In the basement of the Red Tower of Power...
Niklas, after giving his cerebral cortex a bit of a workout, manages to retrieve the information he needs, and recalls that he does indeed seem to be looking for a room full of flasks with a loose magical brick that has divine goodies hidden beneath it! Awash with purpose, he strides down the hallway, kicking down each door he can see, and eventually one turns out to be open! Walking in, Niklas finds that it seems to be full of spiders, and, after apologizing profusely to the arachnids, moves along. The second go around at this goes much better - it does not take too long until another open door is found, and this one does seem to lead to a room full of flasks! Niklas runs right in and begins feeling up the walls, looking for a brick that is slightly more magical than the others.
Fortunately, said brick proves easy to find - it is the only one that responds to Niklas' incessant biting with humming in addition to the altogether more mundane hurting like a bitch and maybe chipping his teeth a little. With tooth and fingernail, Niklas manages to extract the brick without much effort at all, leaving a dark hole in the wall that not even he can see inside of.
"Ooh, secrets!" Lifeboy whispers enthusiastically. "You know what to do with a hole in the wall!"
Obviously, Niklas does, and plunges his hand right in, finding something fuzzy and more than slightly damp almost immediately - feels like plunging his hand into a great big hairy nostril, Niklas can say, drawing on his vast life experience. And then, in an entirely expected twist, Niklas feels a very powerful sensation of extreme pain as something seems to... bite him, maybe? A burning sensation begins to travel up the hand he plunged into the hole, and a shiver goes down his right arm. Nothing else yet, though. After a large quantity of nothing continues to happen, he pulls out his hand from the hole - nothing obviously wrong with it, though it does feel a bit weird now.
"Didja find anything?" Lifeboy asks, drooling slightly.
Outside a healer's tent in Eckledun...
Sigmund, after waxing strategical and expositional for a moment on the topic of the gub, decides to return to matters at hand.
"Well, our first priority should be to get in contact with the Black Circle somehow. If they are here, it shouldn't complicated, and we also have a contact inside the Circle. We have to know what is happening, or how to eventually deal with the Gub. And now that we have actually talked about this, we should find Mark before he kills somebody," he says, and tries to lead the party in search of good old Mark, only to stop at the first crossroads on the way. A moment passes, and a single bead of sweat runs down his temple as the paths homogenize and multiply before his very eyes. Sigmund begins to tremble and bites his lip a little.
"What's the matter?" Art asks as he regards his companion.
In the temple of Automaton Worship...
Darren, not quite sure what this is all about, draws a card and puts it to his forehead, and his friend does the same. The card is a strange thing, completely blank except for a single word - LOVE - written on it in plain black letters.
"See, friend, these are the cards of fate and aspiration. I can't see mine, and you can't see yours, but we can see each other's. We can't tell each other what the cards we see are, we can only give each other one of two pieces of advice - 'keep it' or 'drop it'. We draw cards five times in total, the deck gets shuffled for each draw, and only the ones we keep count at the end. To start off, I'd advise you to drop yours. Oh, and now that we've started the game, we need to do the whole five draws. So, got any advice for me?"
In the entrance hall of Castle Melville...
Morton is slightly disquieted by Lady Melville's sad physiological inability to process tea - it is a feeling all too familiar to Morton. Perhaps if he could make something like tea out of blood - it shouldn't make that much difference, should it? And Morton has already made steps in the field of exotic teas for the physiologically disadvantaged, so if anyone would be qualified to try uncovering recipes for delicious vi-tea, it would definitely be him. As he, in what is for the moment a purely theoretical exercise, begins to work out the logistics of preventing coagulation (leeches, perhaps, could come in handy) in beverages, he notices that Scott appears to be critically low on things to say, as evidenced by his attempts at smalltalk.
"You know Morton, whilst most dullards believe the black and green teas are separate entities, they are actually the same plant. The black variety has just been pressed and heated until dry. The green variety goes well with fruit juices and honey. I must say that the latter ingredient along with the tea is very effective at clearing the humors from the body at a time of illness... Pity we neither have bodies that can experience that sensation," he says, but Morton is hardly impressed, opting to speak with Lady Melville instead.
"One never can say no to a pleasant conversation. A move to the dining hall would be most wonderful, and I thank you for the gracious hospitality. Your abode is quite colorful, and I've never seen a place such as this; I most certainly cannot turn down an opportunity to see more of it."
"Well then, shall we go?" Lady Melville asks, and the others seem to agree. She leads them into a nearby hallway - the walk toward the dining room seems short indeed, though clearing some of the spiderwebs on the way takes a few moments.
"As for the tea, there is nothing to forgive for there is nothing remiss, good lady Melville. If you desire, I could attempt to make a tea more suited to your tastes, but I'm afraid it would be an experimental venture on my part. But perhaps for later, I most certainly do not wish to impose. I'm afraid our knowledge of the surrounding affairs may be limited, due to being newcomers, but I believe the events in Mothdale might be the most interesting as of late. It has presumably gone under a rather dramatic shift and change as of late, from what we've seen," Morton tells her on the way, and it is his last sentence in particular that seems to catch the lady's attention.
"A dramatic shift in Mothdale? Whatever could that be, pray tell? Mothdale's been much the same way for over a century now. Surely Jurgen's not up to any tricks, is he?" she asks, smiling as the group all walk into the dining room, which seems far, far cleaner than the hallway - Henry and a purple-robed, cowled maid of indiscernible features appear to have done quite the bang-up job in cleaning it up.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 556468 times)