faderift | [CLOSED] DON'T DUMAT OPEN INSIDE

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[CLOSED] DON'T DUMAT OPEN INSIDE

WHO: Adrasteia, Laura, Ellis, Tony, Val & Holden
WHAT: Exploration of the Temple of Dumat
WHEN: Drakonis
WHERE: Northern Orlais, Ghislain, ...The Temple of Dumat
NOTES: Mild horror; content warn as necessary; OOC Plot Information; Original Investigation Report

Though the end of winter is hardly the most pleasant time to go trekking through old ruins, returning to the excavated Shrine of Dumat in the heart of the Ghislain region of Orlais is simple enough. Thanks to the collapse of the Venatori-Ander force's hold on the region, they face no opposition and will easily find their way there. While a small contingent of Exalter Marchers has been tasked with keeping tabs on the ruin to make sure no enemy return to it, they've been wary of digging too deep into the sanctum's lowest levels. So congrats: you all get to pick up right where the last group of Riftwatchers left off (or finish what you started in the first place, Tony).

The team has been tasked with two primary objectives:

Follow up on the first team's work. Explore the ritual chamber of the shrine where the rumored "gate" is located; recover any artifacts or clues therein and retrieve as much data about the rift as possible. If anything isn't safe to bring back to the Gallows (like, say, a certain blighted Venatori mage's corpse), conduct a thorough study and then destroy whatever can't be recovered lest it fall into enemy hands. If you can figure out how to close the gate, then all the better.
Thoroughly explore the remainder of the ruin. Verify that there are no ancillary shenanigans on site beyond those found in the ritual chamber. Collect any additional information or traces of Venatori activity on site.

How This Works:
Objective One, which features the exploration of the ritual chamber with its tainted rift and the miscellaneous clues which can be found there are a free-for-all mingle zone. The whole group can interact with that area.

Objective Two, the detailed exploration of the additional chambers, will consist of two branching paths. Look for the header with your character's name in it. These sections will consist of a series of dungeon rooms featuring good old fashioned traps, puzzles, with general exploration hi-jinks encouraged.

Each chamber will be described upon entry and have its own conditions for solving the area and allowing characters to progress through the dungeon, but don't worry if you're not big on puzzles. The ruins have seen better days and what may have once been problems with definitive solutions may now be a little less rigid.

As your characters explore and attempt to solve the puzzles they come across or wander across taps, I will interject here and there with relevant updates. If at any point you get stuck, you can attempt a Perception Check by bolding the relevant section of your tag (i.e. 'She studies the runes on the doors and [blah blah blah insert the rest of the tag here.]') and putting CHECK in the subject line of your comment. I will then roll to see how much information your character manages to glean in order to provide additional hints and clues.

These clues will be oocly visible to everyone, but icly known only to the character who made the check.

If the group as a whole at any point decides they're done playing with puzzles and want the cheat codes for the current room, have the next player put SKELETON KEY in the subject line of their comment and I'll provide you with the solution. I'd much rather we have a satisfying narrative adventure than trap anyone in rooms just because folks aren't feeling a particular puzzle.

If you have any questions, ASK ME HERE.

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Green light plays off the curved walls in fitful sparks and snaps of electrical charge, Tony almost negligently holding up his hand to see by it. He goes carefully, each step considered and tested, but not slow by any means. Ready to hit the brakes if someone awful happens, or hit something awful with blasting Fade energy.

He wrinkles his nose at the smell of this place. "If we need to get all Crawling In My Skin on another weird blood lock, we should probably wipe it down first," is his suggestion, which barely echoes back to them in the oppressive silence.

No pausing to say so, though. Now and then, the fact he can't hear their footsteps compels him to glance backwards more often than he normally might, but otherwise, onwards.

Val keeps very close behind, largely so that he can use the uncertain shard light to try and the walls that they are walking past. He leaves his book and pencil tucked away--not that he is unpracticed with writing or sketching while walking--but it would not do, to find one's self suddenly faced with some danger and have only a pencil for defense.

Then again, would he notice any danger? For he is too occupied with scouring the walls for any new markings or drawings. He sticks out his hand frequently as they walk, entirely without any fear, to brush away the thick soapy strands of cobwebs. If there was a constellation before, and then moons, what might he find here?

Cleansed drags up all the old rumors, tales passed on and on and on between Wardens until it meant nothing. He'd never asked Alistair of any of them, had pivoted so sharply from the discussion of Fiona that mentioning any other rumor was impossible in the moment.

But even the prospect of reaching out to other Wardens makes Ellis hesitate. It's hard to tell how much of that is his own reluctance to present himself to any of his fellow Wardens and ask their attention and how much stems from what he and Vance had worried about: the prospect of infiltration, of the potential that Corypheus' agents had spread farther south than anyone knew. How could they risk calling something like this to his attention?

"No," Ellis agrees. He can feel the pressure of the Calling like clawed fingers dug in at the nape of his neck, not increasing but holding, steady and intolerable. "But we might not come up with a way to deal with it today."

Even shouting, his voice doesn't carry beyond either of them.

"As long as it's kept hidden, we'll have a chance to neutralize it."

Is that a reassurance? He isn't sure that it is.

Does anything truly trouble Orlesians?

This is not the moment to ruminate on it, but some flicker of incredulity comes and goes in the set of Ellis' expression, vanished within the blink of an eye. He can tell himself this is a good thing, in a way. If Val isn't troubled to distraction, their chances of managing something productive will be higher.

"I've never spent so much time in a small chamber, underground, with a rift," Ellis volunteers after a moment's scrutiny. Val doesn't need to know anything beyond that. "Whatever was being done here, it—"

Descriptors come and go. Ellis shakes his head.

"It's better we put an end to it."

And never come back, though Ellis is sure that's unrealistic. This place had to be protected. They can't simply leave it.

Under the shroud of the cobwebs, the walls of the passage here are marked with an undulating, wave-like texture. Here and there along the corridor, the current is broken up by instances of swirling eddies and the rudimentary figures being tossed in them. Luckily, though they've clearly been carefully etched, the grime and age have reduced any cutting capacity the dark waves might originally have had.

As they travel further, they'll slowly become aware of a faint sound: their own footsteps. It grows more definitive with each step they take as if whatever has broached this chamber to open it to wear has also weakened the muffling pall cast over the rest of the temple. Even the light of Tony's anchor extends nominally better here.

Eventually, the passage opens up into a large chamber. A great stationary figure waits at its center for them with a further shadowy shape arcing over it. But before they can get a good look at the architectural elements of the room, a distinctly unpleasant skittering pierces the quiet.

Someone did this to the rift, twisted it until it was as black as the darkest hour before dawn, as far as Adrasteia can figure which means... she hopes, beyond all sensible hoping... that there is some way to undo it. To make it just a hole in the Fade, or to close it entirely.

Then again, it's a temple to an Old God. Perhaps she's being too hopeful in general.

"Okay." The sound of her agreement barely carries; in a normal room it would be pitched low, quiet, and here the vocalization is swallowed by the same growling pressure she can feel all around them and knows the source of which is that tear in the fabric of reality above and behind Ellis.

Adrasteia takes in the cobwebs, the skittering noises, and sighs, which can't be heard at this point at all. Her voice is going to be shot after this, she knows now; her earlier idea of singing into the night sky will probably not be in the cards.

She taps Val on the shoulder and makes a wiggly gesture with one hand above the other, meant to indicate spiders; she figures that Tony will have reached the same conclusion already, but she does make the same gesture in his direction the next time he glances back her way. a

Spiders. There are definitely going to be spiders. She casts a barrier on everyone as they enter the room because this is going to go bad quickly as far as she can tell.

Tony whistles, long and slow, testing the noise negation. The sound carries further than it has in prior attempts, enough that it could almost echo with a little more effort, but then again, maybe not. Getting a sense of progress is in itself a disorienting activity, and immediately backburnered when that skittering sound snags his focus off the shapes of the room.

Cool. Cool cool cool. He reaches into his pocket to snag out his left glove, and tug that on quietly, standing in place as the others filter in behind him. The green glow diminishes for a second, and then almost brightens as its directed through the lens set into his glove, lamp-like.

He clocks: staircase leading into water, waterline, dragon construction.

"Stay close," he says. Still shouting, but his voice is less muted than before, enough that after those two words, he eases up on the gas, there. "Think we need to fill that to drain it. Take a look around, I'll watch out for creepy crawlies."

When Val was very small, he was once gifted a copy of the seventeenth Orlesian translation of Our Dangerous World, which he poured over so often the bindings fell apart and had to be restitched with an alarming (and to anyone not named Foncé, cost-prohibitive) frequency, until it was forever lost when he dropped it into a defunct well in the southern garden of Falaise sur la Mont. This means that Andrasteia's gesture for spiders is met with rounded eyes glimmering with excitement--spiders!, for Val, as a naturalist and a lover of even the worst and most dangerous of the Maker's creations--and, so, such a glimmer contains an equal level of respect. A creation of the Maker is yet dangerous.

His second love, architecture, has its heartstring plucked at the sight of the rest of the chamber before them. Its thickness, its functionality, its apparent wickedness, make this no sight of traditional beauty. But an interesting sight--a gigantic carving, underground?--yes, it is this.

Staircase into water, rusty waterline, puzzle, large dragon, mysterious shapes and valves. Stay close? How can he! Already he is moving toward the basin, the arch, studying its shape and the clues contained in their surroundings. Staircase into water, door, the rusty mark of old water, the cracks in the ceiling. Someone else will worry about the spiders. Val is looking for any mechanism that might influence the valves. Or is it the runes themselves? If only there were time to sketch it.

There seems to be no visible mechanism, leading one to believe that it must be a matter of charging the runes to operate the valves themselves. Whether they will still be functional given the great split in the ceiling is uncertain. However, if the amount of moisture (and fungus and green moss and other gently phosphorescent growing things blanketing the arch and its hanging vessels) is any indication, it's likely that whatever cistern waits above has been leaking down into this place because of it.

A further skittering in the darkness and a tremble of the webs strung about the cavern is the last warning. With a spitting, venomous hiss, a number of giant spiders come clambering out of the darkness toward the sound of Tony's raised voice.

Of course Val does not seem to keep in mind that splitting up in this room means he is allowing for venom-spitting, skittering, angry spiders to stand in the spaces between them. She doesn't sigh, this time; instead her nostrils flare, and she looks up, half expecting to see the great bulbous body of a giant spider lying in wait.

She doesn't. Instead she sees a great crack and runes in the ceiling. She peers at them in the dark, trying to see if she can discern any recognizable... anything from the runes. If they're all fire based, they may well be fucked.

A spider appears between herself and Val in the next instant and Adrasteia doesn't give Tony much chance to respond to the new threat before she's raising her staff over her head and bringing it down on the ground in front of her, striking the spider with lightning and stunning it for a moment.

Though it's difficult to parse at a distance and while on the move in the dark, there are distantly recognizable shapes among the more archaic rune forms which do suggest fire and heat. That said, while dominant features of the etchings, it's impossible to tell whether the arcane element is a product of the valves or used in their activation. Futher, the damage from the crack is extensive enough to cause problems, though the extent—whether the seals have simply been rendered nonfunctional or id their reaction has merely been made unpredictable—remains a mystery.

Edited 2021-03-23 22:00 (UTC)

The shudder raises the hairs on the nape of Ellis' neck. The unease remains, even through the struggle to dispatch the last of the shades. It's short work between the three of them, but when the last shade is reduced to a smear across the stone, the matter at hand still remains—

There is a lower level. Something within it had vibrated, and Ellis can't quite discern whether it was solely against his consciousness or if that unsettling tremor had been noticeable by all.

"I'll go down first," he shouts, more or less resigned to their course of action. Two chambers down has tipped them beyond the point of abandoning their exploration, whatever else Ellis might want.

But still, a pause before he steps cautiously towards the doorway, as he says, "Remember what I said, about this place."

About what may or may not be done in Dumat's name.

Another door. It doesn't register as surprise at this point, just, of course there's another room. Who knows how deep this temple goes, down into the earth?

Well. At the rate they're going, they might.

He keeps a hold on the bell clapper as he follows Ellis below, nodding at the Warden's warning; it's a serviceable weapon, and with the creepiness of that tremor from below, he has a feeling he's better keeping it.

It's disappointing to see the golden city disappear. Had they more time, she might have tried to break a piece off to keep--a little golden house, a little golden person or two. Matthias would have liked to see it. But now that it's hidden away, the possibility seems to have disappeared as well, so Laura follows behind, her claws lighting her hands.

Something is down there, she thinks, something sleeping that they've woken. They are in the shrine of Dumat, about whom Brother Genitivi has written, and Dumat was forced into the shape of a dragonlike Archdemon, the kind the Wardens fight. There could be a dragon beneath them. There could be a demon. Darkspawn. Or something none of them have seen before, something trapped so long that it doesn't have a name on the surface of the world.

She can't see what's ahead as easily as Jim, who has the lean height of an archway, or Ellis, who is in front. But she does her best to peer around them, in hopes of seeing what it is they're approaching. And, of course, she sniffs at the air.

He breathes out, then looks back to her; remembers, from their previous introductions that she's a Warden like Ellis, relatively newer to Riftwatch.

"What do you know about Dumat? Most of what I've heard can be boiled down to bloodthirsty creep. And that he has something to do with the first Blight."

Ahead of them, through that doorway lodged into the great dragon, the passage slopes gently downward into pitch darkness and a deepening silence. The air is thick and heavy, stale in the way that very old things are, and somewhere waiting ahead of them is the scorched tang of arcane things: burning lyrium, or the Veil turned sheer, or old enchantments breathing unexpectedly to life. And--

They are a few steps through the doorway, not yet distant enough to have completely lost sense of the chamber with the disappearing city, when another great shudder trembles through the floor. Behind them, there is a bizarrely muffled deep impact as in the room they've just left one of the ascended bells has snapped free of its old chain hoist and come plummeting back down.

The effect is immediate; a crack spiders along the reflecting pool basin. The newly turned table lurches in its housing as some invisible mechanism supported by the counter weight system suddenly comes untethered on one side, and then the whole rotating table begins to collapse into the hollow space below it. The side of the table closest to the doorway rises--and jams there, cutting the doorway through which they'd just passed in half.

Then, with unsettling quiet, the floor behind them begins to crumble away and the featureless black passage before them likely suddenly seems far more attractive by comparison.

"As long as we can also learn from it, also? I am in agreement."

Only someone without sense would not feel the tingling at the back of the neck, the prickle of hair raising on the arm. Yet one must embrace the feeling, not shy away from it. It is not the fault of Warden Beard that he does not feel that same way. Val therefore claps him on the arm very charitably.

"It would not do to leave without discovering something of this place. Surely you agree, my friend."

The chamber flashes with green light when another spider comes skittering down, and out of the corner of Adrasteia's eye is a mushrooming blast of Fade energy that throws up a wall for the spider to bounce off. It drops on its back, before a leg or two along with a spatter of black gore goes flying as a more direct punch of energy slices through it.

"Any ideas?" he says, glancing at them, at the leaking ceiling, at the twitchy shapes of giant arachnids crawling down walls and descending on thick ropes of silken web. "'Cause I got, uh. One."

It's a bad idea, so, he's open to suggestions.

Holden's sense of smell isn't nearly as good as Laura's, but he still gets a sense of the space below them — of air that's been closed off for a very long time, probably with good reason. Who knows what they might be awakening down there? But

he looks back sharply at the sounds of crashing behind them, has maybe a second to recognize the blockage of their way out before he sees the ground begin to shatter beneath them. He pulls at Laura's arm with a free hand, then gives Ellis a push, quiet signs to hurry.

"Go!"

Edited 2021-03-25 18:23 (UTC)

"Knowing is a hard thing. You're talking about an ancient history, ages past, a lot lost to time, and I am not a scholar. Never have been." Adrasteia shakes her head, eyes reflecting in the dark. What does she know? Stories, and none of them happy ones. "The city of Barindur existed once, and then Dumat decided it did no longer, and now there is nothing there. The first Blight was Dumat's corruption. It was also the worst Blight Thedas has ever seen."

The disappearing floor should have a sound, and it doesn't--but it feels like something, and while that's undeniably helpful, it's worse. Laura goes when she's told, though she tries to shake Jim's grasp as she does, claws out and up in hopes of lighting their way, wherever it is they're being forced.

"Yes." She gives the corpses another long look, as though one might sit up and start sharing its secrets if given enough time. This place is old, and the truths of it will not surface easily. "Why didn't they rot?"

Well, there's nowhere to go but forward—

So they run. Towards what, who knows?

With the urgency of the floor crumbling silently away behind them and the exact pitch of the darkness into which they descending, it's difficult to define the point at which they cross into the passage's final chamber. Did the passage widen suddenly, or was it a gradual shift? How large is the space through which they pass now--are the walls of the chamber just there beyond their reach in the dark, or has the room widened into some great hall? Once the silent rumble of the old ruin's failing mechanisms fades, they are left with just still air, entombed by pitch darkness and a pall of quiet hanging so thick that even shouting feels like physically taking a knife to something.

And then in the dark: a comforting flicker of light.

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[CLOSED] DON'T DUMAT OPEN INSIDE

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imagine as many spiders as your heart desires; not gonna make y'all keep tabs on enemies

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crawls back here

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<3

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