Javi shrugs, "Well, we gotta pick something, right?" He points at the necromantic pillar. "If you can try to shut that one down, I'll try survive triggering the other ... evocation trap." He shrugs, "I've survived a few scrapes in my time."
"Very well then Javi" - Heldar smiles at his companion - "Take no unnecessary risks. I will cast a protective spell on you - it should assist in dealing with any surprises"
Then he turns to the area before them, and focuses on a stronger manifestation of life forces - his eyes glow for a moment as he recites words of power.
Javi begins stripping down to just a few items, leaving most everything else in a pile near Shaggar's ... paws. The little thief flexes his toes against the cold stone floor, "That actually feels pretty good." He looks up at Heldar. "Just tell me when the necromancy effect is down."
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For the second time in the space of one hour, Heldar brings his command over the forces of life itself to bear: concentrating mightily! Once more he finds himself struggling against the will of a powerful wizard, worked into the stone.... and once more Heldar's might proves superior!
Meanwhile, Javi has stripteased. The statue of the woman pharaoh does not seem to be properly appreciative. Maybe she likes her men taller.
In any case...
With protections cast on the diminutive little warrior-thief, the others urge him forward. Javi sidles forward! Or perhaps tiptoes. Or, possibly, vaults like a brown-and-black pinball into the air. There are many potential paths...
...but the destination is the same. Javi moves past the blank pillar of obsidian with its writhing script, which he scrupulously avoids trying to read, and makes it to the far side unscathed.
Javi finds himself in a hallway that stretches perpendicular to the one he just emerged from.
To the north (Javi's right), the corridor ends about thirty feet away. There are two exits that direction: what looks to be stairs leading up, and a ten-foot wide archway opposite them.
To the south (Javi's left), the corridor extends about the same distance. Javi sees three exits: there appears to be a doorway standing open; a pair of large and ornate doors; and a third door opposite the ajar one.
Though the hallway is as richly covered in hieroglyphic panels as the other halls so far, Javi can make out few other details given the current dimness of the hallway around him, with the only light being that of Heldar's magic, shining from behind him.
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Shaggar moves past the black pillar while scrupulously averting his eyes to any sight of the script or the hallways beyond. He has the presence of mind to look slightly disappointed he won't be keeping Javi's equipment as he hands the wily thief all his goods back. He motions Rosalia forward without a light source to ensure she is nearly blind in the darkness of the North-South hallway. He points in both directions, "Sayyidah, please bathe these areas in your mystic sight to see if any magics line the walls."
"Of course" - Heldar nods, satisfied that his powers allowed them to navigate the passage safely. With a simple spell, his awareness expands, allowing him to detect magical auras and emanations.
Lyrian follows along behind.
Rosalia squawks like a chicken... kidding, kidding.
Rosalia arches a brow at Shaggar's suggestion before she understands the reasoning behind his plan and her expression clears. The Brevoyan woman moves forward, squinting into the blackness, and murmurs words beneath her breath, similar to the words Heldar's saying over there!
Both scan up and down the hallway, but neither detect any presence of magic in their field of vision (save, of course, the obsidian pillar behind them, but presumably nobody is looking too hard at that one).
The gang's together again, past the pillars, with several possible directions to explore. The pyramid seems very silent.
Shaggar moves cautiously south, glancing at the walls for anything of interest, and peeking down the east-west corridor.
At a silent gesture from her packmate, Hatyah slinks north, looking for trouble.
Shaggar sidles carefully down the corridor, seeing nothing moving as he approaches the group of doors.
As he approaches the open door, he tenses as he sees figures standing inside the room, then slowly breathes out again as he recognizes they are not moving.
Still, the room is quite full of... dead men. When he passes before the doorway, Shaggar can see the emaciated and dessicated bodies of soldiers standing, arranged in a squad formation. He can see a number of figures, some of bowmen and others holding handaxes. Their armor is ornate although it is hard for Shaggar to make out any further details in the darkness. There is a thin layer of dust on these soldiers.
The doorway to this room, standing ajar, has ancient Osiriani hieroglyphics on the archway.
The double doors gleam dully in the light of Heldar's magic: they appear to be made of hammered gold decorated with yet more hieroglyphics. They are a good ten feet tall, massive and clearly designed to be imposing.
Finally, the single closed door features a single line of hieroglyphic inscription.
Shaggar sees and hears nothing stirring in any of these rooms.
Hatyah slinks forward, nails ticking silently against the green marble. She picks up no particular scents and hears nothing moving.
Shaggar sidles closer to the open doorway, trying to see the limits of the room without entering it. Then he commits the inscriptions to memory and returns to the group to quietly recite them. After which, he says quietly, "Perhaps Ulunat is the name of the cursed one."
When Shaggar steps carefully closer, he can see yet more dead standing at attention, these holding curved khopesh swords, their bodies fixed with unknown preservatives and limbs bound in linen strips. The room is spacious enough, with pillars in the corners supporting the alcoves that each hold their soldiers. More notably, however, is a body lying face down in the center of the room.
It appears badly decayed and dessicated to gauntness, to the point where things like gender, race, and other features would be hard to identify. The body is clad in tattered black robes.
Shaggar tries to identify the legion of undead warriors.
Shaggar's experience with the undead would serve him better if they were undead.
Sadly, these appear to be simply... corpses. They've been treated to keep their bodies somewhat intact-- organs removed, bodies stuffed with nitron, etc, possibly wires threaded into their limbs to keep them upright-- but there's no animating spark of movement. They simply appear to be dead bodies, held in the rigid stiffness of an honor guard.
The body on the floor similarly does not appear to be undead, simply an emaciated corpse.
Javi's Theme
Javi slinks forward and pauses at the opening into the room with all the dead soldiers. ”Might be worth checking out that body,” He whispers back to the crew, ”figuring out how he died could be important.”
"Perhaps Ulunat is the name of the cursed one."
Javi shrugs indifferently, ”Or any number of other things.” Javi moves to the guilded doors and after sliding his goggles back onto his head begins looking for pressure plates, wires, or any number of other triggers on or around the door.
He'll repeat the same on the other two doors (even the ones that are open).
Javi hunts super-carefully for traps on the golden doors, the closed single door, and the open door, and finds nothing.
"These references to prostration and crawling... they could be a clue to the safe approach."
Lyrian examines the area for any signs of traps, thinking especially about traps that would not affect a low-crawling man.
"So if we run into the 'four holy ones', we should keep that in mind." He looks back at the room with the open door. "I think we should deal with that room first. That body may have some insights for us, and I'd hate for this army of ever-vigilant warriors to wake up and come at us from behind."
Lyrian similarly finds no traps.
Shaggar signals the casters forward to detect magic, while the gnoll switches position with Hatyah, leaving the hyena to guard the crew while he investigates the northern passage.
Shaggar sidles north!
He finds that the ten-foot wide archway in the wall opens into a chamber about fifteen by twenty feet wide, with smooth walls unmarked by hieroglyphics. The most striking feature of this 'room' is that the bulk of it is a pit. A ten-foot by ten-foot square where there should be floor seems to be a black hole, of indeterminate depth from where Shaggar views it. Additionally, there is a matching lack of ceiling: the same ten-foot chasm disappears up overhead in that chamber.
On the other side of the hall, Shaggar sees a short flight of stairs heading east, reminiscent of the other short flight of stairs that led to the stone-block 'door'.
Rosalia, meanwhile, moves south at Shaggar's suggestion, to look through the room full of dead soldiers with her 'mystic sight'.
"--oh," the Brevoy woman says with a little bit of a gasp. "...well, all of the armor of these dead soldiers appears to be magical. They're wearing some sort of cuirasses-- possibly horn? I can't tell, but they are all enchanted. That's.... that would be worth a fair bit of coin, I think, there's at least... twenty-five? suits of armor.... oh, and there's some auras on that face-down corpse, too-- personal possessions, probably."
Heldar methodically moves forward, scanning the area as he advances - he maintains the concentration on his magical detection spell while navigating the area, his eyes observing every nook and cranny of the Northern area, staying close to Shaggar.
Heldar finds no magical auras his direction.
Jav—who'd followed Rosalia into the army room like a tiny, protective hound—looks down at the corpse without touching it. "What kind of auras? Explodey ones or life-sucky ones?"
The halfling looks like he's having to work hard to keep his curious fingers off the corpse.
Rosalia snorts at Javi's either-or options, then squints forward. "Looks like....give me a few seconds..."
Rosalia stands still for many seconds, taking the time to thoroughly analyze the auras she can pick up.
"--yes, hm. Several conjuration auras on the prone corpse and... more necromancy, I think."
Shaggar slides forward to see more of the room and stairs. He speculates aloud to Heldar, "Perhaps that grinding we heard is the floor of the pit raising and lowering."
"You are probably right - the sound did stop abruptly as if something slid into place" - the oracle comments - "I find no magical auras in the area ahead" - he adds - "Mayhaps we return to join with the others?"
Beyond the pit is a wall.
If you mean down the pit..? Not really easy to see down a pit without being right on the edge, but from five feet away Shaggar can see, oh, ten feet down (and ten feet up into the blackness above, as well). It appears to be a very smooth-walled, square pit, made of the same marbled stone that comprises everything else here. There are no hieroglyphics or any other decorations or protuberance he can see. The only irregularity is on the far wall, where the stone looks to be worn in a slight rut.
From his new position, Shaggar can also see a bit more up the other staircase-- it looks like a small landing boasts another of the stone-block 'doors'.
"Mayhaps we return to join with the others?"
Shaggar moves to the edge of the pit and looks up and down the shaft, wary of script or symbols. He nods at Heldar's suggestion. "In a moment, sayyid. I want to ensure there are no surprises awaiting us here."
Javi waits until he can hear Shaggar and Heldar moving back towards the group, fishing out his grappling hook in the mean time. He looks over at Rosalia with a smile as he threads his rope into its metal loop. "I figure we can drag our friend there to us. No reason to risk the wrath of all those inanimate soldiers, right?"
Shaggar edges forward to the square pit and gazes long into the abyss. The abyss also gazes into him.
*Coff*
That is to say, he can tell the pit/shaft extends at least sixty feet down-- as far as he can see-- and sixty feet up, as well. The signs of wear he noticed seem to continue in a straight line up and down the far wall. He sees no inscriptions, although, far above his head in the darkness, he thinks he sees something sticking out from the stone on one of the walls, just at the edge of his vision-- not a big something, just a slight interruption in the otherwise smooth-as-glass stonework.
When he and Heldar return to the others... ...Rook is hissing boredly at Hatyah from the top of Rosalia's shoulder, and Hatyah is manfully (womanfully?) ignoring her and scratching at one ear.
When Heldar gets close enough for his light to spill into the room, more details are able to be seen that Shaggar's initial, colorless vision had not been able to reveal.
The floor of the room is patterned with small bits of colored glass, winking red and blue, yellow and black, in the light cast by Heldar's spell. The walls have been paneled with painted murals of great battles, the pigments remaining as vivid as the day they were painted in the dry, cool, sunless air of the pyramid. The two bulky pillars that can be seen on far sides of the room gleam as if made or covered with hammered gold.
The dead warriors look more magnificent, and imposing, with actual light on them. Their armor has an iridescent greenish-purplish-blackish sheen like no metal you've seen before. Their weapons appear well-made and decorated with precious metals and gemstones. Aside from each group holding a different weapon type, there are subtle differences between them:
The ones holding the handaxes have armbands and bracelets that shine black-and-gold, and wear kilts of dyed black linen.
The ones holding the bows also have pectorals boasting wrought electrum and blue stones such as lapis lazuli and turquoise.
The third group, holding the khopesh swords, are decked out richly with gold. Bracelets, pectorals, armbands...
Each group of soldiers has one soldier standing in front of it, his armor decorated with a feathered plume and his appearance more ornate than the warriors behind him.
It's the first real glance you have had of the supposed wealth and treasure of the pharaohs-- if one doesn't take the pyramid around you as proof of the same, given the mind-boggling amount of man-power that must have gone into it. But you can't sell a pyramid...
There's a lot of money in that room, Javi. A looooot.
But... Javi is corpse-fishing! He licks his lips, tries not to be tempted by all the goodies now realized in three-dee glowing color, and he flings his hook. A few tries before the hook lands solidly in the ribcage with a dry, brittle crunch!, and then Javi starts tugging.
This is a very intact corpse! Javi reels it in...
Somehow, the brittle body doesn't fall apart as Javi reels it in. The body makes a scraping sound as it's hauled towards the group.
Once close enough to touch and turn over, the body might, possibly, have been a woman.... it's hard to tell. It's dessicated to the point of being nearly a skeleton, with dry, paper-thin flesh drawn tight over the bones. The black robes the corpse is clad in must have once been very fine; their hems still bear red embroidered symbols... of Asmodeus, actually: small stitched pentagrams.
Additionally, there is a symbol of Asmodeus, made of gold and studded with rubies, hanging from the ex-person's neck.
A sash across the chest holds the source of the magical auras that Rosalia had noticed: there are two small bottles of glass with a clear liquid inside, another bottle that is warm to the touch , and a scroll case.
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"I've got a bad feeling about this," says Lyrian.
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"Now, why ever would you have that feeling, Lyrian?" Rosalia murmurs as she rather unceremoniously rifles through the woman's sash. Rook yawns widely on her shoulder as she begins the slow task of aura identification...
As Rosalia crouches to rummage through the dead priest's possessions, everyone can hear* a rasping, scratching noise, like something hard moving against stone, through the open doorway... it seems to be coming from inside the room, but above the doorway, perhaps--?
Javi and/or Lyrian, what would you like to do about the fact that you just heard a noise through the doorway?
Javi's dark eyes flash up towards the sound. He hisses and points frantically in its direction as his scimitar flashes from its sheath. He stands like his name-sake, ready to sting.
Turning, Lyrian nocks an arrow to his bowstring and pulls it to his ear as he hears the strange sound from within the tomb.