ꙮ In the middle of the Tangle, the only dark place in all Almachadta, the shrine buried in the plane’s heartwood, where the Mask rests in the time between. Tally marks cover the walls. Some are etched deep - some are barely scratched into the hard wood at all. In the centre of the shrine, a dais made out of ancient-looking, rough-hewn stone, with a Mask-shaped hollow. At the back of the shrine, at the end of a short and twisting cleft in the roots and earth, a liminal door, slammed shut, frozen, part of the root-wall once more, with what looks like half of a Spoken Wood permanently embedded in its structure, frozen in mid-turn like they were throwing something of immense value to someone, which is true. 🙧
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- Aurelius
- The Awoken
Scene Archives
← Active ScenesAt The Mask Shrine
#archie
#tsemdrulukh
takes one last look over his shoulder to make sure that he’s alone and his swift is safe. Being in this space the first time with all the others, hearing their stories, the pain in their voices… even for him, as someone who had been trained from childhood how to control his thoughts and emotions, it was hard to stay level-headed. The thought frightened him, knowing that eventually everyone would likely come to Samudra, and he would need to lead by example. But as he entered the doorway, his eyes took on a different glint. Analytical. Easy to mistake for coldness, for many. There was a reason he found this side of himself hard to express among the others, though he supposed they would need to get used to it before entering a world where such an expression was often the norm. But being here alone, he’s ready to turn his analytical mind towards the scene at hand. ⁂
turns his eyes towards the tally marks on the walls. “It figures that the most important task would be the most tedious,” he mutters to himself, and begins to count. 🙧
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Is there a way I could use Pellucid gnosis to do this faster? I don't necessarily wanna automate it in case it gets it wrong, I just wanna basically augment my ability to read fast
ꙮ It takes some time, but ‘persistence’ and ‘patience’ are virtues it’d be impossible for the Archivist not to possess. You are taken by an impulse to count aloud, though. A sense that there -ought- to be someone there listening and taking notes as you perform the experiment, and it feels enough like a missing limb when you’re in the analytical mode that the impulse occurs to you to pause long enough to invoke a Fiend to make it easier. Pellucid, DC 4 - back home this’d be ‘snapping a tiny piece of slate and thinking about it hard enough’, but the Pellucid is thin here.
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Would this count as researching for my Academic techne?
ꙮ Strictly speaking, the check is for the invocation of a fiend, but I like the way you think - there will certainly be analysis to do in the very near future.
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 4.
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No effects, I only have 1 arete so I can't force the explosion
ꙮ And it still comes naturally to you. A little piece of slate in your pocket, snapped in half, and one half becomes a coiling little blackboard-wyrmling Lithos that quickly darts through the air and nibbles the other half of the piece of slate out from between your fingertips before hovering in the air next to you. Somehow, it grew little tiny chalk-white eyes. It’s not as good as (???), but it’ll do.
gives it a polite nod out of instinctual respect. “Help me count,” he tells it, pointing to the opposite wall and gesturing clockwise.
ꙮ It amiably floats off in that direction and makes pleasant little chalky sounds under its breath, and then you count from your end of the shrine, and it’s not TOO much longer before you meet in the middle. Two hundred and sixteen tallies on the wall of the shrine.
notes the number, filing it away in his memory. He tries to recall what details he can of his old research. He’s sure this would be easier to do if he could see everything laid out in front of him again, but for now, he tries to answer the question: assuming a roughly equivalent lifespan to the natives of Samudra, and accounting for early deaths like the one Daina had described, was there a chance the timelines could line up?
I'd like to roll Pellucid here! Do I get Academic here since I'm recalling scholarly knowledge? Also, does the familiar help with this at all?
ꙮ Pellucid 5/10, lowered to 2/7 after [Academic], please!
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 1.
ꙮ You may retroactively [Take Half] for the lower success!
- The Archivist/Archie has gained 1 Arete, and now has 2.
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That's so funny. I don't get the Arete if I do though, right? It might make more narrative sense for me to decide that this is a question for when I can actually reference my texts again instead of relying on vague memories
ꙮ Oh No, Oops, I Already Gave You The Arete (I’m erring on the side of awarding Arete for the failure even if an ass-saving Take Half happens. That said, it’s up to you!)
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I'll take the success! It's not like he won't be motivated to check his notes later anyway
ꙮ You have a persistent sense of missing tools. Some of it, certainly, is just not being at the Academy, not having your notes handy- you remember the -techniques- you used, you could probably use them here on this stranger gnosis, even, if you wanted. All of which said: You recall the Samudran calendar year being 1296. You recall that there is precious little -agreement- within the Academy, for all their precisely-kept records going back centuries to a particularly notable thought-storm cataclysm, concerning what the beginning of the calendar signifies. You recall that your own techniques -roughly- dated the gnosis of a sample of Septentrione ice, however, to approximately 13 centuries. And you know that there are 216 tally marks on the walls of this shrine - each one, according to Salme, signifying the end of an entire cycle of Almachadta’s death and rebirth - the last Sword-Saint of the age returning to the Shrine to place the Mask in a place of safe-keeping, and etch their world’s death into the wall.
turns his attention to the door, leaning hard into the analytical parts of his mind to not turn away in horror at the frozen face in it. He turns his attention towards questions of risk, evaluating the safety of a potential experiment.
This could be Pellucid or Liminal, but Archie has a thought to summon the tiniest spark of Burning gnosis here and see if it feels any easier than in other parts of the planet, implying that it's possible some amount of gnosis may be flowing through the door from Beast. But before he does anything like that, he's going to conduct a full safety report like a good little lab scientist
ꙮ DC 3, Pellucid or Liminal as is your preference. It’s good to perform a safety check!
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 2.
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I'll retroactively take half
ꙮ For a second, you’re -utterly- convinced that invoking burning gnosis here would run the risk of setting something from ‘whatever is left of Ciet’ to ‘the entire Tangle’ on fire, but then you listen with all of your senses, listen -through- the door, and- well, for one thing, you feel -liminality- on the other side of the door, not burning gnosis. There’s -traces- of burning gnosis, and - you catch tiny little spots of wood around the edges of the threshold that look like they were almost, but not quite, charred, decades ago perhaps. If anything, it feels like the Void felt, when you were adrift.
backs away with confident certainty. Turning his attention towards the indentation for the mask, he searches the air and surfaces for any lingering traces of gnosis, any clues to either the mask’s function or how this place may amplify or safeguard it.
Pellucid again, please! Hopefully it goes a little better
ꙮ Pellucid, 3/8!
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 4.
- The Archivist/Archie spent 2 Arete and now has 0 remaining.
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 5.
ꙮ Something strikes you as immediately, profoundly familiar about the stone of the dais. ⁂
ꙮ It’s warding-stone, and you’ve worked with warding-stone before with your own hands, you’ve made it. You remember how fine the Architect’s sample of warding-stone was, and this is… not that. But it’s still finer than anything you’ve ever worked with yourself - the crystals are so tightly-packed and mutually-resonant that the stone is almost white, and for all Almachadta’s bounties you’re sure you’ve not seen any warding-stone here. It would be possible to theorize that something about this warding-stone keeps the Mask - and the structure of the shrine - safe, even in extremis.
looks at it in a mix of curious amazement and unblinking analysis. If it gave this place the power to survive cycles, surely it couldn’t be, but just to be sure…?
I'd like to make extra super sure there's no signs in the gnosis that the corruption that resets the world is starting to affect this place at all, like a "the wards are becoming less effective with time" situation
ꙮ Pellucid, and you -barely- have to expand your gnosis-sense to know that the gnosis bound in this stone is utterly untouched by time in a way that you know you have never seen or felt before. Usually, enchantments fade - it takes a long time, centuries, but they fade. It is actively difficult to even approach it with your own questing and questioning mind. [Auto-Success]
nods with relief. Satisfied he’s learned all he can in here, he takes a step back outside. Taking a deep breath of air, and looking over towards his patiently waiting swift, he does somerhing wholly new to him: acting on instinct. Here, in this place rich with Flourishing gnosis, he turns his focus inward, trying to hear some faint trace of this planet’s Song for himself, to understand how many times this dissonance had been sung.
I'm gonna try doing the Flourishing roll you suggested!
ꙮ The swift chirrs luxiuriantly and with joy and rears up into the air with its front two paws and does a lil’ full-body wiggle, the blossoms of its flowering branch-antlers swaying lightly. The centrelight shimmers through the trees. Briefly, once, Archie’s roots touched Almachadta’s. [DC 2/5/12]
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🟢flourishing gnosis [d8] -> 4.
- The Archivist/Archie has gained 2 Arete, and now has 2.
ꙮ Almachadta welcomes you as if you were its own; a warm and soft embrace. The moss is soft under your paws; there’s a pleasant breeze in the air. You do not -learn- much, but it is a moment of peace. And there is a certain technique that the two of you developed, together, that you had gotten very good at doing, of taking gnosis, and studying it, studying the reverberations and perturbations and echoes, and -knowing- how old a thing was - “when was this crystal inscribed” wasn’t your party trick, that was his - but you were the one who had truly mastered it to the point where it was second nature. It is still second nature. The air, this moss, the trees, the Centrelight, everything within this cycle as you exit the shrine? Thirteen centuries, give or take. Thirteen centuries of reverberations, just like the Septentrione’s core sample.
relaxes into the moment, enjoying this unfamiliar warmth. Slowly opening his eyes, he looks back to his swift, and begins to approach it. He knows who he’d like to talk to next.
Spoiler, it's Tsem!
ꙮ The swift wants to talk to you first! And by talk, I mean nuzzle with profound enthusiasm! They’d been staying well out of the tangle, before the Delicious Fruits were taken care of, but this one followed you all the way in here now, and with a wigglesome hop onto its back it takes you back to Tsemdrulukh’s clearing.
relaxes his grip and dismounts from the swift, rubbing faces with it for a moment and giving it a treat before turning towards Tsem, lowering the hood of his cloak.
is in the clearing. They look like they’re gathering a few things - tucking some small wood-and-crystal instruments into little hollows of their wood and their branches. “Oh, hello!”
: “Hello! Sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to talk to you about a few things. You seem to know a lot about the other worlds, amd this one too. Will you share some of your knowledge with me? There’s a few things I’m trying to make sense of.” He seems to suddenly become aware that he had been leaning forward, becoming slightly bashful at the embarrassment of having potentially been too intensely curious. “I’ll, uh, give you a hand with your tasks in exchange, of course. Assuming you want me to. I’m not sure if I’d be any good at it. No way of knowing, right?” His straightening himself up turned out to be only momentary, as he suddenly becomes very interested in a particular spot on the floor.
leaned -forward- almost as soon as Archie started talking and, well, there’s a certain Vibe that Archie was familiar with from the Academy and it’s the vibe of ‘no it is Impossible, Actually, to be too intensely curious’ and, well, there’s sayings in Samudra about getting your whiskers burnt off if you poke them into too many corners but Tsemdrulukh doesn’t have whiskers, so they’re free to be as curious, and as encouraging of curiosity, as they want to be, and so they respond, enthusiastically: “We’d love to answer any questions we can, honestly. And besides, you’ve already satisfied a curiosity on our part about what a Kushtaka looked like. We’d only had Tasna’s descriptions to go by, before!”
: “Do you know anything about what this might be?” Archie reaches somewhere deep in his cloak and produces a small blue crystal, with gold filigree markings. He handles it gently, with the respect given to a specimen you haven’t proven isn’t poisonous.
reaches out with a paddle-shaped branch they use for Handling Mysterious Samples. If anything happens it can always grow back, it’d just take a couple months! No big deal! They bring it a bit closer, and the crystal part of them shines. “…icosahedral… it’s -quite- lovely. I don’t -think- it was made for a very fancy game of knucklebones, though.” A bit closer to the crystal, still, and the crystal pulses, rhythmically, slowing down over time. Then, a startled leaf-rustle. “Oh. Hunh. That’s interesting.”
looks at it with a mix of excitement and reasonable trepidation. “That’s previously-unobserved behavior. Are you noticing anything about it?”
: “It has a response if we pulse at it with a particular frequency.” They make little sharp wind-whooshes in the air with their gnosis, in time with their crystalline pulses. They’re pulsing at - you recognise it as ‘once per second’ although you’re unclear what, -precisely-, that means. You did not have your timepiece with you when you arrove in the Sanctuary, and you suddenly note the lack of it. “It’s… hn. It reminds us of… when Tasna and we open up communications, we have a… like a secret handshake, to prove that we’re talking to each other and not someone else, except made out of numbers. She came up with it, she was worried that someone would overhear us. It… feels like it’s trying to do something like that, over and over again. But we can’t… make any sense of it.” They rustle. “Or maybe it’s something like a signal fire. Or maybe both.”
thinks back to his time on Samudra. Was there anything like this that he could remember, or might this be a tracking device of the Architect, the Omniclast, or both?
This scene is 90% Pellucid rolls by volume and I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not, lol
ꙮ Pellucid, 1/7 after [Academic]!
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 1.
- The Archivist/Archie has gained 1 Arete, and now has 3.
ꙮ You have an intensely obnoxious sense of having read about something like this somewhere, or talked about it with… someone, but you fully are blanking on the details. What you -are- sure of is that this is a Samudran thing - there is a resonance to the gnosis that you could not mistake for anything else.
nods in relief. “Whatever it is, I get the feeling I’ll get the answer once I make it home. I can take it back now, thank you for looking at it with me.” He delicately places it back in his pocket. “The other thing I wanted to ask - did Tasna ever mention anything about something from Samudra being placed in the shrine? There’s something there that reminds me too closely of home not to ask.”
hands it back to Archie immediately, because it’s his and not theirs, but with excessive no-but-I-want-to-study-it-for-another-fraction-of-a-second slowness. But then the crystal part of them shimmers, a bit. “….think she’d have mentioned if… it sounded like, as far as she knew anyways, prior to her there’d not been anything from… anywhere, ending up anywhere else. Anything or anyone. But there might always be things that happened well outside of our (light-that-could-have-touched-our-leaves), so we… guess it’s possible?”
shrugs. “With the knowledge we’ve gained over even just the past few days, it seems like a great many things ought to be possible.” He finds a comfortable spot to sit. “I’m curious, do the people of this world have any stories of their creation?”
: “Any besides the Song and Stillness, that is, unless that story’s less universal than I thought.”
lets out a slow, steady breath. Settles back, a little bit. “…(I) remember. The (tree) remembers. (I) was there. (I) was barely more than an acorn. Barely awake.” ⁂
: “So if anyone would -know-… (I) would. (I) remember moss. Moss and ferns, before the forest.” They look up, through the canopy. “It looked so different.” ⁂
: “(I) must have been a seed, once. There must have been a fig and that fig must have had seeds and those seeds must have found their way to the earth and been planted. But…” A gusty, wind-through-leaves sigh of gnosis. “We’ve never been able to find…” They shrug. “It’s why we met. The parts of me. It’s why we were so curious about the world, and that curiosity led us to Tasna, and…” –they trail off with an audible shrug. “There are stories, people have. Of how their villages were founded, of legends from their past. But nothing that ever -answered- our question.” 🙧
: “The question of the first fig seed.” Archie nods, solemnly. It’s a thought that had been plaguing his mind lately. “Nothing for it but to keep searching then. Thank you for indulging my curiosity. I’m looking to many more days like this, though I fear it may turn out to be a while before they come.”
They bow, with a very particular solemn joy. “Thank you for seeking us out, friend. It was truly a pleasure. We love this world, but it… was good to have visitors like you and your odd fox-eared friend. We are sure those days will come.”
returns the gesture and returns to his swift, heading back to his accommodations at the Courtyard. He changes out of his cloak and into a set of bathing attire, entering the heated baths with a little caution at first, testing the waters, before happily diving in. He swims a few laps, so much as you could say such a thing for a baths. Having tuckered himself out, he sits on the ledge before letting himself come up to floating on the surface. Without meaning to, he slips away into slumber, and as he sleeps, he instinctively reaches out a hand, rafting with someone who isn’t there. 🙧