ꙮ Archie’s room, in the shelter of the Apostate caves. Yesterday evening he’d taken a short trip to the green-moss district of the caverns to pick up a couple of sheets of glass and a vial of quicksilver to prepare the gnosis-blanks, and then he had dinner (delicious vegetable stew! Luĉja helped make it!), and now today, he’s awake and refreshed, and ready to do some SCIENCE.
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dons his robe and parasol, reluctantly slipping out from the shelter of the cavern. Even through his protective (and frankly, adorable) clothing, he can feel the intense radiant gnosis trying to burn all it touches. “Best make this part quick,” he mutters to himself, scouting the landscape for an undisturbed corner free from the telltale footprints in the sand signifying activity - human or otherwise.
ꙮ Gate three, since it’s closest. On the bright side, you’ve got the feeling the Elementals will steer clear of this place for quite some time! There’s a nice little cleft of rock fairly close to the entrance that, with a little finagling and application of soft clay, you manage to get the piece of glass set into place nice and flat. This part shouldn’t take long, and then the other two will be set up somewhere much more amenable to taking your time. It’s second nature to you, though - the pellucid circle of glyphs woven swiftly and with skill into the glass, like a sunburst around a central point.
watches the glyphs etch themselves deeper and deeper into the glass. At last satisfied with the channels formed, he stops infusing gnosis into the glyphs and procures from one of his truly innumerable pockets a vial of something with silver’s sheen but which pours like water, settling into the channels carved into the glass, finding their home there.
ꙮ The quicksilver seeps into the channels and then they glow, soft and bright, almost invisible against the Sun’s harshness, and the quicksilver blooms into the glass, suffusing it in a single fluid moment before it locks into place, a snapshot of the forces at play, each slice of the sunburst capturing something subtly different and useful about the space where the blank was taken. Now to take it and the soft clay and get back underground where it’s nice and dark!
collects the gnosis-slides and moves with careful haste back to the cavern. Giving his eyes a moment to adjust after re-entering the darkness from the harshness of the Sun’s light, he examines them with interest.
ꙮ The analysis won’t be complete, truly, until you’ve got other slides to compare, against. But what you do notice, immediately, is that the quicksilver didn’t even make it all the way through to the other side of the glass, like it usually would; it’s like it was being stopped, pressed back against, held back from fully suffusing the glass.
exhales deeply, having never seen anything like it before. “It’s from… underground?” Thinking quickly, he makes sure to fill one vial with the soft clay used to secure the location of the slides and a second with a sample from the sand immediately under it. “Best to get rock samples from various strata of the caverns themselves,” he decides, carefully arranging the samples and slides in his robe.
ꙮ An excellent idea! The sand here is strange, and you’ve not yet done a proper analysis of it with all the senses available to you - at least, all the senses available without access to your lab, but it’ll have to do. Where to, next?
thinks for a moment, pondering over what he knows of the structure of the caves. He wants to explore most of them, given time, but he decides to start with the tunnel that leads the deepest beneath the sand, stopping every few feet of vertical distance to carefully chisel off a small sample of the tunnel’s rocky walls, sorting them by depth to go with the sand sample from the surface.
ꙮ One of the apostates asked what in the world you were doing, in a friendly and curious sort of way, and after a bit of chat they cheerfully pointed you in the direction of a particular branch of the caves that goes reasonably deep, reasonably fast, to give you material to work with, and wished you luck! And so you chisel away, and– well. You notice one thing, almost immediately. The rock of the caverns is a consistent very dark granite. The sort of rock that’s steadfastly resistant to erosion.
peers at it through his lenses, comparing it to what he saw at the surface. If the stilling effect observed on the quicksilver was coming from below, not above, could this stone be a clue as to the properties and nature of such stillness?
ꙮ The stone doesn’t have any particularly noteworthy properties in and of itself, that you notice, but its pattern-signature, and its visual appearance - you’re certain that were you to grind the granite into grains, you would not get the sand from the surface. Their gnosis-signatures are wholly distinct.
checks his supplies and is relieved to find he thought sufficiently far ahead to have a few spare gnosis blanks. He makes a mental note to re-sample at the deepest point on the path to get a point of comparison that might narrow down the possibilities of what could be causing the resistance noted in the surface sample.
ꙮ Deep and deep into the cave, you straighten up from working on a gnosis-blank - it’s too dark down here, now, to properly analyse them, although you’ve a little gnosis-wisp of light enough to see and work by - and you look right into the unblinking eyes of a weird, adorable, pale pink salamander with frilly red gills sticking out either side of its head.
takes the tiniest gasp and freezes in place, standing absolutely still, in awe and admiration of the oddly endearing creature. He slowly moves his glimmer of light towards it, trying to keep its attention without scaring it, trying to get a better look at its form.
ꙮ It doesn’t seem to get scared off, it looks as curious about you as you look about it, if weird salamanders can exhibit the Virtue of Curiosity. An open question! It tilts its head towards the bright wisp of gnosis, and dramatically goes, “yub”
works very hard to stifle the various Dignified Noises he wants to make at the cute lil guy as he cautiously approaches. So pale! So colorful in such odd places! What function could these frills possibly serve? He focuses intently on the creature, willing himself to commit as many of its features to memory as possible so he can sketch it when he gets more light to work by.
ꙮ It tilts its head up to watch Archie watch it from every angle, and intones, “yubyubyub”, gullet pulsing with gulped-in air. It’s– definitely the biggest salamander Archie’s seen, about the size of salamander that could, say, fight a coeurl kitten to a bloodless draw in a fight. Slowly and methodically, it lifts one little claw and then the other and starts ambling away down the tunnel. Definitely an amble, not a scamper.
gives it a moment to go fjrst but keeps his light on its tail, following it down at a respectful distance, observing its behavior in awed fascination. “Where did you even come from, little guy? You’re the first wildlife I’ve seen here, assuming you aren’t some kind of escaped pet.”
ꙮ It fully stops to look over its shoulder at Archie and say “yub.” like it’s some kind of response, before turning its head around again. Satisfied that Archie is following it, it rounds a corner, and then another; Archie can feel the damp in the air on his fur, can smell- something, not unpleasant, just -alive- in a way that most of Mu just aggressively hasn’t been, before one more sharp bend in the cave passageway reveals a small cavern with a great big pool of water in the middle of it, choked with stalactites and stalagmites, and– wedged in between the rocks, sitting atop them, lounging half-in the water, are dozens of the weird salamanders.
feels his whiskers twitching involuntarily at the sweet, sweet damp. So far on Mu, his options have been either ‘actively in water’ or ‘dry as a bone’, and his tongue pokes out slightly, smacking the air, realizing for the first time just how dry his throat has felt. As soon as he sees the other salamanders, he gives them a little nod, whispering to himself, “you have good taste in places to be, little ones!”
ꙮ In response to either his presence, or to the light that followed the first salamander into the room, there is a General Disturbance Of The Salamanders for a brief moment before many of them look towards Archie; on a mostly-submerged rock in the middle of the pool is an enormous, weathered-looking salamander with skin gone brown and pebbly but which still has its frilly gills. It gravely comments, “yub”, and then the chant is taken up by its companions and the entire chamber is full of a chorus of soft “yubyubyubyuuuuuuubyubyubyubyuuuuuuuuubyubyubyubyub” from all of the creatures. It’s… strangely soothing, if incredibly weird.
approaches the crowd and gently touches one of the salamanders, keeping his newly discovered healing spell front of mind just in case. “Hey buddy. Mind if I share your water for a minute?”
ꙮ You touch the salamander without any sense of a Rite being about to be invoked on you mechanistically, as would happen if its skin weren’t safe to touch, and it goes, “yuuuuuub”, which, at the very least it doesn’t seem to be upset about Archie being there in any discernible way.
looks at the water with interest, flicking through his lenses. Pellucid, of course, but has the radiant gnosis suffused even this far down? Any notable features of the gnosis-flows of the water itself?
ꙮ It’s remarkably clean and pure, like all the water you’ve examined (or tasted!) while here; there doesn’t seem to be any tangible trace of the Sun’s light this far (or even very far at all) underground, and the salamanders and their habitat are no exception.
gently sets aside his robe, having not fully waterproofed it yet assuming there would be no need. He dips one paw in the water, at first, and finding it pleasantly cool he launches himself deftly into it, grateful for a chance to actually, honest-to-the-God swim for the first time since leaving Samudra. He begins by diving to the water’s depths, interested to see how deep the water reaches.
ꙮ It’s surprisingly deep, but nowhere near deep enough to be uncomfortable for Archie; it’s fed by shallow trickles from clefts in rock, and seems to drain, immensely slowly, from the same, wedged in between enormous crystalline formations that glow with gnosis (in an utterly mundane way, albeit a beautiful one; you’ve seen these in almost every cave here that’s got water in it.) The chorus of yubbing continues unabated, above the water’s surface.
uses the glow of the crystals to look for any signs of life below the salamanders. For so many of them to be here, this place must meet multiple of their needs, and few are more powerful of a motivator than food.
ꙮ Strangely enough, you don’t see anything that they could eat, here - in the caves with natural fish populations, rather than the ones the Apostates have carefully cultivated for their sietch, there’s a kind of moss that grows on the luminescent crystals underwater that the fish nibble nigh-relentlessly. But nothing like that here.
looks back towards the surface as he comes up for air, searching what he can tell of their physiology for some kind of hint as to their apparent lack of need for food.
ꙮ ”yuuuuubyubyubyubyuuuuub”, say the salamanders, as you carefully meet one’s gaze, examine it thoroughly with your eyes and your intuitive sense of gnosis, and– while they have the appearance and gnosis-complexity of a perfectly ordinary living thing… living things perpetually burn, to stay alive; they burn the way iron burns to rust, the way fire burns to smoke and ash, and this leaves a Burning resonance in every facet of their body. These salamanders are utterly without that resonance; it would seem that their mouths are for yubbing with joyous abandon, and for that alone.
finds his utter adoration of the salamanders to be equalled only by his academic curiosity. “Okay, rules say no stealing live animal samples. But if I were to just put my robe right over here, and leave a few of the pockets open, and happened to not immediately notice if one of you self-adopts… well, who could blame me?” He sets out the robe, unclasping several salamander-sized pockets, and deliberately turns away, taking a moment to enjoy the swim and turn his attention towards the walls and ceiling of the space. Does this place seem carved as carefully and specifically as the tunnels themselves?
ꙮ What could possibly be wriggling around inside those salamander-sized pockets? Most of the tunnels don’t seem carved, per se - just the parts where humans live and work, that have obviously had a lot of time and effort put into them. This cavern, for example, seems perfectly naturally-made.
considers this. Granite is an igneous rock and suggests that, at some point, there was volcanic activity here or some other high-temperature, high-pressure event. As Scholar-NIP pointed out, black granite is unusually slow to erode, so for such a large cavern to form naturally would take impossibly long - quite likely, longer than the known length of all the cycles combined. Either the world was created this way wholecloth when the planes were separated, or these depths could represent some small remnant of the pre-separation world. What’s more, granite can have a surprisingly diverse set of composite minerals and crystals, but if his hunch is correct that none of the surface sand could be found in the granite, it suggests a definitive sequence of geological events.
ꙮ Certainly, you’d also expect sand and the products of erosion to be present here, too- but the water is clear, all the way down to the rough crystals of the undersea lakebed. And whatever the sand outside the caves was, originally, before it was sand - and it may be worth doing an analysis on it, too - it certainly wasn’t formed of the dark granite of the caves. Geological mysteries abound. One of the salamanders is swimming through the water, and bumps in to you playfully.
flicks his tail at it, creating the tiniest splash of water, returning the playful gesture. Reluctantly, he clambers back out of the water, pointedly doesn’t check his pockets, dries himself with a subtle application of burning gnosis, and re-dons his robe. “I’ll be back later, little ones. Promise!” He gives them a cheerful little wave and sets back off on the cavern trail.
ꙮ You were about as deep as you were going to get, when the salamander found you, and you have an excellent collection of rock samples from various depths, as well as gnosis-blanks at each depth and at the surface, and comparing them to each other, and to the gnosis-blank you took in the Library’s FU, reveals something interesting. The static sense pervading Mu gets stronger, the deeper into the caves you get; your initial hypothesis, that the force, or energy, or lack of it, is radiating up from the ground, is borne out - each successive deeper gnosis-blank has its quicksilver permeate less and less into the glass, stopped more quickly by a closer, and stronger, force; it seems completely orthogonal to anything caused by, or having to do with, the Sun’s harsh light.