Never mind the faint air of decrepitude or the thin layer of dusk married with the distinct odor of An Old Man Lived Here And It Didn't Go Well. In the first time minutes of them standing in the drawing room, a decorative plate edged in gold and painted with a series of dusty cherubic faces had thrown itself off the expansive mantle at directly Ellis' head. Wysteria, in the process of picking up the pieces from where they'd exploded against the wall behind him, had promptly assured them both that, "Kostos Averesch - he is one of the Nevarran death mages - assures me that it doesn't mean any real harm. Ignore it and the spirit will grow bored and go on its merry way clomping around on the third floor and rearranging all the cutlery. Though I really must congratulate you on your reflexes, Ellis. Now, if the both of you would follow me--"
What followed was a whirlwind tour through a series of cramped rooms slightly too full of the detritus of a life lived by the sort of doddering old gentleman with no heirs of note whose ramshackle estate might somehow fall, by a series of coincidences, into the hands of a young lady who didn't belong anywhere at all in Thedas. There are books and dreadful old paintings and rooms furnished for guests who almost certainly had not been present for decades, and bedroom stacked high with old clothes and papers featuring a a four poster bed whose mattress yet bore the macabre indentation of its former master.
At last, they've ended up in a large storeroom off the house's narrow kitchen. A single high window in the storeroom's wall looks out into a shriveled and weed-rotten slip of garden surrounded by an ominous stone wall which rises high enough to block nearly every scrap of sunlight from this side of the house. In the slate floor sits a trapdoor, through which lies a stairwell so upright it borders on a ladder leading down into a truly wretched root cellar.
The storeroom itself has already undergone a minor transformation. The kitchen table has been dredged into it and taken on a quality of workbench, overflowing with rulers and compasses and open books and half organized piles and piles of paper. Wysteria stands now near the center of the room, her hands on her hips and her sleeves folded back to the elbow.
"You can see why I thought this space might work as the primary workshop. I would like to open up the wall there and put in a proper set of double doors. There is a gate in the side garden and anything that needs transporting could pass through it from here and out in the alley beyond instead of being ferried through the front door and so on. And there are rooms upstairs that could be cleared away and made into secondary places of study, of course, but I suspect it will be easiest to do this one space at a time. What is your opinion of the place, Mister Rhodes-Potts?"
a haunting in high town; misadventure science trio
Never mind the faint air of decrepitude or the thin layer of dusk married with the distinct odor of An Old Man Lived Here And It Didn't Go Well. In the first time minutes of them standing in the drawing room, a decorative plate edged in gold and painted with a series of dusty cherubic faces had thrown itself off the expansive mantle at directly Ellis' head. Wysteria, in the process of picking up the pieces from where they'd exploded against the wall behind him, had promptly assured them both that, "Kostos Averesch - he is one of the Nevarran death mages - assures me that it doesn't mean any real harm. Ignore it and the spirit will grow bored and go on its merry way clomping around on the third floor and rearranging all the cutlery. Though I really must congratulate you on your reflexes, Ellis. Now, if the both of you would follow me--"
What followed was a whirlwind tour through a series of cramped rooms slightly too full of the detritus of a life lived by the sort of doddering old gentleman with no heirs of note whose ramshackle estate might somehow fall, by a series of coincidences, into the hands of a young lady who didn't belong anywhere at all in Thedas. There are books and dreadful old paintings and rooms furnished for guests who almost certainly had not been present for decades, and bedroom stacked high with old clothes and papers featuring a a four poster bed whose mattress yet bore the macabre indentation of its former master.
At last, they've ended up in a large storeroom off the house's narrow kitchen. A single high window in the storeroom's wall looks out into a shriveled and weed-rotten slip of garden surrounded by an ominous stone wall which rises high enough to block nearly every scrap of sunlight from this side of the house. In the slate floor sits a trapdoor, through which lies a stairwell so upright it borders on a ladder leading down into a truly wretched root cellar.
The storeroom itself has already undergone a minor transformation. The kitchen table has been dredged into it and taken on a quality of workbench, overflowing with rulers and compasses and open books and half organized piles and piles of paper. Wysteria stands now near the center of the room, her hands on her hips and her sleeves folded back to the elbow.
"You can see why I thought this space might work as the primary workshop. I would like to open up the wall there and put in a proper set of double doors. There is a gate in the side garden and anything that needs transporting could pass through it from here and out in the alley beyond instead of being ferried through the front door and so on. And there are rooms upstairs that could be cleared away and made into secondary places of study, of course, but I suspect it will be easiest to do this one space at a time. What is your opinion of the place, Mister Rhodes-Potts?"