"Look at all these goods. We can provision for months from this. Wait...what is that sound?!"
Mird draws his bow and an arrow and tries to pinpoint the origin of the sound.
There is something in one of those piles, Thantos whispers into the message spell that still connects the group.
The mage prepares to throw an acid dart at any enemies that emerge.
"What is it? What's going on?" Selena is distracted and alarmed by Mird's and Thantos's warnings. Theras settles on her shoulder and hides behind her golden hair.
The rustling and movement in the room stops. Whatever it is within the confines of this room has ceased action and movement...or has disappeared from the room entirely.
Dirk draws his falchion in a heart-beat. Stalking toward the place he swears he saw movement. As the movement stops Dirk spins around to face the group.
"Ready yourselves!"
Taking the last step or two he kicks aside the cloth he saw moving.
Thantos casts detect magic and focuses on the area where the rustling emanated from, hoping that he might espy a lingering magical signature from any spells that may have been cast.
As the mid to top of the pile of cloth Dirk kicks flies aside a large baboon-like creature raises from a crouch and charges in to attack.
As the baboon like creature springs from the pile of cloth Dirk just kicked aside, you feel your vision shift into that phase between normal sight and supernatural sight where you can see bits of the magical weave existing within your world, connected to the millions and billions of worlds that make up the multi-verse.
Looking around, however, you do not notice any places where the weave of magical energy has touched this room in any recent time, except for the ubiquitous mirror shard which, just like all the rest of them you've ever examined, glows with a perpetual dull magical light that is indeterminate of type.
The most shocking, however, is that the creature attacking Dirk does not glow.
Mird's arrow whistles through the air as he shoots at the baboon, focusing on a fleshy spot.
"Father Armand, behind me!" Mird quickly grabs another arrow and runs toward Armand to put himself between the baboon and the father.
Selena quickly summons heavenly fire to her hand, releasing it as a magic missile at the baboon.
magic missile
Looking in an entirely different direction, Lash is caught off-guard, her reaction slower than usial, her rushed strike missing it's mark as the baboon charges in.
Stepping into the baboons path, Dirk meets it with a viscous attack.
Mird's arrow comes off the bow like a streak slamming into the creature's left side, burying itself in it's ribcage...but obviously not far enough to do serious damage as the big creature screeches and continues forward, table leg in hand.
Selena waves her hand in the direction of the baboon and the silver fire that always seems to be right at her grasp, leaps off her hand in the form of small balls of light, streaking around Dirk's broad form to strike the creature and bury themselves into it's fur hide, scorching skin and obviously causing the creature pain.
Prepared for the charge, Dirk lets his huge blade hang over his head, raised, ready, just slightly wavering to the right side of his body. Eyes narrowed he watches the creature charge toward him, get hit with both the arrow and the bolts of light, stagger and keep coming. Timing perfectly, Dirk's blade flashes down and left slicing it's head clean from it's body. Following the move with a quickstep, Dirk actually steps past and around the big human like creature as it's headless body charges past and falls to the ground into a stack of bound and bundled cloth, scattering it every which way.
The corpse comes to rest on the ground, blood pooling around it, no other sound other than the heavy breathing of the group comes to you.
The afterimages/effects of the magic missile spell from Selena still burn in your vision as you can tell all of the spells properties just by looking at the threads of the weave as they touch the spot her spell struck. Other than that, however, there is still nothing magical showing about this creature.
Thantos shakes his head in amazement at the display of magical and martial prowess.
Poor brute never had a chance. I almost feel sorry for it. He flashes a wicked grin at the others. Almost. Still, I was able to study the creature as you all dispatched it, and unless it commands truly potent obfuscating magics,which I highly doubt considering what short work you all made of it, that beast is no more magical than Dirk's boots. No, the only magic here besides that which we have brought with us lies in that mirror shard. It almost makes me wonder, what would happen if we were to break it?
Dirk bends down to wipe the blood from his sword on the creature's fur. Standing back up he nods in agreement with Thantos.
"I've had a mind to break those shards since we found the first one."
Sliding his weapon back into its sheath, he pats the leather-bound grip with his hand. "Say the word and I'll bust it with my pommel."
Mird walks over to the dead creature, and pulls his arrow out, checking it to make sure it is still serviceable. He moves to wipe the blood off, but thinks better of it and holds it in his bow hand to use again.
Thantos shakes his head. Better to do it from a distance Dirk, just in case there is a backlash of some type. Mird, could you put a shaft through that mirror? While the rest of us stand outside, I think. Maybe from the doorway, so you can get behind it if there is a problem. Lash, Selena, what do you think?
Mird nods his head, taking the arrow he had just pulled out of the creature, nocks it, looks back to make sure all of his companions are out of the doorway, and looses the arrow directly at the shard.
"Well, either it closes the door or breaks open the prison. Should be fun." Lash mutters sarcastically.
The arrow leaps off of Mird's bow hungrily flying straight and true toward the shard of mirror propped up against the wall.
The second the arrow leaps off the bow the majority of you twist back against the outside wall of the room, hunkered down in case of explosion, fearfully fingering your weapons in case a hoard of monsters comes pouring out of the mirror glass.
The crash and tinkle of shattering glass comes clearly and loudly to your ears, a sound as of a thousand glass shards exploding into particles, with a loud screech and snap to fill the breaks in sound of the glass.
Ducking back around the corner of the room weapons raised, you each leap in, ready to confront whatever lays in the room.
But there's nothing. Mird's arrow rests on the ground slightly back from the wall behind where the shard rested, having passed through the shard of glass with force enough to break it into 20 or 30 shards of glass, and then the larger shards themselves having broken into several pieces again as they hit the floor. The arrow head is deformed, having expended it's entire force against the very strong stone of the wall itself and the shaft is snapped at the arrowhead, the force of the shot through a pretty unresisting force of the mirror glass and into the wall behind it, snapping off the wooden shaft as the force of the strike passed up it.
You can easily pass off the huge crash and sounds as your over taught nerves playing upon your subconscious, causing the loud sound of the mirror breaking to grow to extreme proportions as your fear of what might happen takes over.
As the shards settle, their tinkle and ring diminishing as the last of the echoes play off the room's walls and are swallowed up in the soft materials laying in piles around the room, the whole tower goes back to it's normal silence, the sounds of the wind whistling through the cracks outside lessening as, finally, the storm seems to be somewhat abating.
The tenseness in your nerves starts to die out and the adrenaline rush begins to subside as moments tick by and nothing unexpected happens.
"That was...anticlimactic." Mird states simply, shaking his head at the loss of an arrow.
Anti-climactic is good. Now, let's see what we can see.
Thantos casts detect magic once more and surveys the wreckage of the mirror shard for any trace magics that might have been released with its destruction. He also examines Mird for any lingering auras.
Dirk stays on guard as the others inspect the mirror. His eyes continually scan the room for signs of danger.
Selena shudders at the site of the bloody creature and follows the others, also looking around.
Your magical examination doesn't detect anything amiss.
Turning your attention to the small broken pieces on the floor you note that each one still radiates a small amount of magic, just like the larger piece did, and that that magical radiance is of no specific type. There are no linger auras of any kind of magical trigger or effect that occurred after the mirror was broken.
Mird, too, shows no signs of any kind of triggered effect or spell. Other than his various magical weapons, armor and equipment, his magical aura is clean.
From your last several hours of observation of these mirrored pieces, it's becoming clearer to you that they are not really "magical" in nature. Other than potentially having either been created by magic and/or been in contact with something HIGHLY magical, these mirror glass pieces themselves don't seem to be magical in the sense of a "magical" item or object.
The six of you begin to relax after your encounter with the creature and the destruction of the mirror glass piece. Your examination of the creature reveals that it is, indeed JUST a Baboon. Larger than you might expect, the creature is, however, normal in all respects. What a Baboon would be doing in a tower like this leaves questions in your mind, but, at minimum, this was NOT a second of the baboon like fiend creatures you encountered on the second floor.
Poking around more in the stores and other piles and goods, you find little more than you found in the last store room. There are a few additional dried food stuffs (nuts, beans, etc.) but by and large most of the same goods and materials are stored here as was in what was likely an overflow storage area.
"Perhaps we should destroy the other mirror shards as well?"
We may as well, Selena. I see no harm in it.
Thantos takes the shards out of his pack and throws them down the hallway to shatter against the stout, stone walls of the tower.
When he is finished, he says Shall we proceed?
Each shard of mirror glass acts the same as it strikes the solid stone of a wall or floor...the glass shatters into smaller fragments and splinters creating a very loud ruckus that was probably audible out in the courtyard and, were the wind not blowing so hard and the storm not still running, may have been audible for a pretty significant distance in the still woods.
Still, nothing untoward happens with the breaking of each mirror.
"Well that should be good for a few centuries of bad luck." Lash mutters wryly.
Thantos grins at Lasch, I make my own luck. The superstitions of humans do not concern me.
"Besides, they're shards. The mirror's already been broken. I'm just making sure they don't hurt anyone."
"It is only unfortunate that now we may never know where they lead, or if we could have used them." Mird looks over to Father Armand and casually walks to where he can easily protect him.
Thantos shakes his head at Mird's statement. I am not so sure that we could travel through them, my friends. But, I would wager that those are not the last shards we shall encounter in this tower.
seems to be a "wine cellar" of some sort. Several racks of wine and a few large kegs of beer dominate the majority of the room, with easy to traverse rows between racks of wine and access to each of the large kegs seeming to be planned out. The wines do seem to be grouped by date of production and type. You notice that none of the bottles bear any well known names or brands...all of the stuff in this room seems pretty common to you other than some obvious home-brew type of stuff.
Nothing here would be considered the "good stuff".
Delicately balanced on a set of bottle-necks facing the door on a rack right in front of you is a large, squarish, piece of mirror-glass about 2' in diameter.
Selena admires the mirror-glass. Is it similar to the mirror-shards or different?
Other than it's size this piece of mirror glass seems to share the same properties as all the other pieces you've found so far.
Thantos casts prestidigitation and knocks the mirror glass onto the ground.
"Was that enough to break it? These things seem resilient to just falling."
Standing near the door, Dirk adjusts a strap in his armor that has somehow gotten twisted.
Selena looks around the room, briefly, to see if anything of value is present.
"Should we attempt to...use the mirror? Father Armand, Thantos, or Selena, can any of you figure out if there is a command or some such that "opens" the mirror?"
Selena shudders, shaking her head. "I don't really want to try to do that."
Additionally, I don't think it's possible. While the shards are obviously magical, there is no specialized aura to them which would facilitate any type of identification. It might be that the shards act as foci for something else entirely, but I have yet to see any indicia that would allow for two way travel.
He taps his foot for a moment, lost in reverie, then looks up, almost startled.
Perhaps we should proceed to the top of the tower.
Getting a negative response to Mird's question and accounting for Selena's hesitancy and his own sense of letting sleeping dogs lie, Thantos begins a short set of somatic movements followed by a couple spidery words in the language of magic, targeting the shard of glass perched precariously on the wine bottles.
The shard of mirror glass responds as expected to Thantos's spell, and falls the almost 5 feet to the floor to shatter into a few tens of shards on the ground with a loud crash that echoes around the room.
Wincing at the noise, Selena takes a look around the room trying to determine whether anything of value has been left around. While the wine is of obvious quality, it is neither expensive nor overly rare. The rest of the room turns out to be pretty bland and boring and reveals nothing else of interest.
Dirk nods at Thantos, then steps out of the doorway to allow Lash to take the lead.
Returning back to the stairwell on the first floor you begin to climb to the third level, exiting into a hallway very much like that of floor 2, there are three doors in front of you (one straight ahead, one to your left, one to your right) and the central hall seems to continue all the way around the central stair case.
A quick look down the hallway doesn't show any signs of mirrored glass, creatures or other dangers.
Outside the fury of the storm seems to be abating somewhat. The thunder has all but stopped, rolling off into the distance, and while the wind still blows it's chill (and likely snow still falls) it doesn't seem quite as strong as it was earlier this morning when you entered the tower.
Selena sighs.
"At least it is getting quieter."
"I hope that means we'll hear anything out of the ordinary with less noise from that storm."
Mird looks at the doorways and says, "I suggest the door on our left."
Thantos nods to the door on the left, and then to Lasciel and Dirk.