Chapter 4: The City of the Forgotten Ones
Gronk steps forward, believing that he's volunteered by way of mentioning the short sword. He takes the blade from Ulfgar, its fuller shimmering electric blue, and gently slides it into the beside the door. There's a brief flash of blue light, and then nothing...
After a pregnant pause, the door unsticks itself and, after a bit of groaning, slides smoothly upward into its bay in the high ceiling above the doorway.
Now revealed is a large, rectangular room, with multiple nooks recessed into the walls along both sides, and a twin roll-down door in the far wall. The floor is littered with small bits of debris, only a few any larger than a finger. These are heaps of some sort of yellowish fabric, resembling very old shed reptile skins, lying along the wings in solitary heaps like islands protruding above the flat, slate sea.
Upon entry, it becomes apparent that the two opposing nooks furthest back are actually doorways, each opening on an ascending stair. These must lead up to the room with the long windows overlooking the shattered plinth in the tunnel outside.
Arbitrarily, the party chooses the right flight, ascending cautiously lest the stair be trapped somehow. The stair switches back once, then emerges into a chamber similar in size and shape to the large foyer below. This room, by appearance, is almost certainly Master Control. There is an open door at the back of the room, revealing a vertical shaft, choked with rubble.
In the middle of the room is a large stone table, littered with scraps of brittle paper and an assortment of loose, variegated crystals. Close to the horizontal windows overlooking the tunnel is a plinth, topped by a perfectly round, melon-sized, cracked, dark crystal ball set at waist height. It looks like a small-scale facsimile of the shattered structure on the floor of the tunnel just outside. Beneath the windows, which appear to be made from thick slabs of glass or translucent crystal, is a slanted shelf, like a shop counter or elongated drawing table, truncated in the middle to create space for the plinth. The surface of this flat face is pierced by dozens of trapezoidal slots, several of which are filled by upright crystals, each of which protrudes, to some degree, above the surface of the panel.
Curious, Gronk gently touches one of the protruding crystals. It sinks smoothly into the slot and, suddenly, the room is filled with about a dozen glimmering, ghostly white figures- humanoids, elf-like, composed entirely of soft-white light, robed and seemingly hard at work. They shuffle silently around the room, studying documents on the massive table-top, placing and adjusting crystals in the panel, passing notes from hand to spectral hand. They seem completely unaware of the Five. In fact, several of the ephemera pass right through the rapt watchers. Then, almost as one, the flickering images stop what they're doing and move towards the tunnel-facing windows, full of anticipation. All don insect-eyed, full face masks. One of the figures steps forward and places his/her hands on either side of the dark crystal sphere, which subsequently begins to glow. Seconds pass, then the captain's limbs grow rigid and he/she throws his/her head back in a silent scream. The others hesitate for a moment, and then turn and begin running soundlessly away from the windows, towards the door at the back of the room or the stairwells on either side. Intense white light enters the chamber through the windows and the orb operator, still screaming silently, seems to explode. Abruptly, the room descends back into lantern-lit dimness. As quickly as they appeared, the ghostly figures are gone; no sign of the spectral host remains.
Your Turn.
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This message was last edited by the GM at 01:49, Wed 11 May 2016.