Bork! Bork bork bork bork bork (faint chicken noises)
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Elenor
Try to get out of this mess through diplomacy. Be prepared to dodge back and escape if things go too far south.
Oh, and if things do go south, only then mention Elizabeth's name (not mentioning it at first just in case they're enemies).
(Doable, 3: Partial Success)
--
Elenor straightens himself out. In a fluid, deliberately slow motion, he sheathes his sword and drops his shield. Should the two be human, and not looking for trouble, they'd understand the hint.
After exchanging a glance with his companion, the other knight stands up and puts away his weapon, like Elenor. A short pause - was he thinking about something - and then all of a sudden, the unknown man had raised his empty hand to the sky, as if he was trying to strike at Elenor, thought Elenor - and thus hastily raised his shield.
The other man awkwardly lowered his hand. Maybe he had just made a social mistake? But the crest Elenor had seen on this unknown knight's armor was clearly Illyrian, while the... greeting? was not. At least, Elenor had never seen it, and quickly extends his hand for a handshake to confirm his peaceful intentions. And, to his great relief, his hand was taken. Confirming his counterpart's peaceful intentions. Elenor takes this chance and raises his voice.
"Well met! My name is Elenor Warsen, Knight of Illyria. May I ask who you are, and where my travels have taken me?"
"A knight of Illyria? Why, that's a great surprise!" The voice from behind the helmet sounds jovial and friendly. "To meet another man of our great King here, this has to be fate!"
"There hasn't been a King of Illyria for a few years now. We have a queen. Queen Lucia I. Kiske." How long has this man been in here?
"Oh, excuse me. To not remember the name of my sovereign, I must really be getting too old. Ho ho ho!"
"...pardon my rudeness, but I must ask again. Who are you, and where am I now?"
"Where you are? Why, that's simple. Is this not Illyria Castle? How would you forget its magnificent facade?"
Elenor has been in the capital two or three times before, and the Castle hadn't really been to his tastes. It was far too much of a palace. And it had nothing even close to the tower he'd gone through. "Has Illyria Castle become almost completely submerged and home to a great big dragon with his entire cult?"
"Wait. Hold on. Could you repeat the last part?"
Crap, what if he also was a dragon worshipper? "There's a dragon the way I came and it chased me here." Best to not mention the party.
"A dragon, you say? A real, nasty, scaly dragon? Why, that's great! Yes, very great! Hilda, pack your things! We're hunting a dragon!"
"I'm sorry, what?" The third person in the room - presumably Hilda - is busy silently gathering many uncomfortably sharp implements.
"Yes, isn't that wonderful? A dragon to slay! It's been ages since I went on such an exciting quest. Think of its treasure! All of its loot! And the thrill of fighting a dragon! No, no, there's no way I would pass up on that."
"...I don't want to see a fellow knight of Illyria die a meaningless death. Do you know the danger of facing a dragon? They are powerful and cunning creatures, wielders of vast magical force that can kill you in a single strike!" And yet... to kill a dragon... that was everything Elenor himself hoped for in life.
"Don't worry about me. There's no way I'll die to that sort of overgrown lizard!" He brandishes his blade, clearly fired up. "But it'll be a little troublesome with just the two of us, me and Hilda, and if that cult you spoke of also appears it'll become real nasty." Hilda apparently is finished by now, a large bag of... things slung over her shoulder. Some weapons of different sizes are strapped to her back. "So, what do you say. Are you going to help me with my quest to slay the dragon, so that I may help you find your way out of this mess of a tower?"
Certainly a convenient proposition...
Helskaya
Automated: Comfort Taren.
"Listen, Taren. I know that, as a healer, you can't bear to have a single man die. You want to help everyone. Save everyone that puts their trust in you. But, in this unfair world, you just can't always make it, you can't always bear the burden. Let me tell you an old tale, from the far north, my homeland. Once, many, many years ago, when the world was still young and men and animals were like one, there was a mother bear with seven young. That mother bear caught fish, gathered fruit and robbed honey to feed her cubs. Life was hard for the mother bear, but still bearable, for her young were her entire joy. But when winter came, she had only enough food to give to six. And so, the mother bear despaired as she couldn't choose which child to abandon, finally chose the youngest and cried herself to eternal sleep. But the youngest cub, thrown into the harshness of winter, did not die. He learned to survive in the freezing cold of winter, through clawing holes in the frozen river and diving for the fish. He ate magnificiently, for the fish weren't prepared for the new predator, and grew a thick layer of fat to keep himself warm. And the eternal snow stained his fur a bright white.
But he held no grudge against his mother, who threw him out, and the first day of spring, he ran for her cave, bringing many fish. He moved aside the mighty boulder, found her indescribably sad corpse, and wept at the tragedy of her life - the senseless death of a proud mother that, in her grief for the dead, hadn't been there to care for the living."
"And that is how the first polar bear was born. One of my favorite tales..."
Taren
Regroup. Gather everyone to look for Elenor.
(Doable, 1: Backfire)
Taren, done with listening and fairly revitalized, decides to... Bloody hell, where has Elenor gone? Taren searches every corner of the room. Then he peers down into every hole, because maybe he slipped and fell. Then he searches every corner again, then the middle, for good measure. Then the statues - aha, there's a way into the unknown there! But surely, Elenor wouldn't have gone down there alone? He's cautious and wouldn't take that sort of risk alone, he'd have to be out of his mind... and he'd probably still be visible if he went in there. Maybe he left a red string to mark his way, maybe he has a torch? Maybe he'd just be audible, his metal boots clanking?
But after looking into that doorway, all Taren sees is a spiral staircase that goes down into some water, so he doesn't bother because Elenor wouldn't even try swimming or diving in full armor.
And thus, Taren walks back inside and yells Elenor's name loudly, not unlike a concerned mother.
Most of the group simply don't have the nerve to follow him around all that time, so they just sorta disperse again and do their own things while Taren stays loud.
Maka
Skate along the slippery floors, exploring the room for interesting things. Eternally Loyal Jelly may remain on head or roll about on its own, as it prefers.
(Doable, 5: Full Success)
The room is very plain. There's some standard dungeon decor collecting dust and... hold on a second, there isn't any dust on that decor. But why? Does the dragon transform into a dragon maid every Thursday and dust this room? Well, that's an option. Maka would do it like that if she was a dragon.
Jelly wobbles around on Maka's head to the tact of her pouty steps as she walks in circles, gaze lowered, trying to make sense of this. And, through the lowered gaze, she sees the floor, and the floor seems to be appalingly new for a sunken ruin in the middle of nowhere. As if it was built just yesterday. Now, this was also a perfectly explainable thing, to Maka. Maybe the dragon wanted a new toy. So it had its slaves build it a new toy. Or tower. Toy tower. Hm? Jelly is doing something silly, bad jelly! Maka shakes it around for a bit, and because of that, she notices another thing.
The water on the lower floor. It looks nothing, NOTHING like water should look like. Water is in motion, and Maka knows this because she had studied chaos theory with surprising zeal and also because the jelly on her head is basically water so she knew that water reacted to things, like head movements and shaking it - wait, should you shake jellies? What if it was a baby? Maka had heard somewhere that you shouldn't shake babies and experimented and concluded that that might have been true - and wobbled around all wobbly-like. That water down there however just seemed super duper lifeless and calm. Wasn't this the ocean? A water this large was surely an ocean. Wouldn't there be waves? Surely there would be waves. BUT BUT BUT there were no waves down there so kwod erratt demonsterandom there was something really really fishy with this sea and it wasn't the fish because there were no fish. Magic?
(Hard, 4: Partial Success)
Maka taps into the arcane. Most people need to be in a special mindset to see the world that lies under the world, Maka is just naturally crazy. But what she sees isn't to her liking.
The fabric of magic and everything is far too, far too orderly! There's always chaos in the world and in magic, that's like the nature of magical things - and especially in the Labyrinth. The labyrinth was the place where laws of physics gave up and went home. Chaos was its nature. So why - WHY - was this entire place looking so damn IN ORDER?
Maka throws a temper tantrum and then talks to Remy about everything that just happened and her thought process and everything even though Remy doesn't really listen before losing interest herself and returning to the group to pout at the tower some more.
Remy
Follow Taren and try to remember what's been happening for the last however long it's been.
(Doable, 1: Backfire)
In trying to follow Taren, who himself is rather lost, Remy gets even more lost, and ends up fleeing from Maka up that one spiral staircase behind that statue. Looked like someone already moved that aside. Maybe Elenor went that way? As for what's happening, dunno, we're running from some sort of dragon? Maybe? He thinks? It's hard to tell truth from fiction from Maka rant.
After a maybe a minute of climbing stairs, Remy exits into a tower chamber of sorts? Looks like the abode of a scholar. The entire dome of the chamber is made of glass and reveals a beautiful night sky. Bookshelves cover the walls, filled with books and scientific and magical trinkets of all sorts. A large study table with an astronomical motif engraved upon it takes up the entire center space, and a telescope is placed upon it. There's books and old food and beverages all over the table, random crap all over the floor, and sitting in the only chair... well, lying face-first on the table on that chair... is a skeleton. It doesn't look very threatening, in fact Remy finds it almost endearing.
Komas
(Doable, 5: Full Success)
Komas looks around. He's in a large room with two stories and the bottom one is flooded. He appears to have come in through a window or a hole in the wall. Furthermore, this one story actually had a fairly low ceiling - well, not that low, but low enough so that a dragon could not squeeze in. And if it decided to force its way in, the ceiling would collapse and its hoard would also fall down, so unless the dragon wasn't entirely sane anymore, he probably wouldn't pursue them inside.
But they could still be hit by its breath. Supposedly dragons could spew fire around or something like that and it could definitely fire through the hole he came. That'd be trouble. The room would pretty much become a cookpot. So he'd need to escape a little more, and then he'd be safe.
"Hey! Let's go. C'mon, this ain't no place to stay, dragon'll fry us."
Nobody objects.
"One, two, three... wait, can't be right. Where's everyone gone to?"
Taren responds hesitantly. "...Apollo's gone. Drowned. Slipped through my grasp. If only I..."
"Don't beat yerself up for that, else you'll die from grief. And the other two?"
"...Remy was with me, but where he's wandered off to only heaven knows. He isn't anywhere in this room. And Elenor..."
"Oi, the knight person? He said he'd scout ahead and went off there." Maka interrupts.
"Why didn't you say anything? I was worried about him! I looked all over the place!"
"Well, you didn't ask, numbnuts!"
"Shut yer claptraps and run if you don't wanna get roasted crispy! C'mon, through that door! Dragon ain't gonna tear down his own home!" Komas shouts the party through the door at the far side of the room, where he finds a small circular chambers with two corridors branching off to the left and the right, and shouts them down the right because that room is darker and he wants to be as far inside the tower as possible at least until the dragon calms down.
The right way turns out to end in a small dead end room. Helskaya is lucid enough to realize that a light spell would be a good idea, but the room isn't much of a pretty sight - very plain and a bit unsettling. There's a hole in the floor that's filled with water, and what looks like a wooden dresser in a corner, placed on an ugly rug, but nothing else. For now, it might be a good idea to remain here - the dragon shouldn't know where they were.
----
Meanwhile... maybe not exactly meanwhile, don't sweat the details... a certain charmeur/hammerknight, after swiftly dispatching the threat at hand with the assistance of his teammates, gets back to his original task - searching for the elusive third key that was all that prevented exploration of the as of yet unknown parts of the great labyrinth. They'd entered this labyrinth with a somewhat good idea of its approximate location, and to speed up the search Sedna had decided to split the party, which was a good thing and a bad thing as far as Desmond was concerned. On the one hand, apparently she'd thought of him as trustworthy enough to lead one of the two groups. On the other hand... he had to take care of that creature. That absolutely unfeminine drunkard, who, to his great distress, had stolen all of his thunder during that fight. At least she was obeying his orders more than she was ignoring them right now, but... she was still being almost useless in this search mission.
So far, nothing had come up. Not even monsters. The entire situation was a massive boring hunt for a needle in a labyrinth-sized haystack. Lost in thought and his bad mood, Desmond only noticed that he had arrived in a potentially interesting area as his companion broke off towards the center of the... ruin? he overlooked entering. Not like ruin-like structures were rare in this place, but...
...why was she running barefoot? Oh god, her feet were an absolute bloody, dirty mess, didn't she notice at all? He forced himself away from the sight and back into his mission. Survey the ruin. See whether the key is anywhere to be found here. Well, there was some sort of weird pedestal in the middle and that woman was inspecting it with an interest quite unusual to her. The entire thing was embedded in some sort of steep valley running from north to south. Two ways out here apparently - a cavern to the east, something that looked suspiciously like a giant stone door without any obvious means to open it to the west. An open treasure chest - kind of a shame... and... oh, whoa. He had completely overlooked the remains of a campsite on the floor all around that pedestal.
This was worth investigating, and quite strange. The camp looked like its occupants had left it in a hurry - it wasn't cleaned up at all, someone just left it lying around. But there were no signs of a struggle anywhere... Maybe he should look at this in detail? After all, there was a small chance that this group of adventurers had found the elusive key he was questing for.
What will he do?
Author
Topic: Roll to Explore the Dungeon: Ch.2 T.38: Do you even praise the King? (Read 121152 times)