20210427 - Run 7
The floor is covered in broken terracotta. We decide to go up to the stadium seating, hoping to find a place to lie down and rest. We’ve shut the doors, but there’s still thumping on the door. D.va and I head up the rope.
While Chad is coming up the rope, we start hearing some heavy footfalls coming towards the vomitoria for this section of the stadium seating. Chad panics and tangles himself up with his rope when we tell him to hurry, so I grab my rope, tie it on the balcony and toss it to Caleb and Nyla while D.va is using mage hand to bat at the rope now tangled up and dangling off of Chad. We do manage to get everyone up to the stadium seating.
Caleb and I head up the stairs to the top of our section, and intercept some kind of suit of animated armor. Caleb asks it in common something, and then I queried in Old Kraskyan if it could understand him. When it heard the Old Kraskyan, it focused on me, so I pulled out the control rod from the gatehouse, held it up, and told the suit of armor to stop.
It did. So, that’s good.
I then asked it to turn off the alarms. It turned around - body turned around, head stayed fixed looking at me, and waved at us to follow it? I guess. So I yelled at D.va and Chad to hurry up; we look down and D.va’s sitting there playing with a bunch of cut-up rope and Chad’s touching himself, so that’s a great use of everyone’s time. They grab my rope and then come join us.
We ask the suit of armor for a place to rest instead; it leads us out the vomitorium, down, … you know, I’m bad at maps. We walk through a corridor into what looks like the side of a tower, with some stairways that go up and down along the outer wall of the tower. The suit of armor leads us along the wall to a small door. Inside the door is a living room (weirdly angled, because it’s a small tower and all you get is pieces of circular exterior wall), but it’s definitely a place to rest.
Inside the living room we see that it’s not just a living room, there’s an interior bedroom as well, looks like another door, generally this place looks pretty nice. Even has a bath.
I figure out how to start getting info out of the suit of armor. It can’t shut off the alarm itself, but it will shut off on its own. I get it to agree to knock on the door if something hostile approaches and tell it we’re going to rest, and then close the door. From the sounds, I hear it take up position to guard outside the door. So, cool! Time to actually rest and heal up!
After half an hour, the alarm shuts off. As soon as it shuts off, the weird circular-ish exterior wall, which was dark, lights up as though it were a … thin sheet of white alabaster with a bright light behind it.
D.va does a bit of investigation in the suite we’re in. This place was clearly not hit by the entropy effect that hit the moathouse, but she’s also pretty sure that anything we figure out about ‘how old this place is’ might be misleading, due to the complexities of getting into this place. That said, this room has been untouched for years. Decades, even. But that’s probably misleading.
After the light comes back on, it does not go out; I try to ask the armor butler if we can turn the light off and get some sleep, or if there are curtains anywhere, or if he can write… So we also found a refillable pen! D.va was very excited about this. It was in the desk, in this suite. So she’s taking that. Unfortunately Armor Butler can’t write, so I apologized and just went back inside.
Caleb found a ‘do not disturb’ sign, so we stuck that on the door. D.va found a button near the bed, and pushes it, plunging the room into darkness. So then instead of being a normal person and getting some sleep she proceeds to have a lightswitch rave.
The sink in the bath has running water and a shower with a tub. And a toilet. (And a bidet) This is a very luxurious guest quarter, especially after the collapse of the Weave.
We turn off the light and take a long rest.
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We look at the scrolls we got from the gate house.
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“Woah woah woah Mr. Pokey is not a toilet snake.” - Nyla
“Trouser snake.” - everyone else
“Mr. Pokey is my brave and valiant companion.” - Nyla
“Yeah as long as you get the shower before D.va does, no hairballs clogging the plumbing” - Caleb
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We get a slow start in the morning because Nyla won’t stop playing in the bathroom, but eventually we get all our shit together and open the door. We ask Armor Butler: “We’d like an audience now, can you take us to where we need to go for that.”
We go down the stairs of this tower, there’s a larger space that extends towards the interior of the tower on the floor below. We keep going down another floor, and we come out into a small-ish (10’x20’) foyer, opens into double doors, we walk through, and … we’re back in the main entrance. Except, everything is clean. No terracotta army dust. No new lamps, though.
I try to ask Armor Butler where the person we’d be taking an audience from, and he gets distressed and can’t really answer. We stop, and I remind the group that I’m a doctor, not an archaeologist or an arcanist or artificer. I switch over to being a translator.
I borrow a bag of ball bearings and an abacus from D.va, and work out with Armor Butler a calendar, so I can ask how long it’s been since anyone’s been here. Armor Butler tells us that it’s been over 400 years since someone else has come in here.
We think there were probably people in the moathouse for a long time after the last time someone came into the tower. We ask Armor Butler to take us to the wizard’s quarters; he apparently can’t, but he can show us the way to get there. Meanwhile I’m just sitting here holding this fucking rod in present-my-dick position of authority, following Armor Butler.
We go up some stairs, into what looks like a bar or social area. Lots of standing cocktail tables, like you’d have for a little soirée. We could take a set of stairs down to the stadium seating, there’s a balcony over the audience chamber, it’s all quite pretty. There are a bunch of … low cabinets, and what looks like a bar. There’s also a set of doors at the far side of the bar, leading back towards somewhere that I don’t know because I get turned around in places like this.
We take a short break while I go loot the hell out of the bar. I get a martini glass, a sealed bottle that goes into the backpack, and some very good liquor which hits me like a fuckin draft horse. Very good though. I grab the rest of that bottle.
Armor Butler leads us to a room with 2 mannequin guards, who see my rod of office, and a huge set of double doors. We open the doors and sunlight streams in, and we’re looking out over a skybridge, running from this tower to the central tower ahead of us. I thank Armor Butler for his friendly service and we move on.
[LEVEL UP. We level to 4th.]