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[10ebbor10]

D

[Haspen]

D

[NRDL]

D

[Harry Baldman]

You seek a subtler way in, dispatching your operatives to seek weaknesses in the Archive's defenses.

2

And you do find one - an old drain hidden deep within the moat. It's a risky swim to get there for you and your collaborators, but you need far more than mere risk of drowning to dissuade them from forging ahead. Your faith carries you through the long tunnel and into the ancient underworks, a maze of crawlspaces with little air choked with the smell of rot. You dare not light a torch in the pitch blackness for fear of suffocation.

You make the agreed-upon signal click to the rest of your operatives. Only eleven of your dozen call back. At least nobody will find the body.

Operatives Left: 11/12

A) Move carefully and seek a way upward.
B) Move carefully and seek a way further down.
C) Offer prayers to the Hidden God and do not think - simply move.

[Draignean]

C

[NRDL]

C

[Prophet]

C

[Puppyguard]

C

[Harry Baldman]

Where you're going, you don't need eyes to see.

7!

You feel as if the hand (if he indeed has any) of the Hidden God himself were guiding you as you crawl through interminable lengths of tunnels in a trail you never could have possibly conceived of, heading deeper down and further on and even in strange loops sometimes as the stonework grows rougher and the tunnels wider, until finally you're able to stand.

You make your way confidently forward, and your minions pad away in lockstep behind you as you come to a particular wall. It takes you only a few moments to find a mechanism, and suddenly the brickwork parts to unveil an ancient chamber. The blue flames, the golden sarcophagi and the lack of cobwebs are unmistakable - these are the tombs of the Chancellors of old, where only the most respected of the librarians are permitted to hang out and occasionally pull light janitorial duty (in the Archive, all librarians perform menial tasks regardless of their status - to address this oversight toward hierarchy but nevertheless respect tradition, they've ritualized some of the more obscure stuff).

The good news are that you can probably expect to find good stuff buried with these librarians. The excellent news are that the secret repositories aren't that far off - just beyond the stone vault door at the lowest chamber of these tombs, in fact! And it's somewhat unlikely you'd run into any resistance down here - people come down into the ancient tombs perhaps once a week, if that.

A) Check the tombs of the more important Chancellors - they may hold the key to the vault door in some way or another.
B) Check for clues but also loot anything of value. The Queen does love her exotic jewelry!
C) You don't like being in ancient tombs any longer than you strictly have to be - make a break for the vault and see if you can figure out a direct way in.

[Prophet]

A Let us not anger the dead more than we need to.

[NRDL]

A Let us not anger the dead more than we need to.

+1

[ZBridges]

A

[10ebbor10]

On a side note I just realized something. We went through a flooded Sewer to get here. How are we going to get out with the books?

[Harry Baldman]

You decide that a tomb inspection might be a superior idea to outright theft, and resolve to touch as little as possible.

3

Not that you're not terribly tempted by the gold-clad mummies decked out in rubies held in the more ostentatious sarcophagi - what you're interested in mostly are the stone tablets that most of them invariably tend to hold - they seem to contain a name as far as you can tell, and a list of titles linked to accomplishments of some sort, and finally a glyph you can't quite place at the bottom, styled a little differently for each mummy.

After one of your minions is suddenly melted as they inadvertently set off a well-hidden acid trap by attempting to snatch a tablet from a mummy's hands, you decide make a set of delicate charcoal rubbings instead - the mummies fortunately don't appear to mind this, and neither do you hear any sort of alarm going off as you put everything back broadly the way you found it and slink off toward the vault.

As expected, the door to the secret repositories is massive, easily the height of three men, hewn from the very bedrock and covered in reliefs of rather familiar-looking people. Though made of stone, they look like they might actually be articulated to some degree. There is a giant steel valve on the stone door, and beneath it you see a head-sized sphere of black onyx, next to which hangs a stylus on a gilded cord.

Operatives Left: 10/12

A) Puzzle out how to get through this door the way its constructors intended.
B) You've got time. Might as well break out your tools and tunnel into the vault through a wall.
C) Looks like this door is ensorcelled somehow. Brandish a symbol of the Stormrider to coerce it into your way of thinking.

[birdy51]

C.

By the Power of the Old Ways!