She shakes her head sadly.
"We have nowhere we can bury him, but I can preserve his body for a time. It's only a short-term solution, but if we don't all get out of here before too long, it won't really matter," Winter replies.
She sighs heavily.
"It's dangerous out there, as you can see. But ... if you're to find a way out for all of us, maybe one of our guards -- who's proven himself a steady arm -- could accompany you, to hopefully keep all of us alive?"
Tristain looks to see who might be stepping forward to help them...wondering if they have a name and a memory of this place. He will be jealous if they do.
"Well, I suppose that should be me." An older man steps forward. "Spent enough years cleaning up these halls, this task ain't so much different. Sorry for your friend there, it was good of him to face those evil creatures on account of us poor folks."
Tenebrynn nods in agreement with the seemingly older man's opinion of Belzoni. "Thanks. Would offer name, but don't recall it." She gestures toward the others with a wave of her hand, "Been calling me 'gnome girl'. Accurate enough. You talk like you know this place. Do you know you as well?"
"Greetings and welcome. I'm going by Walter, though it feels wrong, it's what I've got for now." he smiles welcomingly.
He thinks a moment and adds, "Shall we continue our search? I know the man from the corner is a little lean but I still have a few spells left. I dropped so fast last time I didn't have time to really use 'em much."
"I think I'd like to try another chamber or two, see what we can find, before we fall back and study the records. I'd really like to know my own name, and that seems like a likely place to find it if anywhere."
Tristain offers a limp-fish handshake.
"I am the man from the cell with the starting corner. We will see how you fit into this reality...and perhaps you come from outside it. Do you recognize a time before all this happened?" Tristain asks, hoping to ground the man into the world as he knows it. "Can you confirm that there are lands beyond the mists? Do you think this is all an illusion?"
Tenebrynn then nods to the red man, "He looks different now, but he's the same other man as before but different. Also different from dopplegangers. It's all very strange and confusing." She offers this more to Winter than to the white-haired guard, and shrugs apologetically.
"Sure, I know a time before this. I was once a patient here, got better and had nowhere to go, so they hired me as a janitor. Good job as any, I suppose, I tried to make things easy on the patients, knowing as how hard it was to walk in their shoes. I remember your big friend, large fellow like that stands out in a crowd, but I don't recall his name. Mine is Albert, but you can just call me Al."
"Uh huh...and have you seen the outside? And the outside outside? Does it truly exist?" Tristain asks 'Al', which is what you can call him.
Tristain looks down upon Belzoni's body, wondering how Al will compare to Belzoni's belzoniness. He is not hopeful, but things they should move on before he starts crying again.
"Maybe...that curtain? Al, what's behind that curtain?"
No one knows exactly the answer to Tristain's question. There's something -- an eye, in fact -- growing on the wall to the east of the chapel. The group of survivors has left it alone and it hasn’t bothered them. That said, Winter and the guards don't really talk about it because they don’t want to upset the children or any of their more delicate souls. Things are bad enough without that, as Winter says.
Albert looks closer at the big dead man. "Hmm, maybe it wasn't your friend I remember after all, don't recall that big ol' soup strainer. No matter, we're still grateful for his sacrifice." He gives Tristain a leery glance."Um, yep, there's an outside, regular nature, not sure what you mean by an 'outside outside', you looking for an outhouse, boy? We've got chamber pots here."
"Strange thing it is, makes me terribly uneasy."
Eventually, you decide you need to see this eye for yourself and you make your way to the hallway, while Winter makes sure the two children are distracted in the former chaplain's office by the nurse, Tolman Leolies.
The hall ends just beyond the dingy curtain, but the wall here suffers some sort of otherworldly parasitism. A mass of stringy, yellow fungus stretches across the stone blocks. At its heart bulges and blinks a watery eye the size of a wagon wheel.
You hear a faint sobbing coming from the eye.
Tristain looks at Al and tries to judge if he is making any sense.
An eye? Kyffin wonders aghast as Al describes the scene.
When he actually gives it a gander it nearly unhinges him.
He stands quiet, studying it some while. "You all hear that?" he mumbles as the scene absorbs him.
After a while, he turns to Al, "Has anyone tried stabbing it? Not sure I want to mind you, without knowing what it is, just wonderin'"
Tenebrynn recoils at the sight of the eye, her face scrunching in disgust. "Yellow tendrils. Yellow mist. Yellow yellow yellow. Is it crying?" She looks at Kyffin, "Is that what you hear? Crying?" She turns her attention to the hideous eye. "Why are you crying, eye?"
The eye does not respond to the gnome's question.
Knowledge (+9 Arcana, Local, Religion, +8 Nature)
Tristain looks at the eye shrinking back once he sees it.
"How is it that they have 5 guards at the other entrance and nothing watching this!? How do they know that this won't move and isn't dangerous?!" Tristain wonders aloud, questioning the placement of guards...and so close to where he slept last night.
"Is it sobbing? Maybe it's mimicking...us?" Tristain looks around, wondering if anyone else has mouths in their eyes.
"See there, hideous and huge, I reckon nothing good will come of that thing."
Does the eye detect as evil?
Chalker, you think it's some manifestation similar to a haunt, though you can't imagine what kind of death could have happened here to cause something like this. That said, obviously something strange has happened in this asylum...
Tristain glares at the eye, trying to figure out why it is crying.
"Is there something in the eye? If there is, is it beautiful?"
Tenebrynn squints at the eye, answering Tristain's question, "Looks like a fanged mouth. Not beautiful. Hideous or frightful would be better descriptions. Maybe answers are elsewhere, like with who we are? Would rather not look at this any longer, if it's all the same." She then turns away from the strange eye and growth, her face still scrunched in disgust.
"Agreed gnome-girl. Let us continue our search for the boy. We have not found him, or any evidence of him, and we've barely searched today - just the one room really." He rubs his chest where the scalpel dropped him, worrying.
"I feel we must see what we can find before returning to the document room for research. Where should we start?"
"Seems like we've checked most of the northern section," he mumbles, thinking, "Let's try the East, maybe that door to the far Southeast if we can get it open."
Tristain looks at the leadery Walter and follows along.
"I just want to know why they aren't guarding this. It seems strange not to watch something so strange, right?"
Tristain will join with others to find any other avenue of escape that the boy might have gone.
"I just want to know why they aren't guarding this. It seems strange not to watch something so strange, right?"
"Frankly I wouldn't want to pull that duty. Thing give me the willies." He's glad to be moving away from the strange crying eyeball.
As the others discuss where to look for the young boy next, Tenebrynn wanders off and finds the young man who she'd seen trying to teach one of the other refugees a game earlier. She sidles up next to him and simply offers, "Hello."
Tristain, in with a bit of courage that had been lacking, goes to speak to the twichy man and women who are cooking.
"Do you guys know anything about that weird eye behind the curtain? Doesn't it worry you that no one is watching it? Do you know anything about it?"
Diplomacy -
"I mean, it's probably not going to come kill us all. But I do think it's haunted. It's weird, huh?"
The two women aren't in the chapel, apparently having been called to stand guard at the barricade, but Chalker approaches Denman Winoparess, the twitch man.
He twitches slightly as Chalker asks him about the eye.
"It just stares," he says, twitching. "The things on the other side of the barricade were trying to kill us, so we had to keep more of an eye on them. It was upsetting the kids, so Tolman put up the curtain, but ..."
He twitches and trails off again.
Gnome Girl finds the young man with the three children in the room with the nest of cushions and linens, where they're working on folding paper animals (the children with far more limited success than Tolman).
"Hello!" he responds brightly.
While the others chat, Kyffin retraces his steps. He casts Detect Magic, idly but somewhat regularly as he rechecks the areas he's already been. It's a small area, so it shouldn't take long I think.
He doesn't expect to find anything, but he doesn't trust his mind either just now so he makes sure.
When he returns to the group, he Creates Water to soothe his throat and clean his head-scarf before wrapping it, still damp, back on his head. He struggles to think his way out of this situation, but finds that nothing comes to mind.
There must be something we missed. he thinks, still trying to measure it out in his head.
"Say there, boy", Al questions the lad with the bite wounds. "Are those eye bites from that big creepy thing on the wall?"
"I would offer my name, but don't remember it. Don't remember much, actually. Very troubling. You are... folding paper? Can I help?"
BK suddenly gasps and seems to shrink and shrivel down until he's once more Confucius-sized. He struggles to his feet and looks around confused. "Oh dear. I was not-me again, wasn't I? Sorry, sorry. I simply have spells, you know. Moments of confusion, nothing to be troubled by." He begins to absent-mindedly wash his hands, removing the dried blood from his knuckles.
Tristain jumps as BK leaves and Heinrich returns.
"That is so weird. So very weird...." Tristain steps back against the wall and begins to bonk the back of he head against the wall as he tries to understand all the weirdness from the last few hours, Belzoni's death, the Eye, & BK Supreme.
Bonk!
Bonk!
Bonk!
Bonk!
Walter, you don't find anything else, though you do detect a magical aura radiating from the scalpel Bloody Knuckles took from the not-doctor {noctor?).
Albert, the boy shakes his head.
"No, it was some of the other patients! They were crazy, like animals! Mura saved me!" he says, nodding to the older woman .
"Of course!" Tolman says before either of the children can respond. "It's lovely, an honor to the Eternal Rose."
The Eternal Rose is a reference to Shelyn, the goddess of art.
Tenebrynn shrugs at the reference, her amnesia keeping more than just her name at bay. "Is that why you were teaching a game before? To honor a flower?" She watches Tolman's fingers as she asks her questions, observing the creases and bends he presses into the sheet. Her lithe fingers mimic the motions as she continues to inquire of the man, "Have you been here long? Do you know Winter? The person, not the season. What brought you here?"
"Well I'll be, is that a door behind that creepy eye thing? How did we never notice that before, what with being trapped in this crazy asylum of freakish monsters and surrounded by an evil mist. Suppose the stress of defending this area must have addled our thoughts, no matter, we can fix that now." Albert jogs back to the guard station and returns with a long weapon with a blade at the end, looking like a walking stick capped with a sword. "I'll cut that eye thing from our wall, like I said, nothing good will come from it."
will first detect evil on the eye,
IF it detects as evil,
THEN Albert attacks it outright and strikes at the eye,
ELSE albert tries to cut the strands that are keeping the door blocked
bardiche +4 (1d10+3/19-20), 10 foot reach
"It's lovely, an honor to the Eternal Rose."
Know (Religion)
Tristain stops his bonking as this is spoken by Tolman, looking at the man directly and thinking something.
"That you know of the Eternal Rose, also known as Shelyn, means that this plane either in contact with her or her powers reach even here. This gives me hope...that we are no cut off from the divine completely..." Tristain stops bonking while he considers this and it mollifies him somewhat.
"Well I'll be, is that a door behind that creepy eye thing?"
"A door? I did not notice that before. Do you think we can talk our way through? Might be we can get through somehow." Tristain says, going to look at the door from a safe distance.
He looks as he gently bonks his head as he thinks.
"Hey Eye! EYE! Can we get by?" Tristain asks.
Heinrich follows the head-thumper toward the eye. "Fascinating! Is this thing embedded in the wall or is it merely projecting its eye from somewhere else where the rest of the form lies? Do you think it malevolent or benevolent? Is there a god of disembodied eyes?" He rambles quickly, trying to cover up the deep distress he feels.
Tolman smiles at the gnome girl.
No, not really," he says in a whisper, moving away from the children. "Maeve there really wants to go outside and play, and she acts out sometimes when she doesn't get what she wants. I was trying to keep her occupied.
"I've been at Briarstone for nearly a year now. It's my job, to care for the patients. Winter? I met her only when the troubles began, and she helped us all get to safety in the chapel."
The eye rudely and utterly ignores Chalker's question.
It does indeed detect as evil.
Al slashes at the eye, cutting a long gash in it. Almost immediately, though, the wound starts to slowly heal, even as the eye's pupil sprouts fangs and immediately attempts to bite at the withdrawn weapon, as its wielder is too far for them to reach.
The eye-mouth screams, “Who am I become?” in three overlapping, drowned-sounding voices, and a massive tear -- reeking of ammonia -- drips down the wall.
Tenebrynn looks up at the commotion by the eye and excuses herself, "Excuse me. I'll be back in a minute." She glances at one of the children and smiles, "Good job."
Slipping over to the scene by the eye, she catches its odd question. "Who are you become? We don't know who we are either. What happened? What is that smell?"
"I think you have made the poor Eye sad, and oddly introspective. I do not know who I was, or who I become, Eye, but they call me Confucius, for I am confused."
Kyffin rejoins the others, approaching the eye just as it's slashed. Wow.
He shakes his head, "What if the eye is merely a prisoner, a patient like ourselves? We should not seek to destroy it until we know what it is."
"Not that I have any idea how to do that mind you. I'm just suggesting we take it slow." he adds, hoping the others don't think he's being too demanding.
Tenebrynn, nods, looking away from the eye and up at Kyffin. "Hmmm. Eye's question might mean it used to be something else. Multiple voices too. Three people turned into one eye?" She shakes her head, pondering aloud. "Movement of time suggests this is not a dream. Causes leading into effects. Hours passing normally." She gestures toward the lamenting eye, "Things like this suggest otherwise. Very strange. Not sure what to think. What if I used to be an eye that got turned into a gnome?"
"I think you're right, Walter. This thing is just like us...empty and unknown...it only seeks the same answers that we do. 'Who have I become?' Is what I wish answered as well," Tris agrees. He moves over to the wall so that he might bonk as he thinks.
*bonk*
*bonk*
*bonk*
*bonk*
*bonk*
"I do think it is a manifestation of a death that happened here...but are we ones to deny it's agency in this reality? It exists because it was created...is its life worth more or less than ours?"
"Quit your lollygagging and grab a long stick, this eye is evil, I'm certain of it." Albert jabs at it again with his long weapon.
"Eyes don't just grow out of nowhere, there's some fell magics at work here, unwholesome stuff. We owe it to these folks to clear this evil eye from their sanctuary." The older man stubbornly insists the eye is evil regardless of any argument.
Kyffin steps up to Al, "Sir, please, stop!"
"We do not know what this is. I agree, there are fell magics at work here, but this... this thing may not be the source of it, but rather a victim much like ourselves."
He senses his arguments fall on deaf ears, and if the man persists in his attacks, Kyffin will walk to the other side of the complex. "I'll not be a part of this."
Al hacks at the wall and eye again, but feels a solid thunk as he hits more wall this time, realizing he hasn't even scratched it (or the eye, which seems to be all one and the same). Worse, as it snaps futilely at him again, another cry and viscous tear pouring forth, he realizes that the small gash his first blow made seems to have repaired itself.