Tel Kendar
Beklar's explorer group returned over the hills, although only 9 out of 15 had safely returned. Beklar met with Korkel to report, while the others went to share their tales more informally over a cup of nutruk.
"One and a half moons' travel downstream the river Liss, there is a great city of the Akkadians, known as 'Akkad'. The Liss joins another river inside their walls. We marked it on the map as the river Yufrat, that is their name although we cannot pronounce it perfectly. That city has huge stone buildings and a great tower in the centre.
They seem to use water from the river to grow crops on the desert soil. We could recognise wickwheat, but they had also vegetables that are unfamiliar to us. The aromatic powders we bought at Tel Tikal seem to be heavily used in the Akkadian food, we could smell them on the market stalls.
From the Akkadians, we learned the Yufrat river goes down through the desert to the sea and their port named Ac Acasid. It seems the desert merchants are seafarers as well"
"Yes, since you left we have been visited by one of their vessels at the island of Tel Sirtis"
"Finally, the Akkadian solidiers were suspicious of us, we could only explore the city under escort. After meeting with their leaders in the tower, we were treated as guests rather than prisoners though.
After leaving the city, we followed the Yufrat upstream for one moon, to reach the rainforest which the Akkadians told us of. We found nearby a huge ruined city in the jungle. Many of the structures were partially collapsed, and the scale of it was too big to explore with a small group. Instead we followed the edge of the desert to complete the map.
Soon afterward, we found a badly corroded metal hatch in the ground..."
Several weeks ago, a ruin in the rainforest
"Lek!", cursed Janik as she landed on something hard and stumbled. She picked herself up and saw a large rusty iron ring protruding from the leafy ground. She tugged at it, but it seemed solidly held. Calling over the rest of the explorers, they started to dig away the loose wet soil and rotting leaves. After a few hours, it was fully exposed. The ring was a wheel in the centre of a three metre diameter iron hatch, hinged on one side and the whole thing badly corroded.
They struggled to turn the wheel, but the rust held it fast. Beklar took a fallen branch and pushed it between the spokes of the wheel to use as a lever, and pushed it. The wheel turned a little before catching again, and the branch snapped off. After a few more tries with fresh branches, the rust gave way and the wheel turned with a screeching noise. The wheel would turn more freely now, and the explorers turned it all the way.
They stopped to rest and then pulled the heavy hatch back. A ladder led down into darkness that not even their night vision could penetrate. They dropped a pebble down the shaft and waited. After 5 and a half seconds, there was a faint sound like landing on dry ground which echoed up the shaft. Strange noises followed it, and dozens of tiny lamps flickered on, illuminating the shaft.
The explorers leapt away and blended in the trees, waiting to see what would emerge.
After a while, nothing had come out of the shaft, and there were no more noises so they returned to investigate.
First, five climbed down the shaft. At the bottom of the shaft was a large tunnel, with very rusty iron walls. Set in the walls were strange lamps behind glass panels. Although they were hot, the light was white and steady, not the flickering yellow of tallow lamps. This was some strange kind of magic, and nobody was around to have lit the lamps either. A few metres along the tunnel it ended in a circular disk of metal, but with a flat floor, making it look like some kind of door. They called up the shaft, and Beklar brought another five down to join. The five explorers left on the surface were instructed to retreat to a safe distance, and be prepared to take back the maps if something went wrong.
As the explorers approached the door, it slid sideways into the wall, revealing a very large spherical chamber beyond. The chamber had corroded iron walls with the same strange magical light sources, but a glass floor and three more doors. Through the floor, there was a pool of water visible, but it was dark and impossible to see more than a few metres down.
The explorers went through the door at the opposite side of the room, and discovered a very strange place indeed. There were glass windows mounted in the walls, but they were mostly dark and nothing could be seen through them. One or two of the windows were emitting a buzzing noise and random patterns of blackness and white light. There were recessed blocks of coloured glass, some of them glowing as if lit up from within, and much rusty machinery.
Janik touched one of the glowing blocks, and it slid easily back into the recess with a click. Nothing else happened, so she tried pressing some other blocks. Suddenly a bright image filled the air in the centre of the room, the the explorers jumped back.
The magical projection rotated slowly in the air. A tall white cylinder in the centre, with spirals around it. above the cylinder, the spirals attached to the side of a sphere, the sphere had a small block on one side and a narrow cylinder going upward from the other... was this a map of the ruin?
After studying the map, the explorers opened the door on the right side of the sphere, finding a spiral staircase descending as the map had shown.
Descending the stair, the passage became flooded.
"Janik, Maris: you are the best swimmers, go down there and find out what there is."
The two swam down the passageway, finding places where the walls had rusted through completely and were penetrated by huge roots from the forest trees above. At the bottom was another hinged hatchway, similar to the one on the surface.
Janik and Maris turned the wheel on the hatch, surprised to find it turned easily. As the wheel turned, suddenly the hatch slammed outwards, crushing Janik against the wall, and then collapsing on the ground as the ferocious water current tore it from its corroded hinges.
Maris grabbed Janik by the belt and swam upwards, the water was a lot deeper now. Finally they reached the surface, Maris gasped for breath but Janik did not. She just lay limply on the stairs, dead or dying. With a shaman, perhaps she could have been saved, but there was no shaman or healer here.
The western stairway was not flooded, but surely opening a hatch into air would be even more dangerous than a submerged hatch. So Beklar led a group of four down the flooded staircase to examine the illuminated hatch that could now be seen at the bottom of the cylindrical room.
This hatch opened easily to expose a small flooded chamber below with a door in the floor.
After closing the hatch, the door slid open, dumping the water into an air filled chamber below, a spiral staircase led downward from the doorway.
As the explorers descended the stairs, lights flickered on to illuminate the chamber below. The chamber had a single door in one wall, and the other walls were lined with large glass tubes. Most of them were full of water, some had decayed bones and a fine sediment at the bottom. In the centre of the room was a rectangular table with more of the glowing glass blocks in the surface. Close to the stairs were suits of armour with bulbous glass helmets to fit a drylander race.
The explorers tried the buttons which looked most similar to the one that summoned the map in the upper room. They did not summon a map, but images did appear in the air.
A small thin eel like fish with a bulbous head and an X shaped mouth.
A normal looking fish with elongated fins.
A squid like creature with a round, spherical shell.
Giving up on the panel for now, the explorers went through the door, to find a corridor with many small rooms off each side. Each room contained a decaying bed similar to what they had seen in the tavern at Akkad. At the end of the corridor was a door that did not open.
The explorers returned to the room with the glass tubes, and pressed some other buttons close to the one which had shown the long finned fish. First they heard a click, then the sound of something opening in the distance. A drawer slid open from the front of the table, containing a thin white rectangle of some strange material never seen before. It was slightly flexible, but hard and smooth.
Considering the locked door, they went back down the corridor. It was still closed, but as they approached holding the white talisman, the door slid open to reveal some kind of storage room.
Hanging on the wall were three odd looking crossbows, and there were crates containing fat blunt bolts. It took some time to figure out how to load the crossbow, as the mechanism was quite different to the ones they had seen before. As an experiment, they fired the crossbow down the length of the corridor.
After about 10 metres, the "bolt" cracked open and fell to the floor, a steel chain net had expanded from it and flew along the corridor for some distance before dropping to the floor. It could be a useful hunting tool, indeed. Beklar gathered up the net and the pieces of sabot but could not figure out how to reassemble it for reuse. The net itself was good and much stronger than the rope nets they normally used.
It was time to return to the surface...
The explorers climbed back up into the upper chamber and let the door slide closed behind them. As they opened the upper hatch, the chamber flooded with murky brown water. The water filled upper chamber was now brightly lit, but the water was so murky that they could only see a short distance through it.
They swam back towards the wrecked hatchway they had entered through, and felt a disturbance in the water behind them. Quickly they span around with spears at the ready, to see a huge version of the X-jawed eel swimming right at them! A thrown spear caught the eel in the jaw, but it plowed on, crushing one of the explorers with a mighty blow. In fear, the others swam as fast as possible for the hatch, and made it just in time, as the eel crashed into the metal behind them, its open maw against the hatchway. A spear stabbed into the mouth, and the eel thrashed, then rammed the hatchway again. The explorers were already fleeing up the stairway, reaching the upper chamber and leaping across to the entrance passageway in a single bound.
"Huh, why are you running like that?" was all one of the group left above had to say, before the eel crashed upward through the glass, snatching him it its jaws and falling back into the water. Two more of the explorers fell into the water, and one was impaled with a shard of glass. The last one fled in terror, following the three who had just dashed for the ladder.
Four of the explorers made it to the surface, the others who fell were not seen again.
Finally, the explorers resealed the hatch in the forest, and painted warning symbols in blue pigment, along with the names of those lost.
Tel Kendar
"So this is what we could bring back"
Beklar laid out the three crossbows, and 14 net cartridges.
"This talisman appears to open locked doors, but maybe it works only in that place."
He added the white rectangle to the pile.
Tel Santos
The growing population was providing extra labour and the engineers were making good progress in turning the savanna into swamp.
Progress: 281/800
Tel Yolanda
With the immediate problems of food and defences out of the way, they began to study the ruined furnace and forges. The black rocks were not an ore, as they had thought, but they would burn if added to an already hot fire. The red rocks would glow in the heat of the fire, but no metal flowed out of them. In the forges, they found casting moulds and crucibles for working with molten metal. The iron bars found near the furnace were brittle and hard to work.
Excavation of the ruin was still ongoing.
Tech up (improve metalworking): 171/1000
Tech up (iron smelting): 171/4000
Author
Topic: Battle of the Gods III+ (Read 64847 times)