"Let us be careful as we enter. That balcony above the door looks like it might come down any moment. It does not seem a sound structure by any means, so be very careful."
You proceed into what was once a wide hall flanked by a pair of waiting rooms, but the foyer to Harrowstone now lies in ruins. With little left to hold up the ceiling, the wooden beams above sag dramatically. The wall to the north contains a large pair of oaken doors.
"Agreed." Barret looks around as he opens the large oaken doors.
Barret finds nothing of note regarding the doors - they seem to be a fairly standard wood door, but have seen considerable wear over time and now hang slightly off of their hinges due to rotting.
Barret opens said doors then.
Barret opens to the doors and you enter into a foyer. Streaks of mold stain the walls in here, and the floor below is a thick, gray carpet of fungal growth. Sturdy wooden doors beckon from every wall - north, west, east, and the south - through which you'd come.
Lor-Sinn advances, stopping cautiously into the doorway and examining the foyer with all her senses while she motions her companions to wait.
You detect faint evil auras at every portal, as if the doors themselves were somehow evil, or infected with something that was evil.
"The doors... they don't feel right. Let's be prepared."
With a hand on her hammer, the woman steps forward slowly, picking the west door.
Gur hefts his axe and follows Lor-Sinn into the next room.
Lor-Sinn opens the doorway to reveal a hallway with doors along the length of it facing north. At the end of the hallway all the way to the west, it turns towards the north. Also at the end of the hallway are two doors.
The group files through the door, and apparently just in time. Just after the last person steps through, an odd and frightening thing happens. Shrieking, disembodied faces appear in the doorway. Badly burnt, they cry in anguish as they streak through the open door, only to disappear into the air a moment later. The door, perhaps driven by whatever the things were, slams shut behind the group, seemingly trapping them in the narrow hallway.
Barret moves to open the closest western door.
Raphael keeps his bow at the ready as they begin to explore the prison.
"What was that?" Lor-Sinn whirls as the door slams shut behind them, her hand moving to the haft of her hammer. Wielding the weapon in these confined quarters is rather tricky, but she manages to unsling it without causing too much damage to the architecture.
"Perhaps this place is haunted after all." she says, with no trace of humour. Some people may view ghosts and hauntings as nothing more than folk stories, but she knows better.
Turning towards the nearest door, she focuses all her senses on it.
"Perhaps? How much evidence you need for certain?"
The door to the north emanates an aura of evil, in fact all of the doors leading out of the front foyer do. It's as if a spirit, or many spirits had taken control of the the doors and infested them with their undying hate.
"There is evil here, I can feel it. Be on your guard."
Barret enters into the room at the end of the hall, its door sagging off of its hinges and too out of plumb to lock. This spacious room smells of mildew and rot. A long desk and chair sit to the south, while to the northwest a narrow alcove contains a closed safe. Thick layers of dust cover everything in sight.
Barret looks over the safe before trying to open it.
Though the safe bears no apparent traps, it is of course locked. It could be opened with a skilled, or very heavy hand, though the latter may end up damaging whatever is within, if breakable.
"Can anyone open this? Otherwise I'll open it my way."
"Let me have a look at it, I've some experience with these kind of things."
Livana says cryptically as she steps forward pulling a set of lock picks concealed in her boot. She scans the safe with a practiced eye placing a torsion wrench in first she applies pressure to the plug so the can try and rake the tumblers open. Finding the pins to be too tough or stuck almost ruining her rake in the process. She steps back with a sigh of defeat. "It's either an extremely high quality safe or time has ruined the mechanism, I can't make any headway with the thing"
"I can carry it if need be... but I would rather we just cut the hinges off. We can spare the time."
"Fine. Cut through it then."
As the others fiddle with the safe, Lor-Sinn takes a good look around the room, trying to open the desk drawers and looking for any clues that might hint at the room's past.
Lor-Sinn finds little of value within the safe, but is able to read some papers that would be interesting to those who would have been involved in the management of the prison. In fact, nearly all of the papers are of the managerial level, documents about supplying the prison with goods and personnel, payroll ledgers, inmate lists, and more. Though mundane, it still provides for some interesting reading. There is no evil within the room though, as far as Lor-Sinn can tell.
Once Raphael opens the safe, Lor-Sinn finds more legal documents within, along with 500 gp, and a wooden rack with 9 potions of 3 differing hues. There is a small ledger book under the box of gold, indicating payment for certain sundry items or services - a petty cash ledger.
Barret will make sure everything is packed up after he looks through the papers, searching for anything out of the ordinary.
Barret sees nothing beyond the mundane ledgers and reports of a supervisor at the prison - probably the warden himself.
Barret will lead the way to the next room after he puts everything away.
Baret leads the way to the north, and into a small room that appears to have once been a washroom - probably used by the guards. There's nothing of interest in here, even after a thorough investigation and detection of evil and magic. There is a small chamber to the west of the washroom that was apparently a privy.
This seems to be the end of the corridor, and the small offices along the north wall also contain nothing of interest
Before allowing the potions to be put away Raphael tries to identify them.
Livana started thinking back on the gargoyle that had fallen on her friend professor Lorrimor, setting her on edge. Caution seized her mind and she began taking note of her surroundings. In case of any traps, she called out to Barret. "Hold on a second Barret, I've been thinking if someone killed the professor they may have left traps for others as well. I'd like to check as we go so as not to be surprised by any gifts they may have left."
Raphael is able to identify 3 potions of lesser restoration and 1 potion of remove disease.
"Fair enough. Make it quick."
"I'm sure if someone set snares we would have run in r0to tthem by now."
"Not necessarily, this place is rather big. We should exercise caution as we go - not just for traps, but also for other... phenomenons."
Lor-Sinn hasn't forgotten the haunted door, and as Livana had pointed out, this place had already claimed a victim. No reason at all to be reckless. Returning to the door that leads to the entrance hallway, she gives it a good once-over.
Lor-Sinn gives the door a closer examination. It does the same thing - the voices and strange apparition pass through, then the door slams shut. Whomever or whatever is in the way when the door closes gets bruised and pinched between the heavy slab and the jamb.
The vestibule is empty save for doors leading off in every direction; these doors like the one Lor-Sinn had just tested, are of much better construction than the rest of the doors you've seen thus far in the prison.
"Spirits are indeed restless here."
After opening the doors in the northeast corner, you find that they act the same way - remaining open for only a matter of seconds before slamming shut at the visible urging of the hideous screeching wraiths. Concerned, but not directly stopped, you enter into the room before the door slams behind you, the next time.
Ahead of you are several rows of wooden benches, all spotted with old and sagging with neglect. These benches face a stage walled off from the rest of the room by a wall of iron bars. The room looks as if it could be a courtroom of some sort, over which a person of judicial inclination could preside from behind the iron bars.
You realize that, once the door slams shut behind you, there's very little...or, no light within the large chamber. Before the door shuts, you see another door directly across the room from you, leading to the east.
Barret carefully heads towards the only door out. "Be wary. The spirits may not be content with shutting doors."
Lor-Sinn makes a slow, careful circuit of the room, relying on her darkvision to see.
Lor-Sinn's search of the room does indeed paint a picture of a courtroom. The benches show that that they were probably in disrepair even before the fall of the prison, and seemed to be hastily made. The walls about the room show old black marks amid the mold and signs of age.
The bars in front guard a small raised platform - no more than a few inches high - presumably from which the judge would issue a sentence. The doors to the east are closed, though they sag in their frame like the majority of the doors in this place.
Lor-Sinn's detection does show a faint aura of evil around the center of the platform. As she steps closer, she feels the temperature around her drop...far too quickly.
"Something is strange here," she calls out to the others. "Well, stranger than we have seen so far. The air feels cold, unnaturally so."
She steps to the side, a hand extended in invitation for anyone else who would like to investigate the spot more closely.