”Well, none a’ it appears to be magic at least. Still, could be hidden somehow, either with magic or just buried under them balls. Not to mention mechanical traps..”
At Ed’s suggestion, Briar looks back worriedly at the big face, remembering all-too-well its furious breath.
Alaïs is glad of her choice to bring up the rear given the direction the conversation takes, and she maintains a respectful silence as the locals discuss a lost friend about whom she knows only what Kata’s mentioned here and there in the past few days.
‘Puzzles’ is an interesting way of looking at it, and she’s torn between being amazed and appalled at the bravery and recklessness of Diamond Lake’s youth. Or, it speaks volumes to the state of the town that scrambling through the cairns can seem like a good way of spending an afternoon. Alaïs has a rather limited sense for just how different her aristocratic normal is from the lot of ordinary folk, but she does know that it is, and she’s pretty sure that this sort of casual tomb-diving would seem extreme even to a less skewed perspective.
Into the silence that falls once Kata starts moving ahead cautiously to check for traps, Alaïs, once she feels that she won’t be intruding, thinking about what the elegist had said just before mentioning Caith, says quietly, “The whispering seems to have stopped. For now? At least, there are no voices on the air that I can understand.”
Unlike down where we first entered. Should that be a worry, with the stone face, and now a scream that she heard and I didn’t?
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Rosella drops the first stone. It bounces and clatters among the spheres, the sounds echoing throughout the chamber. She throws rocks at each of the walls--one of them shatters on impact, the other ricochets off and hits the bridge, then falls down to join the first.
As the third rock is thrown and ricochets, you notice something else strange. The rock ricochets at the wrong angle for striking a solid surface. Now you realize that the honeycomb of patterns disguises countless small holes in the walls--each roughly the size and shape of one of the spheres, you would guess.
"Hey! Hey, come on! Come look over here, quick!"
"Are you sure it's safe?" You laugh at the sluggish, reluctant way she weaves her way through the shadows after you. She's so skittish, but you can always count on her to follow in the end. "This place is supposed to be full of traps!"
"Yeah, and I found one that's still armed, so come check it out!"
She approaches. Briefly, she stares at the strange broken mirror, black and shimmering in the candlelight. You watch with satisfaction as her eyes drift down to the long rectangle of off-colored stone leading up to it, and to the little dart holes in the wall.
"We can't jump that."
"We don't have to." You flash her a grin, excited to show her your discovery. "Look, I've already figured it out, see?"
You brace, and she has a moment to cry out in fear just before you step casually onto the rectangle. Nothing happens.
She stares at you in wonder, and you giggle at the look on her face. You almost want to keep the secret to yourself and leave her thinking you have psychic powers, but you're itching to share it too badly, and it spills out like butterflies. "See, the way I see it, they're not gonna put the trap trigger on the first third of it, right? Because then if you dodge the first dart, it's easy to just step back. So they have to make it so it detects the weight in the middle. It's not about how much you weigh, it's about where the weight is."
She's nodding uncertainly, and seems to almost be relaxing. That's when you back up and take a flying leap over the rest of the rectangle, and your heart bobs and bounces in glee at her startled shout. Gosh, Ka, never ever change.
The memory passes, but a strange feeling of guilt, shame and disappointment lingers.
Edrukk holds fast to the rope, preventing the young bard from stepping out onto the beam.
"'old, lass. Those rocks of yers, they tell 's somethin', aye? Mebbe we 'r not alone. Le's wait a moment fer seein'."
“There is definitely something moving under there,” Alaïs chimes in confidently from the other end of the line. Musician she may be, but she’s not normally so focused outside of performance, so how carefully she’s listening now betrays how unsettling she finds this heretofore unexplored part of the cairn.
She reaches over her shoulder for her bow from an abundance of caution. Unless those are hollow or it’s not that deep, whatever it is would have to be quite strong, wouldn’t it?
At Alaïs' comment, Broccan sheathes his blade and pulls out his crossbow, cocks it, and loads a bolt into the slide.
"Le'me know'f ye'see it," he replies.
"Let me know if you see it."
“Of course,” Alaïs nods to Broccan, before the import of Edrukk and Kata’s observations strikes her. Hopefully, that doesn’t entail that other things will too, in short order.
“If you’re hinting at what I think you are,” she says carefully, “is there some sort of trigger we can bypass or disarm? Or will we just need to run a gauntlet of volleying iron orbs?”
“Those of us with shields can try to provide some cover, I suppose,” she adds, though if the mess beneath the bridge isn't just for show, she's not sure how effective that will be.
”Mebbe so. The windy face ‘ad a way t’ stop ‘t. ‘Ow d’ye suppose we can stop this one?”
Edrukk does not see any signs that this trap was intended to have a disarm option.
Briar takes off her hat and scratches her head. ”So is it triggered by weight? We could go get a big rock or something to put there and trigger it until it wastes its ammo or has to wait to reset?”
Briar takes off her hat and scratches her head. ”So is it triggered by weight? We could go get a big rock or something to put there and trigger it until it wastes its ammo or has to wait to reset?”
"Guess w'can rope'r'selves t'geth'r 'n then run fer't," Broccan suggests.
"I guess we can rope ourselves together and then run for it."
Growling, ”What be th’ point if’n th’ people ownin’ th’ place can’t get in? Either we don’ need in, or there be a way t’ stop ‘t.”
"We cou' climb down'n cross on the pile'eh balls'n then climb back'p," Broccan offers as another option.
"We could climb down and cross on the pile of balls, and then climb back up."
”There be something ’n th’ balls. Take th’ fight right to it?”
Briar takes off her hat and scratches her head. ”So is it triggered by weight? We could go get a big rock or something to put there and trigger it until it wastes its ammo or has to wait to reset?”
“I don’t see anything that looks like an obvious mechanism for that, but as you said before, Briar, it could be triggered or concealed by magic. I’m not that sort of nimble,” Alaïs shrugs, wiggling her harpist’s fingers in an exaggerated, stagy imitation of a fingersmith’s movements.
She looks rather alarmed, though, at Broccan and Edrukk’s suggestions.
“Depending on what’s down there, I’m not sure we want to rope quite all of us together,” she says, imagining some terrible domino effect if the lurking beast is strong enough, or if there's some other nasty surprise lurking below. “But if you think that’s best.”
Alaïs bites her lip before coming to a clearly unwelcome conclusion. “Could we just try something else first? It’s a bit silly, but could we try just jumping over the likeliest spot for the trigger? I must confess, I’ll have to work on my desultory – er, my jumping-in-armour? -”
Her accent grows more pronounced as she reaches for a Common equivalent for what must be a very old Elven word. “- but I’m willing to try, and if the trap goes off or that thing, whatever it is, springs up to try to eat me, please do jump down to take the fight to it.”
She eyes the beam for how much room she’ll have for her run up…
Alais backs up, then races across the narrow beam and takes a running leap. She flies nearly twenty feet through the air... and lands on the other side, unharmed.
As Alaïs lands neatly, she can’t resist turning on her heel with a bit of a flourish to look back at the others. Her wide, delighted smile betrays that she wasn’t expecting for it to turn out that well, and gives the lie to her cheeky call back, “See, nothing to it! Looks safe from here!”
Her relieved banter evaporates almost as quickly as it formed, and she continues more seriously. “Shall I just check this other door? Could it just conceivably be a ward set to if or which doors are open? Maybe we can simply leave these balls to the rats.”
She rather doubts it was anything that small that made the sounds she heard, but hope springs eternal, and matching actions to words, she examines the door on her end to see if she can get it open or if there are obvious wait-for-Kata-before-proceeding signs on it.
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Caith was always the brave one, capable, and smart and from Kata's perspective, like a star, burning bright in the night sky. Of course it was Caith that figured out the plate trap. And as Alaïs floats through the air, for a second - a few seconds really - Kata is profoundly disoriented, as if time and space themselves have collapsed. Fear and wonder course through Kata as Caith/Alaïs spins and lands turning on their heel, and third emotion rises in Kata accompanied by a thought, her mindvoice the awestruck, self-doubting soprano of her young self. Gods, Caith, you're so... effortless!
The world spins, and Kata is standing once again near the beam with a rope tied around her waist, and it strikes her just how alike Caith and Alaïs are, so filled with self-assurance and grace and bravado and Kata's face pinches with relief and jealousy, grinding within her like those tumbling spheres below.
"Ca-- Alaïs, I'm glad you're OK! Yes, try the door!"
Broccan takes a deep breath, and decides to chance fate. He runs forward and leaps at the same point Alaïs did, hoping to clear the trap.
Alaïs is not quite so scatterbrained as not to notice that Kata seems rather alarmed, as she herself nods and starts poking at the portal ahead. Especially for someone reiterating that everything’s ‘ ‘K.’ Then again, there are reasons enough for this place to get to us, each in our own way.
For the airy elf, it was the walls and water closing around her below, compared to a wider passage where even her earlier buffeting fall proved surprisingly manageable. And it is true that they seem to be running out of places where Kata and Broccan’s friend might have – goddesses – fallen. So.
Just in case, to her purely visual inspection, Alaïs calls up her cantrip to check for magical auras, though she knows there are regular ways to disguise such for traps. In addition to the door, while her senses are enhanced, she quickly sweeps her gaze back behind her, in case whatever’s in the spheres is using magic to hide. Fantastic, now she’s getting jumpy.
She smiles encouragingly as she turns back just in time to see Broccan launch himself after her over the arching bridge.
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Edrukk just shakes his head at the acrobatic crossings.
”Ah ain’t doin’ that.”
"OK," Kata murmurs, passing by Eddruk and giving the dwarf a reassuring pat on the shoulder as she goes. The beam is wide enough to support her, Kata knows this, and yet, when taken in the context of the room, worryingly small. Kneeling at the midpoint of the beam, Kata removes her puzzles tools, and begins working. It should be a simple trick to jam the plate enough that the rest can cross over. Failure of course, would not be so simple.
Briar makes sure Kata has Calistria’s guidance before she attempts dealing with the trap. She also takes a few steps back off the bridge after. Just in case.
Edrukk makes sure there is enough slack in the rope to let the young one work freely, but not so much that he cannot reel her in quickly. He stands there, quite tense, waiting for something to happen.
Kata finds that there is a subtle mechanism running through the beam, a mechanism designed to detect when the weight on the center outweighs the weight on the closer end. Rigging the mechanism is a subtle, risky thing, like preparing a thread to run a cannonball up and down its length.
She hears a click.
After a moment, when nothing happens, she determines the trap is disarmed.
Broccan keeps an eye out for danger while Kata disarms the trap.
Remembering Alaïs' warning about something in the balls beneath the bridge, Broccan glances over the edge, watching for movement. He also looks upwards, in case something swoops down from above.
Briar waits for Kata’s confirmation that she has indeed shut off the trap, then claps. ”Good job, Kat! Really came through on that one. ‘preciate it!” She begins walking over to the other side to meet up with Alaïs.
Alaïs is pleased to see that when things go well, the group comes together like a choir or consort hitting its stride, with all voices or instruments harmonizing nicely. Not that the cairn complex hasn’t been horrific enough already, and possibly still, with mysterious critters moving about somewhere below and who knows what behind the next door, but maybe there’s hope after all that this ancient place can be explored without further disaster.
Alais, meanwhile, is stumped on the door. It is forged of a dark metal, unscratched and unweathered. Not even lichen grows on it. It isn't entirely solid--fine twisting tubing that passes in slow, gradual spirals through the door in strange patterns. The tubing is so fine a pair of pillbugs would struggle to squeeze their way through.
There is no visible mechanism to open the door.
Edrukk waits, keeping an eye on the floor below. "Good on ye, lass! N' take care 'n that beam!"
"Y'wann'eh take'eh look? Maybe there'sa switch'r somethin'" Broccan says to Kata. "If y'don't fine'ennethin', I'll try t'pry't open."
"Do you want to take a look? Maybe there's a switch or something. If you don't find anything, I'll try to pry it open."
"Yeah, I'll take a look," Kata says, maneuvering around Broccan and kneeling at the door. She stops and utters an incantation, and then proceeds to slowly run her fingers along the frame. "Has to be something here..." she murmurs, lost in thought.
As Kata steps up to the door, Alaïs watches, unafraid to admit her own puzzlement. Her alchemy is more of the vintner’s type, largely, than the metallurgist’s, but she tries to think of what she knows about various types of metals, though then again, with the piping and patterns, she hardly thinks this is just the natural state of whatever metal it is when in such a large mass.
It also seems unnecessarily complicated for something like the poison gas trap below. The elegist’s murmur as she kneels to take a closer look gives Alaïs another idea, one that’s probably crazy, given the stone door previously intervening, but then, if there’s more magic involved…
Squeezing to one side to make sure she’s not getting in the way, she runs her hand higher up on the door proper, over the spiraling tubes, before leaning her ear in to listen for a moment and then, feeling silly, turning her face forward again to huff a small breath through the nearest openings. Listening the while, she wonders, Could this be another source of the cairn’s whispers? Not the only one, perhaps, but…
Five minutes pass as Kata works. The closer Kata examines the pipes, the more frustrating she finds the contraption. Alais's breath does make the tubing seem to vibrate briefly, but then it recedes. Any attempt to blow through the pipe seems to have some effect, but it's like trying to blow away an apple with a halfling's bellows from ten feet away. Broccan can find no visible crack in the door to pry.
leave this place
you intrude upon the graves of the fallen
coward
traitor
tomb-robber
Kata
Broccan looks down, over the edge of the bridge. "Y'said'ye saw some'un in the balls below, din'ya?" Broccan asks Alaïs.
"You said you saw something in the balls below, didn't you?"
She ought to have guessed, Alaïs thinks, regretting that she has no way to generate a suitable gust of wind. Maybe if she had one of her brothers around to jolly into it, though she knows that they would give her a hard time about that being her element to look after, even if she is the youngest, and with less-suitable training. Still, the vanishingly small resonance she does manage to produce is intriguing, even if she's not likely to be able to test it further anytime soon.
She shakes her head at Broccan’s question, too.
“Only heard it, I’m afraid,” she clarifies, hand gripping tighter around her bow as she looks back down into the mass of spheres to see if she can spot what the source might be after all.
"Caith?" Kata asks, her voice a whisper, her hand moving to her spear. "Do you see it? The flickering eyes? The tiny skeleton crawling on the beam? The pipes, they whisper, they whisper..."
Kata's voice is pitched high with barely suppressed fear, she blinks, twice. "Yes, there's something here. It wants us to leave. Knows my name..."
Alaïs doesn’t catch the quiet first part of Kata’s remark as the other singer straightens up from the door, but her brows raise as Kata’s voice does.
“That is alarming,” she offers, before hesitating for just a moment. It’s not her place to push, but they have elementals to free and how much more to this place can there be, and… Then again, with the way forward currently shut tight and no obvious way through, the point is moot. If only Ardarion were here! Or maybe even Lina – I don’t know that she knows that spell, but she might.
Alaïs considers how the metal felt under her hand, trying to place the metal or at least compare it to those she knows. And then she reluctantly asks, pitching her own voice to rise softly, undemandingly, “How truly aware of us do you think it is? Could we negotiate for passage?”
She keeps one brow raised as she turns to the others, gaze lingering especially on those either more heavily armed or otherwise inclined to get stuck in close, her silent question fairly clear: Does anyone want to jump down?
Her attention drifts back to where she thought she heard movement below, before.
Edrukk is clearly studying the area below, shield and axe in hand, ready to engage if his friends are threatened.
"Caith?" Kata asks, her voice a whisper, her hand moving to her spear. "Do you see it? The flickering eyes? The tiny skeleton crawling on the beam? The pipes, they whisper, they whisper..."
Kata's voice is pitched high with barely suppressed fear, she blinks, twice. "Yes, there's something here. It wants us to leave. Knows my name..."
Kata hears--or feels--a vibrant, distorted laugh. A second later, everyone else hears it, too.
The figure doesn't exactly appear. Kata turns and sees it there--sees her there. Edrukk and Alais hear her reaction and look up. Broccan looks where they are and doesn't see the figure, blinks, and does. Rosella and Briar don't see her until she starts talking.
"Hi, Ka. Wow, you took your time getting here."
The figure is that of a young child, hair long and feminine but clothing boyish and plain. At first, she seems fully solid, but then the next moment she is gone, and the next half-instant she is back, her form a wispy mist-gray, and the next she is back to normal. A crackling like divination static hangs heavy when one looks directly at her longer than a second.
As you reel from the horrific vision, Caith smirks and winks at you, and in a second is back to normal.
The ghost steps forward, her eyes not leaving Kata's. "Hey, it's... Broc, right?" the child asks, her voice light and airy. "Can I borrow you really quick?"
”Watcha mean, borruh?” Broccan asks the spirit, in an uneasy tone.
Before Alaïs can start poking about in the spheres at range, as it were, a new voice among the group stops her before she gets much further than reaching for her quiver. Whatever she might have expected next it wasn’t a ghostly child, though perhaps it isn’t all that surprising. It seems the cairn is determined to swallow hope: terrible enough that it’s such a dangerous place, but that it traps the spirits of those it catches is especially cruel. She can feel her skin crawl.
So this is Caith, she muses.
Or a shadow of her, she corrects herself, hoping it doesn’t show on her expression as she notes how impossible it is to hold the ghost in one’s vision for any length of time. Broccan's reservations seem very much in order.
”Watcha mean, borruh?” Broccan asks the spirit, in an uneasy tone.
Caith grins, turning to face Broccan. The next second, she is frowning. Then her form flickers, and returns with her already in the middle of a riotous laugh. "Oh, Broc. C'mon, it's easier this way." In a mockery of a child's dutiful recitation, she adds, "I promise I'll take good care and return it just as I found it."
Without waiting for a response, the ghost steps forward and right into Broccan's body.
You feel an external will pressing against you, trying to find a way inside, but you harden your mind against its cloying, clawing grasp. You make a wall of your mind, and Caith is rebuffed, a sense of petulant disappointment sticking to your thoughts for a few seconds afterward.
Caith's will catches you by surprise, and it is a curious feeling that tingles at your mind--something like dreaming, or the half-dreaming state when you're about to fall asleep. Caith's presence is small, unassuming, but prickly as a hedgehog. It feels wrong being there.
Especially when she flares to life, shunts you to the back of your mind, and seizes the reins.
"There! Much better," you hear yourself say aloud. "Wow, okay, this air tastes amazing. I mean, for stagnant musty death-cave air. Okay, so really quick, how long are those lanterns burning for?"
She doesn't take control completely. You sense that if you ask, she will allow you to speak freely--or rather, relay what you say as if you'd said it. There is a slight undercurrent of delicacy, even apology. But mostly, you just feel her satisfaction at having access to a living body again.
You hadn't known how it felt to be undead until this moment. Now you feel a pinch of it. You are struck by how... how little there really is. How small Caith's soul seems to be. You've heard that possession spells usually shunt the displaced soul into a gem or statue or the like, but Caith takes up so little room, it doesn't seem to be necessary. There's not much of her left. She's like a shell, the rest of what was Caith already withered and rotted from within.
You are also struck, though you can tell she's trying to hide her emotions from you, by the intensity of what remains, the fierceness of her feelings. Anger. Grief. And, of course, loneliness. So much loneliness.
"There! Much better," Broccan says in a clear, feminine voice. ”Wow, okay, this air tastes amazing. I mean, for stagnant musty death-cave air. Okay, so really quick, how long are those lanterns burning for?"
His posture and gestures change as well, as if Broccan were suddenly a different person.
“A couple of hours, give or take,” Alaïs replies with the promptness of someone who’s carefully burnt midnight oil in her alchemical dabblings, to say nothing of being brought up in a family where all the children were expected to pursue some form of magic, and casually quizzed on various arcana accordingly.
It’s instinctive, the same way she sorts through words for what she’s seeing: her own people, especially in mystical contexts, but often more generally, given how jealously they guard their independence, call it ‘standing aside,’ but many Avistani cultures ‘possession,’ and – if she recalls correctly, and she really should get a better grasp of Polyglot one of the these days – several Garundi ‘riding.’ It’s a fascinating if (or perhaps, hypnotically, because) deeply disturbing sight, but for all her curiosity, she hopes she never finds out what it’s like to have some other personality clamp down over her own sense of herself in her own body.
It’s a wicked thing to do without permission, and the cautious edge that creeps into her voice strengthens the accent to her Common as she continues with the easy politeness of an elvish lady only mostly glossing over her discomfort with the grim spectacle. “We’re sorry for the delay; navigating this place has been a bit of a trial. I must say, though – begging your pardon – do you think you could release Master Dunchad? What do you need him for that we couldn’t help you with just for the asking?”
Alaïs watches the Diamond Lake natives for cues as to how to proceed, especially since she doubts any of the group are quite prepared to handle a malevolent ghost, should it prove to be such. Kata would know much more about such things than she does – she’s extrapolating from what she knows of the undead and forms of possession generally – but Alaïs' tense posture clearly conveys her silent conclusion, Whatever she is now, this is not truly the girl any of you knew, once.
"Is'okay," Broccan replies, suddenly shifting back to his normal posture and voice. "She's no' hold'n me, more like rid'n on m'shoulders. I can'eh'splain it bet'r, bu' she's weak'n need'n me t' carry'r a bit." He looks to no one in particular, and says clearly to himself. "Say whatcha got'eh say, Caith." He then seems to let go, and his posture reverts to the other person's once again.
"It's okay. She's not holding me, more like riding on my shoulders. I cannot explain it better, but she's weak, and needing me to carry her for a bit. Say what you've got to say, Caith."