|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We don't come to the party, we ARE the party.
No offense, cause I'm not sure what kind of fey you are, but when we enter a bar, we have no intention to drink responsibly: we just unleash Rumble. Anyway, we have a designated driver for the cart to bring him back, our Jade resident here.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The delicate balance between drinking an acceptable amount in one gulp while in non-Dwarf company, yet one to satisfy a Dwarf takes entirely too much of Rumble's focus for him to contribute to the conversation. He gets the job done though. Ain't bad. Obviously not Dwarven, but this isn't for ninnies either!
Rumble frowns at Hepsubia. "Oy, whaddayah mean ye jus' unleash meh? 'ave we bin drinkin' buhfore? 'ow do ye know thah abouh meh!?" he asks the Elf. Must of pushed me so hard into the drink I've forgotten!
________
"Hahah, I like you!" Seripan smiles at Hepsubia. "You too, Mister Statue - you're very polite. But you shouldn't invoke that miscreant's name after dusk! It's bad juju, you know!"
She saws a couple of her legs against her body, making a rather chirpy, catchy tune. "Let's change the subject! How about a little entertainment?"
~Bones of the earth, rise from the ground
Keep us sound, within your girth~
"Uringen hasn't really been around that long, you know. And even it was built on top of something older," she remarks cryptically. The grig then sings another short ditty...
~Reckless Rhona
Looked at her Tower
But was quite sour
For every hour
She heard every flaw~
"Turns out, no matter how long you prepare, you can't get it right the first time...but I wonder if it was her first time making the Tower?" Seripan shakes her head again. "The Tower does seem to work...mostly. That's a lot of gears and flim-flammery, and it's amazing that even one of those faces is actually useful!"
Rhona refers to Rhona Ambros, one of the founders of Uringen and the architect of the tower.
"Yes but most of those things are beyond me, Cerotius knows more about the gears that turn than I do," Seripan replies with a dismissive wave, still fiddling. "That said, it's quite neat to look at! The huuuuuuuge gears that turn, in the center, and go all the way up, the symbols and markings everywhere. You should go have a look for yourself if you get the chance!"
"Oh no, not personally, that was a long time ago," Seripan replies with a shake of her head. "But it does seem pretty obvious that she built the tower to do more than just stand there and look pretty - or to give the time. That's what Aurelia and Cerotius and some of the others have been studying, you know! And now Aurelia wants to to fix the tower to do what Reckless Rhona intended it for..."
Seripan giggles and sings another little ditty.
~Time is just a door
Just step right through
In stolen cloak of blue
To the days of yore~
You realize, thanks in part to Seripan's song, that Rhona Ambros must have constructed the Clock Tower to study the exotic field of chronomancy.
Pausing her fiddling, Seripan looks at Zithembe. "It's amazing what can happen when you build something atop a fey circle, you know. How very reckless."
The grig then winks.
______________
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
______________
"Nope!" Seripan responds cheerfully. "But that's not going to stop her from trying to figure it out! Creatures of the Second World are so stubborn when they want to be - it's adorable."
And come to think of it, you remember Aurelia herself mentioning that she didn't know what the tower's original purpose was meant to be.
|
|
"Now thah's ah plan aye can geh buhind," Rumble cheers, tossing back the rest of his stout and slamming the mug against the bar. "Zithembe, yer jus' full o' good ideas, aye don' care whah tha othahs say abouh ye!"
Pleased, the Dwarf stomps out of the tavern and heads for the clocktower. Knowing the others, they'll over take him shortly.
"Ooh, you'll like the tower, I think," Seripan nods as you all quickly reach a consensus and decide to head off to inspect the clock tower. "It was fun meeting you! Tell Cerotius I said hi!"
And after taking a few minutes to get your rooms squared away - true to her word, Mayor Ogden has covered the cost - you all leave the Oaken Knot and head back towards the center of town...
______________
In the center of “unstuck” Uringen stands the Clock Tower, a five-story edifice constructed of blue-gray stone and mottled with pearlescent white blocks. At the very top, the clock faces align to the cardinal directions, while long arms of weather-tarnished metal click out the hour and minute, but the four faces do not depict the same time. The time on the western face moves the most erratically, with its arms swinging backwards and forwards, while the northern face depicts an accurate time. On each floor, glass windows break up the monotony of stone, but even these are covered with arcane scripts and sigils from an eclectic variety of arcane traditions.
As you step inside you can see that almost every available wall is taken up by bookshelves stuffed with ledgers, likely recording the Clock Tower’s behavior since Uringen’s founding. There's a flurry of activity here as plain-robed apprentices can be seen setting up delicate apparatuses, while others walk slowly up the wooden stairs to the next floor. Cerotius is also here and his eyes light up as you walk in.
"Ah, there you are! Welcome! As you can see, Ogden’s lesser apprentices are moving her timepieces to various places within the Tower, but my focus is here - on the circle. Most of the speculation up to this point thinks that Reckless Rhona messed up her construction…but I don’t think so."
The pixie flits over to an open windowsill, pointing at the narrow gap between the stonework. "This is not the work of a sloppy person! No, I think that the fey circle interfered with her design somehow, and that’s why part of the town disappears…I just have to prove that somehow." Cerotius pauses for a moment, tracing a symbol on one of the white stones embedded in the wall. "Aurelia mentioned that an unbiased and fresh set of eyes might reveal insight otherwise clouded by staring at it too long. As the senior assistant researcher and head pixie on the Clock Tower Deciphering Project, I take any potential leads very seriously. So please, feel free to look around and if you find yourself struck by insight or inspiration, don’t hesitate to let me know!"
______________
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Parison keeps from grinning when Zithembe convinces Rumble to not be a party-pooper, but suddenly finds that easier to do when the dwarf begins to encourage everyone to knock back some drinks.
"One applejack for me, if you please," he requests to a nearby server and then pays the appropriate price. When delivered, he slowly sips on it as he listens to his companions and Seripan discuss the clock tower, its history, and the plans Mayor Ogden has for rediscovering its purpose.
The cleric holds up his glass to take another drink. His eyes widen as he sees that he's almost reached bottom. He turns and the server, like magic, is right there asking him if he'd like more to drink.
"No, no," he says, waving the server away. "One's enough to prime the pump. More would just clog the pump pipe." A cheerful glowing sensation seemed to be spreading from his cheeks across his face and his earlier melancholy had been pushed to the back of his mind by the current buzz he was feeling from the drink.
Parsion found himself admiring the shabti all the more when the idea is brought up to investigate the clock. The admiration turned to surprise when Rumble lit out of the tavern half-cocked and half-lit. "I'd better catch up with him. No idea of what trouble might come looking for him when he's like that," he says, quickly excusing himself. "Nice to meet you, Seripan," he calls back while trying to sidestep the other revelers in the tavern as he hustles to catch up with the dwarf.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Parison catches up with Rumble, but the rest of the group happen to be right on their heels and they find themselves at the clock tower in less time than it takes to tell.
The stonework in the floor struck the disciple of the Dawnflower as strangely intriguing. Parison began to take in the craftsmanship as he knelt down and slowly ran his hand over the floor. The applejack coursing through his body seemed to be scrubbing through the blood vessels within his brain and leaving him with a fresh sense of awareness. He wandered away from the others as the stonework engrossed him and became all-consuming in his state of alcoholic transcendence.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Maria mutters something about taking in the whole structure before investigating anything specific and disappears, trying to get a feel for the basic build of the tower,
She gives Parison a wide berth when she sees him really admiring one of the cobblestones in the courtyard.
|
|
"Hello again, Cerotius. Seripan sends greetings also." Janus nods to the pixie, and takes in the surroundings within the clock tower.
"A remarkable construction."
Suddenly, a terrible notion occurs to Janus. "Cerotius! This conjunction - and this project - they will not cause Unstuck Uringen to cease moving, will they? To be cut off from the First World - that would be... unthinkable."
For the first time in longer than they can remember, Janus is afraid. Afraid of being cut off from the source of their inspiration, perhaps even cut off from their god. Determined to avoid such a fate, they examine the tower to try to understand it.
|
|
The shabti wanders the tower, fascinated by the complexity but also completely flummoxed. "This resembles in style the architecture and creations in Axis, but in application, it is far too..." He struggles for a word to accurately describe the problem. "Chaotic. In Axis, the machinery was so intuitive that it conveyed its purpose to you simply by looking up on it."
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
OF COURSE Hepsubia was a stonemason once in her long life.
Twice, in fact, but the less said about the second time the better.
Using her omnitool, she pokes and prods and measures and writes "Killroy was here" on the walls.
She even use an old ballad learnt as a skald, when she was a little baby elf, to remember things she haven't seen yet (but can probably imagine, her restless mind going in unexpected places and times all day long)
Everyone spreads out and begins to investigate the strange and enchanting workings of Rhona Ambros' creation. One thing that actually isn't hard to figure out once everyone gets to looking around is that the pearlescent white blocks that dot the tower's walls are made of the crystalline stone known as quartzite instead of the more common granite.
Normally this sort of thing, symbols and stonework, is well outside of Parison's wheelhouse and he'd know it. But the applejack he'd consumed back at the Oaken Knot seems to have had the dual effect of bolstering his confidence and dulling his senses...as alcohol tends to do, especially to those that don't normally indulge. While he's unable to really learn or notice anything of any significance, he sure does seem to have an enjoyable time wandering around and looking at things.
Zithembe also finds himself unable to discern much of use, though in his case it's due to the strange and seemingly chaotic manner in which the tower was built - so close to the styles he remembers from Axis and yet so totally foreign at the same time.
The rest of the group seems to fare better in their investigations, at least...
You realize that each stone of the tower was individually carved and fitted into its resting place, with no mortar used to hold the structure together - merely pressure and gravity.
After a careful inspection of every single floor the two of you discover that the stone is inscribed with numerical sigils, along with five repeating shapes. Each floor has one of these shapes embedded multiple times in the stonework, glass, and in the clockwork gears that run up the central shaft of the tower, but in subtle ways.
The ceiling of each floor other than the top floor contains the symbol of the floor above and the floor of each floor other than the first floor contains the symbol of the floor below.
You notice an anomaly in the gear mechanism; some of the gears should not be moving at all, or should be moving in the opposite direction, if they worked as typical gears.
|
|
What in the world do these marks mean? Seems pretty intentional to me, but that's about all I'm good for! Rumble does his best to sketch/take a rubbing of each of the five symbols.
"Janus, do ye know whah in tha worl' these things mean, er are we gonna 'ave tah ask one ah tha othahs?" he asks, holding up his handiwork.
|
|
Maria tracks her allies down, "So this is quite interesting and honestly, impressive. No mortar was used in the construction of this tower. Each stone was perfectly milled to fit with all the other stones and then stacked. Like... I don't even know if dwarves can do something that good."
She splits off, "I gotta check out the gears, see if I can figure out why the time is all off."
|
|
As far as I can tell, some of the gears shouldn't be moving like they are moving currently, or shouldn't be moving at all. It's like Time was a tangled ball of yarn, but if that's truly the case, don't worry, I have a plan already...
Hepsubia nods toward the so called " not-Effie's cat", trying to draw Maria's attention to it
After your initial round of inspection you take a few moments to reconvene and share what you've learned.
Maria, curious about the gears to begin with but even more so after Hepsubia's observation, attempts to discover just why the faces are asynchronous. Despite her best efforts, she can only confirm what Hepsubia observed - there's absolutely no discernible reason for some of the gears to be moving as they do, or even moving at all, based on how typical mechanisms of this sort normally work.
Janus and Rumble then draw everyone's attention to some strange symbols they've discovered on the floors and ceilings of most of the tower's levels.
Even better, Janus has little trouble identifying the symbols present:
On the first floor, a four-sided tetrahedron.
On the second, a hexahedron with six sides.
On the third, an octahedron with eight sides.
On the fourth, a dodecahedron with twelve sides.
At the very top in the tower’s belfry, a twenty-sided icosahedron.
It's all very strange! Has Aurelia, Cerotius, or any of the other researchers noticed this? When you bring it to the pixie's attention, he looks quite impressed.
"The very thing! Shape and form are so much more important to us of the First World than those of this world. I’m glad that you agree that these patterns are significant. Aurelia wasn’t so sure that they were more than an artful design, but I think these numbers are tied to the nature of the tower somehow."
Now that you've made the discovery of the strange symbols, you can also study the other sigils that decorate each of the floors...
You notice some sigils within the jumble of sigils that seem particularly significant.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hepsubia gives an half conscious rambling about the times she was a dwarf when she was young, living in a small house in a forest with six siblings, when a pale looking woman tried to get in, and eveyone through she was a vampire cause no one can be so pale, white as snow, really, the girl was, so the six dwarves and Lil"Hep defended their home and tried to hammer bits of wood in her heart but constantly missed (cause everyone was pretty hammered too, it was a long night for short folks, in fact Hepsubia thought that maybe it was only late evening but the darkness was deep all around the house when she looked through the wondow, and she thought that maybe someone could do a cool song about it, those hard days flying by, but no, it was always that stupid "Hi Ho" thing when they went to work), but even if everyone missed the vampire's heart-yeah, the stakes were too high ,and the dwarves too, on pesh, boy, these folks knew how to party!, the pale looking girl was a mess.
They put her in a glass coffin (yeah, they were in a wood, so a wood coffin would have made more sense, probably another stupid drunken bet. In fact it was one of Hepsubia's idea, as a warning for other vampires. Someone suggested throwing glitter on the corpse, too).
As she didn't seemed to be a real vampire (but vampire are deceptive creatures, so you can't be sure!), Hepsubia or one dwarf or another put a bit of paper with "Sowwy" written on it in her hands.
Having no clue aboout the symbols, but her frail mind even more in a mess inside the tower, and we all know how tenuous the elf's grasp on the continuity of Time is already, Hepsubia start looking for potential traps (probably dice-shaped rocks tumbling in the stairs to crush them. And that's her professional advice. Se would definitively put that kind of trap in the tower.)
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Rumble scowls at Maria when she claims that Dwarves are incapable of making work as fine as that which can be found in the tower. Before he manages to think of how best to handle this heinous stain on the entire Dwarven race's collective reputation, Hepsubia ups the ante with a half-baked story about Dwarves being inept due to their height.
He only manages to palm his face with a quivering hand and shake his head. What do these Elves even know about Dwarves? Probably nothing more than fairytales and second-hand tall-tales! BAH! Patience is what I need, like Parison said.
As some of you attempt to study the sigils-within-sigils on the floors of the tower, Hepsubia starts on a rambling story that seems to go on for ages and makes it rather hard for anyone else to concentrate on what they're doing.
Except for Maria, who seems to be prepared for nearly any contingency and casually pops some earplugs in before setting about her own research. Finally, just when the rest of you are probably feeling about ready to snap, Hepsubia finishes her story and Maria her research. The studious elf points out what seem to be sigils of some significance and Cerotius whoops with joy when you draw his attention to them.
"Yippee! This is a major breakthrough in our research! These symbols that you've discovered, they're a part of Rhona's esoteric time magic! With these, maybe now we'll be able to determine, once and for all, if the tower might really be used to travel through time!"
Wait.
What?
|
|
"Time travel. Yes, we believe that would make sense. We have learned to manipulate time somewhat. We theorise that it is a consequence of our proximity and contact with the First World.
If the tower's movement could be controlled, we could end enemies of the Green before they became a threat. A most useful asset. One that should be concealed, lest it make Uringen a target.
But what is the significance of the specific numbers?"
"Hmm...well, it could be a pattern of some sort, since the numbers increase in value as you ascend the tower," Cerotius answers, looking thoughtful. "Or maybe it was meant to be an indication of function, with each flower of the tower serving a unique purpose? It's difficult to say but I hope that tonight's convergeance will serve to further enlighten us!"
"Nothing else that you've noted is new to me but I'm still glad to have fresh eyes to help confirm what we already know. There's not really any way for us to prove it now but those quartzite blocks? Aurelia and I have long suspected that Reckless Rhona intentionally took them from the fey circle to use in the construction of the tower. Perhaps Reckless Rhona wasn't actually quite so reckless, eh?"
"But anyway, I very much appreciate you coming to have a look around," Cerotius smiles, bowing to you all. "The convergeance event is set to happen very soon so you should probably make sure you have anything that you think you'll need and then go take your positions at the square. Oh, this is all so exciting, isn't it?"
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
|
|
Hepsubia put the tip of her sword in the ground, and kneeling, put her forehead on the handle, holdingg the sword as if she was in a deep prayer to whatever god would listen to her.
A lght snore shows she's instead having a small, rejuvenating nap.
Hey, when Time is in a mess (or will be in a mess. Or has always been in a mess, for all she knows!) who can say when you will be able to get some proper rest?
Wise decision, Hepsubia.
Lanterns, torches, and magical lights of every color surround the central square around the Clock Tower, lighting up the night in a festive atmosphere as the metallic embellishments and clock faces catch the light, breaking it into prismatic hues. These hues shimmer and reflect off the fountain at the center of the town square. Many of the residents of 'unstuck' Uringen have gathered outside to watch the spectacle as well and somewhere in the crowd you can hear music playing, likely Seripan and some other fey friends putting on a bit of a concert. You take up positions around the central fountain, ready for anything.
As the appointed hour ticks closer a hush descends over the gathered crowd as three of the faces start to move in time in the final minutes of the day. The arms of the fourth face swing wildly, teetering and tottering according to some unknown rhythm, until its minute arm moves steadily backwards, ticking and clicking in time with the other three faces. At a whisper before the dawn of a new day, all of the faces of the tower suddenly erupt in a vivid violet light, and arcs of blue and red energy strike out into the ground. Ripples in the air twist and bend the light around the tower, splitting and shredding with blue and red energy, forming what look to be small portals.
There's a collective gasp from the assembled crowd...and then a cry goes as several tiny figures suddenly appear around the edges of the square! Two of them appear to be fierce little insectoid creatures with the heads of angry crustaceans, wielding tiny, but solid-looking, hammers. Two others look for all the world as though a pair of the world’s ugliest lapdogs decided to walk upright and take up arms. Last of all, you see a tiny dragon with gray scales and moth wings. It is this creature that cries, "Now's the time! We'll bring down Reckless Rhona's creation for good!"
The two dog-faced creatures are pugwampis, the most cowardly and least of all gremlins. No one likes pugwampis, not even other gremlins!
The angry-headed crab creatures are vexgit gremlins, maniacally destructive little fey.
The strange-looking dragon is a gloom dragon, an evil, corrupted creature that was once a benevolent faerie dragon.
______________
Rumble
Parison
Hepsubia
==============
Green & Cyan
==============
Janus & Janus Too
Zithembe
==============
Orange
==============
Maria
==============
Yellow & Purple
Active Conditions: None
Environmental Conditions: None
Rumble, Parison and Hepsubia are UP!
|
|
She shouts out regarding the dog-faced creatures, "Pugwampis, they have..."
__________________________________
And she points out the next to appear, "The angry-headed crab creatures are vexgit gremlins, maniacally destructive little fey. They have..."
__________________________________
And with a bit of awe she adds lastly, "And obviously the dragon is a gloom dragon, an evil, corrupted creature that was once a benevolent faerie dragon. They have..."
__________________________________
But as a quick summary she shouts, "They are evil creatures obviously bent on destroying the tower, stop them!"