THREE HUNDRED THIRTY
(I/C)
Brendon motioned everyone to enter the room with a series of sweeping hand waves. Once in, he muttered, “Excuse me,” and took out his lock picks. Crouching low in front of the door he peered at the lock and drew two thin picks from his collection and then worked on trying to lock the door. Abraxas was standing over him, Scythe at the ready while Kovid moved across the chamber, left the lantern on the table, and made his way to the south door, bracing it closed with his foot and glancing back, ear cocked to listen here.
The Scout worked quickly (<Reverse Open Locks, Red 02!) and there was a snicking sound as he twisted the lock in place. “Whew,” he muttered and stood up, rubbing his eyes. “Let me go do the other one.”
“I will listen here for the bad hombres here,” the Fighter said.
Giving the accoutrements on the tables a distant look, Lyra followed the Scout to the other side of the chamber where Kovid was positioned and turned her attention to the iron elven statue.
Once at the other door, Brendon crouched low and worked his picks again (>Reverse Open Locks +20% bonus same lock type, Red 72) but after a few minutes couldn’t get the lock to engage. “You ok?” Kovid asked him, glancing back to see Lannis was already checking out the bottles and jars at the tables and shelves, while Wyn was concentration more on the symbols and formulas painted on the walls.
“Yeah, give me a second.” The Scout shook his fingers free and tried the lock again (<Reverse Open Locks +20% bonus same lock type, -10% loss of confidence, Red 21) this time smiling as the lock clicked in place. Standing up he stretched his back out and replaced his picks. “Done. I’ll listen here. How long we staying, you gonna look tat the Crystal, Big Brain?”
“Gimme a minute,” Lannis muttered. “Real nice set up,” he muttered.
Kovid was checking out the fireplace/forge area, noting the embers at the bottom of the shaker bin (<Int check, +2 dwarf, Yellow 13). “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s been 5 hours since this fire was tended. Most everything has burned away. Charcoal and dried timber. Hardwoods.” He looked to the side of the fireplace, noting the wood bind there held the expected woods. “Well stocked too. At least a dozen hours of fuels here.”
He poked through the stone molds stacked up there, every one of them was about the size of the palm of his hand and maybe half as deep, and all were roughly oval and showing faceted sides. “Looks like a mold for...making cut jewel looking rocks?” he frowned.
He turned his attention next to the barrels, finding the tops of them had been just knocked in place and not sealed. They were heavy, two of them, one of them half as much. He pried the lids up on all three and saw that they all held the same thing. Sand. One barrel was more than halfway empty. He reached in and felt around, but it was only sand. He scooped some out and let it run through his fingers, examining it closely (dwarf, no roll). “Silicate sand. Heavy too. Good for glassmaking.” He looked over at the mold again. “No molds for bottles or vials, no glass blowing tubes or tools. But a half dozen molds of making what…glass gems?” He rubbed his beard. “I don’t get it.”
Wyn meanwhile was looking over the formulas and symbols on the walls. “Dere is something here,” he mused giving it a hard look. Some of the symbols he remembered from his time at the academy regarding magical theory (>Int check, +1 elf, Orange 20 – no), but nothing was clicking. “Monsieur Offop,” he asked, whispering to Lannis who was tilting jars and bottles and peering inside methodically, “How much alchemy do you have experience wit?”
“Quite a bit. Most of it was thrown at my head, why?”
“I’m serious, I dunt know wot dese are.”
“How should I know?”
“All dat mage schoolin you always be talkin bout make me tink alchemy may ‘Ave been an elective. It might help to parse through deze formulas, oui?”
Lannis glanced over at them (<Int check, +1 bonus wizard, Pink 12) and nodded. “Yeah yeah yeah, keep your girdle tight. Most of them are short hand formulas for reagent mixing. Like three parts wormwart, 2 parts cedar oil, mix, boil 15 minutes, extract and cool 3 hours. I don’t know all of them, whoever did it has terrible handwriting and truthfully, some of them are abbreviations. Like Sul right there,” he pointed, “Is that sulfur? Sulfurous ash? Sulfide salt? No way of knowing, but the person who uses this area knows what it is.”
“If we deface it,” Brendon whispered, “will that person be screwed?”
Lannis shook his head. “Nah. I’m sure he has it memorized or written elsewhere properly,” he pointed to all the books and scrolls in the room, “This is just at his fingertips shortcut. My own teacher did something similar.” He backed away from the table. “Ok, there are at least 50 different ingredients that I can identify and maybe 10 that I can’t. It’s a pretty well stocked lab here from what I can see.” He pointed at a section of the alembic. “But here? Right here?” he got closer and pointed at three sections with a green thick liquid covering maybe an inch of the bottom of each section. “I would bet all of Lyra’s glue…”
“Fuck you,” she muttered from the elven statue.
Lannis continued, “Whatever My Little Pony. Anyway, this stuff? This is green slime.”
“Burn it,” said Abraxas, Brendon, and Kovid.
“Yeah,” the Magic User muttered, “I figured that. But it’s in the middle of the alembic network and the burners are all off. I’d like to NOT fuck this up and let the shit out or break this set up because it will make a fuck ton of noise and we’ll have the Hobmob two feet up our ass in half a second flat.”
Throughout all this Lyra was giving the elven statue a once over. It was old and had some small rust spots at the joints and along the lower areas but was surprisingly in good shape. She lifted the apron off its gauntlet, “It’s like someone was using it as a clothes rack.” It was heavy, the leather scarred and stained in many places. “Like you do with the big chair in the bedroom, you toss your clothes on it.”
“You could try sitting in it,” Kovid muttered.
“True.” She shrugged. The apron had a smell to it of mixed herbs and faintly the sour scent of goblin. She felt around it and in the side pocket was something hard. She tilted the apron and held her hand under the pocket…and a simple key rolled out. She looked it over and glanced at Brendon. “Hear anything?”
“Not yet,” he whispered back.
She handed him the key. “Try this out.”
He took it, looked it over, and stuck it in the lock. And it fit. A gentle turn back and forth confirmed this was the key for the door. “And the locks are the same,” he sighed. “That’s a good find, Lyra.”
She went back to the statue, Wyn whispering back to her, “Priestesse, I would not move de polishing cloth off de shield…ah fuck it, nevermind.” Lyra had pulled it free and was rolling it up, giving the shield a once over. Like the statue itself, it was larger than normal and the shield was quartered, each field showing an etched area of a stalk of grain, a waning moon, a chimera made of a gargoyle and spider and a snake, and lastly a heart. The middle of the quartering though the shield had been marred. Something had been set in the shield but (<Wis check, -4 penalty, White 10) she was able to tell that it had been hacked out. The marking were flat and wide, “A chisel?” She wondered, “Some sort of awl or wedge?” Whatever had been set in the shield was about 5 inches long at its widest part and was roughly egg shaped.
As for Abraxas (>Hear Noise, Blue 19) and Brendon (<Hear Noise, Black 21), neither one reported hearing anything nearby or approaching. Glancing over at the lantern, Kovid frowned. “Have about half an hour of oil left at this point. What’s the deal?”
Time now is Day 8, 10:50 AM
(OOC)
Alright. Some things learned and discovered. What would you guys like to do? Crystal ball at some point? Anything else? What’s the plan?
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