Since Thomas' pointing had mostly been largely outwith the others' attention whilst Henry was talking, it takes them a moment to notice him trekking up to the rock surface to the left of the leftmost bundle. There is indeed an old, intermittent trail of blood heading straight up, just beside an eroded patch of sandstone that would be easy to climb.

Left to her own devices, his horse bunches closer to the other beasts, head high and ears flicking, not at all keen on staying near what is dead. Kaiser isn't much more settled, and the twitch of Mulberry's shoulder under Henry's hand as she sees off flies is hard not to read like a shudder at their presence.

Poking the budle of dark cloth, James stirs up flies and gets a good look at the decaying chunks of indeterminate organs the raven managed to pull out. The hard mass bound on top of the chunks seems to be a skull of some kind. The other bundle appears identical, save that poking it brings up a complex little binding of twigs shoved into the outside layer like a charm in a mummy wrapping. Possibly one of the harder lumps encountered amongst the entrails was another.

Henry frowned as Gill went poking around. He'd assumed some local hunter had left these ghastly bundles of bait, but if James was saying that wasn't normal...well that was all the stranger.

He glanced toward Thomas, seeing now the trail of browned blood that he seemed to follow. "Has something been dragged up there?". Henry examined the eroded stone, eyeing up the height to decide if he should scurry up.

It looked like it had. A fly landed and edged across the side of Henry's face as he gazed up, the back of his shirt already sticky with sweat.

The part of the formation the trail led to was perhaps four or five yards up, at a very easy climb for an unburdened man. A girl might have more trouble, hobbled by the bulk of her skirts, but then Maggie had said that Janey had run off improperly dressed, which likely meant a night smock or a shift, considerably less of an impediment.

Moving to a position to where he could see Henry, Thomas yells down to him, "There is a blood trail that leads up here.  The path is very easy to follow if you wish to come up here." Thomas goes back to look over the area to see what else might be found up here.

OOC
[14:19, Today: Thomas Daniels rolled 20 using 1d100.  Spot Hidden (75).]

What is up here is mostly obvious at this level, and distressing. The thrum of flies is louder here, the cicada sounds rising from the background of swaying trees.


[[going to repeat that request for a SAN check, Thomas, in case you see it here before the OOC thread.]]

Seeing the horror before him, Thomas closes his eyes and takes a few steadying breaths before opening them again.  Shouting down to Henry.  "Do not I repeat do not come up here.  There is nothing for you to see up here.   Trying not to look too closely at the symbols, Thomas takes out his note pad and attempts to draw what he sees from the brief glance he got of them and transcribes them there.

OOC
[16:30, Today: Thomas Daniels rolled 44 using 1d100.  sanity (50)]

James, who had looked ready to follow, paused at the timber of Thomas's voice. He looked slowly over to Henry and raised one bushy eyebrow purposefully before he craned his head back in order to stare up the slope.

"Tom? You alright?" James called after him, concern heavy in his voice. But he did not move, indeed, James stood his ground, one leg slightly bent upon the hillside, as he leaned over his knee and peered up through narrowed eyes.

It's still not the right notebook, but it suffices for sketching in. Down below, the raven starts edging along the branch to have both bundles down there in sight, hoping the humans will leave.

[[@Thomas - shouldn't that be (52)? At any rate, now it's 1 less.  ]]

Henry hesitated at the foot of the rock face. It’d take him twenty seconds to scurry up, hell, he’d enjoy the scramble. But the broken tremble in Thomas’s voice made him pause and he glanced back to see the frown on James’ expression.
“What’s up?”.
It didn’t sound like there was nothing up there...the man seemed alarmed.
”Are there any signs of Janey? Looks like she went that way. We should be getting after her.”. he gestured in the direction the other footsteps led.

Yelling back down the hill to the other two. "There are strange markings up here.  They are not meant to be seen by mortal man, I have taken to sketching them out in my notebook and will bring them down presently.  There are a few other objects I wish to check out before coming down.  Any sign of Janey?"

Steeling himself for what he maybe encountering Thomas heads over to look at the rest of the drawings.

Henry blinked bemused. Strange markings? Well that sounded interesting! Cheerily he called up to Thomas, ”Phew, I thought you’d found a body or something!”.
He reached for the first hand hold, ready to scramble up. ”Do you think the indigenous folk left the marks? The professor will be interested im sure.”.
With the naive immortality of youth he hoisted himself up.

The ascent is joyfully easy, and Henry pulls himself up top and sees.

{Previously Private to Henry Cotton:} It's the symbols that draw his eye first. Something in his instincts - old, old instincts, back in the pulsing primal thoughts that go deep as blood - says this script is not for recording human speech, or concepts the human mind is meant to comprehend. Certainly it is not a human mind as it is meant to be that has made this broad sigil in blood and charcoal, nor marked points around its containing circle with those weird, precise stick-sculptures, recording symbols requiring more than two dimensions for their writing. The sheer mad precision of it gives an impression that some great and terrible thing has been worked in this place, like a great empty spool the world had been turned around and now left slack.

At the centre of the design sits a long-cold fire and a pot furiously upended, spilling a dark substance off to the right. There's another bundle part-unwrapped in the shadow of the overhang above the flat space, a sheep skull returning his gaze from a half-dried rotting throne of viscera in the relative gloom. Above this last bundle is a drawing on the sloping rock, though he'd have to go closer to inspect it. The medium seems to be charcoal and fat, or more blood. There's a big scribbling of charcoal on the floor over there, too, but Thomas' curious crouching over it prevents Henry seeing any more than its presence.

Henry looks down at an odd, shell-like sensation under his hand as he pushes up to rise to his feet and finds he has placed it on an orphaned human tooth. There are others nearby.


[[SAN check, please, our lad.]]

{Previously Private to Thomas Daniels} It proves hard to copy things accurately, but Thomas manages the two-dimensional symbols as best he can. Passing around the edge of the circle he notes that the teeth he encountered further back were probably pushed there when the pot was overthrown, since there's a partial circle of them around the remains of the fire.

Under the overhang, sweating amongst the thick stench of rancid blood and flesh, he can hunker to his heels to get a look at the drawing.

{{...and postimage seems to have fallen out with RPoL at present, so you'll have to use your imagination here.}}

It's not clear what it is, except clearly religious art: a thick dark halo shines around a row of concentric zigzag patterns down to a blot below centre. Seven rays, or tongues, or flames waver out from the bottom of the icon, sinuous yet stretched out as though putting out power or preparing to embrace.



The frantic charcoal scribbling off to his right that seems to be unrelated to this legible if incomprehensable sermonising - more like an idiot's effort to scribe a warning about the 'jail' of sticks and scrub piled up on top of something at the corner of this boulder-top. Though wordless, this second person doesn't seem to share any high sense of ceremony and only wants that others should know to keep away.

He hears movement behind him at this point, from Henry joining him up top.

---

The raven tilts its head the other way to give James something of a sardonic look.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:14, Wed 18 Mar 2020.

Henry stood there blinking, trying to process what he saw.


23:38, Today: Henry Cotton rolled 34 using 1d100.  San (vs 70 I think).

Flies dance and settle on the young man as he stands and stares, their legs catching on the tiny hairs of his arms and face. There are a lot of flies here.

[[a cleared check will usually cost little to no SAN -  a single point in this case, putting you at 69.]]

James returned a less amused one. He was beginning to wonder about having brought these men along at all, what with the odd ramblings. Not meant to be seen by mortal man? Was it some kind of poor joke? Had the man mispoken? or was Thomas some manner of religious zealot as of yet undetected by the colony? that might see native art as something incredibly sacrilegious.

Whatever was going on up there, James decided he wanted none of it. "I'm headed back to the horses. Just...meet me there when your done." he eventually said, and shot one last look at the Raven before he made his way back towards where they had hitched the animals.

Henry swayed slightly as he stood there, a look of befuddled confusion on his face twisting to a sour disgust as he tried to process what he saw. Did the indigenous folk make this? His thought's couldn't quite connect. For some reason it felt like the ground was moving and he was sweating again. The sickness, it was probably that. The quick climb and morning riding... he looked away from the scene to take a few deep breaths and reassure himself.

Resisting the urge to look back he crouched to call down to Gill.
"There are weird things up here James. Symbols and etchings like I aint seen before. Teech...human teeth scattered around. Don't look normal to me.". He stood again and risked a glance toward Tom and the thing that loomed there. 'Normal' was an understatement but it was hard to explain. "Tom is taking a sketch...we'll hurry.".

His eye twitched as he tried to remain calm and approached the fire.

Henry's observations did not improve his initial impression of the place. The heat and the relentless screeching of surrounding insects conspired to bring a sense of pressue down on his sweating head.

{Previously Private to Henry Cotton} Flies explode upward in a cloud about him as he crouches. The spilled substance smells sharp and vile, like marrow and blood gone rancid in some boiled brew of herbs and bark. The pot has to be lifted to see into (and clearly scattered some of the teeth in falling, since the rest are ringed neatly about the fire - at least one adult male is represented), the movement causing a slithering of finger-bones attached to a boiled, decaying mesh of flesh and tendons to slump onto the ground. Henry catches the glint of gold tangled with the mess, and the grim remains of string that was presumably used to tie the hand into some gesture.

Besides that revolting discovery there are two pieces of wood kept humid by the containment of the pot, the best-visible one slashed with several lines across the cut surface and the unmistakeable word 'Cleary' picked out by the liquid pooling in the carving. It looks like there was a large rock or similar in the pot at some point, since there are rusty scrapes within and it looks like something was pushed out of the spill with a stick, over towards Tom's charcoal patch.

The sheep skull looks like it had been put down whole and subsequently picked clean in days following. The meat beneath is unidentifyable.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:17, Wed 18 Mar 2020.

Now he knew why Tom had said what he had, why he’d tried to stop the others coming up. Henry felt sick.

With Tom busy the lad needed something to ground himself. He picked up the pot and returned to the edge of the rock. ”James.”. There was a pleasing urgency in his tone. ”James, something is wrong up here. Wierd was an understatement. I don’t know...it’s like a ceremony or something, but not like anything I’ve seen before. Drawings, tokens, and I found this pot.”.
Henry crouched to lower the pot down.
”Careful, it’s mostly empty but it’s got some stinking black gunk in it. And something else. Look.”.

There inside the pot James would find a pair of slashed carvings. Henry hadn’t made sense of one of them, but the other invited an ominous worry. Cleary.

Shaking his head to suppress a tremble the lad stood again and looked around for a stick. Something was very wrong.

James felt his heart pick up pace, a slight twitching in his neck and temple as  Henry called out to him.

What had started as something he would associate with young boys, dramatically prompting each other to ever higher levels of delerium over an ominous shadow or an unusual track was not verging on the surreal. These were men, grown men, out here in the bush talking about symbols and ceremonies.

He was briefly reminded of the men back in Cornwall who would talk gravely over their cups about nonsense like Knockers in the mine.

"I'm not touchin anythin you bring down here Henry Cotton." James called over his shoulder. "Probably some'a the Bushmen doin God knows what out here, and I'd suggest you not touch nothin neither. Liable ta catch a pox'er what not."

He stopped, and turned around to help his voice carry. "No sign of Janey up there right?"

The raven glided over to the pot where it had slid down to a foothold. It poked its head inside, quickly shook it as though encountering stinging ants, and perched on top instead. Having found the pot contained nothing good and yet unwilling to rouse some vast depth of bird jealousy by letting anything else have it, it pooped down the side.

Up top, Henry had little difficulty in locating a stick fallen from the trees high up atop the outcrop.

Hearing Henry scramble up the hill, Thomas takes a second from his sketching and looks over at the young man.  "I thought I told you not to come up here.  Well no changing that now,  take a look around for your self since you didn't listen to me and maybe you'll find some sign of the girl Janey"

After continuing his drawing, Thomas hears Henry yell down to James about what he found in the pot and the reply of James.  Turning to Henry once again.  "Be careful with that, I know you want to find Janey and all but after looking at those markings over there, are you sure you still want to try and figure out what might be in that pot?"

Yelling back down the hill to James.  "We're both up here now and Henry is looking for some clue of Janey.   How much do you know about the locals and their traditions?  I'm not very familiar myself.  After I'm done up here do you mind looking at them or at least do you know of someone who can decipher them?"

James kept walking. He was not about to go raising his voice in the bush if it could be helped. He was not angry, not even frustrated, but worried if he was being honest with himself. The whole affair felt odd, odd in a way that he would have trouble explaining to another person, and this bothered him as well.

He returned to the horses and patted Kaiser on the flank, taking some small comfort from the animals big eyes and curious demeanor.

"Just some sheep boy, nothin to worry about" he said softly and soothingly to the horses suspecting that the charnal scents on the air would agitate the beasts.

Kaiser blew out a breath from his nose, appreciating the reassurance. He'd decided to stand as far from the upsetting scent of blood as his tethering would allow, not trying to pull free but not at ease, either. The mares had collected in a little hollow a few strides off, not wanting to stray far but equally nervous at the presence of dead things and a bold black bird.


[[if James is going over to them you can give me another Spot Hidden, if desired.]]

Hearing Tom speak was reassuring. At least someone else was up here seeing this stuff too and it seemed the older man had calmed himself slightly. Prising open the grisly bundle Henry spoke aloud, in part to keep himself distracted, in part to hope one of the others might make sense of his findings.

”There was something in this...meat that fell out of the pot, bundled up with string...gold...a gold ring with leaf design...no, make that an olive branch, not just leaves. And a cross.”

He slipped the thing into his back pocket and moved toward the ominous image that was scratched above where the pot had laid.


[[Keeper edit: accuracy/props]]
This message was last edited by the GM at 13:21, Thu 27 Feb 2020.

The image was no more comprehensible than it had been, depicting an idea or angel or diagram unlike anything Henry had seen. The English text gave its sermon and no more. If this was done by bushrangers, the bandits would seem to be out of their minds.