[CLOSED] DON'T DUMAT OPEN INSIDE

[katabasis]

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.

Comments

[heorte]

Ellis marks the appearance of the thing with an intense sense of dread.

It's not too late to leave it. To take the two of them from this room and come back with Wardens, however many Wardens can be trusted or contacted. (Who can be picky, these days?) He looks up at the sharp end, grits his teeth, and reaches in himself to start pulling.

His misgivings can wait. For the moment.

[justashotaway]

As soon as Holden started to plunge his hand into the hole, Laura was coming over. She's crouched there beside him now, standing as he pulls out the...pike? It doesn't register as a staff to her, too sharp-edged and cleanly planed.

Whatever it is, it looks like the same material as everything else they've encountered, brutal and dangerous. She holds a pair of claws up to it, unable to do much more than observe.

[acreage]

He has to pull himself up to standing soon enough. There seems to be no end to the staff, for all that only a short portion of it is blunt enough to touch. And that's quickly becoming a problem, as that portion goes up higher and higher...

he looks to the other two.

"Any thoughts?"

[heorte]

The look Ellis gives Holden absolutely communicates his thoughts: we should leave this be.

But Ellis knows as well as anyone else that this isn't an option, so—

He bends, turns his back towards Laura after a brief, inviting wave of his hand.

[justashotaway]

Considering Laura's first thought was can I stab it with my claws and pull it up that way?, then can I grab it without cutting my hands?, Ellis' idea is probably the best available. She goes over to him and clambers onto his back--high onto his back, legs dangling from his shoulders, hands gripping his shirt to keep from falling off. And when they're upright, she reaches for the hilt of the sword...thing.

[acreage]

Holden's look back to Ellis is tinged apologetic, self-aware. The impulse is understandable, but also of course they aren't leaving.

Laura scaling Ellis like a tree is sensible. It's also hilarious. He makes no comment either way, helping where he can, but then handing off the pulling to Laura when the thing gets too tall even for him.

[justashotaway]

Once Ellis is upright beneath her, she takes the hilt and starts pulling. It's a rare moment when being highest up feels bizarre. When her platform is a person, the whole experience has an organic tippiness she has to reassess constantly, ensuring neither she nor Ellis throw off their balance.

Laura assumes she'll be raising the thing all the way over her head, too, but it stops only a few fingers' breadths over Holden's reach. There's none of the sway or heft she expects, a long and awkward object pulled free and dangling from her hands. Instead, it snaps into position, a sharp column that dwarfs all of them, and there's a flash of light the colour of red lyrium. Around them, the ground sinks away into stairs leading to some lower level.

[heorte]

The absolute absence of sound makes the entire event more disorienting than it might have been under less stifling circumstance. Ellis reels a step back on instinct, jostling Holden. All he can do in this situation is immediately anticipate a threat.

But he doesn't quite anticipate Laura's needs to keep her balance.

[justashotaway]

Ellis' moment of surprise is just as she's letting go of the hilt and shifting so she can slide off his back. Overbalanced, Laura falls over into Holden with a growl that gets swallowed up by the air around them. Her first instinct is to grab at whatever she can reach--fistfuls of Holden's shirt, one leg around Ellis' neck like she means to choke him with it.

[acreage]

Distracted as he is by the flash of red light, by the appearance of the stairs, he doesn't immediately clock the motion happening next to him. At least, not until Laura falls directly into him and grabs hold, upsetting his balance and sending the lot of them tumbling down the stairs.

"Motherf — " gets swallowed by the muffling enchantments.

[heorte]

If Ellis had any prayer of recovering from being garroted by Laura's leg, it's gone the minute Holden tips.

It's a short, painful descent. Groaning, Ellis tries to lift himself out of the tangle of limbs and only manages to half-flop backwards onto the bottom step.

PERCEPTION CHECK

[justashotaway]

As soon as they've come to a stop, Laura sits up. (She might have the easiest time of it. After all, she's clinging to everyone else, and everyone else is simply stuck.) Nothing is broken, and anything that's bruised will heal quickly enough--for her, anyway.

She'll try to shake off the daze of going head over feet down a flight of stairs once she's gotten to her feet, a hand against the wall to keep her balance. This is what she's trained for, what instincts have been built into her: mission first, self second. As her sense of place returns to her, she looks into the room they've fallen into and sniffs again at the air.

[katabasis]

At the bottom of their graceless (and soundless) descent, they find themselves on the landing between two sets of stairs. The first set is the one down which they recently tumbled. The second set leads a further ten feet down to the sunken floor and a walkway which cuts toward the far side of the cavernous chamber through what might have once been a shallow reflection pool. From the comparatively dark stain of the basins to that of the walkway's stones, it's highly doubtful that water was what was doing the reflecting.

It's dark. It's quiet. It smells very old.

The far side of the room is dominated by a fantastic brass city in miniature. It rises from out of where the walkway suddenly ends to form an untraversable ramp (unless someone feels like trampling over miniature rooftops and the miniscule population of figures in residence). The ramp slopes up to an impressive height of around ten feet and leads to where it ends flush to an unsettlingly lifelike depiction of Dumat. The figure is half mural and half artistically rendered column, effectively making it appear as if the great dragon is emerging from the chamber's rear wall to meet the city's pinnacle. At the lower end of the brass city, a gate is set into its miniature wall. The twin watchtowers are empty.

Flanking either side of the walkway is a slightly raised platform. Above each hangs a large black bell with a brass tongue. The chains from which they're suspended stretch up into the darkness toward a matching black city which hangs down from the ceiling far above their heads.

PERCEPTION CHECK

[heorte]

Whatever Ellis says, half-risen on the landing and looking down at the dragon, the brass city, the watchtowers, is not loud enough to carry. It's swallowed up by the spell that holds this temple. His face is very grave.

Instinctively, he focuses in on the endless, looping flow of whispers that's nipped and pulled at the edges of his awareness since their descent into the main chamber. Is that ancient, crushing attention present in this room too?

[katabasis]

The magnetic hum of the Calling lingers low in the air, but it doesn't seem to have intensified here. If there happens to be an especially keen sense of being watched, it likely has something to do with the chamber's high ceiling and how the reflective polished stone and metal of the chamber occassionally reflects light back at them through the otherwise syrupy darkness.

No eye of sauron here.

[heorte]

Rising fully, Ellis' hand drifts to the hilt of his mace then away. There's nothing here to wield it against. (Yet?)

"We need to be very careful here," Ellis shouts. The muffling quality of the spell might rob some of the urgency from his warning. He points grimly down at the mural. "That is Dumat, and nothing that's been done here in his name can be good."

They should leave. Adrasteia's proposal to reduce the entire temple to rubble is becoming more and more appealing, even if Ellis has no idea whether or not it's the right approach. But the margin for error, what they could possibly do if they aren't careful, has expanded alarmingly in the space of one fall down a set of stairs.

PERCEPTION CHECK

[acreage]

He pulls himself to his feet as they untangle themselves, blinking as he takes in the vastness of this new chamber. He thinks of Wysteria's bright voice over the crystals, The usual gamut of horrors in a shrine to an ancient god known for its—his?—proficiency with blood magic, I should think.

Nodding in acknowledgement to Ellis's warning, he takes the walkway slowly, and approaches the two black bells, looking for any kind of designs or inscriptions.

[katabasis]

The two bells are identical and hang high enough that Holden can comfortably duck down into it to get an inspection of the inside as well as the outside.

Roughly three feet in diameter, the bell's exterior is a smooth and featureless black. However it's interior features a series of elaborate Ancient Tevene brass inlays. The inlays are patterned in such a way that the negative space creates a dragon-like shape which twists up to the peak of the bell. It terminates in a set of black jaws into which the bell's brass tongue is hooked.

The tongue itself is also etched. While to a cursory inspection it might merely appear patterned, a close study reveals that the etchings are of a multitude of human figures with their arms stretched imploringly upward towards the dragon.

[acreage]

He starts with the exterior of the first bell, then ducks inside of it — carefully, avoiding making any noise. Though whether the bells' ringing would even be audible down here is another question. He takes his time, looking first at the design of the dragon, following its shape to the bell's tongue, then looking at the etchings until he's clear on what they are.

(What they are being: creepy as fuck.)

He emerges with a frown, then moves to examine the other bell, inside and out. He misses hand terminals, the ability to take photos of what he's seeing. There isn't enough light to try drawing the carvings even if he could, had paper or a pen on hand.

Both bells inspected, he cautiously moves away from them, and shouts a quick description of what he found to Ellis and Laura.

PERCEPTION CHECK

[justashotaway]

Laura, meanwhile, walks off the little walkway once she's reached it, tromping unconcernedly over ages-old bloodstains over to the tiny golden city. This, she's learned from library books, is what people believe in when they say that the Maker is real. Not this particular city, tiny and eye-height if she walks just a little way beyond the bells Holden has disappeared into, but the much larger place it represents.

She examines it up close, touching one of the little buildings carefully to see if it, too, is designed to make people bleed.

[katabasis]

Happily, there are no unnecessarily sharp edges here among the brass city. It is a meticulous but not inherently dangerous rendering of city walls, carefully ordered markets, trading houses and residential boroughs. The tiered city, each section thoughtfully laid out around a square containing a delicately rendered fountain, leads to a depiction of a domed palatial estate trapped in Dumat's shadow. It might be a singularly lovely piece of craftsmanship if it weren't for the stooping old god ruining the mood.

Strangely, all of the city's minuscule inhabitants seem to be facing away from the dragon. The only obvious exception is a single robed figure locked outside the city's entrance. It's notable both for the fact that it faces the depiction of Dumat and because it's the only piece in the diorama cut from black stone.

[heorte]

"Don't either of you bleed on anything here," Ellis calls, urgency translating somehow, possibly simply through the effort expended to make sure those words carry.

Is there a chance it's necessary? Yes.

Is there a risk they bring down something very nasty onto their heads? Also yes.

"If we have to feed blood into anything in this room, it should be me while you two stand up on the second landing," follows after, as Ellis draws up alongside Holden and Laura.

[acreage]

To Ellis —

"What do you think might happen that standing a couple of feet away is going to help?"

He probably shouldn't waste his voice on being a smartass, but here we are.

[heorte]

"I don't know."

Admittedly, Ellis has never received any particular training about blood-powered shrines. However—

"But I do know if something happens, it's likely to be blighted." punctuated with a sharp, uncharacteristically agitated movement of Ellis' hand. "As long as you're nearer the stairs than to me, you'll have a better chance at getting Adrasteia here to help me with it."

This is a very inopportune time for a training session on Blight, tainted foes and otherwise, and yet.

[justashotaway]

"Bleeding doesn't bother me," is Laura's contribution, while she reaches for the little black carved figure and attempts to pick it up. No luck, despite some little cracks at the base of it. She doesn't succeed in lifting up any of the others, either, and turns her attention back to the gentlemen she arrived with. "We should ring the bells."