As the candlelight illuminates the room, Photinè quickly produces a white-and-orange embroidered handkerchief from her breast and uses it to hide her face. Behind the delicate silk fabric, her eyes are red and swollen, and makeup runs in dark rivulets down her face.
She hurriedly retreats to the separate bathroom. A few minutes later, she emerges with her face clean and bare, sans red lipstick, and her dark hair neatly rearranged.
"Surely, Martella and Lady Gloriana will help the princess escape. Competent women, all of them," she says earnestly. For the first time, she glances around the room, taking in the strangeness of their circumstances. "How did we end up here? Where is here?"
Chana hesitates, then agrees with Photine "Capable, yes, definitely. As for how we ended up here... well, barring that one-" she jabs a finger in Greenly's direction. "-the rest of us were all working with Martella. Maybe she prepared some magic to protect us? But then, why didn't she do the same for herself? And for the princess?"
"Bah, no use wondering and sittin' around. I'll see if there's something we can use here, if you want to check the switch Olivia." Chana strides over to the set of wooden lockers and starts to search them, looking for any tools or weapons they might be able to use if the assassins catch up with them.
Photinè is too grateful that the plumbing in the bathroom still functions to be surprised by how many centuries it has endured.
Chana opens the lockers one by one. She discovers a grooming kit, a moth-eaten set of clothes, and a small hand mirror within one, but all the rest are empty save for dust and cobwebs.
As you explore the old room, you hear Martella's voice in your minds, courtesy of your aide badges.
"Where did you go?! I just saw you and several others in the senate vanish into thin air."
Greenly shoots up upon hearing this strange voice for the third time tonight. Once, and she was imagining things, twice and maybe she was just repeatedly overhearing someone, but three times was an awful lot, and she didn't like it.
She rises to her feet, hand on her hilt. "Who are you!" she accuses, shouting into open air. "Get out of my head, witch!"
"Unsure, but safe," Photinè replies to Martella. "Will find our way out. Find Eutropia and Morilla, and do the same. Good luck."
She then joins Chiara in exploring the room, holding her hands out in a bit of an overdramatic gesture, and makes a show of feeling for magical auras. "Obviously, we were brought here by magic; perhaps we can use it to get out again."
Little in this room radiates magic. Photinè faintly senses magic within the walls and floor of the bathroom, likely enhancing the plumbing, but the most noticeable magic aura is from the brass and glass switch upon the wall.
Cautiously opening the two creaking doors that exit this room reveals two short hallways with doors on the far sides, leading presumably to additional rooms in this complex.
Photinè points to the panel, and then crosses the room to it; she reaches out with a single finger and touches the glass carefully.
Photinè touches the green glass disc set into the brass panel and...nothing happens.
Although it indeed clicked like some sort of button or switch, it affected nothing in this room.
Hearing Olivia and Photine's replies, Chana taps her badge and adds "Don't know. All together though. Miss Trant's bodyguard with us too."
She gathers the scattered few items from the lockers, peering at the
aforementioned bodyguard from the corner of her eye. After mulling it over for a moment, she says "I don't know what's happening to her, but I'm worried what she might do once she snaps out of it. Anyone else think we should put her in the bathroom and shove up a bed next to it? She'll be safe enough there until Miss Trant can get her. And we won't have to worry about her trying to kill us while drugged up."
While she speaks, she makes her way to both of the doors and lets her eyes run over the door frame and handle. It wasn't out of the question that the room was some kind of trap. Maybe the doors would be blocked or trapped to prevent people from escaping.
Still on edge from her meditation's interruption and premature end, Greenly keeps her hands on her sheathed sword. "I'm not drugged up you flouncy hatted b*#~&, I was, like, meditating! And anyone tries to trap me in the bathroom?" her eyes narrow and she spits. "Something bad'll happen to them."
Her mood immediately levels and she shrugs halfheartedly, hands off her weapon, yawing away on her leaf. "Besides, my chew isn't drugs, it's just like some red Varisian tobacco leaf I think. I like it, it's cheap and makes me feel good, chewing on stuff helps me relax too, so, like," she makes a non commital hum that sounds vaguely like 'Idunno' before continuing. "But if anyone does have drugs, now seems like a good time to do them, am I right?" She smiles and winks, pointing at Olivia, Chana and Photiné in that order, hoping one of them will accept her olive branch of bonding.
Greenly stiffens again when Olivia implies that she failed her charge. "Dame Trant is alive. I cleared the path for her; all she had to do was walk through the door. Besides, none of you look very strong and you all made it out fine, so why not her? Uh, no offense, I just meant, like, uh, we would have taken you in the fight she set up. Easily."
She smiles and bows when asked her name. "I am Greenly Baerdóttir of House Basri. If it means all of us getting out of here safely, I will gladly lend you my services."
The little paper and wig fire doesn't last long, but soon plenty of candles are lit and it is no longer needed. She takes a candle and begins to look around the room. Obviously the place is long abandoned and she tries to get some idea of the age of the room by studying its contents, furniture, decorations, and such.
As she moves from place to place looking, Amandine picks up any small mundane items that have some heft to them. She stuffs them into her skirt pockets.
When Olivia mentions her name to the bodyguard, Amandine stops to give the woman a nod in greeting and a wan smile. She then immediately goes back to her business. When she is finished, she walks across the room to help Chana check the doors, as well as to take a look at the brass panel.
As she passes by the others she asks the question that is worrying her. "Do you think the violence is limited to the Senate, or has it spilled out to the streets?"
"Yah, Baerdóttir, on account of my granddad Baer Bjørnson, Ulfen Guard." She chews and chews and chews, smacking her teeth and spitting intermittently. The dark skinned 1/8th elf, quarter-Ulfen woman tilts her head and buries a finger deep in her long crooked ear, picking at wax. "Us Ulfens inherit our father's names, usually. I, like, don't got my own name cuz I'm, like, a bastard or whatever, but I don't give a Calistrian's tit about that garbage. Caring about names and status is stupid and it makes you weak. All that matters is, like, honor and junk. The stuff you carry with you into death."
With her mixed heritage, Greenly looks like no Ulfen you've ever seen, but she has the same high cheekbones and bright eyes as many other Ulfens, and the plaited braid she wears her hair in is also disctinctly Ulfen. She refolds her folding chair and returns it to her back, looking around at her surroundings. "Dusty, innit?" Without care, she walks through the north door.
"We've met," Photinè says when introduced, sashaying over to Olivia and Greenly. She extends a hand to the woman with a smile. "Lady Michèle-Aurelius, s'il vous plait."
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"Enchantee," she mangles, kissing the offered hand.
”Mm,” Photinè responds coolly, withdrawing her hand from Greenly’s and subtly wiping it on the wall behind her.
Looking back at Amandine, she says, ”The guards—assassins—blocked all the exits. Royalty likes to do things behind closed doors; easier to justify it later if nobody outside saw what happened.” She pauses. ”I hope that means they won’t pursue anyone who manages to escape. At least not overtly.”
"Hopefully you're right. Although I can't imagine everyone will be safe if away. How could Grand Prince Stavian allow Princess Eutropia and her closest people sanctuary in escape? He may not intend the Princess's death, but he can hardly allow her to remain free."
"My thinking is running more toward what happens when word gets out in Oppara. Do Stavian's supporters see this as an invitation to continue his work? Mob violence might not have been part of the original plan, but the massacre in the Senate could spark it."
And closer to herself Dammit, please please have stayed home tonight Calix!
"Mmm-hmmm." Chana assents to Greenly's threat of 'something bad' happening. She'd heard it before, dozens of times, and usually from people far more dangerous. What she'd learned from those encounters was that if you didn't want to risk a dirty brawl, you just agreed with them. Smarter that way. Safer too.
"I guess we don't need to lock you in if you'd like to work together to escape."
Listening to introductions being done while she checks the doors, Chana can't help but mull over the whiplash changes in behavior and character in the strange 'ulfen' woman. Was this another aspect of the madness of the nobility? So much money and freedom that their brains started falling apart at the seams? Or was it flayleaf or one of its friends after all?
She'd just have to keep an eye on the madwoman.
At Amandine and Photine's conversation, she adds "Based on that speech, the Prince has an issue with the nobility, and the Princess as much as anyone else for daring to go against him. I'm sure he'll send people after her." She pauses, thinking about her own next move. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to find her and help protect her. I think she'll still have support out in the city, but it won't matter if she's not alive to use it."
She looks to Amandine from behind her veil, the hat bobbing as she nods agreement "Mm. People are going to die out there tonight, I'd reckon. One way or another."
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"I'm trying very hard not to think about all the people who may be dying as we speak. My interest is to help the Princess and Lady Martella, while also saving as many innocents as possible along the way, assuming there's still slaughter happening by the time we arrive. We can also check on Miss Trant. Are there any other objectives that we should add?"
For now, no additional messages are forthcoming from Martella, presumably because she continues to fight for her life back in the senate.
Amandine finds no clear understanding of the brass panel and leaves it be for now, lest she become too frustrated. She joins Chana in examining the doors and hallways beyond.
Stepping into the northern corridor, they find no signs of traps or danger, but they espy a sliver of light from beneath the door at the end of the short hallway. Once Chana and Amandine are certain that the door is safe, they open it to survey the room beyond.
A wooden counter juts from the northwest corner of this thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot chamber. Open cabinets of dusty liquor bottles stand behind the bar, while one cabinet remains tightly sealed with a visible lock. Three tables with adjacent chairs fill much of the room. Portraits of posing nobles and historical scenes adorn the walls, all faded with age. Magical light fixtures set into the ceiling provide soft illumination, and an additional door exits this room to the east.
Greenly oohs and aahs upon the reveal of the portraiture. "Fourth Army of Exploration," she says. "Conquered Andoran. Now those are true Taldan men. Not like these prissy noble Senators, all afraid to get their hands dirty."
Amandine follows Olivia and Greenly into the next room. Since the subject of the tapestries is readily known to them, she moves on to other things. First she takes a look around the room for anything else of interest, also studying the architecture of the room to see if she can find anything to confirm her guess about where they might be.
Eventually she moves on to the locked cabinet and goes to work trying to open it.
"Considering the decorations, I'd guess we're still in the Senate buiding somewhere. But where?"
Greenly shrugs and spits a wad of red, viscous spit underneath one of the tapestries. "I mean I don't remember leaving it, do you? Like, all I remember is killing that assassin and then a bright light, and then, darkness. I certainly didn't, like, walk out or nothin, or I'd still be with Miss Malphene."
Photinè bypasses the art to rifle through the unlocked cabinets behind the bar. As she opens a creaky door, she notices the red stain left on the back of her hand where Greenly kissed it, and grimaces in distaste.
"Clearly somewhere that hasn't been cleaned in centuries," Photinè contributes, holding her handkerchief over her mouth and nose to avoid the cloud of dust that wafts into the air as she opens a drawer. "If it is part of the senate, it must have been boarded-over, or lost."
"Either the Senate building, or some place someone really wanted to look like the Senate building. Someone who likes their history." Chana muses out loud as she follows Amandine to the locked cabinet. When she doesn't get the cabinet open immediately, Chana suggests "It looks fairly old, we could probably pry it open if we needed to. I wonder why they locked it in the first place?"
She looks up at the light fixtures, checking to see if their magical light sources can be removed. After all, if they've lasted this long, maybe they'll keep burning forever?
As Amandine and Photinè survey the new room, they recall how the modern senate is built atop successive layers of older constructions. This leads to the creeping suspicion that the party is now underground, in the ruins of some older iteration of the senate.
Opening the bar cabinets reveals many bottles in a panoply of colors. Inspecting them reveals that almost all of them have either evaporated over untold years or soured until nearly toxic.
However, two bottles of whisky remain sealed with wax and appear salvageable. Olivia and Photinè suspect that such truly aged, rare spirits could be worth 75 gold each.
Furthermore, Photinè makes a curious discovery in the drawers beneath the bar counter. First, she finds some manner of wand carved from walnut wood. Secondly, set apart from the rest of the rusted or tarnished utensils, an unblemished if simply pewter spoon sits in its own small wooden case.
The locked cabinet, though, proves beyond Amandine's ability to open. It will take either a key or a superb amount of force to open.
The light sources in the ceiling seem quite stuck in place, tied into some manner of magical circuit.
Photinè holds onto the bottles, loath to let perfectly good liquor go to waste, and then examines both the curious spoon and the wand.
Greenly takes a candle and moves into the next room, excited to explore and conquer, just as the Grand Armies of the Exploration did.
"If moving quickly is our, like, priority," she says as she moves past Olivia, "we better get a move on then; no use in standing around inspecting the tapestries."
When Olivia pushes to move onward Amandine tamps down her curiosity. It's difficult, given the age of the room. Whatever among the things there that deserved a lock could be worth a fortune. But she can't hold the others up as long as it would take to get the cabinet open.
"Yes, of course. We should keep going."
The party cautiously explores the rest of this small complex, but ultimately you find no danger beyond the dust and isolation.
In the northeastern chamber , you find that heavy wooden bookshelves line the walls of this opulent bedchamber. A posh chair sits in the northwestern corner alongside a small circular table. A massive bed and an adjoining table rest along the eastern side of the room. An open bathroom fits into the southwest, with a bathtub matching the room's opulence, but adding an ignoble odor.
Similar to the previous room, magic light fixtures in the ceiling provide illumination.
The moldering books largely detail even more obscure points of Taldor's long history, hinting at the historical fascination of this room's original owner. Meanwhile, despite the thick layers of dust, the high-quality bed and comparable bedclothes in this room have fared the test of time far better than those in the servants' quarters you originally appeared in.
Immediately drawing your attention, an ornate golden key lies atop the table beside the plush sofa chair.
A hand mirror and frayed hairbrush rest on the sink in the bathroom.
...
Finally, in the southeastern chamber , you find that stacked wooden crates cover the southern wall, and more crates occupy the northwestern corner. Wooden shelves fill much of the eastern half of the room, each tier filled with dust-coated bottles, crockery, and glass jars.
The light fixtures in the ceiling here remain dark, so you explore via candlelight, keeping the edges of the room in shadows.
Faded changes of clothes, pickled vegetables, preserved delicacies, salted meats, rotted condiments, and a well-stocked toolkit are stored in this room.
...
After exploring this ring of four rooms, you make two overall observations. Firstly, each room has one of those odd brass panels on the wall beside one of the doors. Secondly, and more worryingly, there is no evident exit from this group of rooms.
Chana picks up the key as she moves into the 'noble's bedroom', flipping it over with her hands and inspecting it. "A key for the liquor cabinet, maybe?" She moves on to the bathroom and spots the scroll case hanging from the bathtub's railing. Opening it up, she reads 'Fourth bed from the north. Comforter. Backup Key.' before following with "Another key? Hmm."
Before running back to check both of the new clues, she takes a peek in the last of the four rooms. When that room doesn't yield a clear exit, she freezes. "This is a trap after all. Isn't it? No normal house would be constructed like this... unless, maybe this is some noblewoman's safe-room. A bolthole, but with a whole bunch of amenities." She starts looking with curiosity at the walls. "In that case, there might be a secret way in or out."
---
But before she gets too deep in scouring walls and bookshelves for hidden levers, she returns to the servant's quarters and checks the comforter of the fourth bed from the north. If that doesn't yield anything, she tries the third bed from the north, reasoning that maybe the noble's bed is included.
Amandine just glances into the bathroom and completely misses anything of importance there.
She is instead drawn to the books of course. She checks the cases for hidden compartments and devices that might open a secret door. But, while doing so she also checks the books, looking for any that are in good to decent condition and might be valuable. If she finds any she knows exactly where to sell them.
A bolthole? Greenly racks her head, trying to think if she's ever heard any gossip about people hiding in the Senate. S*@+ hideout, people are in and out of the Senate all the time! Why are there no doors out? How would people get in here if they needed to bolt, anyway?
Greenly pushes every glass panel she can find, inspecting them. Satisfied with one push each, she then scours the storage room, locking for anything and everything, and sampling any food that still looks edible, setting her diminishing wad of chew down to do so.
In the servants' quarters, Chana immediately finds the key mentioned in the note, sewn into the comforter atop the fourth bed from the north. She rips open the seam and extracts the inelegant brass key.
"Voritas nearly bankrupted his family while trying to protect himself from assassins during the Shining Crusade," Trant had said derisively. "It was his obsession, that and the Fourth Army."
As Greenly fiddles with the brass panels, the rest of the party - scattered through the four rooms - notices that they seem to trigger the light fixtures in odd patterns. When she presses the panel in the servants' quarters , it shuts off the lights in the social room and the senator's room . She sidles over to the panel in the social room, now lit only by carried candles, and pressing that one turns on the light in the senator's room.
In this same manner, Greenly finds that the panel in the senator's room triggers the lights in the social room and storage room , and that the panel in the storage room triggers the lights in the servants' quarters and social room.
Photinè reasons that the magic powering these lights has decayed over the centuries, causing a sort of "cross-wiring" that diverts each panel's function away from its corresponding room.
Greenly considers this a more interesting discovery than the food, little of which remains even remotely palatable.
...
Amandine rifles through the books, finding that many of them fall apart or even crumble in her hands like soggy bread. Although their value even to collectors is suspect, Amandine has a hunch that there may be a clue within one of these books. Finding it among the decaying volumes could take quite some time - unless she had an idea of what book, what topic to start with.
Disappointed by the selection of food, Greenly starts to make another lap on pressing the buttons- for fun, mostly -but gets distracted from continuing after pressing only the panels in B1 and B2, leaving the whole place lit up. She walks into the bedroom and sits on the bed, watching Amandine rifle through the bookshelf.
"I think this is, like, the old Senator, uh, Vorbly-tas's place," she says conversationally, yawing away on her tobacco leaves. "Mr. Senator Trant was talking to Dame Malphene about him when he was pinning this button on me."
Thrusting her lapel forward, Amandine sees that Greenly wears the same senator's aide badge as the rest of the party: a linnorm strangling a unicorn.
"Mr. Senator said that, uh, dead Senator Vorum was obsessed with, like, the Shining Crusade and the Fourth Army of Exploration and was afraid of assassins and lost his fortune because of one of those." She spits and stuffs a finger up her nose, picking away. "I was thinking, cause, like, Ms. Chiara called this place a bolt hole and I was like 'who would bolt here, how would you even get in?', and I remembered that Vorititas liked everything here, so I figure, maybe this is, like, his house or something. I dunno why he'd need seven beds if this is his apartment, but maybe he had like six children? I dunno. What do you think?"
She smiles, and in the magical lighting her teeth shine clear and bright, stained a deep red from her dip.
|
|
As the others are finding clues and playing with the lights, Olivia is getting more and more frustrated. She grimaces and starts circling through the rooms over and over again. At the peak of her frustration, she stands in front of a wall in B2 and slams her fist against it.
As she breathes heavily and tries to calm down, she takes a closer look into the portraits of the 4th army.
Greenly's conclusions sound as reasonable as anything to Chana, and she adds "If we've made our way to his manor, we should be safe ourselves, but won't be in a good position to help the princess. Or for you to help Miss Trant. Let's hope this is really somewhere in the Senate."
With both keys in hand, Chana returns to the storage room to clear away the few piled boxes in front of the sculpture or mural she noticed earlier. Once she has the way clear, she points it out to the rest of the group. "Anyone see this?"
She also stops by at the locked cabinet in the social room to try both of the keys she's found. As she does so, she mulls over her thoughts out loud. "Maybe the only way in or out of here is with that flash of light? That was magic, right? In that case there might be something around here that'll let us leave magically."
Photinè listens to Greenly and Chana with interest. ”It must be the Voritas badges that brought us here,” she reasons, pulling it from her collar and turning it over in her hands. ”Enchanted to transport the wearer if their life is threatened?”
She begins to move methodically from room to room, pausing in each to feel for magical auras.
”If this is a panic room, it explains the lack of an entrance. But there must be some hidden exit, magical or otherwise.”
Amandine pauses, looking back and forth between the shelves of books and Greenly as the half-elf talks to her.
”It’s just heartbreaking. The age of these books and considering who put the collection together, there’s almost certainly extremely rare or even unique ones among them. But I don’t think any of them are moveable, much less readable anymore. This is how the past fades away to nothing eventually.”
”But there may be other things hidden among them, and what you’ve said could be useful. When people hide things away, they tend to follow certain habits of mind. They must also not forget where the thing is, so they link it to some mnemonic device. By remembering the easy thing, they can also recall the harder thing. The Senator, Voritas? Certainly did have a fascination with the Fourth Army of Exploration.”
”He may have chosen a book on the subject for a hiding place, but those books take up a lot of shelf space. So how to narrow it down?” By now Amandine is talking more to herself than Greenly. ”Why was he so fascinated with the subject? What about it moved him so? I can’t know what was in his head, but considering the subject and who he was, I’m going to bet he had an ancestor played a role in the Fourth Army’s exploits. It could be many things other than familial pride, but it’s an obvious place to start.”
Amandine finds the section holding books on the Fourth Army and begins culling through them, looking for those with titles suggesting they contain biographical information, profiles, or hagiographies.
Chana, reasoning that it could take a little while to move or rearrange the boxes blocking the mural, decides to start with the locked cabinet in the bar area. The gold key is too slender for the lock, but the brass key is a perfect fit.
Sliding open the cabinet doors, she finds a device that can best be likened to an immovable crystal ball built into the wall. However, a noticeable hole in the top of the orb suggests that the device is currently incomplete.
...
Photinè concentrates upon gleaning magic auras as she circumabulates the safe rooms. Aside from the light fixtures in the ceiling, all active thanks to Greenly, she notices two areas of magic. The southern wall of the storage room, where Chiara indicates a mural of some sort is hidden behind the boxes, shows faint hints of enchantment.
However, the largest source of magic comes from the opulent room that must have once been the senator's quarters (B3). A large portion of the floor radiates magic, although she cannot discern how or why. Furthermore, seemingly an extension of this enchantment, Photinè follows the hints of magic to find a small, coin-sized niche or slot carved into the wall.
...
With the long-dead Senator Voritas' fascination with the Fourth Army established, Amandine uses this clue to focus her search among the tragically neglected library. She identifies a thick, well-preserved volume that chronicles and details the exploits and legacies of the Fourth Army of Exploration. It is a text she has encountered before, daresay a rather ordinary one. Perhaps that is why the senator chose to cut pages from the book to form a hiding spot.
Amandine finds a small, curved piece of rectangular glass tucked inside the hollow cut out from the book's pages. This material seems to match the crystal ball Chiara found in the unlocked cabinet.
...
Back in the storage room, and with some begrudging aid from Greenly, Chiara is able to rearrange the boxes in about fifteen minutes. Their efforts reveal a beautiful fresco painted upon the wall, depicting a human commander leading his troops in battle against dwarves.
A brass plate just below the large work of art reads, "Noble Galitian Maramaxus, hero of the Fourth Army of Exploration, champion of Taldor."
Olivia finds a particularly flattering rendition of this commander among the portraits, although she finds nothing unusual about the portraits themselves.
Amandine is surprised by her find. She'd been expecting a sheet of paper with instructions for exiting or something of the like.
"Huh! A safe book! But what the hells is this?" She holds up the piece of glass, frowning at it. "It doesn't seem like something important enough to hide away."
"Best have Lady Photine look at it. Maybe it's enchanted?"
Amandine takes the piece to Photine since she has no ability to sense magic at all.
Photinè takes the curious piece of glass from Amandine, turning it over delicately to look at it from every side. ”Hmm.” She sits on the part of the floor radiant with magic, taking care to arrange her skirts elegantly around herself, and runs her free hand gingerly over the floor. She taps it gently a few times, and then rises and follows the magic to the coin-slot in the wall.
”It must all connect somehow,” she puzzles to Amandine. ”The crystal ball, and the mural Miss Durante found as well. But why go to all this trouble?”
Frankly bored by all the goings on, Greenly stomps back to the storage room (once again pushing buttons as she passes, in both B3 and B4) and, by candlelight, rummages through the bins until told to stop, looking for anything and everything.
Chana steps back from the crystal ball, frankly baffled by what she's uncovered. "I'm starting 'ta think Voritas was nuts. Sh-" She cuts herself off "A little off his rocker perhaps, to create such a needlessly complicated bolt hole. I mean, you'd want such a place to be hard to find and get into, not hard to get OUT of." She shakes her head, then shrugs, helpless to understand the mind of this nobleman.
When she sees Amandine find the curved glass insert, she beckons her over. "That might be what's missing from the crystal ball. Might as well put it back together. Maybe it'll turn into... something? A doorknob to get out of here?"
After clearing up the area around the mural, she tilts her head to one side as she looks at it.
"The fellow liked his history. Maybe a bit too much."
---
On a whim, she also tries to put the gold key in the wall slot that Photine found.