Scene Archives

ꙮ Luĉja, apparently, found a hidden door in the caves, by accident. They were being shown the hydroponics system by one of the apostates they’d been helping out in the kitchen, and then there was something involving Ĉasid chasing after a “weird salamander”, and one thing led to another and, apparently, in an unlit and untraveled portion of the apostates’ cave system, there’s a door that nobody found before. Chaya, having been told about it, and having seen the group in action, said that if you wanted to take a look at it before she had the chance to, you were welcome to – she had the feeling that you were the sort that would want to.

ꙮ Sietch? Anyways, it is remarkably close. The friend Luĉja made - Sarah, she works in the kitchens most days, you briefly met her when you were all called to mealtime and fed a delicious vegetable and mushroom stew - wrote down instructions on how to get there, following particular patterns of light-strips buried into the ground and particular colours of iridescent moss on the walls, that seems to be how ‘directions’ are given around here. Eventually, you get to where the lights all cut out, and instead there’s a thick gouge cut into the ground, to follow, into some winding passageways that’re pitch-black without a light.

ꙮ And that does the trick without needing to bring a lantern. You follow that gouge in the floor, all the way to what looks, at first, like a dead end, except - the walls are too regular, here, they look carved out of the stone passageway, made smooth. There’s a slight, door-sized indentation, in one of the walls, and next to that indentation is a twenty-keyed keypad with slightly soft, raised buttons, and a crystal display.

ꙮ It’s definitely different in design and construction, to be sure, but the idea’s one everyone’s seen before on Samudra’s elevators and even baths, yes. It looks like there may have once been markings on the keys, but they’ve long since given up the ghost.

ꙮ It seems like a perfectly normal number of keys to put on a keypad to me!

ꙮ Factually inaccurate.

ꙮ Certainly worth a shot. It doesn’t look like it’s been used at all in - it’s impossible to say how long. And you’ve got everything you need to try it, because you’re [Always Prepared]. Also, when you get close to it, the crystal display flickers– flickers– and then lights up steady.

ꙮ Surprising how little dust there is, really - although possibly not surprising at all, given Mu and its predilections. Pellucid, DC 2?

ꙮ That certainly does the trick - you carefully, lovingly brush dust off the keys, and the crystal display. Whatever the security key here was, it was fairly well-chosen, but it doesn’t seem to have been changed often if at all. There’s a consistent pattern of wear that narrows things down… somewhat, at least.

ꙮ Every button you push on the keypad adds one character to what’s displayed on the crystal. The glyphs - numerals? are each made of either zero, one, or two vertical lines, zero through four dots next to that, and then zero or one horizontal lines underneath both of them, except for the key on the bottom right, which produces what looks like an X. The display fills up up to twelve different characters before making an obnoxious BZZT noise, and clearing itself fully.

ꙮ No, a gross would be if it accepted 144 characters.

ꙮ …Respect for the bold approach! Liminal, please, DC 10?

ꙮ I think stepping through a forgotten, long-lost door like it’s not there is something ‘impossible’, yes, but - what does that feel like?

ꙮ And you take a look around, indeed. ⁂

ꙮ It is - or it was - someone’s home. Someone’s… dwelling, actually, you get the immediate sense. A shelter in extremis, perhaps, although a remarkably well-apportioned one. There’s a huge, curved crystal screen that’s got a huge crack running through it from corner to corner that takes up a solid chunk of one wall. There’s a bed in a corner of the room that’s divided off from the rest of the room by thin folding screens. The angles are all incredibly smooth, and clean, and look – nothing like any style you’ve seen on the Beast or even Samudra; there’s a metal table with a smooth white surface that is, somehow, still softly glowing. ⁂

ꙮ There’s a small cushioned surface curving around the table, and slumped against the wall, facing the broken, curved screen, is the body of a - you guess he was human - with vivid blue hair. He’s got one hand reaching out towards a crystalline tablet, resting on the table, and it looks like he was looking down at it. There’s a box, on the table, full of figs that are still fresh; one of them’s been deliberately cut in half. Behind you, there’s the controls for the door - you could unlock it, from this side, you think. 🙧

ꙮ It turns out you can! The door chirps brightly, and some latch inside it clears.

ꙮ You find it, after casting about for a moment or two. It’s more or less where you’d expect it to be - soft light, like the persistent glow of the table, coming from no real identifiable source, diffusing off of surfaces, but suddenly the room is bright enough to comfortably see by. There’s a metal plaque on the back of the door - it looks a little like a map.

ꙮ Definitely a diagram, at the very least. It looks like this room was, at one point at least, one of many - at least a hundred, on this diagram alone, at any rate, in an elaborate warren of rooms and chambers.

ꙮ He looks neither young nor particularly old; he had a fencer’s build, and was wearing a remarkably dapper-looking dark blue silk suit that’s- somehow you recognise ‘formal wear, even in a bad situation’ even if you’re wholly unfamiliar with the stylistic sartorial language. He’s wearing a tight solid metal collar that looks like a single piece of smooth metal, tucked unobtrusively under the suit collar. He was crying, you think, when he died.

ꙮ There’s a resonance within the collar, in response to your radiance. A lightning-quick and complicated weave, like a secret handshake; if you knew the counterweave by heart– well. Something might have happened. But anyone who knew the counterweave, you think, must be long gone by now.

ꙮ It seems, somehow, like a solid piece of metal, with no plausible way to remove it. But he is also wearing a bracelet with an inlaid shell band, ingeniously elastic, and with what looks alarmingly like the surface of a small Samudran tomestone worked into it. You could probably take that without much trouble, and he’d be in no position to mind.

ꙮ There doesn’t seem to be any physical controls, for the table, but– you can almost -feel- it gently snagging and catching your mind.

ꙮ Well, did you try operating the light switch with your mind? Maybe you should have. Anyways - it feels a little bit like a fiend, honestly. Nothing happens when you just think about it getting brighter, but. The man’s collar responded to gnosis; perhaps the table would also?

ꙮ Ooh, that definitely works. The surface of the table dims, drastically, and then flares up again! (And as the light changes, your eyes catch - you think the crystal he was holding is literally etched, inert, maybe? There’s definitely markings on it.)

ꙮ Calling it a ‘tablet’ would have entirely the wrong connotations! The library is an irrica tablet, carefully sculpted! This is a piece of etched crystal! In any event, focusing on the bracelet - you feel the catch, again, with your mind, you quest out a little pulse of gnosis, and you get one in response.

ꙮ The face of it lights up, and a bloom of gnosis unfurls from it. For Aurelius’ eyes only, imagery flickers into the space in front of him. A desk, with locked drawers. A little model of a white tower that you feel like you could pick up with your hands and hold, you swear, it’s that detailed. An outline in the air, a suggestion, like a vivid sketch in three dimensions, looking down on the desk and its occupant with a faintly-amused smile on his face.

ꙮ Somehow, inexplicably, despite that you know you’re touching thin air, it feels heavy in your hands, you can feel the surface of it, cold and polished.

ꙮ It’s possible!

ꙮ When you try the locked desk drawers, they respond fairly vigorously - you’re good enough with gnosis and with systems that you know they’re keyed to a living person’s gnosis. There may be no way to access whatever informational secrets this device holds… but you’re pretty sure you could make some headway on replicating some of the effects.

ꙮ Ceiling’s… just the ceiling. Whatever effect the bracelet is having doesn’t extend that far.

ꙮ There’s a slight textured pattern to it that interacts pleasingly with the diffuse light in the room.

ꙮ It seems more like a very odd version of a portrait kept on one’s desk, if anything.

ꙮ You reach out with a gnosis-pulse, you even get an acknowledgement pulse back- and then you can practically see wisps of radiance dissipating out of the crack in the huge crystal display.

ꙮ Part of it’s working, at least! Just not a part that makes anything visibly interesting happen, alas.

ꙮ How do you mean? You reach out, gently move his hand aside, take the crystal slab, hold it up to the light. It’s etched with letters, although, well… “BO SN WSHSGMHW— NMVZ ZGQVQV NTOV BDBE HZ CN TBEBQYDWGMHW GPCGOW. HZ CN TBEBQYDWGMHW GPCGOW;” …and it goes on like that, for quite some time. {A Letter Inscribed In Crystal}

ꙮ All in characters you recognise, at least, for whatever that’s worth.

ꙮ Yeah, what did you think I meant?

ꙮ Oooohhhh. Okay.

ꙮ Visible in a little inset cubby along one wall, there are several boxes full of what look like emergency supplies – Chaya’s people can probably use them more than this guy can, at this point.

ꙮ Worth asking what her strategy is, probably!

ꙮ Would explain why things like the hydroponics system Chaya mentioned still works perfectly, right?

ꙮ Seems like you found everything worth making note of. Although if Chaya and her people find anything you might find valuable when they do a sweep, Emberlight’ll probably get first crack at it. Finders’ privilege.

ꙮ A good precaution, really! And now you’ll have even more interesting things to report to Chaya once she’s back from whatever she’s working on.