then one mighty alvizian you are, boasting with high expertise in crafts lore, history, languages, and geography. Your social side is not much weaker either: obtaining access to all this knowledge took a lot of bartering and sweet-talking. Alas, these are opposite to your combative capabilities.)
[] They say that in order to understand the true worth of status and fortune, one must lose it. This was your house's fate, and something you sought to overcome with your own efforts and wits. Generations after the demotion of the Yorvic's house, it was you who led it to attain the status comparable to lesser nobles, with an estate at the capital, a well-managed enterprise trading in exotic contraptions & antiquities, and a vast network of suppliers and contractors. And who knows: maybe, after gathering lore and clues for years on end, you would finally be able to procure the evidence weighty enough to force the great houses to cede what rightfully belongs to your family.
(Your skills at fending for your own might be limited to lobbing shoes at the snouts of scoundrels, but you have others to fill in this gap in your skillset for you. And as for your strengths, scalpel-sharp wits, good education, unparallel scrutinizing ability, and the experience of avoiding harm's ways is what you have in plenty.)
As you mull through your thoughts and look back at the long trail that led you to these savage lands, the sound of a heavy thump ruptures the stillness of the night: Davon has finally unblocked the entrance. Rallied by it, you lose not a moment and fix the bag with travel supplies on your back and the long boots on your feet. Given that the hulking derelict isn't that far off from Tzuh-Aran, it's feasible that some sections of the underground passageways would be flooded. But this is something you'd have to worry about later: it took you almost a week to locate this place, and you only did so by the evening. You are well aware of the Freelanders' proneness to rob or enslave lonely wanderers. Hence, you decide it would be safer to secure a forward base within the ruins than to spend another night at the surface, tempting the beasts and the thugs with what they might consider easy prey.
Not without a vibe of anticipation in your gait, you approach Davon - your golem companion and the heirloom of your dynasty. He is not just a primitive puppet with the absent or rudimentary will but a legitimate soul-propelled platform from the good old times of the Soltsveig's golden age.
"Not a moment too soon," you comment on the golem's efforts, "We should now descent and seek the secure pocket within the ruins to set up a camp. Though it's doubtful the indigenous scoundrels would work up the courage to follow us down there, it would be prudent to set up traps. That would also do well to deter the local fauna from seeing the site for free real estate while not cutting off our escape route in the case of bollocks."
[] As you issue the command, the levitating set of armor with the bright-cyan light emanating from its shell's gaps twirls its steel spear in a "ready" gesture. (Floating armor chassis features decent integrity, unparalleled mobility, adequate power, easy maintenance, and the utilities of flight and illumination)
[] Hearing your instruction, the tremendous mass of plates turns towards you and nods with its helmet before retracting its steel punchers into the stand-by position (Walker chassis features good integrity, standard mobility, high power, moderate maintenance complexity, and the capacities of a heavy infantry unit)
[] A couple of moments after you stop speaking, the hulking carapace with siege-weapon-like arms and city-gates-thick armor bends its tremendous mechanical legs and opens up its saddling box to you. Thoughtful as ever. (Chariot-type chassis features topline integrity, lower mobility, overwhelming power, expensive maintenance, and a whole slew of peculiarities such as the autonomous and piloted modes, limited passage due to sheer sizes, and enormous carrying capacity)
Witnessing your metallic companion's readiness, you glance at the dark, gaping maw of the ruin. You smell the stench emanating from its newly-opened depths. Perhaps, it is due to the work of your imagination that painted the site as a gargantuan dead beast rotting away in the middle of the great grassland and into which you'd have to crawl now.
" 'ere's one for the family," you mutter quietly while suppressing disgust and starting your way into the ancient depths.
But alas, the speed at which your steel servant bulldozes through the millennia-old debris blocking the vault's entrance does not inspire the confidence of the swiftest return to the comfort and civilization of Soltsveig islands. Damn, you almost feel like killing for a neat fruit tart with creme like they cook in Lorendale. As you think of it, the gastronomical recollection only makes matters worse, bringing in the memories of gentle springtime rains, neat gardens, and idyllic fields of your island homeland. While starting into the night that shrouded this savage land, you feel homesick, tired, and even a tad bit afraid.
And there indeed were a lot of reasons to be worried about: even though, after spending about the worth of a tidy little seashore hut somewhere in the Southern Soltsveig archipelago on this expedition, you located what was supposed to be the atheneum vault of Almafey, there were zero guarantees that you'd get to its sanctum in a week, less so a couple of days you hoped for. If there was anything you've learned from exploring the Ars oceanside ruins of Almafey it is that, aside from expecting nigh-guaranteed debris blockages, sporadic flood zones, and pest infestations, almost anything can end up being bottled behind the heavy obsidian walls. Anything from smugglers' hideouts to goblinoids' ritual sites dedicated to their fertility deities and filled with primitive thematic "art" can lie and wait for you in these ruins.
At this thought, you cringe. "Get a hold of yourself, Katherine," you mentally issue a command to yourself, thinking it would allay the feeling of uncertainty before what might be lying below you. And, at least this time, it works, diverting your mental spotlight from the fear of the unknown to the sacrifices and efforts you've made to get this far.
[] After all the years and fortunes spent on trinkets studying, artifacts reassembly, and dabbling into theoretical and practical engineering, including magitech, should you not find the fabled anamnestic miner here, you would strip this place clean of all the Almafey contraptions and assemble one yourself! At this thought, you straighten up under the weight of your handmade bolt repeater hanging on your back. The grenade shells on your belt clack merrily against each other as you do so.
(From the early youth, you practiced artifice and craftsmanship, eventually dabbling into the theoretical and precursors' tech. If not for the dubious reputation of your lineage, you might have been one of the most trendy mechanists of the Rosanrica kingdom. Your skillset is represented via crafting, lore, and self-defense skill groups in the fading order of prominence.)
[] Being an offspring of a pariah house is a harsh fate, so when your own society closes the doors before you for what they see as the sins of your forebearers, the workaround venues of getting the objects of your desires become all too evident. Some shady deals and services for the ever-rivaling nobility, a neat spy network, active participation in the unauthorized artifacts trade, and here you are: about to expand the "black archeology" segment of your portfolio in a chase for the artifact that could override the centuries of your family's infamy.
(Being one of the old but maligned bloodline, you had to refer to more clandestine methods and contacts to get what the Rosanrican nobility obstructed from you. You are no stranger to espionage and infiltrations, know how to pick the suitable bargains or cause advantageous situations, and are not a total slouch at self-defense either.)
[] Countless hours spent in the academy's library studying dusty history tomes to the point some students began to think of you as a ghost haunting the premises. The struggle and humiliation of seeking out archivists willing to overlook your pedigree and oblige your inquiries. Through all these hardships, you still haven't found the answer to why your ancestors acted against the crown during the latter's darkest days. But it didn't stop you: to get the answer you wanted, you delved even further into the past, seeking the clues and keys to unlocking the memories concealed within the humble piece of memorabilia that connects you to the turning point of your bloodline. Unbeknownst, you grew into one of the continent's leading historians, ready to plunge into a whole sanctuary of ancient knowledge.
(It took generations for your dynasty to rehabilitate itself to the point the Rosanrican royal academia deemed it unnecessary to bar your kind from the kingdom's knowledge anymore. If what they say about knowledge being power is true, then one mighty alvizian you are, boasting with high expertise in crafts lore, history, languages, and geography. Your social side is not much weaker either: obtaining access to all this knowledge took a lot of bartering and sweet-talking. Alas, these are opposite to your combative capabilities.)
[] They say that in order to understand the true worth of status and fortune, one must lose it. This was your house's fate, and something you sought to overcome with your own efforts and wits. Generations after the demotion of the Yorvic's house, it was you who led it to attain the status comparable to lesser nobles, with an estate at the capital, a well-managed enterprise trading in exotic contraptions & antiquities, and a vast network of suppliers and contractors. And who knows: maybe, after gathering lore and clues for years on end, you would finally be able to procure the evidence weighty enough to force the great houses to cede what rightfully belongs to your family.
(Your skills at fending for your own might be limited to lobbing shoes at the snouts of scoundrels, but you have others to fill in this gap in your skillset for you. And as for your strengths, scalpel-sharp wits, good education, unparallel scrutinizing ability, and the experience of avoiding harm's ways is what you have in plenty.)
As you mull through your thoughts and look back at the long trail that led you to these savage lands, the sound of a heavy thump ruptures the stillness of the night: Davon has finally unblocked the entrance. Rallied by it, you lose not a moment and fix the bag with travel supplies on your back and the long boots on your feet. Given that the hulking derelict isn't that far off from Tzuh-Aran, it's feasible that some sections of the underground passageways would be flooded. But this is something you'd have to worry about later: it took you almost a week to locate this place, and you only did so by the evening. You are well aware of the Freelanders' proneness to rob or enslave lonely wanderers. Hence, you decide it would be safer to secure a forward base within the ruins than to spend another night at the surface, tempting the beasts and the thugs with what they might consider easy prey.
Not without a vibe of anticipation in your gait, you approach Davon - your golem companion and the heirloom of your dynasty. He is not just a primitive puppet with the absent or rudimentary will but a legitimate soul-propelled platform from the good old times of the Soltsveig's golden age.
"Not a moment too soon," you comment on the golem's efforts, "We should now descent and seek the secure pocket within the ruins to set up a camp. Though it's doubtful the indigenous scoundrels would work up the courage to follow us down there, it would be prudent to set up traps. That would also do well to deter the local fauna from seeing the site for free real estate while not cutting off our escape route in the case of bollocks."
[] As you issue the command, the levitating set of armor with the bright-cyan light emanating from its shell's gaps twirls its steel spear in a "ready" gesture. (Floating armor chassis features decent integrity, unparalleled mobility, adequate power, easy maintenance, and the utilities of flight and illumination)
[] Hearing your instruction, the tremendous mass of plates turns towards you and nods with its helmet before retracting its steel punchers into the stand-by position (Walker chassis features good integrity, standard mobility, high power, moderate maintenance complexity, and the capacities of a heavy infantry unit)
[] A couple of moments after you stop speaking, the hulking carapace with siege-weapon-like arms and city-gates-thick armor bends its tremendous mechanical legs and opens up its saddling box to you. Thoughtful as ever. (Chariot-type chassis features topline integrity, lower mobility, overwhelming power, expensive maintenance, and a whole slew of peculiarities such as the autonomous and piloted modes, limited passage due to sheer sizes, and enormous carrying capacity)
Witnessing your metallic companion's readiness, you glance at the dark, gaping maw of the ruin. You smell the stench emanating from its newly-opened depths. Perhaps, it is due to the work of your imagination that painted the site as a gargantuan dead beast rotting away in the middle of the great grassland and into which you'd have to crawl now.
" 'ere's one for the family," you mutter quietly while suppressing disgust and starting your way into the ancient depths.
Characters sheets
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
- Katherine Mary Yorvic (aka you)
-
Race: Islander Alvizian
Gender: Female
Age: 41
Background: lesser noble & de-facto head of Yorvic house. A scholar of history, linguistics, and lesser arcana.
Status: Healthy, a bit jumpy
Attributes Base value Modified value Total value Dice bonus Strength 10 10 5 Constitution 10 10 5 Mobility 12 12 7 Perception 13 13 8 Coordination 10 10 5 Micromotorics 15 15 10 Intellect 19 19 14 Wisdom 16 16 11 Charisma 15 15 10 Luck 2 2 2 Misfortune 2 2 2 Skill Attribute value Learned value Modified value Dice bonus Melee combat 1 1 Ranged combat 4 4 Arcane skill 7 7 Defense 1 1 Objects usage 4 4 Mounted combat 2 4 6 Willpower 7 2 9 Balance 1 1 Sneaking 2 2 Reconnaissance 6 3 9 Persuasion 7 6 13 Intimidation 2 2 Haggle 5 6 11 Performance 6 6 Seduction 3 3 Geography lore 7 8 15 Nature lore 7 7 Arcane lore 7 8 15 Social and cultural lore 8 11 19 Craft lore 8 8 16 Lingual lore 8 9 17 Daily craft 7 5 12 Pharma and treatment 8 8 Weaponsmithing 6 6 Armorsmithing 6 6 Tailoring 7 3 10 Art 6 6 12 Artificery 7 4 11 Burglary 7 7 Huntsmanship 3 3 Alchemy 8 8 Sorcery 8 5 13 None: you don't seem to be born with any arcane bounds.Travel clothes, a portative arcane lantern, a backpack with food&water supplies for two and a half days, a steel dagger, two runic fire wands (one-time-use), two smoke grenades, one flash grenade, a journal, a musical locket, a bandage roll, and two remedy potions, a golem control bracelet.Capable of basic artificiery (on the level of crossbow mechanisms, simple magitek devices, and grenade shells), intermediate runic enchantments, basic tailoring (cloth repair, producing minor clothing articles), intermediate level (sketches, illustrations, engraving), and cooking knowledge (mostly common Soltsveig cuisine)
- Davon (aka Dave)
-
Race: Chariot-type automaton (possessed)
Gender: formerly male?
Age: over four centuries (old family heirloom)
Background: soul-encased chariot-type golem of the Yorvic family back from the Rosanrican Kingdom's silver age days.
Status: Fully functional, 85% integrity (a bit worn down from the long road and irregular maintenance, minor damage from fighting a giant centipede)
Attributes Base value Modified value Total value Dice bonus Strength 30 30 25 Constitution 30 30 25 Mobility 8 8 3 Perception 10 10 5 Coordination 8 8 3 Micromotorics 4 4 -1 Intellect 10 10 5 Wisdom 14 14 9 Charisma 5 5 0 Luck 2 2 2 Misfortune 2 2 2 Skill Attribute value Learnt value Modified value Dice bonus Melee combat 9 5 14 Ranged combat 3 3 6 Arcane skill 3 3 Defense 15 7 22 Objects usage 2 2 Mounted combat 5 5 Willpower 2 8 10 Balance 4 4 8 Sneaking -1 -1 Reconnaissance 2 2 Persuasion -1 -1 Intimidation 14 14 Haggle -1 -1 Performance -3 -3 Seduction 4 4 Geography lore 2 2 4 Nature lore 2 2 4 Arcane lore 2 2 Social and cultural lore 1 3 4 Craft lore 1 1 Lingual lore 1 1 Daily craft -1 -1 Pharma and treatment -1 -1 Weaponsmithing 2 2 Armorsmithing 2 2 Tailoring -4 -4 Art -3 -3 Artificery -2 -2 Burglary -3 -3 Huntsmanship 1 1 Alchemy 0 0 Sorcery 2 2 None?Mid-tier steel plating, edged shield weapon, big hanging bag (camping supplies, food&water, and spare materials and parts).None. He's a shell propelled by a soul of an old-dead man!
Last edited:
3. The main gate
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
As Davon - your chariot-type, soul-empowered automaton - walks forth, his metallic hull shakes, and so do you with it, nested in the seating lodge. You did not mind the inconvenience, though. Partially because it is something you seamlessly adapted for in the last month of a journey, and to some degree due to dedicating all of your focus to the sparse fragments of constructions within the shaft of the ruin.
The columns and beams that get into the cone of your lantern look familiar: the purple-obsidian-colored metallic material usually seen in Reisorians ruins. These particular constructions, however, contained design features indicative of the Almafey architecture philosophy. This observation could only mean that the derelict to the depth of which your automaton was descending had been erected during or after the precursors' golden age - the time when the prominent races of the bygone era worked out a cohabitation solution, which brought about immense advancement pace.
Trying to recall the known habitats of the precursors, you could not avoid thinking about this site in particular. With the now-Olfadirian Pheotor heartland being a population center of precursors and Eldhaetaed mountains being their mining and industrial core, it is predictable that the lands of Turan would be the prime zone for warehouses and vaults in this configuration, but why so close to the river? Even tens of thousands of years ago, Tzuh-Aran riverbed was where it is now, meaning this vault had to have a river dock to justify proximity to the surface and subterranean humidity. There weren't any signs of such infrastructure, causing the root of suspicion regarding this derelict's nature dug into your mind.
Your contemplative state did not last for long, though: Davon's chassis shook after either misstepping or stumbling against some debris chunk, pulling you back to reality. A swift search with the lantern in front and behind the trail revealed nothing of notice, causing you to think it was mostly your automaton's doings. As hard as you tried to keep him in good condition for the duration of the journey, he did need some maintenance after a month of the travel-tied wear out. And alas, you haven't encountered anyone capable of servicing such a machinery piece and, unlike your little brother, lacked the skill yourself, not even mentioning the materials and installations needed. Now thinking of Isidor, hanging and tinkering around Davon has been his favorite pastime since his early childhood; it might as well be the main reason your precious little sibling decided to pursue artificiery in the first place. And as for you...
[] You have only seen this soul-possessed shell as an expensive tool with more or less clear-cut uses. For whatever reason, you tried to distance yourself from it or, for that matter, the whole ethical aspect behind its existence.
[] Your "relationship" with it was and remains somewhat complicated. On one hand, it's hard to fully trust a weaponized mass of steel possessed by a soul of a person that lived centuries ago when you know nothing more about their life. And from the other side, your parents told you that Davon has been both a family heirloom from the times of your dynasty's lost glory and simultaneously the most loyal servant of the family. So, if they are unhappy about their current form, it's best not to make it any worse by ill treatment.
[] To a certain degree, you also fascinate this entity. Ever since you were little, you saw him like a magnanimous fairytale creature that has always been a part of your family, warding it from harm. Whenever you felt scared by the stormy & thunderous Soltsveig weather, nightmares, or just the dark, you often rushed not to your parents but Davon and, despite his limitations with interactions, he made you feel safe. Growing up, you encountered things far worse than those which made you anxious as a kid - the ordeals beyond Davon's reach. But even then, the air of mystery and attachment from your childhood remained, with you seeing him as a silent and sometimes quirky distanced relative.
Not long after a short trip down memory lane, the spotlight from your alchemical lantern finally caught the shape of the ruin's entrance. It was a massive dark obsidian contraption composed of two gargantuan gear-shaped rolling lids and a monstrously-sized frame holding them in place. Despite the imposing look, there was a gap in between them, supplemented by clusters of debris - the sure sign that the ruin did not stay insulated all these millennia. Your theory of the derelict being infested found its confirmation as soon as you saw skeletal fragments of what appeared to be an animal lying by the collapsed gates. The less-than-pleasant smell (of what you can only presume to be rot and old manure) was also indicative of unwanted wildlife presences somewhere deeper.
Your situational analysis concluded after you evaluated the gates once more, settling down on the assumption that a vault or an archive would not need such an enormous transitional capacity, meaning your hopes for a faster pace of exploration might end up shattered depending on the nature of the site. Slightly frustrated by the now-discovered uncertainty, you pushed yourself to seek possible entrances and found three options:
[] The obstructed gap of the main gate. Davon would be able to clear it out, but whatever is beyond the gates will certainly get alerted by your automaton's attempts to clear the path. Plus, there's a risk of your steel companion's wear down or even damage from the gate's crumble (Davon's epic STR check (24), Luck roll, easy COORD check (13) & easy MOB save check (13) if COORD failed), free CON roll if COORD and MOB are failed)
[] An elevated gap in the collapsed part of the wall to the left from the main gate. You think you can cross it more or less easily on your foot, but you're not so sure about your automaton companion. Although, this might be a stealthier approach... unless someone slips and falls. (Davon's normal COORD check (17), Luck roll, if failed, free CON and COORD rolls)
[] A surprisingly intact-looking smaller hatch within the gateway frame. Wide enough for Davon to squeeze in with some effort. However, the problem is finding a way to open it without raising too much noise. (Katherine's luck roll and easy burglary check (17), if failed, Katherine's easy artificery check (17), if both checks failed, Davon's epic STR check (24))
The columns and beams that get into the cone of your lantern look familiar: the purple-obsidian-colored metallic material usually seen in Reisorians ruins. These particular constructions, however, contained design features indicative of the Almafey architecture philosophy. This observation could only mean that the derelict to the depth of which your automaton was descending had been erected during or after the precursors' golden age - the time when the prominent races of the bygone era worked out a cohabitation solution, which brought about immense advancement pace.
Trying to recall the known habitats of the precursors, you could not avoid thinking about this site in particular. With the now-Olfadirian Pheotor heartland being a population center of precursors and Eldhaetaed mountains being their mining and industrial core, it is predictable that the lands of Turan would be the prime zone for warehouses and vaults in this configuration, but why so close to the river? Even tens of thousands of years ago, Tzuh-Aran riverbed was where it is now, meaning this vault had to have a river dock to justify proximity to the surface and subterranean humidity. There weren't any signs of such infrastructure, causing the root of suspicion regarding this derelict's nature dug into your mind.
Your contemplative state did not last for long, though: Davon's chassis shook after either misstepping or stumbling against some debris chunk, pulling you back to reality. A swift search with the lantern in front and behind the trail revealed nothing of notice, causing you to think it was mostly your automaton's doings. As hard as you tried to keep him in good condition for the duration of the journey, he did need some maintenance after a month of the travel-tied wear out. And alas, you haven't encountered anyone capable of servicing such a machinery piece and, unlike your little brother, lacked the skill yourself, not even mentioning the materials and installations needed. Now thinking of Isidor, hanging and tinkering around Davon has been his favorite pastime since his early childhood; it might as well be the main reason your precious little sibling decided to pursue artificiery in the first place. And as for you...
[] You have only seen this soul-possessed shell as an expensive tool with more or less clear-cut uses. For whatever reason, you tried to distance yourself from it or, for that matter, the whole ethical aspect behind its existence.
[] Your "relationship" with it was and remains somewhat complicated. On one hand, it's hard to fully trust a weaponized mass of steel possessed by a soul of a person that lived centuries ago when you know nothing more about their life. And from the other side, your parents told you that Davon has been both a family heirloom from the times of your dynasty's lost glory and simultaneously the most loyal servant of the family. So, if they are unhappy about their current form, it's best not to make it any worse by ill treatment.
[] To a certain degree, you also fascinate this entity. Ever since you were little, you saw him like a magnanimous fairytale creature that has always been a part of your family, warding it from harm. Whenever you felt scared by the stormy & thunderous Soltsveig weather, nightmares, or just the dark, you often rushed not to your parents but Davon and, despite his limitations with interactions, he made you feel safe. Growing up, you encountered things far worse than those which made you anxious as a kid - the ordeals beyond Davon's reach. But even then, the air of mystery and attachment from your childhood remained, with you seeing him as a silent and sometimes quirky distanced relative.
Not long after a short trip down memory lane, the spotlight from your alchemical lantern finally caught the shape of the ruin's entrance. It was a massive dark obsidian contraption composed of two gargantuan gear-shaped rolling lids and a monstrously-sized frame holding them in place. Despite the imposing look, there was a gap in between them, supplemented by clusters of debris - the sure sign that the ruin did not stay insulated all these millennia. Your theory of the derelict being infested found its confirmation as soon as you saw skeletal fragments of what appeared to be an animal lying by the collapsed gates. The less-than-pleasant smell (of what you can only presume to be rot and old manure) was also indicative of unwanted wildlife presences somewhere deeper.
Your situational analysis concluded after you evaluated the gates once more, settling down on the assumption that a vault or an archive would not need such an enormous transitional capacity, meaning your hopes for a faster pace of exploration might end up shattered depending on the nature of the site. Slightly frustrated by the now-discovered uncertainty, you pushed yourself to seek possible entrances and found three options:
[] The obstructed gap of the main gate. Davon would be able to clear it out, but whatever is beyond the gates will certainly get alerted by your automaton's attempts to clear the path. Plus, there's a risk of your steel companion's wear down or even damage from the gate's crumble (Davon's epic STR check (24), Luck roll, easy COORD check (13) & easy MOB save check (13) if COORD failed), free CON roll if COORD and MOB are failed)
[] An elevated gap in the collapsed part of the wall to the left from the main gate. You think you can cross it more or less easily on your foot, but you're not so sure about your automaton companion. Although, this might be a stealthier approach... unless someone slips and falls. (Davon's normal COORD check (17), Luck roll, if failed, free CON and COORD rolls)
[] A surprisingly intact-looking smaller hatch within the gateway frame. Wide enough for Davon to squeeze in with some effort. However, the problem is finding a way to open it without raising too much noise. (Katherine's luck roll and easy burglary check (17), if failed, Katherine's easy artificery check (17), if both checks failed, Davon's epic STR check (24))
Last edited:
Vote closed
4. The atrium and sylos
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
Reconsidering the options again, you close the side lids of the lantern except for the frontal one and move the light beam across the gigantic ancient gateway. The islet of light floats across the obsidian surface of the gate's unknown material, hugging its ornate central locking mechanism, and then dips into the worse-for-wear battered and eroded with time gateway frame. It stops on the gap in the said frame: by the looks, the breach was made from within the space of the vault, most likely caused by the cavern's structural damage from an unknown tectonic event. The cone of light then slowly recedes to the hill of debris below the gap, calling for associations with a lonely, battered siege tower breaching the otherwise impenetrable barrier. The hole above the pile of obsidian-ish rock and dirt looks wide enough for Davon to squeeze in.
Noticing where the spotlight stopped, your friendly walking fortress jerks backward a little, probably interpreting your intentions and showing little enthusiasm about what you are considering subjecting him to. He might be a mute entity forever trapped in steel and the soul stones, but it does not mean he could not express himself. This particular example of his "body" language was known to you all well since the day when you and Isidor decided to test-run him after a retrofit in the early springtime countryside, which resulted in him butting into slush and you with your sibling chaotically pestering half the nearby unamused Eastwich villagers to lend a few draft horses to get him out. Silly times.
"Come on, Dave," you say while encouragingly tapping the hood of your living fortress's chassis top, "It might be the best route for as long as you don't slide down, as tampering with the structure might result in nothing at best, or a cave-in at worst."
The possessed steel chariot jerks again, but this time weakly, almost pitifully. "Aw, come on! I'll even scale it first for the sake of your confidence~" you reply, and after a short pause, Davon begins his march toward the place of interest. Although, judging from his velocity, you get the idea of him hesitantly agreeing to fancy your request out of the sense of subordination and ineluctability rather than faith in your plan. One would not expect a soul stuck in metal for centuries to be this temperamental, but this is your buddy, and you are pretty happy about him still being this animated.
Within the next couple of minutes, you got yourself dismounted and was now scaling up the debris mound with the trusty lantern in hand as promised. The angle of the embankment surface was, luckily, low enough to brave it on foot and offered enough gaps and texture to push against, so perhaps, Davon won't have much issue climbing it either. But as you mentally thank yourself for remembering to get the sturdy high boots for travel instead of absent-mindedly taking the vogue Rosanrican shoes on the very last day before the departure, one of your feet almost slips, causing you to emit a short but high-pitch shriek. Thankfully, you did not lose balance, and the worst that happens is Davon rising upright at the alert, returning to his "rest" poise shortly.
You catch a breath and look under your feet to ascertain the cause of the ruckus and find it a muddy yellowish blot of clearly organic origins and recent freshness. Oh, blast it, says your inner voice as you conclude that you nearly tumbled down because of the pile of some beast's excrement. This realization sours your mood: if there was something you hoped for - aside from the place being the vault that you hypothesized from the records and artifacts - it was the site's lack of inhabitants or infestations. You garnered a faint hope the beasts would not venture deeper inside the derelict itself, but alas, you'd have to consider this group of risks when pushing deeper.
But despite the reconfirmed circumstances, you push forward and approach the edge of the fallen stone chunk, peeking into the vast darkness behind the gates. Breaching the ancient grounds where no sentient being treaded for millenniums always had this unique feeling of awe and mystery, stemming from the realization of the unknown in front of you being anything but empty. Heeding this sensation, you crouch and aim your lantern's focused light into the virgin sea of darkness behind the gates.
And as you do so... you find yourself somewhat disappointed, for you are greeted not with majestic architecture of the civilizations long gone but with what looks like a badly damaged by time, half-collapsed mine. As the beam reaches up, you notice some cavernous vegetation sprawling on the cave's ceiling - the giveaway sign that there might be more unaccounted-for natural caverns leading to this hollow, allowing for access, humidity, and perhaps even some sunlight. As you shift the beam to the body of the cavity, the rundown supporting columns and a few landslide-caused mounds (some reaching to the ceiling) reveal themselves. By your rough estimation, the cave appears to be one-fifth to one-third collapsed, with most of the rockfalls taking place closer to the gates. On the floor, your lantern picks dirt, occasional clearings of mosaic flooring, and the vast, murky puddles filled with stagnant water - the evidence of multiple cracks in the ceiling, through which rainfalls reach down here. You also find a convenient slope from the stone slab you stand at.
At least Isidor isn't here to state his room being tidy and ordered compared to this, you think and crack a faint grin while looking back at the familiar ghostly-green lights behind you - the glow and haze emanating from Davon's soul stone engine and shimmering through the hull exhausts. As you walk back to it, you state (not without some theatric confidence): "See? Absolutely manageable. The stone pillar ends steeply behind the gate, so be wary of the debris slope to the right."
But even though you voice this encouragement, you prefer not to get into the cockpit of your golem, illuminating the passage from the distance (and cheering for him not to fall off) instead. And to be fair, his less-than-graceful mechanical gait does give you a couple of jumpy moments during his climb. Fortunately, the plated ebony hull strapped with the supplies bags on its rear ends up at the hill's peak without rolling down right at you, prompting you to catch up and find that cozy safety of its cockpit.
And you do precisely this: once the hulking mass of armored steel descends to the floor of what seems like a gigantic atrium, you climb Davon, recline the seat, clutch to the levers, and assume direct control of him. Chariot-knight golems, as they are called, were invented back in the Rosanrican crown's golden age to fill in the similar-ish niche of Landers' heavy cavalry knight lances with the ability to double as portative siege weaponry and defense installations. Bound to bloodlines via now-forbidden spirit magic rituals and sustained by the soul echoes of the lineages' surviving members, these ghost-animated engines of war were built to act as independent bodyguards and dub as exceptionally-impenetrable suits of armor. Considering the actual combat purposes for which Davon's shell was manufactured, your piloting skill was lacking, but it was more than enough to navigate.
Feeling sufficiently safe behind Davon's thick armor to dull out the anxiety of an entourage-less expedition, you stomp around the ancient grounds in search of hints that would let you deduce the purpose of the complex. Shortly, one such object emerged in the spotlight of the searchlight-lidded & strapped to Davon's hull lantern: it was an effigy. A tall - about thrice your height - statue stemming from a massive pedestal around the center of the hall, forming an incomplete half-circle with the fragments of other pedestals, some of them still containing other idols in varying states of preservation. As you tilt Davon's torso to flush the statue with the lantern's light, you recognize it: the T-shaped central shape, reminiscent of a stylized dragon head, enclosed in a vertical ribbon-like circle that is divided by six spheres at even intervals is the symbol of Uragoth - the presumed central deity of the precursor Reisorian kin and their race's sign.
Next to it, you find a fragment of another statue sticking out of the pile of rubble that likely fell from the ceiling: it looks like the top half of the Almafey race symbol - a heavily-stylized swan-like shape with a flower protruding from its back. And to the opposite side of the best-preserved sculpture, you find another intact body that looks like the sun image but has a hollowed center and nine curved beams spreading out to contain the outer circle. Unlike the first two visages, you can't confirm ever seeing this one, so you produce your journal, climb out of the cockpit to unlid the lantern, and make a hasty sketch of the unknown artifact.
While putting the rough outlines onto the paper, you ponder about these statues and the hall: you expected this complex to be primarily almafeyish, as you referenced and deduced its location from their artifacts, yet the presence of not just their but four other races symbolics (three other of which you struggle to recognize) suggest the high ceremonial and/or administrative value of this place. This notion gives you mixed feelings, as it is not something you imagined the athenaeum vault to be, but it may still contain what you search for in its depths.
Done for now, you put away the journal and return to the cockpit proper, navigating the hull around the atrium and searching for pathways to the deeper levels. While doing so, you notice a series of stone steps on the floor, adding some verticality to the layout. Soon, you figure that the atrium was built multi-layered, with the pathway leading from the main gateway to the statues-adorned central platform elevated relative to the now-flooded recesses; perhaps, those were ponds with fountains in this place's better days. Following this mental scheme of the site that oddly reminds you of Lund's royal library's atrium, you navigate the mech to the sides from the effigy's crescent formation.
The left pathway ends up in a part of the hall buried under the landslide, clearing out which would be a bit too much even with the portative siege weapon you possess. Against it, the right pathway is clear of geodesic damage, leading to an arch and a tunnel, which you soon find to be sealed off by the same mechanic lid, the two bigger of which the main gates were composed of. Disappointed by yet another impassable route, you stare at peculiar large metallic geodes scattered nearby the sealed-off tunnel. They are tremendous - about time and a half Davon's height - and it takes you over a minute with slight backpedaling to realize: they feature internal lines and shapes too straight to be natural!
But as your golem steps in reverse, his massive feet crush against the stone flooring what sounded like a bone, immediately provoking a choral of menacing hisses to your left. Startled, you raise Davon's hood plate, fully encapsulating yourself under the armor. Now looking through the visor slits of your golem's "helmet," you frantically point the beam of light in the direction of the sounds: it reveals nothing even though the noises persist and only aggravate as if irritated by the spotlight's proximity.
Caught in this standoff, you take the chance to illuminate the side of the disturbance further, registering the noises originating from the wall alcoves placed along a wide half-circle stairway leading down to an archway entrance to the lower levels. The path down is littered with rocks, bones, piles of dung, and a humongous relief fresco fragment that collapsed from the wall and cut the closest stairway from its twin sibling on the other side. As you suspect that both pathways might be leading to the same exit, you notice a suspicious pair of lights peeking from behind the path-dividing chunk of decorated stone. After a heartbeat of hesitation, you train Davon's chassis in a way that sheds the lantern's light on the peculiar spot, causing the flickers to immediately disappear and witnessing something seizable and dark-furred (?) scatter behind the barrier.
As you stand still, concealed within the chariot golem, you feel your heartbeat rising as opposed to the intensity of the smaller creatures' hisses. You are a little scared but understand there is no other way than to take either of the pathways down, risking a confrontation with the wildlife. Unfortunately for you, natural sciences are not your faculty, so you have absolutely zero ideas what these species are, what they fear, or what danger they present; all you can surmise is the other stairway arm is inhabited by a relatively large and likely solitary beast, while the one in front of your golem possibly infested with scores of smaller predators.
With bated breath, you pry open the "helm's" plate just wide enough to smuggle your backpack into the cockpit before resealing the defenses and glancing through your belongings; you have three runic blaze wands, two smoke bombs, and one flash bomb. Perhaps, using any of these expendables would prevent a fight or at least ease it up, but you don't know how handy any of them would be or even how threatening these entities are, for that matter.
______________________________
Take the path (select challenge):
[] The closest one infested by hissers (skirmish chance: high? (3/5))
[] The further one inhabited by a large beast (skirmish chance: ???)
Use of supplies (might decrease the chance of a fight if picked correctly):
[] Fire wand (3 remaining)
[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
[] None (save the expendables for later)
Contingency fight plan (if the fight triggers):
[] Leave it to Davon (Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Pilot Davon (1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's melee combat roll, 1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Leave fighting to Davon while lobbing expendables from the cockpit (1/2 Katherine's object usage roll + 2/3 Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
-[] Fire wand (3 remaining)
-[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
Noticing where the spotlight stopped, your friendly walking fortress jerks backward a little, probably interpreting your intentions and showing little enthusiasm about what you are considering subjecting him to. He might be a mute entity forever trapped in steel and the soul stones, but it does not mean he could not express himself. This particular example of his "body" language was known to you all well since the day when you and Isidor decided to test-run him after a retrofit in the early springtime countryside, which resulted in him butting into slush and you with your sibling chaotically pestering half the nearby unamused Eastwich villagers to lend a few draft horses to get him out. Silly times.
"Come on, Dave," you say while encouragingly tapping the hood of your living fortress's chassis top, "It might be the best route for as long as you don't slide down, as tampering with the structure might result in nothing at best, or a cave-in at worst."
The possessed steel chariot jerks again, but this time weakly, almost pitifully. "Aw, come on! I'll even scale it first for the sake of your confidence~" you reply, and after a short pause, Davon begins his march toward the place of interest. Although, judging from his velocity, you get the idea of him hesitantly agreeing to fancy your request out of the sense of subordination and ineluctability rather than faith in your plan. One would not expect a soul stuck in metal for centuries to be this temperamental, but this is your buddy, and you are pretty happy about him still being this animated.
Within the next couple of minutes, you got yourself dismounted and was now scaling up the debris mound with the trusty lantern in hand as promised. The angle of the embankment surface was, luckily, low enough to brave it on foot and offered enough gaps and texture to push against, so perhaps, Davon won't have much issue climbing it either. But as you mentally thank yourself for remembering to get the sturdy high boots for travel instead of absent-mindedly taking the vogue Rosanrican shoes on the very last day before the departure, one of your feet almost slips, causing you to emit a short but high-pitch shriek. Thankfully, you did not lose balance, and the worst that happens is Davon rising upright at the alert, returning to his "rest" poise shortly.
You catch a breath and look under your feet to ascertain the cause of the ruckus and find it a muddy yellowish blot of clearly organic origins and recent freshness. Oh, blast it, says your inner voice as you conclude that you nearly tumbled down because of the pile of some beast's excrement. This realization sours your mood: if there was something you hoped for - aside from the place being the vault that you hypothesized from the records and artifacts - it was the site's lack of inhabitants or infestations. You garnered a faint hope the beasts would not venture deeper inside the derelict itself, but alas, you'd have to consider this group of risks when pushing deeper.
But despite the reconfirmed circumstances, you push forward and approach the edge of the fallen stone chunk, peeking into the vast darkness behind the gates. Breaching the ancient grounds where no sentient being treaded for millenniums always had this unique feeling of awe and mystery, stemming from the realization of the unknown in front of you being anything but empty. Heeding this sensation, you crouch and aim your lantern's focused light into the virgin sea of darkness behind the gates.
And as you do so... you find yourself somewhat disappointed, for you are greeted not with majestic architecture of the civilizations long gone but with what looks like a badly damaged by time, half-collapsed mine. As the beam reaches up, you notice some cavernous vegetation sprawling on the cave's ceiling - the giveaway sign that there might be more unaccounted-for natural caverns leading to this hollow, allowing for access, humidity, and perhaps even some sunlight. As you shift the beam to the body of the cavity, the rundown supporting columns and a few landslide-caused mounds (some reaching to the ceiling) reveal themselves. By your rough estimation, the cave appears to be one-fifth to one-third collapsed, with most of the rockfalls taking place closer to the gates. On the floor, your lantern picks dirt, occasional clearings of mosaic flooring, and the vast, murky puddles filled with stagnant water - the evidence of multiple cracks in the ceiling, through which rainfalls reach down here. You also find a convenient slope from the stone slab you stand at.
At least Isidor isn't here to state his room being tidy and ordered compared to this, you think and crack a faint grin while looking back at the familiar ghostly-green lights behind you - the glow and haze emanating from Davon's soul stone engine and shimmering through the hull exhausts. As you walk back to it, you state (not without some theatric confidence): "See? Absolutely manageable. The stone pillar ends steeply behind the gate, so be wary of the debris slope to the right."
But even though you voice this encouragement, you prefer not to get into the cockpit of your golem, illuminating the passage from the distance (and cheering for him not to fall off) instead. And to be fair, his less-than-graceful mechanical gait does give you a couple of jumpy moments during his climb. Fortunately, the plated ebony hull strapped with the supplies bags on its rear ends up at the hill's peak without rolling down right at you, prompting you to catch up and find that cozy safety of its cockpit.
And you do precisely this: once the hulking mass of armored steel descends to the floor of what seems like a gigantic atrium, you climb Davon, recline the seat, clutch to the levers, and assume direct control of him. Chariot-knight golems, as they are called, were invented back in the Rosanrican crown's golden age to fill in the similar-ish niche of Landers' heavy cavalry knight lances with the ability to double as portative siege weaponry and defense installations. Bound to bloodlines via now-forbidden spirit magic rituals and sustained by the soul echoes of the lineages' surviving members, these ghost-animated engines of war were built to act as independent bodyguards and dub as exceptionally-impenetrable suits of armor. Considering the actual combat purposes for which Davon's shell was manufactured, your piloting skill was lacking, but it was more than enough to navigate.
Feeling sufficiently safe behind Davon's thick armor to dull out the anxiety of an entourage-less expedition, you stomp around the ancient grounds in search of hints that would let you deduce the purpose of the complex. Shortly, one such object emerged in the spotlight of the searchlight-lidded & strapped to Davon's hull lantern: it was an effigy. A tall - about thrice your height - statue stemming from a massive pedestal around the center of the hall, forming an incomplete half-circle with the fragments of other pedestals, some of them still containing other idols in varying states of preservation. As you tilt Davon's torso to flush the statue with the lantern's light, you recognize it: the T-shaped central shape, reminiscent of a stylized dragon head, enclosed in a vertical ribbon-like circle that is divided by six spheres at even intervals is the symbol of Uragoth - the presumed central deity of the precursor Reisorian kin and their race's sign.
Next to it, you find a fragment of another statue sticking out of the pile of rubble that likely fell from the ceiling: it looks like the top half of the Almafey race symbol - a heavily-stylized swan-like shape with a flower protruding from its back. And to the opposite side of the best-preserved sculpture, you find another intact body that looks like the sun image but has a hollowed center and nine curved beams spreading out to contain the outer circle. Unlike the first two visages, you can't confirm ever seeing this one, so you produce your journal, climb out of the cockpit to unlid the lantern, and make a hasty sketch of the unknown artifact.
While putting the rough outlines onto the paper, you ponder about these statues and the hall: you expected this complex to be primarily almafeyish, as you referenced and deduced its location from their artifacts, yet the presence of not just their but four other races symbolics (three other of which you struggle to recognize) suggest the high ceremonial and/or administrative value of this place. This notion gives you mixed feelings, as it is not something you imagined the athenaeum vault to be, but it may still contain what you search for in its depths.
Done for now, you put away the journal and return to the cockpit proper, navigating the hull around the atrium and searching for pathways to the deeper levels. While doing so, you notice a series of stone steps on the floor, adding some verticality to the layout. Soon, you figure that the atrium was built multi-layered, with the pathway leading from the main gateway to the statues-adorned central platform elevated relative to the now-flooded recesses; perhaps, those were ponds with fountains in this place's better days. Following this mental scheme of the site that oddly reminds you of Lund's royal library's atrium, you navigate the mech to the sides from the effigy's crescent formation.
The left pathway ends up in a part of the hall buried under the landslide, clearing out which would be a bit too much even with the portative siege weapon you possess. Against it, the right pathway is clear of geodesic damage, leading to an arch and a tunnel, which you soon find to be sealed off by the same mechanic lid, the two bigger of which the main gates were composed of. Disappointed by yet another impassable route, you stare at peculiar large metallic geodes scattered nearby the sealed-off tunnel. They are tremendous - about time and a half Davon's height - and it takes you over a minute with slight backpedaling to realize: they feature internal lines and shapes too straight to be natural!
But as your golem steps in reverse, his massive feet crush against the stone flooring what sounded like a bone, immediately provoking a choral of menacing hisses to your left. Startled, you raise Davon's hood plate, fully encapsulating yourself under the armor. Now looking through the visor slits of your golem's "helmet," you frantically point the beam of light in the direction of the sounds: it reveals nothing even though the noises persist and only aggravate as if irritated by the spotlight's proximity.
Caught in this standoff, you take the chance to illuminate the side of the disturbance further, registering the noises originating from the wall alcoves placed along a wide half-circle stairway leading down to an archway entrance to the lower levels. The path down is littered with rocks, bones, piles of dung, and a humongous relief fresco fragment that collapsed from the wall and cut the closest stairway from its twin sibling on the other side. As you suspect that both pathways might be leading to the same exit, you notice a suspicious pair of lights peeking from behind the path-dividing chunk of decorated stone. After a heartbeat of hesitation, you train Davon's chassis in a way that sheds the lantern's light on the peculiar spot, causing the flickers to immediately disappear and witnessing something seizable and dark-furred (?) scatter behind the barrier.
As you stand still, concealed within the chariot golem, you feel your heartbeat rising as opposed to the intensity of the smaller creatures' hisses. You are a little scared but understand there is no other way than to take either of the pathways down, risking a confrontation with the wildlife. Unfortunately for you, natural sciences are not your faculty, so you have absolutely zero ideas what these species are, what they fear, or what danger they present; all you can surmise is the other stairway arm is inhabited by a relatively large and likely solitary beast, while the one in front of your golem possibly infested with scores of smaller predators.
With bated breath, you pry open the "helm's" plate just wide enough to smuggle your backpack into the cockpit before resealing the defenses and glancing through your belongings; you have three runic blaze wands, two smoke bombs, and one flash bomb. Perhaps, using any of these expendables would prevent a fight or at least ease it up, but you don't know how handy any of them would be or even how threatening these entities are, for that matter.
______________________________
Take the path (select challenge):
[] The closest one infested by hissers (skirmish chance: high? (3/5))
[] The further one inhabited by a large beast (skirmish chance: ???)
Use of supplies (might decrease the chance of a fight if picked correctly):
[] Fire wand (3 remaining)
[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
[] None (save the expendables for later)
Contingency fight plan (if the fight triggers):
[] Leave it to Davon (Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Pilot Davon (1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's melee combat roll, 1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Leave fighting to Davon while lobbing expendables from the cockpit (1/2 Katherine's object usage roll + 2/3 Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
-[] Fire wand (3 remaining)
-[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
Last edited:
Katherine Mary Yorvic and Davon as of Bloom of the year 1469
Vote closed
5. Warehouses
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
For over a minute, you stare at the bundles of jars and rods with explosives, struggling against the encroaching fear paralysis. You, after all, are just a historian: an archeologist, not a fighter! But as anxiety slowly builds up in your heart, your mind evokes all the efforts and the material and emotional costs you've sunk for this expedition. You can't let them go to waste. You can't go back empty-handed because of some foul cavernous vermins!
As you gradually fire up emotionally, your hand drifts over runic fire wands, brushing one of them as you contemplate "lighting" up those cells infested with incessantly hissing menaces.
"Dave," You finally whisper to your iron companion, "Be ready to fight as I'm about to scorch them out of their crevices." In a familiar acknowledging gesture, the chassis tilts forward for half a heartbeat, with you shortly opening the lid of Davon's cockpit and staring into the hisses-animated darkness.
Finally, you muster your resolve and nimbly crack the safety seal on the wand, lighting up the stairway with warm light emitted from the activated rod. Its tiny amber fire consumes the wood, inching closer and closer and closer to its rune-inscribed core segment. Perfectly aware of what happens when a rune comes in direct contact with its conceptual element, you toss the projectile into one of the holes from where, according to your hearing, most of the hisses were coming. Sharp like a crack of a lightning strike, the chorus of hisses turns into unholy screeching cacophony, and you see the distorted shadows of the miniature but numerous and ill-tempered creatures dance on the walls of the infested stone-cut cell.
Wasting not a moment, you dive back into the safety of Davon's hull and lock the lid securely shut as the audial chaos ensues, muffled by the isolation of Davon's steel. You hear clicks of claws against the ancient stonework, startlingly loud, pained screeches of the vermins outside, and a few heavy metallic thumps against something fleshy, with shrill screeches following right after. The pungent smell of smoke and burnt flesh soon makes it through the slits and cracks in Davon's shaking chassis, confirming the macabre butchering scenery with pyromaniac vibes outside that your imagination was painting. But just as the stampede seemed to slow down, you heard the curious roar, most likely voiced by the larger creature from the opposite side of the divide. Not taking any chances, you unroll from the semi-fetal pose (in which you waited through the bacchanalia), reach for Davon's controls, and pilot him away through the tall gateway to the lower levels, not bothering to look back.
You have little clue how long you spurred your steel companion at joints-integrity-threatening speeds through the long-dead hallways of the complex. Your mental faculties begin to return only when the surroundings change, and you find yourself on a spacious new floor, starting at an intricate effigy doubling as a signpost with partially-preserved engravings. As you hold your breath to listen to the surroundings, the absence of the visceral screeches finally encourages you to open Davon's top lid and assess his status.
With the alchemistric-mechanical lantern in your hands and on still-shaky legs, you hit the surface to make a quick roundelay around Dave, who courteously lowered his hull to facilitate your disembarking. A quick inspection reveals that your chariot golem sustained no damage besides a few minor scratches on the shield plates and a few particularly gross gore splatters on his mechanical limbs. As you wrap up this little inspection satisfied, a certain sense of pride resurfaces: you made it through the first encounter with hostile beasts unharmed despite not having the budget to hire Rosanrican mercenaries for this lengthy expedition and not trusting any of the local sellswords. Ha!
But a short moment of internal jubilation concludes with a pat on Davon's hood shielding, and you turn around to flush the light at your immediate surroundings. You find yourself standing at the center of a vast hall with many arched side gateways to smaller subsections, somewhat reminiscent of a conventional library or a gigantic warehouse layout. And apparently, you stopped exactly where a reception or redistribution desk might've been eons ago, with a wide column carrying direction pointers and other essential trivia towering above.
This new floor appears to be more intact than the previous one, with most arches, columns, and internal walls between the sections featuring only minor signs of damage. The space looks carefully planned, and glancing at the floor reveals signs of a peculiar gutter or chute - too geometrically correct to be something without a utilitarian purpose, such as rail transportation or fluids drainage. But there is only so much you can study without moving further from the central aisle into the side branches and corridors. Before you do so, you carefully climb atop a well-preserved heavy desk made of a weird, ceramo-metallic obsidian-esque material and stare at the column's inscriptions. But alas, the symbols are faded, and all you can make out from the precursors' late common language are the word "storehouse," a suffix of a word related to manufacturing or processing, and an even more degraded couple of symbols related to water.
You sigh in mild frustration from being unable to decypher the worn-down signs, which makes you register an oddity: the air is still fresh relative to the depth at which you are right now! There must be a concealed air shaft nearby or a multiple of them, still passing breathable air down to these subterranean-pests-infested halls. A faint grin creeps as you realize the testament to the late Reisorians' and Almafey architecture that endured tens of thousands of years as derelicts. Thrilled by the prospect of diving deeper into a well-preserved historical site you uncovered, you somewhat clumsily crawl up into Davon's piloting cradle, prompting him to march beyond the now-familiar aisle.
And with the measured, methodical stomps of your walking fortress, you come across increasingly more findings in the interconnected floor section, which you surmised to be storage cells. Most of them host nothing but the rack carcasses made out of the same mysterious material as the main gates, filled with rot that, at some distant point, must've been containers stored at them. You come across several sealed containers made out of this decay-resistant metal. Yet, you cannot open them nor locate any inscriptions describing their contents. In more than half of the storage sections, the floor is buried under the tides of weird, puffy beige rot of unknown origins that resembles heaps of particularly puffy snow. Passing those, you hold your breath and cover your face with a handkerchief, protecting yourself from ingesting the clouds raised by Davon's marching.
But nothing makes you stop in awe like passing to the rear section of this gigantic warehouse and witnessing the vast "sea" of this alien rot, stretching across multiple separate cells, with some effigies, furniture elements, and other artifacts sticking out of it like from under a landslide or quicksands, with only carved columns in intersections protruding from the submerged bottom all the way to the ceiling like mythical titans, immune to time and the literal tide of decay caused by it. You spend no less than half an hour starting at it, noticing sporadic chunks of machinery and containers sticking out of it. Whatever this particular floor was keeping, it wasn't cultural artifacts or knowledge. However, on the opposite wall, separated from you by this "sea of rot," you spot the vague outlines of Pheotor carved as a part of an enormous relief etching. But as enticing as these findings are, you dare not submerge even partially into these cotton-like waves, begrudgingly turning away to explore the rest of the floor.
Mulling on how significant of a discovery a glimpse at the precursors' geographical knowledge could've been, you barely restrain yourself from marching Davon through the dust & rot tide. Yet, another discovery soon wash the persistent idea out of your head: you found precursors themselves! Well, not alive, of course: in one peculiar storage cell, both entrances of which were obstructed by makeshift barricades, the light of your lantern brushes against seizable bones.
Having Davon bulldoze through a minor hill of debris, you soon get a better view of the scene. You register a pile of ancient bones by the wall, and half of them look too large to belong to contemporary roths. By the direction of, presumably, thigh bones, you get the impression that these two precursors died leaning with their backs against the barricaded wall of this storage cell. The smaller person probably leaned onto the larger one, who, judging by the skull shape and presence of horns, was a reisorian. Were they... hiding from something? The placement of the crates and the haphazard obstructions reinforce this theory.
Looking around, you noticed the second - a smaller - pile of bones in one of the corners, hidden behind the rubble. Leaving Davon in the cell's entrance, you carefully sneak to the third deceased. The skeleton was less scattered than the other two, and you could make out its posthumous pose: curled in a ball as if in pain, crushing terror, or both. Judging by the sizes and characteristic flanks of the skull, it was an almafey female, possibly a relatively young one. Looking closely, you notice something else: there's something faintly glittery under her palm bones.
Giving it a thought and then biting your lower lip pensively, you procure leather gloves from your pocket and don them before reaching for the object. As the bones, with hushed clutter, give way to what looks like a golden fetish of sorts, you can't help but feel somewhat guilty for taking away the last solace of a girl that died thousands of years ago. But the scientist in you takes reign over Katherine-the-girl, and you shed more light on the artifact.
The object in your hand, albeit dirtied and mildly deformed, is unmistakenly made of either ancient gold or a gold-based fusion. It is delicate and resembles a geometrical pattern reminiscent of a lily or chaliced dancing flame. At the back of your mind, you recall seeing this pattern somewhere, but the details elude you. Tantalized by the missing context, you dig deeper into your memory, and, finally, you remember: you saw this symbol on one of the ceremonial urns recovered by Kathorian scriveners. Yes - it began to resurface: quite uncharacteristically for themselves, daevish scholars from Ussar decided to attend Lund's exposition of precursors' artifacts, bringing some from their homeland for the expo! It was quite a misguiding show: most attendees and scholars were more interested in the exotic guests than their contributions to historiographical and archeological exchange. But not you, evidently, as you managed to imprint fragments of lore on the cult of the life-giving flame practiced by many almafey in ancient Eucad.
Long-range travel was standard in the late eras of precursors' reign up to their mysterious collapse, which led to significant foreign population enclaves in the larger settlements. This ceremonial - most likely prayer - fetish only reinforces your assumption that this place was inhabited during the precursor's last era and might have seen its collapse around the time of the extinction event or maybe even after it to some degree, ultimately succumbing to a cascade failure or some freakish force-measure, the marks of which you now observe.
Satisfied by your archeologic acumen, you sigh and look at the object in your hands again: its delicate weave shaped into a burning flower almost makes you feel a bit warmer and safer in this kingdom of dust and darkness, and your glance slips down to the object's "owner." A brief moment of contemplation follows, and, with the utmost care, you lean over the antique almafey girl, carefully returning the trinket to her dead grasp. You came here for the metascope, not to rob the deceased.
Then, after hopping back into Davon and leaving the peculiar storage cell behind, you spend about an hour and a half slowly riding around the enormous floor level, searching for other peculiarities and exciting spots. Still, you don't find anything except for small fragments of bones - likely remnants of the stragglers from the floor above and the sounds of water from one of the lengthy, half-collapsed corridors. Also, to your great confusion, you register faint air currents in one branch of the level, but your attempts to find the source of ventilation fail once you start feeling light-headed, and your body hurries to inform you of the last time you rested.
Succumbing to the needs of your flesh, you break down an improvised camp in a storage cell not far from the one you found the living blaze effigy in. You may not be of the most skittish sort, especially compared to the Rosanrican court darlings and socialites, who wrinkle their noses whenever the name of your house is mentioned, but the assumption of sleeping among the dead is just too morbid for you. You set up the sleeping bag, the "camping candle," and cut the enclosure away from the spooky ruins via parking Davon as a barricade. Even though he has no tactile senses, you rub his frontal plated hood affectionately: he sure did earn your praise today, to which he "nods" forward in acknowledgment. And just like that, under the cyan-green lights and hazes emanating from your friend and protector's soul engine, you sneak into the sleeping bag, procuring your journal and cataloging the findings and impressions over a chunk of chocolate brick you took from the home Islands.
With writing accouterment procured, you hastily scribble the findings, thoughts, and impressions from the first leg of the "dive," trying to outrun the amassing sleepiness with the quill. You calligraphically ponder about the purpose of the entrance hall, which terribly reminds you of the carriages and river ferry depot at Lund. You heard rumors of bhiroths recovering well-preserved clockwork chariots of precursors from Eldheitaed vaults and even finding an entire subterranean lane network for them. Perhaps, what you saw above was a part of this lane at some point? If so, then this vault might eventually lead to even more discoveries! Thinking of the vault itself, you can't help but mentally "promote" it from a standard storage outpost, many of which are scattered near the Ars Ocean's shore, to a settlement: there's no way such an immense, hooked to logistic chains, warehousing capacity would be used for anything less than a settlement. And where's a city, there are administrative archives. You need to find them.
Mildly encouraged, you briefly pause and begin to illustrate your interpretation of the passed floors' layouts. The puffy tail of your quill twitches like a butterfly drawn to the flame as you sketch, and sketch, and... sketch... and...
You observe the slow yet sure propagation of schematics on the whiteboard. Isidor can be messy sometimes, especially when he's over-excited or proportionally exhausted, but never with drafting his ideas. Never!
"Isi?" you say, allowing yourself to pass the threshold of his little workshop, "Isi, why haven't you joined us for dinner? Margaret made your favorite Eastshire pastries, and I'd let you know your absence did a number on her mood and confidence." You explain yourself while passing by the tables filled with brass spare parts, blueprints, and notes to one side and the tall windows separating you from the rainy Soltsveig weather to the other. The black-haired boy does not respond to your query, continuing to scribble after a short pause, albeit now with a guilty look glued to his face.
"Come now, Isidor," you speak gently, stopping your thread behind the back of your precious younger brother not to be overbearing, "Is it because of your today's outing with Atterberry's girl?" You know it must be it, but give your little sibling some breathing room.
For a moment, the scribbling stops for a few lengthy heartbeats. You observe the tiny, short-lived tilt of your brother's nape: he is struggling to either spill the beans or keep it all to himself, foolishly thinking you - for the first time ever - would fail to decypher his attempts to ward you from his problems. Soon, the scribbling continues, but you can't overlook the uncertainty and twitches in his hand's motions. He's at his limit.
"Isi... you know I can see through you, and your silence only makes me more concerned," You flank him and slowly lean against the edge of the closest workbench, giving your brother a concerned look, "Please, if it would make you feel at ease, I promise not to overreact or invite myself to act as your proxy head-on."
The young, dark-haired lad with bright green eyes gives you a sulky look and capitulates to your persistence, putting down the charcoal piece with which he was scribbling his schematics. "Yes, it's because of the... uh, outing with Natalie Atterberry," the chap says, observing your reaction, which was withheld for now. You blink with a lopsided, sadly-confirming grin and let him continue.
"It started out well enough - I zealously stuck to the etiquette you and Margaret taught me and, for some time, it felt like we were on the same wave: she asked me about the ideas and inventions I am pursuing, and I tried to fancy her intelligence and tastes by inquiring of the city's latest events and performances that left her thrilled. About an hour in, I... I really believed we might become friends..."
"But?" you continued for him, narrowing on the reason that left him in such an inadequately sorry state for a bright lad of his disposition.
"But when we arrived at Dunworth Point market..." your brother takes a pause not unlike a steed would make before going for the second lap to brave a daring obstacle, "Two more girls ambushed us, and Natalie broke out from my side to join their clique. I believe one was Whitehall's youngest, while the other I failed to recognize. They... began to loudly demean me... to insult our house, calling me a "Regicidiac spawn," the "bandit in the making," "turncoat rat," and similar hogwash, along with... uh... downplaying your marriage prospects. Then, after making sure every single one of the bypassers had a glimpse of the scene, they started away wherever they pleased with a wild gaggle."
"I... I'm afraid I... failed to live up to the promise given to Sir Randolf and escort his daughter back." The lad finishes, trying to hide his hurt behind self-deprecating humor.
"...Duplicitous viper!" you finally comment, shocked - things are worse than you thought, "What woodwork asp accosted Randolf Atterberry to bore such a fiend?!"
You cover your mouth with your palm and try to simmer down as you promised not to overreact. Still, this is a disturbing case in more ways than one: it's not the first time noble girls pick on Isidor for his lineage, but this is the first time someone from a relatively friendly family does this! You would've never believed it was possible if only Isidor did not go through his predicament. After all: Randolf the elder, unlike most of the other nobles of academic persuasion, had always been on a friendly foot with you, offering both the courtesy of pleasant casual correspondence and mutually-beneficial professional cooperation. The fact his flesh and blood could do something like this throws a shadow on him either as his daughter's father or as your friend. You will have to go through this with him the soonest you encounter him at the Academy.
Your eyes creep up silent and slouched Isidor; when he was younger, and his peers only began to pick on him, he used to take it painfully, sometimes even crying into your shoulder, but now, he looked tired and defeated, with that vibrant, full of vim sparks gone from his emerald eyes. Truth be told, he is a kind-hearted, highly-intelligent young man who aspires to improve everyone's lives through his ingenuity. Still, despite all his merits, the only peers he interacts with are two labor-family boys from the nearby sawmill and Lizzie - the youngest of the few servants working at your family's estate despite its ill reputation.
Fearful of the risk the harsh world might dim his inner light, you stand up and approach him, silently arresting him in a warm embrace. "Don't let it get to you, Isi: perhaps, I'd send her a card at the coming fuge, thanking her for emancipating me from the risk of ever having to free you from her poisonous clutches." As you hug your pride and joy, Isidor buries his face into your neck, not shaking or crying, just hurt.
"It will always be this way, isn't it?" you hear him mumble quietly, and his words stab you like a searing knife, "They will always treat you and me like this, don't they? They will never settle until we're gone, just like Dad."
You try to pick words to discard his notion, to allay his fear, and to instill confidence, but you lack it yourself, and all that you feel is indignation and fury stirring in your heart like a desert whirlwind, causing your blood vessels to drum a savage beat.
Some people wake up to the sharp sensation of falling in their dreams, while others may experience ejection from their delusions by the overpowering pleasure of fear. As for you, the wild drumming of your heart and the angry clench of your fists pulled you back from the dream world. First, you check for the camp candle, as you don't recall turning off the light and saving the fuel. Thankfully, the device was extinguished, meaning Davon was thoughtful enough to curtail your forgetfulness. Then, you look at your steel protector, who notices your awakedness and greets you with his tiny "stepping" morning dance, just like he does. And just as usual, his eccentricity dented your less-than-tranquil mood.
Pull your wits together, Katherine: you've got a metascope to find and an old conspiracy to unveil. You think, reaching into your pocket for another "tranquilizer." A moment later, you wind up the spring of a music locket adorned with glow stones and moving engravings of your hometown's spires, Yorvic's crest, and outlines of Isidor, yourself, and your dad. It was one of Isidor's first trinkets, which he gifted to you on your 25th birthday. Ever since then, you held it as a treasure and used it whenever you needed to calm yourself. And same as amid the social travails of your home country, its soothing effect brings you back the sense of clarity in these long-dead halls. Finally, you exhale, hide it close to your heart, and pack your humble camp inventory, strapping the articles to Davon's back.
But as you ride out your living portative siege weapon, a new surprise awaits you, sticking out of the closest to your overnight cell rot pile. You halt Davon and watch down at the torn apart creature, terribly reminding a gigantic chitinous centipede. Were... they always there? Did Dave butcher one of them while you were sleeping? It's blood still looked fresh, so you murmur to your warden: "Is... this your doing?"
In reply, the steel hull shakes to the sides in rejection, albeit you don't find it convincing. The "Do you know that I know that you're lying, right?" question dances on your tongue, but you don't voice it. Instead, you quickly glance at your automaton, noticing a few new minor dents on its plating.
"You didn't sustain much punishment, didn't you?" In response, the hull shakes sideways again, de-facto blowing up the prior statement of unawareness. You shake your head, simultaneously endeared by how watchful your bodyguard is and, at the same time, bemused by his occasional goofiness.
Still, you are in a bit of a pickle: you suspect there are two routes to other levels, but you have zero ideas of where they would lead and what you would find there... or perhaps what would find you there.
Proceed via:
[] The corridor in which you heard echoes of water splashes
[] The section where you sensed faint air currents.
As you gradually fire up emotionally, your hand drifts over runic fire wands, brushing one of them as you contemplate "lighting" up those cells infested with incessantly hissing menaces.
"Dave," You finally whisper to your iron companion, "Be ready to fight as I'm about to scorch them out of their crevices." In a familiar acknowledging gesture, the chassis tilts forward for half a heartbeat, with you shortly opening the lid of Davon's cockpit and staring into the hisses-animated darkness.
Finally, you muster your resolve and nimbly crack the safety seal on the wand, lighting up the stairway with warm light emitted from the activated rod. Its tiny amber fire consumes the wood, inching closer and closer and closer to its rune-inscribed core segment. Perfectly aware of what happens when a rune comes in direct contact with its conceptual element, you toss the projectile into one of the holes from where, according to your hearing, most of the hisses were coming. Sharp like a crack of a lightning strike, the chorus of hisses turns into unholy screeching cacophony, and you see the distorted shadows of the miniature but numerous and ill-tempered creatures dance on the walls of the infested stone-cut cell.
Wasting not a moment, you dive back into the safety of Davon's hull and lock the lid securely shut as the audial chaos ensues, muffled by the isolation of Davon's steel. You hear clicks of claws against the ancient stonework, startlingly loud, pained screeches of the vermins outside, and a few heavy metallic thumps against something fleshy, with shrill screeches following right after. The pungent smell of smoke and burnt flesh soon makes it through the slits and cracks in Davon's shaking chassis, confirming the macabre butchering scenery with pyromaniac vibes outside that your imagination was painting. But just as the stampede seemed to slow down, you heard the curious roar, most likely voiced by the larger creature from the opposite side of the divide. Not taking any chances, you unroll from the semi-fetal pose (in which you waited through the bacchanalia), reach for Davon's controls, and pilot him away through the tall gateway to the lower levels, not bothering to look back.
You have little clue how long you spurred your steel companion at joints-integrity-threatening speeds through the long-dead hallways of the complex. Your mental faculties begin to return only when the surroundings change, and you find yourself on a spacious new floor, starting at an intricate effigy doubling as a signpost with partially-preserved engravings. As you hold your breath to listen to the surroundings, the absence of the visceral screeches finally encourages you to open Davon's top lid and assess his status.
With the alchemistric-mechanical lantern in your hands and on still-shaky legs, you hit the surface to make a quick roundelay around Dave, who courteously lowered his hull to facilitate your disembarking. A quick inspection reveals that your chariot golem sustained no damage besides a few minor scratches on the shield plates and a few particularly gross gore splatters on his mechanical limbs. As you wrap up this little inspection satisfied, a certain sense of pride resurfaces: you made it through the first encounter with hostile beasts unharmed despite not having the budget to hire Rosanrican mercenaries for this lengthy expedition and not trusting any of the local sellswords. Ha!
But a short moment of internal jubilation concludes with a pat on Davon's hood shielding, and you turn around to flush the light at your immediate surroundings. You find yourself standing at the center of a vast hall with many arched side gateways to smaller subsections, somewhat reminiscent of a conventional library or a gigantic warehouse layout. And apparently, you stopped exactly where a reception or redistribution desk might've been eons ago, with a wide column carrying direction pointers and other essential trivia towering above.
This new floor appears to be more intact than the previous one, with most arches, columns, and internal walls between the sections featuring only minor signs of damage. The space looks carefully planned, and glancing at the floor reveals signs of a peculiar gutter or chute - too geometrically correct to be something without a utilitarian purpose, such as rail transportation or fluids drainage. But there is only so much you can study without moving further from the central aisle into the side branches and corridors. Before you do so, you carefully climb atop a well-preserved heavy desk made of a weird, ceramo-metallic obsidian-esque material and stare at the column's inscriptions. But alas, the symbols are faded, and all you can make out from the precursors' late common language are the word "storehouse," a suffix of a word related to manufacturing or processing, and an even more degraded couple of symbols related to water.
You sigh in mild frustration from being unable to decypher the worn-down signs, which makes you register an oddity: the air is still fresh relative to the depth at which you are right now! There must be a concealed air shaft nearby or a multiple of them, still passing breathable air down to these subterranean-pests-infested halls. A faint grin creeps as you realize the testament to the late Reisorians' and Almafey architecture that endured tens of thousands of years as derelicts. Thrilled by the prospect of diving deeper into a well-preserved historical site you uncovered, you somewhat clumsily crawl up into Davon's piloting cradle, prompting him to march beyond the now-familiar aisle.
And with the measured, methodical stomps of your walking fortress, you come across increasingly more findings in the interconnected floor section, which you surmised to be storage cells. Most of them host nothing but the rack carcasses made out of the same mysterious material as the main gates, filled with rot that, at some distant point, must've been containers stored at them. You come across several sealed containers made out of this decay-resistant metal. Yet, you cannot open them nor locate any inscriptions describing their contents. In more than half of the storage sections, the floor is buried under the tides of weird, puffy beige rot of unknown origins that resembles heaps of particularly puffy snow. Passing those, you hold your breath and cover your face with a handkerchief, protecting yourself from ingesting the clouds raised by Davon's marching.
But nothing makes you stop in awe like passing to the rear section of this gigantic warehouse and witnessing the vast "sea" of this alien rot, stretching across multiple separate cells, with some effigies, furniture elements, and other artifacts sticking out of it like from under a landslide or quicksands, with only carved columns in intersections protruding from the submerged bottom all the way to the ceiling like mythical titans, immune to time and the literal tide of decay caused by it. You spend no less than half an hour starting at it, noticing sporadic chunks of machinery and containers sticking out of it. Whatever this particular floor was keeping, it wasn't cultural artifacts or knowledge. However, on the opposite wall, separated from you by this "sea of rot," you spot the vague outlines of Pheotor carved as a part of an enormous relief etching. But as enticing as these findings are, you dare not submerge even partially into these cotton-like waves, begrudgingly turning away to explore the rest of the floor.
Mulling on how significant of a discovery a glimpse at the precursors' geographical knowledge could've been, you barely restrain yourself from marching Davon through the dust & rot tide. Yet, another discovery soon wash the persistent idea out of your head: you found precursors themselves! Well, not alive, of course: in one peculiar storage cell, both entrances of which were obstructed by makeshift barricades, the light of your lantern brushes against seizable bones.
Having Davon bulldoze through a minor hill of debris, you soon get a better view of the scene. You register a pile of ancient bones by the wall, and half of them look too large to belong to contemporary roths. By the direction of, presumably, thigh bones, you get the impression that these two precursors died leaning with their backs against the barricaded wall of this storage cell. The smaller person probably leaned onto the larger one, who, judging by the skull shape and presence of horns, was a reisorian. Were they... hiding from something? The placement of the crates and the haphazard obstructions reinforce this theory.
Looking around, you noticed the second - a smaller - pile of bones in one of the corners, hidden behind the rubble. Leaving Davon in the cell's entrance, you carefully sneak to the third deceased. The skeleton was less scattered than the other two, and you could make out its posthumous pose: curled in a ball as if in pain, crushing terror, or both. Judging by the sizes and characteristic flanks of the skull, it was an almafey female, possibly a relatively young one. Looking closely, you notice something else: there's something faintly glittery under her palm bones.
Giving it a thought and then biting your lower lip pensively, you procure leather gloves from your pocket and don them before reaching for the object. As the bones, with hushed clutter, give way to what looks like a golden fetish of sorts, you can't help but feel somewhat guilty for taking away the last solace of a girl that died thousands of years ago. But the scientist in you takes reign over Katherine-the-girl, and you shed more light on the artifact.
The object in your hand, albeit dirtied and mildly deformed, is unmistakenly made of either ancient gold or a gold-based fusion. It is delicate and resembles a geometrical pattern reminiscent of a lily or chaliced dancing flame. At the back of your mind, you recall seeing this pattern somewhere, but the details elude you. Tantalized by the missing context, you dig deeper into your memory, and, finally, you remember: you saw this symbol on one of the ceremonial urns recovered by Kathorian scriveners. Yes - it began to resurface: quite uncharacteristically for themselves, daevish scholars from Ussar decided to attend Lund's exposition of precursors' artifacts, bringing some from their homeland for the expo! It was quite a misguiding show: most attendees and scholars were more interested in the exotic guests than their contributions to historiographical and archeological exchange. But not you, evidently, as you managed to imprint fragments of lore on the cult of the life-giving flame practiced by many almafey in ancient Eucad.
Long-range travel was standard in the late eras of precursors' reign up to their mysterious collapse, which led to significant foreign population enclaves in the larger settlements. This ceremonial - most likely prayer - fetish only reinforces your assumption that this place was inhabited during the precursor's last era and might have seen its collapse around the time of the extinction event or maybe even after it to some degree, ultimately succumbing to a cascade failure or some freakish force-measure, the marks of which you now observe.
Satisfied by your archeologic acumen, you sigh and look at the object in your hands again: its delicate weave shaped into a burning flower almost makes you feel a bit warmer and safer in this kingdom of dust and darkness, and your glance slips down to the object's "owner." A brief moment of contemplation follows, and, with the utmost care, you lean over the antique almafey girl, carefully returning the trinket to her dead grasp. You came here for the metascope, not to rob the deceased.
Then, after hopping back into Davon and leaving the peculiar storage cell behind, you spend about an hour and a half slowly riding around the enormous floor level, searching for other peculiarities and exciting spots. Still, you don't find anything except for small fragments of bones - likely remnants of the stragglers from the floor above and the sounds of water from one of the lengthy, half-collapsed corridors. Also, to your great confusion, you register faint air currents in one branch of the level, but your attempts to find the source of ventilation fail once you start feeling light-headed, and your body hurries to inform you of the last time you rested.
Succumbing to the needs of your flesh, you break down an improvised camp in a storage cell not far from the one you found the living blaze effigy in. You may not be of the most skittish sort, especially compared to the Rosanrican court darlings and socialites, who wrinkle their noses whenever the name of your house is mentioned, but the assumption of sleeping among the dead is just too morbid for you. You set up the sleeping bag, the "camping candle," and cut the enclosure away from the spooky ruins via parking Davon as a barricade. Even though he has no tactile senses, you rub his frontal plated hood affectionately: he sure did earn your praise today, to which he "nods" forward in acknowledgment. And just like that, under the cyan-green lights and hazes emanating from your friend and protector's soul engine, you sneak into the sleeping bag, procuring your journal and cataloging the findings and impressions over a chunk of chocolate brick you took from the home Islands.
With writing accouterment procured, you hastily scribble the findings, thoughts, and impressions from the first leg of the "dive," trying to outrun the amassing sleepiness with the quill. You calligraphically ponder about the purpose of the entrance hall, which terribly reminds you of the carriages and river ferry depot at Lund. You heard rumors of bhiroths recovering well-preserved clockwork chariots of precursors from Eldheitaed vaults and even finding an entire subterranean lane network for them. Perhaps, what you saw above was a part of this lane at some point? If so, then this vault might eventually lead to even more discoveries! Thinking of the vault itself, you can't help but mentally "promote" it from a standard storage outpost, many of which are scattered near the Ars Ocean's shore, to a settlement: there's no way such an immense, hooked to logistic chains, warehousing capacity would be used for anything less than a settlement. And where's a city, there are administrative archives. You need to find them.
Mildly encouraged, you briefly pause and begin to illustrate your interpretation of the passed floors' layouts. The puffy tail of your quill twitches like a butterfly drawn to the flame as you sketch, and sketch, and... sketch... and...
You observe the slow yet sure propagation of schematics on the whiteboard. Isidor can be messy sometimes, especially when he's over-excited or proportionally exhausted, but never with drafting his ideas. Never!
"Isi?" you say, allowing yourself to pass the threshold of his little workshop, "Isi, why haven't you joined us for dinner? Margaret made your favorite Eastshire pastries, and I'd let you know your absence did a number on her mood and confidence." You explain yourself while passing by the tables filled with brass spare parts, blueprints, and notes to one side and the tall windows separating you from the rainy Soltsveig weather to the other. The black-haired boy does not respond to your query, continuing to scribble after a short pause, albeit now with a guilty look glued to his face.
"Come now, Isidor," you speak gently, stopping your thread behind the back of your precious younger brother not to be overbearing, "Is it because of your today's outing with Atterberry's girl?" You know it must be it, but give your little sibling some breathing room.
For a moment, the scribbling stops for a few lengthy heartbeats. You observe the tiny, short-lived tilt of your brother's nape: he is struggling to either spill the beans or keep it all to himself, foolishly thinking you - for the first time ever - would fail to decypher his attempts to ward you from his problems. Soon, the scribbling continues, but you can't overlook the uncertainty and twitches in his hand's motions. He's at his limit.
"Isi... you know I can see through you, and your silence only makes me more concerned," You flank him and slowly lean against the edge of the closest workbench, giving your brother a concerned look, "Please, if it would make you feel at ease, I promise not to overreact or invite myself to act as your proxy head-on."
The young, dark-haired lad with bright green eyes gives you a sulky look and capitulates to your persistence, putting down the charcoal piece with which he was scribbling his schematics. "Yes, it's because of the... uh, outing with Natalie Atterberry," the chap says, observing your reaction, which was withheld for now. You blink with a lopsided, sadly-confirming grin and let him continue.
"It started out well enough - I zealously stuck to the etiquette you and Margaret taught me and, for some time, it felt like we were on the same wave: she asked me about the ideas and inventions I am pursuing, and I tried to fancy her intelligence and tastes by inquiring of the city's latest events and performances that left her thrilled. About an hour in, I... I really believed we might become friends..."
"But?" you continued for him, narrowing on the reason that left him in such an inadequately sorry state for a bright lad of his disposition.
"But when we arrived at Dunworth Point market..." your brother takes a pause not unlike a steed would make before going for the second lap to brave a daring obstacle, "Two more girls ambushed us, and Natalie broke out from my side to join their clique. I believe one was Whitehall's youngest, while the other I failed to recognize. They... began to loudly demean me... to insult our house, calling me a "Regicidiac spawn," the "bandit in the making," "turncoat rat," and similar hogwash, along with... uh... downplaying your marriage prospects. Then, after making sure every single one of the bypassers had a glimpse of the scene, they started away wherever they pleased with a wild gaggle."
"I... I'm afraid I... failed to live up to the promise given to Sir Randolf and escort his daughter back." The lad finishes, trying to hide his hurt behind self-deprecating humor.
"...Duplicitous viper!" you finally comment, shocked - things are worse than you thought, "What woodwork asp accosted Randolf Atterberry to bore such a fiend?!"
You cover your mouth with your palm and try to simmer down as you promised not to overreact. Still, this is a disturbing case in more ways than one: it's not the first time noble girls pick on Isidor for his lineage, but this is the first time someone from a relatively friendly family does this! You would've never believed it was possible if only Isidor did not go through his predicament. After all: Randolf the elder, unlike most of the other nobles of academic persuasion, had always been on a friendly foot with you, offering both the courtesy of pleasant casual correspondence and mutually-beneficial professional cooperation. The fact his flesh and blood could do something like this throws a shadow on him either as his daughter's father or as your friend. You will have to go through this with him the soonest you encounter him at the Academy.
Your eyes creep up silent and slouched Isidor; when he was younger, and his peers only began to pick on him, he used to take it painfully, sometimes even crying into your shoulder, but now, he looked tired and defeated, with that vibrant, full of vim sparks gone from his emerald eyes. Truth be told, he is a kind-hearted, highly-intelligent young man who aspires to improve everyone's lives through his ingenuity. Still, despite all his merits, the only peers he interacts with are two labor-family boys from the nearby sawmill and Lizzie - the youngest of the few servants working at your family's estate despite its ill reputation.
Fearful of the risk the harsh world might dim his inner light, you stand up and approach him, silently arresting him in a warm embrace. "Don't let it get to you, Isi: perhaps, I'd send her a card at the coming fuge, thanking her for emancipating me from the risk of ever having to free you from her poisonous clutches." As you hug your pride and joy, Isidor buries his face into your neck, not shaking or crying, just hurt.
"It will always be this way, isn't it?" you hear him mumble quietly, and his words stab you like a searing knife, "They will always treat you and me like this, don't they? They will never settle until we're gone, just like Dad."
You try to pick words to discard his notion, to allay his fear, and to instill confidence, but you lack it yourself, and all that you feel is indignation and fury stirring in your heart like a desert whirlwind, causing your blood vessels to drum a savage beat.
Some people wake up to the sharp sensation of falling in their dreams, while others may experience ejection from their delusions by the overpowering pleasure of fear. As for you, the wild drumming of your heart and the angry clench of your fists pulled you back from the dream world. First, you check for the camp candle, as you don't recall turning off the light and saving the fuel. Thankfully, the device was extinguished, meaning Davon was thoughtful enough to curtail your forgetfulness. Then, you look at your steel protector, who notices your awakedness and greets you with his tiny "stepping" morning dance, just like he does. And just as usual, his eccentricity dented your less-than-tranquil mood.
Pull your wits together, Katherine: you've got a metascope to find and an old conspiracy to unveil. You think, reaching into your pocket for another "tranquilizer." A moment later, you wind up the spring of a music locket adorned with glow stones and moving engravings of your hometown's spires, Yorvic's crest, and outlines of Isidor, yourself, and your dad. It was one of Isidor's first trinkets, which he gifted to you on your 25th birthday. Ever since then, you held it as a treasure and used it whenever you needed to calm yourself. And same as amid the social travails of your home country, its soothing effect brings you back the sense of clarity in these long-dead halls. Finally, you exhale, hide it close to your heart, and pack your humble camp inventory, strapping the articles to Davon's back.
But as you ride out your living portative siege weapon, a new surprise awaits you, sticking out of the closest to your overnight cell rot pile. You halt Davon and watch down at the torn apart creature, terribly reminding a gigantic chitinous centipede. Were... they always there? Did Dave butcher one of them while you were sleeping? It's blood still looked fresh, so you murmur to your warden: "Is... this your doing?"
In reply, the steel hull shakes to the sides in rejection, albeit you don't find it convincing. The "Do you know that I know that you're lying, right?" question dances on your tongue, but you don't voice it. Instead, you quickly glance at your automaton, noticing a few new minor dents on its plating.
"You didn't sustain much punishment, didn't you?" In response, the hull shakes sideways again, de-facto blowing up the prior statement of unawareness. You shake your head, simultaneously endeared by how watchful your bodyguard is and, at the same time, bemused by his occasional goofiness.
Still, you are in a bit of a pickle: you suspect there are two routes to other levels, but you have zero ideas of where they would lead and what you would find there... or perhaps what would find you there.
Proceed via:
[] The corridor in which you heard echoes of water splashes
[] The section where you sensed faint air currents.
Last edited:
6. The air shaft
Teloch
ಠ_ಠ
- Location
- The middle of nowhere
As your vehicle and companion navigate through the darkness of the ancient warehouse's corridors, you can't help but ponder on what is going on above in the world of the living. Is it morning or afternoon there? Maybe there's a gentle rain there, or the opposite - a warm springtime day with all the trees and grasses reaching out for the sun's warmth? The sun... As these seemingly spontaneous thoughts and imagery pop up in your mind, you finally register them in the context of where you are now - deep down in millennia-old darkness, insignificant, unsure of the fruitfulness of your expedition, and almost alone, like a lonely candle fire in a place where time lost its meaning. You sense the spurring fury that woke you up today was shaken off unnoticeably yet thoroughly with Davon's steady mechanical gait and the enveloping darkness.
Keenly aware of the newly spotted symptom's nature, you refer to the easiest method to boost morale and resist succumbing to claustrophobia and paranoia - you playfully knock on Davon's cockpit dashboard. The giant responds as he did all those years ago when you, clutching to your favorite plush seal, snuck up into his cockpit to hide from the oceanside storms, sliding his frontal hood plate to the popular alvizian nursery rhyme. Nostalgia spreads instantly, filling the cavity of your heart into which fear was starting to seep in a few heartbeats before. Distracted, you smile and gently brush the edge of Dave's hood plate, fully aware he won't sense it.
As Davon's chassis reaches the border of the warehouses' chamber, you recompose yourself after weathering the first-of-more-to-come waves of subterranean paranoia and lift the lantern, spilling its warm light onto the dust-caked surroundings. Before you stand a badly damaged, half-collapsed gateway, with its doors lying flat on the outside floor; the wall is thick, and its shape on the other side is cut to form a cylindric corridor. Midst all this tectonics-caused (at least you hope it was natural) disrepair, you spot a fragment of an engraved tablet lying on the floor, evidently struck down with the chunk of the wall it was attached to. As you slowly dismount to investigate the writing on it, the symbols start to make sense: it's written in late reisorian; the intact side reads as "air," and the partial chunk, you conjecture, was meant to be "mine" or "hole" or "passage" with the attached number two.
Stirred by the hint, the picture emerges in your mind after falling into a pattern thanks to the previous observations. You peeked behind the gateway, swaying the lantern's beam to the sides. To your right is spotlight-consuming darkness, stretching so far away and disrupted only by those obsidian-colored metal protrusions. To your left, the view is somewhat different: instead of the gaping void in the middle of the corridor, the spotlight danced on the blade-like metallic debris filling the duct, while on the ground lies a fossilized mess of corroded metals mixed with puddles of water brought by the air from the outside.
The air... You hold your breath and try to discern any sounds from the darkness once your cheeks sense the faint brush of air currents —nothing: no hum or wailing of the wind entrapped by a cunningly placed intake of a shaft. After pondering a little, you decide to go with the current - deeper into the corridor filled with industrial debris. With your mind made up, you crawl up into Dave's cradle seat like a startled squirrel and assume direct control of his chassis: it's easier for you not to miss a thing this way, and you could use some confidence boost from controlling all this armored mass.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch...
As Davon's heavy stompers march through the debris, the slow but sensible air current outpaces the gait of your living chariot. It tickles the tips of your ears with its coolness and smells humid. Perhaps it did rain outside overnight... or whatever part of the day you slept through.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch. You witlessly proceed.
For some reason, you recall one magnificent after-rain sunset in the lead, blood, and pale gold hues you witnessed about a month ago, on a day indigenous tribesmen tried to rob you.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch. With each passed pile of debris, you submerge deeper into your musings.
Yet, here you are now: riding through the forest of shattered antique blades, sticking from the moist floor in a dark, foul-aired passage. It's as if you ended up trapped amid a forgotten battlefield that took place in the maw of a gigantic monster, sensing its humid breath on your skin. An uncomfortable thought creeps in like a snake that found its shelter in your bag: what if this place is not as dead as you think it is?
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch... clang!
As a sudden, metallic noise emerges from behind Dave's port side, you violently turn his chassis around and frantically comb the passage with the lantern's spotlight. Instinctively, you backpedal Davon from the perceived threat was the noise source. Yet, there's nothing - no signs of movement of any cavernous pests or grotesque shadowy horrors your imagination came up with instantly. After hiding behind the closest pile of broken obsidian metal, you spend about a minute simply staring, with the goosebumps on your back gradually subsiding. Finally, you calm down and exhale: it must've been just the vibration from Dave's stampede that caused a loose iron shard to fall to the rocky ground.
But your relief is cut short once the spotlight of your lantern catches the sign of movement some distance further into the tunnel. Startled, you freeze again, resuming breathing only after the disturbance reappears less than a heartbeat later. It's a blade — a wide obsidian blade spinning slow-ish, forming a corridor-wide fan with its four other siblings in different degrees of disrepair. You can even see another fan behind this one rotating even slower, albeit it lacks one and a half blades in comparison. As the shock fades, the astonishment takes its place.
Cautiously, you dislodge from the cockpit, with the damp & brittle debris on the floor unpleasantly greeting your boots' soles. Absent-mindedly, you shed light on the fans, registering a heavy cylindrical core from which the blades span, the seemingly unconnected to the wall circular metallic frame containing the rotating fan, and seven peculiar metallic bulges on the wall aligned with the levitating fan frame.
About as abruptly as the disappearance of your thoughts some moments ago, they were returning with the ferocity of a mountain river. In many years of your practice as an archeologist and historian, you have never seen a functioning gizmo of the ancients like this one. Does it run on runic principles? Or is it the alchemistry of incomparable potency? Or, perhaps it works on some yet undiscovered by contemporary scholars natural law? You have no idea, but you are absolutely sure that you have never been more inclined to believe in the speculated marvels of predecessors, such as the clockwork caravan route under Eldheitaed mountains and the hovering palace island over Cullanor Lake. If only Isidor was here with you, he would've been totally swept with rapture from this sight.
But regardless of how marveled you've got from witnessing a barely functioning, half-fossilized piece of precursor's tech in what became their industrial graveyard, the pesky notions of reality remind of themselves, and you register yourself standing at a dead end. Unless you are willing to hop through those blades or sabotage the surviving fans to make way. Concerned over such options (or rather the lack of), you crawl back into Davon's saddle pit, clutching to the levers and reassuming control.
"There must be some way in this shaft," you mutter to your steel guardian as you inspect the walls for possible passageways, "They had to maintain these installations, which means it's unrealistic they would disassemble half of the shaft to fiddle with the ones in the middle." As you say that, Davon flickers his ghostly green lights to signal his agreement. For some reason, it gives you a bit of ease as you inspect the surroundings.
Sure enough, you soon stumble at what looks like a side corridor barred with debris due to seismic damage. Just like all the pathways in this dungeon complex, it was designed by Reisorians so Dave could easily fit into it should the debris be removed. You also notice a badly worn-out fragment of engraving right above the passage; the combination of runes is hard to read, but, with high probability, you assume it contained the noun related to manufacturing and number one; the manufactory floor number one, perhaps?
Yet, your emerging optimism is soon dampened by the new reveal: as the lantern's spotlight slips behind the flimsy wall of debris, you notice something entirely alien: greenish-yellow globules of the size of handheld basket scattered across the pathway, with the trembling "snout" webs connecting them. At first, you think it's because of the air currents generated by the fans, but then you notice the globules themselves pulsing, like some exotic carnivorous fungi or corals, or even worm colonies. You also find a hole the size of a hog or a small sheep under the debris barricade barring your way, with what looks like a mummified limb of those cavernous goblins from the level above lying detached in this little "tunnel." No alarming sounds are coming from the darkness by the other side, yet it does not dissuade you from the thought of something unknown yet organic and quite possibly hungry lying in wait there.
Squeamish, you continue your search for other pathways, and after a couple more minutes of staring at the walls, you notice a barely visible crack in the wall, betrayed by a hole with badly corroded gear facets sticking out and another engraving on top of it, reading along the lines of "maintenance port #3." It takes you some time to double-check and verify the engraving before something in your mind clicks: this must be the entrance to the section's control room, quite possibly connected to the storage, too!
Even though you would not call yourself even an amateur burglar, it doesn't take you long to project how this doorway looked in its prime times and what part of the locking mechanism the gears were connected to initially. Apparently, there should've been a socketed lever once, pulling which lifted the control gear and undone the blocker bulks. Alas, the presumed lever was missing along with its socket, with the mechanism's innards exposed to you like an opened ribcage of an animal. With some effort, you poke some gears with the tip of Davon's in-built pincer.
Fast-forward a few more moments, via Davon's armored hands, you press up the least stable of the gears, hear a faint clatter, and push the door through its resistance. Your grin grows wider the more the dirtied metal lid pries open. Yet, it disappears when the decrepit internal hinges of the entrance emit a hushed but agonized final creak and break, dropping the heavy chunk of obsidian metal that collapses inward the space it was sealing, raising the clouds of dust older than the migration of landers from Yrsengard to Pheotor.
Unfortunately, you must cough and suffer through the dust and odor, which is even worse than your little brothers' hidden barn stash filled with years-old brochures of Lynd's glamorous songstresses and actresses. Finally, you persevere through this ordeal, navigating Davon into the chamber undisturbed for millennia. The air feels different - stagnant, perhaps, with only fresh gusts from the shaft, making the experience tolerable. Inside, however, the limelight of your alchemistric lantern reveals several contraptions in arguably the best state you have seen so far in this derelict and a lonely pile of bones scattered by the air shaft's wall.
And, of course, it is the morbid curiosity that takes hold of you first, pulling you closer to the skeleton's whereabouts before investigating the contraptions. After amassing enough courage to dismount, you kneel over the seizable pile of bones. Despite this cell being located next to the miraculously (somewhat) functioning air shaft, the thick walls and apparently diverted or cluttered air ducts limited the spread of humidity or alien objects or presences, preserving the remains in... well, actual calcified skeletal form, instead of nearly totally decomposed bone remains above. Curious, you slowly lean over the antique corpse.
It is unmistakably a Reisorian and almost certainly a male. A mature, if not a senior one, at that. That much you can deduct from its horn patterns, sizes, and pelvis composition. Despite the relatively good preservation in this "time capsule," the bones are fairly scattered, with the massive skull lying apart from its lower jaw. But even then, you are almost sure that death came for him when he was leaning with his back against the wall: this theory is supported by the angling of his leg bones. But even as your mental focus moves in search of other clues, you can't get the picture of the skull from your mind: it looks like he drew his last breaths either screaming or gaping into the nothingness of this room, all alone. You can't help but shudder at this thought.
Suddenly feeling disenchanted with coroner's routines, you distance yourself from the morbid spot, refocusing all of your attention on other attributes of the room. A relatively well-preserved lever is sticking from the floor socket, and what appears to be a wide half-circular gate lid with a neighboring pillar is situated on the opposite side of the cell. Aside from these points of interest and the skeleton, there are only decrepit shelves littered with unrecognizable fossilized nuggets and occasional deformed metallic tools of unknown purpose and humongous size.
You slowly drive Davon toward the massive cylindrical lid with a pillar and shed light on those. The lid appears to be made from some unknown, brass-like metal that has preserved well through the ages but is unremarkable otherwise. The same can't be said about the neighboring pillar: it is segmented, made from the same metal, and is composed of a vertical sequence of drums and discs of the same diameter, bearing engravings. Your inner linguist springs up from the melancholy instantly as your eyes dart toward the symbols and another - bigger - gravure on the wall.
A few minutes of frantic translation attempts and consultation with the log regarding this dungeon's layout bear fruit: you presume to be in the dungeon's auxiliary second-and-a-half layer. The southern air shaft that leads to the third floor from the top. If the previously-encountered pointers and the notice etchings before you are to be believed, the third floor is composed of three large areas somehow related to production and two other halls, whose precise translation eluded you due to the usage of unfamiliar glyphs. Most you could surmise from the composition of those nouns is that one has something to do with power or, perhaps, energy, and the other one with air and water. What you found more critical is that under the manufacturing halls, the gravure before you indicated the fourth level - the "outer habitat."
A grin once again graces your face: if the fans are still working, there is a solid chance that spectromerters stashed in the depths of this archives are at least semi-functional, too! All that separates you from the coveted widget are the sealed or blocked pathways to the production halls, the building yards themselves, the said "habitat," and... the unknown number of deeper levels and obstacles. But hey! You finally began understanding this place and have been faring reasonably well so far. It's a good thing you are well-packed with supplies for a few more stops along the way.
Feeling encouraged, you gently tap Dave's levers, receiving an acknowledging shake of his hull before focusing back on the segmented pillar. It appears to be some sort of a controllable pathway, with either "Manufactory 2" or "Manufactory 3" routes being available choices should you arrange the slices in the correct order. There is also another cell like the one you stand in marked on the topmost "drum" further to the side, suggesting there might be more pathways behind those still working fans, leading to either "Manufactory 3" or the "Air&Water-something." The issue is, you have serious doubts Davon would be nimble enough to step through the gap between the blades in time and that other lever sticking out from the floor and looking toward the centrifuge might stop them for good, stopping the air inflow to the depths. Oh, and then there's that first infested by pulsing blobs pathway, potentially leading to the "Power room" or "Manufactory 1." That place... doesn't look safe.
You sigh ever so slightly and consider your odds for each route. After all, you feel closer to your goal than ever before. You can almost imagine obtaining it already.
Take the path (select challenge):
[] The corridor splattered with suspicious slime (skirmish chance: ???)
-[] Burst a fire wand (2 remaining)
-[] Throw a smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Throw a flashbang (1 remaining)
-[] Don't use anything (save the expendables for later)
[] Through the portage device toward the manufactory #2 (Katherine's easy INT check (13) (highly-successful preliminaries bonus), Katherine's luck roll)
[] Through the portage device toward the manufactory #3 (Katherine's easy INT check (13) (highly-successful preliminaries bonus), Katherine's luck roll)
[] Try pulling the presumably fan-controlling lever and go to the further pathway behind the fans (breaking chance: 2/5, Katherine's luck roll)
[] Try destroying the remaining fans to clear the way and proceed further (Davon's auto-pass due to high STR, Davon's luck roll)
[] Try to slip through the rotating blades with Davon (Davon's hard SPD check (20), Davon's hard COORD check (20), Davon's Luck roll)
Contingency fight plan (if the fight triggers):
[] Leave it to Davon (Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Pilot Davon (1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's melee combat roll, 1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Leave fighting to Davon while lobbing expendables from the cockpit (1/2 Katherine's object usage roll + 2/3 Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
-[] Fire wand (2 remaining)
-[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
Keenly aware of the newly spotted symptom's nature, you refer to the easiest method to boost morale and resist succumbing to claustrophobia and paranoia - you playfully knock on Davon's cockpit dashboard. The giant responds as he did all those years ago when you, clutching to your favorite plush seal, snuck up into his cockpit to hide from the oceanside storms, sliding his frontal hood plate to the popular alvizian nursery rhyme. Nostalgia spreads instantly, filling the cavity of your heart into which fear was starting to seep in a few heartbeats before. Distracted, you smile and gently brush the edge of Dave's hood plate, fully aware he won't sense it.
As Davon's chassis reaches the border of the warehouses' chamber, you recompose yourself after weathering the first-of-more-to-come waves of subterranean paranoia and lift the lantern, spilling its warm light onto the dust-caked surroundings. Before you stand a badly damaged, half-collapsed gateway, with its doors lying flat on the outside floor; the wall is thick, and its shape on the other side is cut to form a cylindric corridor. Midst all this tectonics-caused (at least you hope it was natural) disrepair, you spot a fragment of an engraved tablet lying on the floor, evidently struck down with the chunk of the wall it was attached to. As you slowly dismount to investigate the writing on it, the symbols start to make sense: it's written in late reisorian; the intact side reads as "air," and the partial chunk, you conjecture, was meant to be "mine" or "hole" or "passage" with the attached number two.
Stirred by the hint, the picture emerges in your mind after falling into a pattern thanks to the previous observations. You peeked behind the gateway, swaying the lantern's beam to the sides. To your right is spotlight-consuming darkness, stretching so far away and disrupted only by those obsidian-colored metal protrusions. To your left, the view is somewhat different: instead of the gaping void in the middle of the corridor, the spotlight danced on the blade-like metallic debris filling the duct, while on the ground lies a fossilized mess of corroded metals mixed with puddles of water brought by the air from the outside.
The air... You hold your breath and try to discern any sounds from the darkness once your cheeks sense the faint brush of air currents —nothing: no hum or wailing of the wind entrapped by a cunningly placed intake of a shaft. After pondering a little, you decide to go with the current - deeper into the corridor filled with industrial debris. With your mind made up, you crawl up into Dave's cradle seat like a startled squirrel and assume direct control of his chassis: it's easier for you not to miss a thing this way, and you could use some confidence boost from controlling all this armored mass.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch...
As Davon's heavy stompers march through the debris, the slow but sensible air current outpaces the gait of your living chariot. It tickles the tips of your ears with its coolness and smells humid. Perhaps it did rain outside overnight... or whatever part of the day you slept through.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch. You witlessly proceed.
For some reason, you recall one magnificent after-rain sunset in the lead, blood, and pale gold hues you witnessed about a month ago, on a day indigenous tribesmen tried to rob you.
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch. With each passed pile of debris, you submerge deeper into your musings.
Yet, here you are now: riding through the forest of shattered antique blades, sticking from the moist floor in a dark, foul-aired passage. It's as if you ended up trapped amid a forgotten battlefield that took place in the maw of a gigantic monster, sensing its humid breath on your skin. An uncomfortable thought creeps in like a snake that found its shelter in your bag: what if this place is not as dead as you think it is?
Thump-splash-crunch, thump-splash-crunch... clang!
As a sudden, metallic noise emerges from behind Dave's port side, you violently turn his chassis around and frantically comb the passage with the lantern's spotlight. Instinctively, you backpedal Davon from the perceived threat was the noise source. Yet, there's nothing - no signs of movement of any cavernous pests or grotesque shadowy horrors your imagination came up with instantly. After hiding behind the closest pile of broken obsidian metal, you spend about a minute simply staring, with the goosebumps on your back gradually subsiding. Finally, you calm down and exhale: it must've been just the vibration from Dave's stampede that caused a loose iron shard to fall to the rocky ground.
But your relief is cut short once the spotlight of your lantern catches the sign of movement some distance further into the tunnel. Startled, you freeze again, resuming breathing only after the disturbance reappears less than a heartbeat later. It's a blade — a wide obsidian blade spinning slow-ish, forming a corridor-wide fan with its four other siblings in different degrees of disrepair. You can even see another fan behind this one rotating even slower, albeit it lacks one and a half blades in comparison. As the shock fades, the astonishment takes its place.
Cautiously, you dislodge from the cockpit, with the damp & brittle debris on the floor unpleasantly greeting your boots' soles. Absent-mindedly, you shed light on the fans, registering a heavy cylindrical core from which the blades span, the seemingly unconnected to the wall circular metallic frame containing the rotating fan, and seven peculiar metallic bulges on the wall aligned with the levitating fan frame.
About as abruptly as the disappearance of your thoughts some moments ago, they were returning with the ferocity of a mountain river. In many years of your practice as an archeologist and historian, you have never seen a functioning gizmo of the ancients like this one. Does it run on runic principles? Or is it the alchemistry of incomparable potency? Or, perhaps it works on some yet undiscovered by contemporary scholars natural law? You have no idea, but you are absolutely sure that you have never been more inclined to believe in the speculated marvels of predecessors, such as the clockwork caravan route under Eldheitaed mountains and the hovering palace island over Cullanor Lake. If only Isidor was here with you, he would've been totally swept with rapture from this sight.
But regardless of how marveled you've got from witnessing a barely functioning, half-fossilized piece of precursor's tech in what became their industrial graveyard, the pesky notions of reality remind of themselves, and you register yourself standing at a dead end. Unless you are willing to hop through those blades or sabotage the surviving fans to make way. Concerned over such options (or rather the lack of), you crawl back into Davon's saddle pit, clutching to the levers and reassuming control.
"There must be some way in this shaft," you mutter to your steel guardian as you inspect the walls for possible passageways, "They had to maintain these installations, which means it's unrealistic they would disassemble half of the shaft to fiddle with the ones in the middle." As you say that, Davon flickers his ghostly green lights to signal his agreement. For some reason, it gives you a bit of ease as you inspect the surroundings.
Sure enough, you soon stumble at what looks like a side corridor barred with debris due to seismic damage. Just like all the pathways in this dungeon complex, it was designed by Reisorians so Dave could easily fit into it should the debris be removed. You also notice a badly worn-out fragment of engraving right above the passage; the combination of runes is hard to read, but, with high probability, you assume it contained the noun related to manufacturing and number one; the manufactory floor number one, perhaps?
Yet, your emerging optimism is soon dampened by the new reveal: as the lantern's spotlight slips behind the flimsy wall of debris, you notice something entirely alien: greenish-yellow globules of the size of handheld basket scattered across the pathway, with the trembling "snout" webs connecting them. At first, you think it's because of the air currents generated by the fans, but then you notice the globules themselves pulsing, like some exotic carnivorous fungi or corals, or even worm colonies. You also find a hole the size of a hog or a small sheep under the debris barricade barring your way, with what looks like a mummified limb of those cavernous goblins from the level above lying detached in this little "tunnel." No alarming sounds are coming from the darkness by the other side, yet it does not dissuade you from the thought of something unknown yet organic and quite possibly hungry lying in wait there.
Squeamish, you continue your search for other pathways, and after a couple more minutes of staring at the walls, you notice a barely visible crack in the wall, betrayed by a hole with badly corroded gear facets sticking out and another engraving on top of it, reading along the lines of "maintenance port #3." It takes you some time to double-check and verify the engraving before something in your mind clicks: this must be the entrance to the section's control room, quite possibly connected to the storage, too!
Even though you would not call yourself even an amateur burglar, it doesn't take you long to project how this doorway looked in its prime times and what part of the locking mechanism the gears were connected to initially. Apparently, there should've been a socketed lever once, pulling which lifted the control gear and undone the blocker bulks. Alas, the presumed lever was missing along with its socket, with the mechanism's innards exposed to you like an opened ribcage of an animal. With some effort, you poke some gears with the tip of Davon's in-built pincer.
Fast-forward a few more moments, via Davon's armored hands, you press up the least stable of the gears, hear a faint clatter, and push the door through its resistance. Your grin grows wider the more the dirtied metal lid pries open. Yet, it disappears when the decrepit internal hinges of the entrance emit a hushed but agonized final creak and break, dropping the heavy chunk of obsidian metal that collapses inward the space it was sealing, raising the clouds of dust older than the migration of landers from Yrsengard to Pheotor.
Unfortunately, you must cough and suffer through the dust and odor, which is even worse than your little brothers' hidden barn stash filled with years-old brochures of Lynd's glamorous songstresses and actresses. Finally, you persevere through this ordeal, navigating Davon into the chamber undisturbed for millennia. The air feels different - stagnant, perhaps, with only fresh gusts from the shaft, making the experience tolerable. Inside, however, the limelight of your alchemistric lantern reveals several contraptions in arguably the best state you have seen so far in this derelict and a lonely pile of bones scattered by the air shaft's wall.
And, of course, it is the morbid curiosity that takes hold of you first, pulling you closer to the skeleton's whereabouts before investigating the contraptions. After amassing enough courage to dismount, you kneel over the seizable pile of bones. Despite this cell being located next to the miraculously (somewhat) functioning air shaft, the thick walls and apparently diverted or cluttered air ducts limited the spread of humidity or alien objects or presences, preserving the remains in... well, actual calcified skeletal form, instead of nearly totally decomposed bone remains above. Curious, you slowly lean over the antique corpse.
It is unmistakably a Reisorian and almost certainly a male. A mature, if not a senior one, at that. That much you can deduct from its horn patterns, sizes, and pelvis composition. Despite the relatively good preservation in this "time capsule," the bones are fairly scattered, with the massive skull lying apart from its lower jaw. But even then, you are almost sure that death came for him when he was leaning with his back against the wall: this theory is supported by the angling of his leg bones. But even as your mental focus moves in search of other clues, you can't get the picture of the skull from your mind: it looks like he drew his last breaths either screaming or gaping into the nothingness of this room, all alone. You can't help but shudder at this thought.
Suddenly feeling disenchanted with coroner's routines, you distance yourself from the morbid spot, refocusing all of your attention on other attributes of the room. A relatively well-preserved lever is sticking from the floor socket, and what appears to be a wide half-circular gate lid with a neighboring pillar is situated on the opposite side of the cell. Aside from these points of interest and the skeleton, there are only decrepit shelves littered with unrecognizable fossilized nuggets and occasional deformed metallic tools of unknown purpose and humongous size.
You slowly drive Davon toward the massive cylindrical lid with a pillar and shed light on those. The lid appears to be made from some unknown, brass-like metal that has preserved well through the ages but is unremarkable otherwise. The same can't be said about the neighboring pillar: it is segmented, made from the same metal, and is composed of a vertical sequence of drums and discs of the same diameter, bearing engravings. Your inner linguist springs up from the melancholy instantly as your eyes dart toward the symbols and another - bigger - gravure on the wall.
A few minutes of frantic translation attempts and consultation with the log regarding this dungeon's layout bear fruit: you presume to be in the dungeon's auxiliary second-and-a-half layer. The southern air shaft that leads to the third floor from the top. If the previously-encountered pointers and the notice etchings before you are to be believed, the third floor is composed of three large areas somehow related to production and two other halls, whose precise translation eluded you due to the usage of unfamiliar glyphs. Most you could surmise from the composition of those nouns is that one has something to do with power or, perhaps, energy, and the other one with air and water. What you found more critical is that under the manufacturing halls, the gravure before you indicated the fourth level - the "outer habitat."
A grin once again graces your face: if the fans are still working, there is a solid chance that spectromerters stashed in the depths of this archives are at least semi-functional, too! All that separates you from the coveted widget are the sealed or blocked pathways to the production halls, the building yards themselves, the said "habitat," and... the unknown number of deeper levels and obstacles. But hey! You finally began understanding this place and have been faring reasonably well so far. It's a good thing you are well-packed with supplies for a few more stops along the way.
Feeling encouraged, you gently tap Dave's levers, receiving an acknowledging shake of his hull before focusing back on the segmented pillar. It appears to be some sort of a controllable pathway, with either "Manufactory 2" or "Manufactory 3" routes being available choices should you arrange the slices in the correct order. There is also another cell like the one you stand in marked on the topmost "drum" further to the side, suggesting there might be more pathways behind those still working fans, leading to either "Manufactory 3" or the "Air&Water-something." The issue is, you have serious doubts Davon would be nimble enough to step through the gap between the blades in time and that other lever sticking out from the floor and looking toward the centrifuge might stop them for good, stopping the air inflow to the depths. Oh, and then there's that first infested by pulsing blobs pathway, potentially leading to the "Power room" or "Manufactory 1." That place... doesn't look safe.
You sigh ever so slightly and consider your odds for each route. After all, you feel closer to your goal than ever before. You can almost imagine obtaining it already.
Take the path (select challenge):
[] The corridor splattered with suspicious slime (skirmish chance: ???)
-[] Burst a fire wand (2 remaining)
-[] Throw a smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Throw a flashbang (1 remaining)
-[] Don't use anything (save the expendables for later)
[] Through the portage device toward the manufactory #2 (Katherine's easy INT check (13) (highly-successful preliminaries bonus), Katherine's luck roll)
[] Through the portage device toward the manufactory #3 (Katherine's easy INT check (13) (highly-successful preliminaries bonus), Katherine's luck roll)
[] Try pulling the presumably fan-controlling lever and go to the further pathway behind the fans (breaking chance: 2/5, Katherine's luck roll)
[] Try destroying the remaining fans to clear the way and proceed further (Davon's auto-pass due to high STR, Davon's luck roll)
[] Try to slip through the rotating blades with Davon (Davon's hard SPD check (20), Davon's hard COORD check (20), Davon's Luck roll)
Contingency fight plan (if the fight triggers):
[] Leave it to Davon (Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Pilot Davon (1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's melee combat roll, 1/2 Katherine's mounted combat roll + 1/2 Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
[] Leave fighting to Davon while lobbing expendables from the cockpit (1/2 Katherine's object usage roll + 2/3 Davon's melee combat roll, Davon's defense roll, Katherine's luck roll, Davon's luck roll)
-[] Fire wand (2 remaining)
-[] Smoke bomb (2 remaining)
-[] Flashbang (1 remaining)
Last edited: