[IC]Shadow over Stygia

[Korgan0]

"As much as it pains me to say it, perhaps someone other than Neb or Kamoses should lead the way, given their... predilections."

[Nebuchadnezzar]

While people are deciding a marching order, Neb. places one of the beers retrieved from the northern chamber into his sack. He then begins distractedly looking into the Glass of Leng, occasionally smacking his blue-stained lips.

(OgreBattle's proposed lineup is cool with me.)

[Prak]

"Actually, I may be able to use the same magics that allowed me to map the desert to explore the undershrine, while my body is in trance up top, removing the need for anyone to carry me in a drug craze."

[Ancient History]

Beneath the Shrine
Deciding to explore this burial pit, you quickly arrange yourselves into marching order and descend one at a time through the narrow opening beneath the bookcase, descending the ladder-steps worn smooth by many hands, and turn to find yourselves in the narrow shaft carved from the living earth described by Kamoses.

The tunnel that serves as both ossuary and archive, the shelves carved into the walls holding both stacks of bones and heavy codices and piles of vellum. Skulls are set into the wall at about head-height between the rows, their eye-sockets fitted with brass and bearing the stubs of candles to serve as lamps. The tunnel must run for at least thirty feet, and then turns to the left.

Karlus takes the lead, Kamoses and Neb holding their oil-fed hand-lamps high so everyone can see. Turning the corner, your group finds another, shorter corridor - perhaps fifteen feet long - with, again, a left-hand turn at the end. The carving here is more worn than the first corridor, the bones more fragile and discolored, and the dust laying on books and bones is thicker. Most of these codices seem bound in a strange brown leather of kind none of you have ever seen before, and interspersed with the bones of humans are those of animals - great teeth, mainly, some looking very close to the dagger Kamoses took from the statue upstairs.

Again you turn the corner - which is not quite square as it had seemed from far away, but more rounded - to find yet another corridor, this one only about ten feet long, though it is markedly more curved than straight, and ending again at a left hand turn. Here the bones are more obviously animal than human - or at least, they are inhuman, and the codices of vellum have given way to what look like beaten sheets of copper or tin. The dust on everything has a slightly blue tinge, though without any trace of the narcotic sense above.

Karlus can see in the dust where Kamoses stopped and went back, but now he carries on. The next section of the corridor is even more curved, spiraling in towards the center, and cracks in the ceiling of the tunnel correspond to those that in saw in the hidden chamber above. A strange smell pervades this section of the tunnel, though no one notices any untoward effects save that it is stuffy and slightly harder to breathe. There are also no books here - only plates of stone and metal stacked on the walls, the bones little more than fragments. Not stopping, Karlus strides forward to turn the final corner...

...and beholds a door.

The door is made of stone, the fittings of some time-worn metal that resembles heavily tarnished bronze, and it is bound and barred by wood and ancient ropes made from some sort of tendons. Images are painted all on and around the door, but in a style you have never seen, and can scarce make out the details, save for a leering face above the mantle, and the suggestion of serpents of tentacles on the door itself.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Neb. places the lamp on one of the higher stacks and briefly examines one of the metallic plates.

[Ancient History]

Based on the weight, the plate appears to be made of lead. There is an image on it:

[Kurama314]

"Maybe we shouldn't open the door that's barred from the outside."

[Nebuchadnezzar]

"Hmm, this image looks similar to something in the Sefer Malakim of the wandering Pelishtim sorcerer Lud Igeal. I wonder if one could use something akin to the flesh alembics in chapter 4 to distill the blue sand into an approximation of the waters of wisdom..." Neb mutters to himself while waiting for Karlus to crawl out from under his mother's skirt and open the door.

[Whipstitch]

"I have less than no idea what that means."

[OgreBattle]

[on the giant teeth we've been finding, can I make a check to see if I can identify what kind of animal it is, like a reptile or mammal]

[Ancient History]

(You've never seen the living animal, but you've seen such teeth before, in the ritual elements of high priests of Set, who claim they come from wyrms.)

[Korgan0]

"Fine." Karlus will debar the door then attempt to open it.

[Ancient History]

The dust of ages lays on the door, but Karlus cuts through and discards the ropes, then manages to pry the bar out and set it aside. Finally, he takes hold of the handle set in the door and tries to open it. For several moments the air is still and stuffy and warm with the heat of your bodies as you hear Karlus grunt, the veins popping out on his forehead as he alternately pulls and twists...and eventually, with the squeak of metal on metal and a puff of dust, the handle turns from a vertical position. The half-Cimmerian redoubles his effort, now that he knows which way to turn the handle, and using all his weight and strength it inches slowly and painfully towards the horizontal.

The moment that the bar is horizontal, Karlus feels a great release as the door seems to relax a little - and then he is flung backwards as the door explodes off its hinges.



A wall of blue liquid explodes from beyond the door, instantly soaking Karlus, Kamoses, and Velasco, and the force of the wave and falling bodies is enough to knock the rest of the party down so that all six of you lie sprawled in liquid as the initial torrent finishes and finds its level. The oil-hand-lamps were dropped and extinguished as they hit the blue liquid, plunging the labyrinth into darkness...and yet right before the lights go out, Karlus sees something beyond the door and screams...

What happens next is confused. The lights are out, but more than that the stench of the narcotic everywhere, stronger even than it was in the chamber above. Too late you remember the pool that was in the middle of that chamber, and the liquid that was in it...now you are all drugged to the gills, in the cramped dark. What follows next could be an eternity or only minutes; some retch, others giggle madly at the secrets of the dark, one or two lap with gusto at the liquid treasure under their fingers, or run unseeing hands across lead tablets, feeling alien heiroglyphs.

Then the earth begins to shake. Images flash in the darkness, tentacles that move through stone like water, glowing orange-hot, pulling at the stones...

You do not know how long it is later that you emerge, painfully, sick and shivering into the dying sunlight of the tomb; you have no recollection of the events. But when you all do recover your senses it is night, and the stars and moon are out. Nekka has built a fire, and is combing the camels, who seem to enjoy the attention. One or two of you look at where the pyramid was, and find only a great gaping pit in the earth.

[Okay, that's -6 SAN for everyone except for Karlus, who failed his save and gets -12 and goes temporarily insane; we'll discuss his permanent insanity effect in PMs.]

[Prak]

I believe Kamoses is now saying "fuck it" and rummaging through his robes for blue dust to rub into his gums.

[Ancient History]

Reaching into his robes, Kamoses cannot find any of the narcotic. <He does remember that they filled a wine jug full of it; it's on one of the camels.>

The smell of roast meat drifts across the desert sands, and you see Nekka has a rotisserie set up, cooking what look like two large lizards.

[Kurama314]

"God damn it!"
While Velasco's outburst seems mainly fueled by anger and a need to vent there is undeniable panic in his voice.
Taking a deep breath he'll begin walking back to camp and the fire, taking off some of his extraneous clothing to aid in the process of drying off.

[Ancient History]

Nekka smiles and waves, poking the lizards with a stick. "I think this one is done. Would like a leg or breast?"

[Nebuchadnezzar]

"I have less than no idea what that means."

(If this was meant OOC as well as in, it was a bad play on words about Luigi Serafini's art book coming from somewhere near Stygia. Sorry.)

Neb moves his camel to the side of the oasis opposite Nekka, attends to his viper, puts on his cap, shield, and padded robe, and after sitting upon the ground stares into the Glass of Leng.

[OgreBattle]

Taotie will take a leg, then go check out the great gaping hole in the earth and figure out if we crawled out of that hole, or did we walk out of the pyramid then everything fell into a hole.

[Ancient History]

Taotie stands as close as he dares to the edge. It looks like the whole shrine was pulled down into the sands, leaving a conical depression. There are tracks leading from the nearest edge - if Taotie is any judge, they were running away from the pyramid as or before it collapsed.

"So," Nekka says, giving the lizards another turn. "What now?"

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Nebemakhet stands up, stashes the Glass of Leng, and brushes himself off. He then carefully approaches the temporarily insane Karlus, to see if he can offer immediate psychological aid (per CoCd20). If the half-Cimmerian can be put at some ease. he'll approach Nekka while brandishing the framed entrance focus, and pointedly question her as to the events surrounding the sinking of the shrine.

[Ancient History]

Karlus mumbles something about "the rock-spirits are uncouth," then goes to get a hunk of lizard. Nekka for her part offers the following explanation:

"I was just combing the camels," she begins, and Neb can see that not only are all the camels combed, but in some cases elaborately braided "...and then the earth started to shake quite violently, and you gentlemen came out of the shrine, giggling and screaming, and fell down on the sand. A few moments later the whole shrine sank, like a crust of bread in a gallon of beer. I thought you might be hungry when you got up, so I caught a few lizards for dinner." So saying the giantess gives the reptiles a half-turn to Karlus can cut off the head of one <"Cimmerians like the neck." he mumbles "The earth-spirits say so.">

"Are we going back to Kheshatta?" Nekka asked.

[Prak]

Kamoses shuffles over to the fire, and takes a leg of lizard. "I don't think we have any clue where we're going right now. Our mission is half done/half foiled, and if we go back to Keshatta, we're walking into an army that wants us dead. If we keep delving into desert tombs, any one could kill us all, or hook us all on the damned blue powder and keep us in a pool of it until our drug-addled bodies starve to death. At best, I can keep communing with the earth until we find our way to a new city."

[Ancient History]

"Every time you do that, don't you wake up screaming?" says Nekka.

[Prak]

"Eh." Kamoses shrugs, tearing a chunk of lizard meat from the bone.