"Sure, stonework looks good. Why don't you show me around some more? So I can see more of it?"
Rítes assents and crosses the room, stopping at one of the spaces between the chests. This time you predict what is going to happen successfully: she traces another pattern on the wall and it opens up again. "Come on, then. The good stuff's further in!"
Powerless to resist the siren call of phat lewtz, you follow her along an unusually dark hallway, down a short flight of stairs, and then through a square passage that inexplicably twists to the left as you walk down it, so that you have to jump across the corner onto the left wall and then again onto what was originally the ceiling to keep level. Just to be sure, you steal a glance backward and satisfy yourself that the walls themselves did in fact twist, and you're not actually hanging upside-down. At the end of the passage is another magic door, this one framed in brass and engraved rather than secret; Rítes does her thing and you both head through. She explains: "This is the section where my dad, my brother, and I all work, along with a few cousins and their families and apprentices. My family's workshops are here through the first opening on the left, because we're more important!"; as she says so, you look around and take in a low, wide circular room with open doorways all around, the centre filled by a round squat stone table, leaving only a narrow walkway at the walls. The floor is uneven here too, sloping gently downward as it goes around the table to the left, so that there is a ledge on the right of the door you came in where the lowered grade meets the higher again. You assume that sloping floors are conducive to magic somehow. By this point, Rítes has already started walking into the first doorway, so you hurry to catch up with her.
She leads you to and through a smaller rotunda, this one empty, with a wide magic door to the left of the entrance and a few more small openings on the right, the last of which being the path you take. A long curving hallway seems to bring you back around 'behind' that rotunda from the perspective of the entrance, where you finally come to a room more like what you expected to find here: a cramped workspace with chests, a desk and worktable, bookshelves, strange tools, and all sorts of other little odds and ends that give it a "magical" feel. For example, the jars containing glowing drops of blood suspended in oil are a nice touch. Rítes does something to the sconce and the room lights up like daytime; you fail to restrain yourself from poking around in her stuff a little as she begins to monologue again: "This is my workshop! Isn't it lovely? A lot of this stuff was my mother's, before she died. I don't know how much you know about our customs, but we don't really do 'inheritance'; usually everything gets traded around within the clan and even outside it when somebody dies, so that nobody gets too powerful — but she had a really nice collection which she got partly from my grandparents, and from the moment we were born she was adamant that the majority of it would go to us. My dad had to make a lot of deals to keep it, but it was definitely worth it. Oh, you like that, do you?", she adds with a smirk, seeing you pick up a little pincer-like tool and eye it like you have any clue what you're looking at. "Do you know what it does? It's for clipping bits off small animals. They come in a few sizes. That one there's for things about the size of a chipmunk; I was working on a paste made of ground chipmunk, heh, gonads yesterday."
You're not quite squeamish enough to drop the tool or yelp or anything, but you do put it down a bit more reverently than you picked it up, wincing on the inside.
I guess you have an opening in the conversation now.
A) Ask her a question!
B) Keep playing with her stuff.
Poll
8 (88.9%)
Author
Topic: SpamDwarves: Low King Golian Duskbrow of Abystok! (Read 24931 times)