As you force open the door at the end of the room, you realize that it opens out into the hall where you first came in. Light streams in from outside to your right, and darkness and cobwebs are to your left.
You arrive back at the city as the sun sets, and return to your respective homes/beds/holes in the ally for a good night sleep. The next morning you meet up for another run at Asad’s Keep. The hike back is just as difficult as you remember it being the day before and blessedly uneventful.
This cramped chamber stinks of something worse than rotten eggs. A black mildew covers the walls and the three holding cell doors that lie beyond the entrance. Each has a small metal slot at its bottom, but the latched covers long ago rusted away.
The doors are locked, but after years of mold and rust a strong jolt should be able to break them open.
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"Here, let me... ah... loosen it for you." Dasiji takes a shot at opening the first door, but as expected, the derelict door resists his attempts.
"Maybe I'll have better luck with this one..." Dasiji tries the next door, but it sneers at his puny efforts.
"Third time's the charm, right?" Getting embarassed, Dasiji puts his shoulders into it when he tries to open the third and final door.
Again, Dasiji has been foiled by his greatest nemesis of all, the closed door!
The first door gives way to Dasiji's hacking. In it you find the long dead remains of some poor prisoner. His shredded garb has a hint of finery about it. You find on his person a folded letter, written in Tian, bearing a seal of a kirin flying amid three clouds.
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Dasiji views the splinters of his conquered foe with satisfaction. "Lesson learned: if brute force isn't enough, try deadly force." He nods sagely.
The Mwangi ranger stares blankly at the letter, since he was hard-pressed just to learn Chelish (what Avistanis call "Common"). Dasiji looks away and shrugs. "Tell me when you're ready and I'll start on the next door."
The letter introduces the ambassador Xeng Li, and describes the gift to Taliq Asad - a jade katana, a representation of the Li family’s honor and its ties to House Asad.
Upon forcing open the other two doors you find two more corpses, imprisoned for centuries, with nothing interesting on them.
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Quintus reads the translation aloud to everyone.
"Well this is interesting. I wonder if this," Quintus points to the corpse in the first cell, "was the ambassador mentioned in the note. If so, why would he be imprisoned? The incivility of the Qadirans knows no bounds. Does that also mean these trade agreements were with someone invading Absalom? This is quite a political dilemma."
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"Might I suggest a concerted effort to force a door instead of hacking it - loudly, I should add - to pieces?"
Dasiji looks dubious. "Ah, yes. Teamwork. Wouldn't hurt to try it, I suppose. I'm not sure how many of us could try to bust down the same door at once, though."
Cracked and crumbling frescos line the walls of this large empty room. The sections of the frescos not destroyed by the passing ages show Qadiran men engaged in battle. A hall juts off the room immediately to your right, and a wider passage curves off the northeast corner of the room. A rough stone tunnel leads off to the northwest, as if the ground simply cleft in two ages ago. A pile of bones rests just inside the passage; a dumping ground for some carnivorous creature.
"How about the northeast passage next?"
This crossroads of stairs has one dominant feature: a crumbled statue in the southeast corner, once the image of a proud warrior chiseled roughly in granite. The statue’s helmeted head now rests on the floor, its lifeless stone eyes gazing toward the south. On the helmet, a single Kelish word is carved in the stone, “Earth”. The wide stairway to the north leads to a passage that ends in a cave-in ten feet past the foot of the stairs. A smaller stairway leads up to the east.
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"Coin says north! Who are we to argue with gold?" he pockets the coin.
"I wouldn't argue, except that I don't feel like digging out a cave in. How about you stay here while I check it out real quick, and then we go east instead?" Dasiji winks and then practically bounces up the stairs, in a remarkably good mood after exploring several rooms without fighting anything.
The cave-in happened some time ago. The rock is well settled and impassable.
Barrels and boxes of supplies fill this cramped chamber with a door exiting to the south.
Perception:
Dasiji
Kehl
Irijaya
Quintus
Zedril
As you enter, you can hear voices speaking from the next room, muffled by the door.
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After trotting back down the northern stairs, Dasiji scoops up Kehl's dropped coin on his way back to the front of the line. Looking back at Kehl, he grins and raises his eyebrows at the knife fighter. "Let's see if your gold lies consistently. That could still be useful!" He idly flips the coin for practice, then slips it into a convenient pocket and advances up the smaller eastern stairs.
The voices are paying homage to their leader, someone they call “Fire Speeker”.
If you want to rummage through the boxes, then I need a stealth check to not be heard, unless you don't care about that.
The voices continue on in the next room in sporadic intervals. There is nothing that indicates they have noticed you.
The room is full of mostly worthless junk someone has collected here, some extra clothing, size small, and some food stuffs.