"Hopefully it doesn't have any friends," Ordyt grunts grimly as he quickly sweeps the rest of the room, focused on potential threats.
Flint enters a room dominated by a vast clockwork globe made of glowing curved metal pieces mounted on a metal armature and connected to a spherical pivot in the center of the room. The top of the pivot is hinged, like a lid. The air here is unusually warm, but there's no signs of a floating fireball.
Skidding to a stop, Flint lines up with the northern wall of the new chamber, ready to Stellar Rush the blob if it makes an appearance through the wall.
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"Take heart, friends! We've got it cornered!" Ordyt rushes over to join Bel and Flint in hacking at the fiery orb.
Belmarniss looks over at Ordyt as the strange creature makes its escape.
"Cornered, huh Ordyt?" she says with perhaps a bit too much venom in her voice.
She listens for Flint to confirm if it's close.
Sammad tries his best to forget the awful sight of the creature...but as Bel snaps at Ordyt, he favors her with an impish grin. "Cornered, on the run...either way, it's not setting us on fire. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll get another crack at it, and with it a chance to regain your 'warrior's honor'."
In the orrery room, Flint notices the fireball emerging from the wall and turning solid once more. He rushes in, catching the creature off guard enough that it misses its attack of opportunity. His own attack narrowly misses the fireball as the monster compresses itself away from the arc of his weapon. The fireball opens its mouth and whips its napalm tongue out and into Flint's leg. Flint notices ash draining from his wounds and flowing toward the fireball. It seems to grow more intact as it absorbs the ash.
|||| INIT ||||
Bel (31 dmg)
Flint (63 dmg, Pyric Curse d8)
Ordyt
Sammad (Sickened 1 rds)
Mari (13 dmg, sickened 1 rds) x2
Malevolent Sun (68 dmg)
”It’s in here—I could use some help guys,” says Flint as he he seethes with disappointment at himself that he failed to land a telling blow while the blob was still extricating itself from the wall.
Taking advantage of the speed boost from his haste circuit, Flint takes a guarded step to the side to allow his team good shots if they can make it around the corner, then he strikes twice at the fiery creature, hoping his blade lands true this time.
Ordyt hardly has time to give Bel a puzzled look before the Captain finds the little fire-orb again. "On my way!" the oread calls, sprinting around the corner and rushing to Flint's aid.
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"Coming!" Mari shouts, sprinting around the corner to catch up with the others, firing her breaching gun once, twice, three times.
Combat Over!
"Nice shooting, Mari," says Flint as he leans against the wall, needing yet *another* rest after that short but fierce combat. Gesturing to the orrery, he adds, "What do you think of this? And is that a hinge that might allow the top to open?"
Now that you aren't in the middle of fighting, you're able to inspect the strange clockwork globe that dominates this room. The arrangement of curved metal plates on arms of varying lengths give the globe the appearance of an orrery - or an onion with its various layers, depending on how you look at it. The individual pieces are all dimly glowing, and the room feels quite hot, even within your climate-controlled armor. The closer you stand to the globe, the hotter it feels.
Flint isn't exactly able to deduce the purpose or structure of the globe, but he does identify that the massive metal plates that comprise the structure could be moved, though they look exceedingly heavy. The model is dense enough that it would take moving the metal plates to get better access to inspect the inner layers and the pivot at the center of the model. As mentioned previously, the pivot at the center of the model is capped with a hinge - it looks like it could be opened if you could get past all the outside layers.
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Belmarniss stomps up to the remains of the creature and starts whaling on it with her junksword, hacking at it for a good two minutes before she's calmed down.
Then she looks over to the globe where Flint is examining it. She immediately recognizes the magic it radiates.
"Conjuration's the strongest, with abjuration and divination in addition. Hybrid technology."
"It's a model of the Sun. A very elaborate one...almost more elaborate than anything we could create in the Pact Worlds...and those plates are plated with siccatite...probably for energy containment of some sort. The way they're set up...they're interlinked so it's hard to find where you turn it in order to get from one layer to another...it's set up like a puzzle...presumably to make it difficult for people like us to interfere with it."
Letting the experts investigate, Flint rests as Belmarniss inspects the orrey. Suddenly, he has an idea, saying, "Belmarniss, perhaps there is something about the mural in the previous room or the arrangement of the planets that might give us a clue how to solve this puzzle."
Spending 1 RP to regain Stamina.
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"First we should probably make sure we WANT to solve it in the first place, Flint. For all we know this is the key to Ezorod's prison and solving it would let whatever's being imprisoned here out...or at least disable the bubble allowing Legion vessels to fly in," Belmarniss replies.
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"Speaking of which, what does the Legion even want with this place? Are they aware of what it is?"
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"Both excellent questions, and I wish I had a clue as to the answer," says Flint humbly.
To Belmarniss, he says, "I am hoping we can find out the implications our actions might have in the process of learning how to solve the puzzle, but we must balance the potential harm we might do by releasing the entity trapped here or collapsing the bubble against the potential benefit gained by increasing our knowledge. In truth, the technology here is above my head, but I trust you and Mari to go carefully and tell us if we *should* proceed, not just if we *can* proceed."
To Ordyt, he adds, "Perhaps the Legion merely seeks the knowledge here to improve its power--or it may seek to release and/or control the entity imprisoned here. We know of two ways to enter here now -- one with the Aklo tome, and then there is that portal. I feel that we must either get to the bottom of this mystery or cut off any avenue for the entity to escape before we leave so as to stymy the Legion's plans, for I am sure they are not in our best interests."
"Perhaps with your background you can shed some...ahem...*light* on the subject, Ambassador Sammad?" Flint suggests.
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While the others are so preoccupied with whether or not they should solve the puzzle, Mari focuses on how it could be solved. She circles around the device, analyzing every bit of data she can find.
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"Speaking of which, what does the Legion even want with this place? Are they aware of what it is?"
"Shouldn't that be obvious, Ordyt? They're would-be-conquerors seeking a conquest; even if Noma held the key to Ezorod, they didn't quite seem to know what they were looking for since we got it first despite them having had time to search for it before we arrived, and seemed more concerned with claiming it. They were probing this bubble even though they lacked a way in, and they were undermining the Archipelago through multiple-nested-proxies. What they want here is what they want for the entirety of Mataras: its complete subjugation."
Belmarniss then moves back to the room with the mural to take a closer look at the writing on the wall.
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"Both excellent questions, and I wish I had a clue as to the answer," says Flint humbly.
To Belmarniss, he says, "I am hoping we can find out the implications our actions might have in the process of learning how to solve the puzzle, but we must balance the potential harm we might do by releasing the entity trapped here or collapsing the bubble against the potential benefit gained by increasing our knowledge. In truth, the technology here is above my head, but I trust you and Mari to go carefully and tell us if we *should* proceed, not just if we *can* proceed."
To Ordyt, he adds, "Perhaps the Legion merely seeks the knowledge here to improve its power--or it may seek to release and/or control the entity imprisoned here. We know of two ways to enter here now -- one with the Aklo tome, and then there is that portal. I feel that we must either get to the bottom of this mystery or cut off any avenue for the entity to escape before we leave so as to stymy the Legion's plans, for I am sure they are not in our best interests."
"Perhaps with your background you can shed some...ahem...*light* on the subject, Ambassador Sammad?" Flint suggests.
"Awful joke, Captain," he retorts with a faint chuckle.
Then he looks pensively to about the room. "I wish I had light to shed, Captain. The only clue I've had is the location of their shipyards, and this doesn't give us any further leads on that place...Ordyt does raise some good points, though."
He turns and paces as he continues to speak. "These fiery spirits are a curious find in a place known for supernatural darkness. Perhaps the entity imprisoned here is not one that fears the fire's light, but one who would be strengthened by it...and given their affiliations with the Plane of Fire, the Legion might think that they can weaponize it by breaking its containment."
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"Why stick its prison in a star then? Why not out the deep dark void, where a light-eating horror would find no food at hand if the prison failed?" Ordyt throws his hands up and makes an exasperated noise. "Too many questions, and never enough answers! Mari, can you make heads or tails of that thing?"
In the Orrery globe room, Mari carefully inspects the massive device. The intricate interconnections in the outmost layer slowly resolve themselves into a pattern in her head, and after some mental visualizations, she works out how several pieces could be moved to open up the first of four layers. She also notes that the metal panels themselves are quite hot. Moving them quickly to minimize contact might be a bit tricky .
Back in the mural room, Ordyt examines the diagram of "planets". While he doesn't understand Aklo (I think?), and therefore doesn't have a chance of decoding the meaning encrypted into the writing, he does apply his knowledge of the esoteric. The seven sites have been placed on rings orbiting a central spot. However, the orbits don't look like the typical ellipses of a planet's passage around a star. Instead, they have the look of an arcane inscription or diagram. The positions of the 'planets' are also suspicious, as if these places are all in their fixed positions for some greater mystical purpose.
Six of the seven locations have been intentionally scorched and gouged. Ordyt is able to clearly tell that the damage was caused by either the fiery skeletal creatures first encountered here, or something with similar fiery claws. The purpose of the gouging is largely inscrutable, but if this is an arcane diagram or a representation of one, its now very lop-sided.
"I know as much about Aklo as I do about about Drift beacon repair--but this isn't intended as a map of a solar system, or even just a stylized representation. The placement of each planet is very deliberate, like a spell-sigil or a chemical formula. It's not actively magical, I think, but there's a significance to it I can't quite parse. Bel, what does it say?"
Mari reaches a hand up to the device, but pulls back before actually touching it. She looks at it for several more seconds before joining the others studying the mural.
"I think I've figured out how to get through the first layers of the big egg," she announces upon entering the room. "Learn anything from the creepy cave drawings yet?"
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"I know as much about Aklo as I do about about Drift beacon repair--but this isn't intended as a map of a solar system, or even just a stylized representation. The placement of each planet is very deliberate, like a spell-sigil or a chemical formula. It's not actively magical, I think, but there's a significance to it I can't quite parse. Bel, what does it say?"
Mari reaches a hand up to the device, but pulls back before actually touching it. She looks at it for several more seconds before joining the others studying the mural.
"I think I've figured out how to get through the first layers of the big egg," she announces upon entering the room. "Learn anything from the creepy cave drawings yet?"
"As I was saying before that thing interrupted us," Belmarniss says with a distinct bitterness at the mention of the hostile orb, "the text is Aklo, and it's mostly just labels for the planets or whatever they are depicted here. What's interesting is that if you look really closely, you can see the edges undulate in a pattern, trinary numbers I suspect."
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Belmarniss takes out her holo-grimoire and fiddles with it to straighten out the code and as she works she thinks out loud a bit.
"Okay...relatively simple, just tedious...hmmm...some of these figures look familiar...let me cross-reference something here...oh! Oh! Aw, Spirit! These are astrogation co-ordinates!"
After she's done, she shows what she's entered into the holo-grimoire and what it translates to to the rest of the group.
"These are navigation markers for each of the depicted locations, each one described as an 'Anchor that binds Eshtayiv.' Ezorod, this place, is one of those Anchors and...if what I'm afraid those scratched out ones indicate is true, it may be the last one."
"What in the Hell have we gotten ourselves into this time?" Mari mutters.
"There's a grim thought, Bel. Mari, could you show us the--wait, you don't mean a literal egg, right?"
Considering carefully his friends’ words, Flint says, ”This is indeed troubling, and anything we do *could* make the situation worse. However, we cannot be paralyzed by indecision.”
Turning to Belmarniss, he says, ”If you are right, something has been progressively weakening the prison, with only one sphere remaining to secure the lock. If we do nothing, I fear whatever has disabled the other spheres will disable the last one and release this Eshtayiv entity.”
Looking at Mari, he says, ”Mari, unless you think peeling back the first layer of this shielding will have catastrophic effects, please proceed. We must figure out what is going on here if we are to stop it.”
"What? No, I mean like those jeweled puzzle things they used to make for rich people. They just look like eggs for some reason."
Mari snaps off a quick salute to Flint before heading back to the other room. She doesn't get to work straight away, instead choosing to wait for everyone else to catch up.
Finishing his rest, Flint volunteers, “If you like, Mari, I can move the plates under your direction.”
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Belmarniss gives Flint a skeptical look, but then sighs.
"I don't want to hope you're right, Flint...but I can't think of any counterargument. These Anchors do appear to have been systematically dismantled, possibly long before we were even born. At least if we're the ones who pop the lock on this Eshtayiv thing, we're best positioned to try and kick its ass, or at least warn other people that it's out there, as opposed to the Legion, who'd probably just get swallowed up by it or whatever it does..."
She follows the group back to the strange device, joining in trying to move the plates.
Working together Bel and Flint move the pieces from position to interlocking position, peeling back the layer of the model in the process. Although the pieces are extremely hot, your fire resistance protects you from harm. Once you slide the last piece aside, a wave of radiant heat from the next layer washes over you. The temperature in the room rises about 20 degrees. Although its now very hot, your armor is able to keep you cool.
Flint will look carefully at the mechanism.
Mari gives the second layer a quick glance, working it out almost immediately. "Easy money," she says, stepping up to the device.
Before Flint can even begin to offer help, Mari is already working her way through the next layer. He stays quiet but ready as the next layer opens.
Mari combines her keen eye with clean movements of the burning hot metal panels. She slides half a dozen panels into place one by one, twisting the last one a full 180 degrees before it slips to the side and clears the path further. The hot panels do little more than singe Mari through her armor and don't cause her any real injury.
You're blasted with severe heat, radiating off the next set of panels. Your armor mitigates the worst of the elevated temperatures, but too long an expose to the heat here - for those not inured to fire at least - and you'll be fatigued. . The third layer of panels looks about as tricky to decipher as the previous one, but these are glowing red hot. They're probably even more dangerous to manipulate.
Ordyt lets out an impressed whistle as the others rapidly solve the orrery-puzzle and a blast of heat hits him from the device's interior. "This is what I imagine working on a ship's power core is like," the oread comments to no one in particular. He reminds himself not to be too engrossed in his companions' progress and glances over his shoulder to scan for any more unpleasant visitors.
"Well, in general," Mari says as she starts working on the next set of panels, "if the core is giving off this much heat directly into the crew compartment, you've probably already eaten enough high energy radiation that you'll--" She pauses, considering. "Actually, let's not get into that right now. This is probably just thermal radiation."
Probably.
Flint stands at the ready nearby, scimitar drawn and lantern on to keep the darkness at bay, though the increasing glow of the orrery core is beginning to light the room all on its own.