Scene #5966: Saigoth That Was-2

Owner	Pose
Bloody Revelations	"The greatest there is." the crowd of masks repeats in its slightly mismatched set of voices, tilting inwards in a way that makes all of them simultaneously affect doubt. "On this very spot? Perhaps. Otherwise, such a young and egotistical creature should be considered fortunate, that he voices something so absurd to one without his 'martial pride'." A second series of mask corpses wriggles free from the seafloor behind him, adding their old voices. "Leaning on the inventions of your ancient kings. Using the works of the old savants that held your leashes to your ends. Pilfering creations you cannot possibly understand, and wielding them as cudgels against other vicious, ignorant savages. Slaves tearing the throats of slaves, shedding blood over the scraps left by the masters they themselves murdered. Obtaining the power solely feel a little less terrified of their utter insignificance and killing others to sit atop the heap of ruin they've created." The masks pause, before taking on a vaguely satisfied (and intensely creepy) cant. "You are an exemplary Dragon-Blooded. You do your part in sending your world spiraling into madness." The coral effigies of faces judder up and down as if laughing, but the effect is far too uncanny, given that their different voices all manage to somehow merge and jumble into the exact same, cold, feminine, and profoundly empty tone. All of a sudden, they swivel simultaneously to look Staren in the eye, making the water loudly swish around them. One tendril flicks at the end, and sends a mask tumbling quite a distance through the water, where a second darts out of the dark and catches it near to Staren, and speaks from there. "Why would I know such a disgusting thing? The mind of the Isli creature was butchered without artistry, her soul flayed open and grafted with golden codes. The Isli creature has no say in anything she does or says, and so could not respond to my embrace. If I had such repulsive knowledge, you creatures would have no need to look, and interrupt me while I am dismissed from service." A different tentacle across the plaza uncoils itself, and strobes of offputting, faintly nauseating light pulse up its length, concentrating in something like an eye pattern that illuminates a rising alley at the southwest edge of the plaza. "Read their putrid books if you must. You will find them in the hands of creatures even more fearful and violent than you. Creatures that have finally begun to understand once again, that not one thing in this hole has even the slightest value. That all of this 'treasure' is trash when the living must look inside at what they are. I enjoy them. They know what beauty really is." Most of the masks then fall off the end of the tentacles, leaving just two still speaking. "Do not think that the other three would be as lenient on you creatures as I am. They do not appreciate the perversity of your existence as I do."
Bloody Revelations	Moonfin ends up the only one with the easy time. With so much pride put in Solar markings, it's easy to track down the Twilight Caste statues by their half-lidded sun markings, and to chase the line to a distinct that appears to be centered around a decrepit, dark, and most certainly haunted factory cathedral deep into the naval district, centered around what was definitely a ship assembly yard some time ago, and now just looks utterly ridiculous under uncountable fathoms of water. The quarter-finished hulks of First Age warships are still there, halfway complete, all of their non-metallic components having long since floated away. A lack of any memorials or monuments to his particular man is as telling as anything else: the Solar must have still been alive when whatever this was happened. Considering his known accomplishment is building a ship, and this place's main craftsmanship was building ships though, it seems like easy addition to assume he worked here. Scratch that. The tech here isn't quarter-finished so much as incredibly stripped down -scavenged to the bare skeleton. Here, everything of useful magitechnological complexity has disappeared, and the power sources aren't drained so much as non-present. It looks like the whole factory cathedral has been cleared out completely a long time ago, and all of its pieces and energy used to- Probably do whatever is responsible for the light Moonfin can faintly locate yet further west, sending rays of gold weakly shimmering into the pitch black waters, as if the sun were absurdly trying to rise from the crushing depths. His sensors detect a pocket of severely abnormal pressure, and the telltale signs of functioning machinery, buried in the deep, deep corner of the city.
Staren	"Moonfin, wait up." The mysterious light source seems like the most solid lead yet. Could someone be alive down here? He decides that talking to the... strange creature is probably dangerous, and he's not in the mood for a philosophical argument right now. So he makes his way to Moonfin cautiously, bidding the creature a "Well, we hope not to intrude upon your territory for long."
Starbound Flotilla	Moonfin was planning on just, you know, checking this area for ancient riddles that secretly reveal codes and such. But how's a guy supposed to solve a hundreds-of-years-old complicated mechanical code-puzzle if everyone's fucking scavenged every goddamn thing here? He rummages around and roots through the stripped-down crafting quarter in a frustrated way until he catches sight of that light. That might be the next best thing, after all. He starts making his way there, still zigging and zagging to avoid those dangerous monsters, still doing his best to leave a trail of essence-bearing chum or to simply not be immediately relevant to the gargantuan titan(s). He won't go start messing with it until Staren does what Staren needs to do, but at the very least, he's going to get a good look at whatever this sunless sea's sun might be, and provide that datafeed to the others.
Wandering Dog	The masks bother Wandering Dog, mostly because they're an undead horror, but he listens to their speech anyways. Most of it glosses over him, because he doesn't exactly understand what it means by leaning on the inventions of ancient kings and stuff. The martial artist doesn't do any of that, in his opinion. He does beeline onto one line, though, as he moves to start following Staren. "I don't agree with you, and you're pretty creepy, but yeah, I'm pretty damn exemplary!" The old man follows up to join with Moonfin and Staren, wanting as far away from these masks as possible. As they follow up to the light, Wandering Dog has a question to ask. "Yo! Find anything less creepy than horrible undead monsters? More creepy? Anything further to our goal?"
Bloody Revelations	There appears to be good reason that everything is so heavily scavenged where Moonfin is, here where there is no evidence of life whatsoever, save for its strange, plasmic imitations of the Underworld. Though Elites converge from multiple angles, the central source is just large and bright enough, even in the crushing gloom of the grey depths, to stand out from every side, its glow rising over the tops of towering buildings and guiding walks down winding, cavernous back streets. The number of creatures essentially disappears. On one side, it's obvious that Nilih has simply devoured them all. On Moonfin's, it's not quite so certain why, for a bit. What they eventually come across is some corner of the city -perhaps as big as a small village overall, despite being tucked away in the heart of a metropolist- is a huge, shimmering golden dome of force, rippling like liquid brass, and shining what appears to be actual daylight across the seafloor, driving back the gloom for a short space before its power wanes and the Sea of Shadows claims its expansive territory. Every thousand paces or so, huge struts are visible around its perimeter, cobbled together out of a number of magical materials, plated as best as possible, but still featuring many exposed wires, slowly turning gears, and luminous hearthstones. They're partially submerged into the field, just barely visible from outside, and probably doing something to project or maintain it, but within the radius of daylight that must certainly be something the creatures here hate. Scanning it obviously detects a great deal of heat and UV light, but also a huge pressure differential inside, indicating empty space, or at least a lack of crushing deep sea water.
Starbound Flotilla	Rippling brass. Smart-metals? Morphic structure? Moonfin examines the struts around, trying to determine the way they interact with this, and if he needs to fuss with them in any way to secure passage. The flow of the metal, next, is what he focuses on. If it flows, it ought to flow in some way with respect to an airlock somewhere, it ought to ripple with signs of a steady site at its entry point, and Moonfin knows the ripples of fluids. The brightness doesn't deter him at least. It's an opportunity to close all but one eye, the third, and focus on this. He'll even dig, if necessary, to get to lower sections. The man has enough materials on-hand to craft his own ocean-floor-rated airlock linked to the dome itself if that's what it takes to get the morphic rippling metal surface to open up, or to safely operate any openings he finds around it.
Staren	Staren was beginning to suspect the light was a sign of continued habitation! But a forcedome is kind of an unclear sign. He watches to see if Moonfin tries to swim though it, but the Hylotl is being extra cautious! So it seems Staren will have to perform a test. He looks for a bit of debris, anything he can lob into the dome even from a short distance, just to see what happens. If there continues to be no obvious way in, though, he'll assist Moonfin with his construction.
Wandering Dog	As they reach the massive solar forcedome, Wandering Dog kind of stares at it. "Well, that's sure as hell something. Even their super magic underworld domes have tog be gold and glittery, huh?" As the others focus on other things, Wandering Dog knows exactly what he's going to do, which is probably not the most advisable thing, but he'll be fine, because he's Wandering Dog. As Staren throws the rock, Dog swims up to the dome, and moves to touch it. If he doesn't burn or get horribly injured or anything, and it's not solid, he'll try to actually swim through it and enter the dome. Better to test with his own body, right?
Azure Armature	There are long moments of spooky, dead underwater zone. This is unsurprising. Long moments stretch on and on, and internal clocks get a little weird. Minutes become hours. Hours become days. Days stretch like the seconds cast from an analog clock. Tchotch. Tchotch. Tchotch. The second hand crawls across the face, grinding away at existance. The light that the party approaches is joined by another muted pop of light, a flickering mirage of empty pops. Armature - 'Blue' - in her diving suit, reappears near the party. She had been blinking around farther off, but upon seeing the light, joins the group on Staren's flank. "You were late. I had to go looking. Did you lose track of time?" "The other direction was empty - outskirts and an empty undersea shelf-expanse. Not important to the mission."
Bloody Revelations	As far as Moonfin can assess, despite the obligatory Glorious Golden Gaudy Grotesquery, all the construction he can find is far from artisanal. It looks to be slammed together out of thousands of parts from hundreds of different machines, of subtly different make and quality, many jerry rigged from alternative configurations, and many in the process of breaking down, or having already broken down or been replaced (or more ominously, not replaced). The fact that it's made of some composite of several magical materials is clearly the only reason it hasn't buckled and fallen to pieces completely, and then it's still not far off with its advanced age and hastily improvised construction. There appears to be nothing like an airlock though. The dome is basically symmetrical all the way around, and when Staren chucks rocks through it (and Wandering Dog just swims through it), they pass through easily enough, experiencing a tingling of daylit warmth, and then some brief vertigo as they lose all buoyancy and flop to (relatively) dry ground on the opposite side. Anyone in a black jade diving suit might feel pretty clunky, seeing as they're now in a warm, dry, well-lit bubble of breathable air, inside of which the sea beyond the dome's walls visually appears normal, resembling the western ocean of the living when filtered through the golden film. This is also the only place in the city that hasn't been completely demolished. The streets are still decrepit, vacant, and crumbling, but they haven't been blasted to pieces by tidal forces and storm winds beyond comprehension, and there is no sign of water damage, nor any plasmic colonization. What there are instead, are signs of being recently lived in. The odd light is on in otherwise dark windows here and there. Debris has been cleared off streets, and the odd carpet, stall, signpost, or attempt at decoration has built up here and there over some time. Park space at the center has been cultivated into some kind of orchid of ghost white apple trees, and 'gardens' hewn out of the white cement and marble have been filled with strange beds of sea grass and fungus, with lichens, mushrooms, and vines crawling on wooden meshes. The sparse sound of birds can be heard faintly echoing down empty streets, along with mingled noise of conversation, sparse and hushed. Aside from the constant tang of salt and brass, there is the faint smell of something like roasting fish. It might also be hard to miss the wooden racks bearing rows of gleaming First Age magitech spears near the exits, as well as crude crates draped in woven covers and bearing advanced tools of sorcerous savants scattered messily over them. Solid gold statues serve as supports for growing strange, grey, creeping berries, and moonsilver gizmos riddled with fist-sized rubies sit in the black grass like discarded children's toys. Some evidence of movement with the outside is obvious, in rows of dead coral masks drying out on clotheslines, alongside incredibly expensive silk sheets hung like common laundry.
Starbound Flotilla	Moonfin regards the interior with a cautious artistic appreciation. A simple underwater life is something he is uniquely poised to appreciate. As he looks long over the streets, he takes a quick moment to prod at his Matter Manipulator and disengage the armor, stowing it away for now. He continues a close investigation, and finds himself sneering distastefully at the misuse of art... But at least appreciating the fact that they reserved that mostly for the gaudy types. Where does one find codes in a place like this? Everything's been scavenged into this one zone, which means any storage systems, any old military gear, anything that looks like it could be hinting at old, recovered command code materials, in the myriad discarded machinerty, Moonfin needs to look for. He keeps a keen eye out and strides in as if it were normal. There's signs of life here, and so he's hopeful for what he finds, but the lack of immediately visible people is at least a little unnerving. Surely he'll find something to dispell that sense of anxiety shortly, as he heads in on his search.
Staren	Oh huh they can go inside. Staren's not sure what to make of it. It looks lived-in but he doesn't see anyone. He's not sure if they'd be friendly, anyway, so he doesn't call out. Wait. there is conversation. He heads that way, trying to peek around buildings, looking to see what kind of people might live here.
Wandering Dog	As he swims right through the dome and falls to the ground, Wandering Dog uses his agility to land on his feet, though he stumbles ever so slightly, dizzy. Once he's got his concentration back, he moves to check his air supply, considering removing his helmet but deciding against it just in case the entire thing's a trap and collapses on them suddenly. As he glances around the place, though, it weirds him out. There's people living here, aren't there? The smell of fish and the sounds of conversation are picked up by his keen senses, and he ignores the strange fruits and the weapons and crates to focus on following Staren in that direction. Wandering Dog isn't sneaky, though, especially not in this sort of situation. "Hey, is someone out there? Come out! We don't mean you any harm unless you're some sort of undead monster." Calm and confident, that's the way he is. He's speaking in Seatongue, which these people may or may not recognize, but hopefully his armor, if seen, would show he's not himself a horrible undead monster.
Azure Armature	Passing into the area with her power suited armor, the very first thing Armature does is kerthunk her foot and nearly fall forward, overcompensating heavily for the field being at all resistant, or any water resistance at all. There's a stumbling half-pace, and the suited operative recovers. "This area appears habitable. I cannot ascertain the source of the field, and while it's likely that it will stay on..." She gestures back, towards the bubble's surface they had passed through. "It may close at any time. Remain on internal supplies of energy and air." She cautions. Also because there may be some sort of Super Solar Chemical Attack That Drives You Madly In Love Slash Addicted To Them. Take no chances. Armature drops to a knee to examine the moonsilver studded in rubies, brushing her suited fingers against them and checking for any reaction. "Growing gemstones...?"
Bloody Revelations	To be serious, it'd be difficult to mistake any of the four here as undead. For one, they've come through a barrier of something approaching 'sunlight mana', for two, they've reached the bottom of the Sea of Shadows without being drained to a husk and dissolved into the water, and for three, they lack any of the typical characteristics of ghosts. A bunch of people thunking around on dry land, doing all that breathing and nonsense puts 'horrors from the deep' out of mind, never mind several of them wearing recognizable Deliberative-era diving suits. The lack of visible habitation, despite signs of recent living, may be eerie and sombre for quite a while, but it turns out mostly to be lack of population for the space available. Though there is a significant chunk of well-developed cityscape to live in, very little of it can apparently be used for growing anything, and even then only strange, improvised things that can survive down here, and any materials but salvage would be understandably extremely scarce. Wandering around, the interlopers do, eventually, encounter people, scattered in small gatherings, harvesting sparse crops alone, or inhabiting a few choice rooms of towers meant to hold hundreds. They're weird. Quiet, pale, tired folk, with very little presence about them, tending towards thin, and universally pallid. Not outside of human range, though; they look like one would expect from someone who has lived permanently without sun on a very limited diet. They're dressed very lightly, mostly using rough cloth holding together bits of coral and nacre into vaguely tribal outfit, but with the odd, incredibly jarring inclusion of insanely expensive jewelry or fine silk simply added as accessorization, apparently judged about as worthless as seashells and colourful stones that share the same strings. Also, they all share the same aspect markings; every one of them has fairly pronounced Water Dragon lineage features, such as swirling patterns on their skin, dark blue hair, or even small patches of black scales, easily marking them as 100% Dragon-Blooded.
Bloody Revelations	The minute the martial artist wanders into them, only a brief period of paralyzed surprise gives way to the handful of pale figures in the streets swarming around him, trying to talk over him all at the same time, speaking a very, very, /very/ old dialect of Old Real that is more or less the precursor to the Seatongue he's using. They predominantly focus on him over Staren, since he is an instantly more familiar sight, but both of them are deluged with questions anyways. It's hard to make any of them out individually, as heads peek out of windows and footsteps gather down lonely streets, but they focus on the understandable (where did you come from, how did you get here, who are you, how did you find this place, etc.) while frequently sidetracking into the less immediately comprehensible (what of the war, how fairs Okeanos, has the admiralty heard of them, etc.). Azure Armature finds a lot of finely crafted, extremely valuable, and highly gaudy accoutrements of rich living. Meals roasted on iron spits are being eaten on plates of behemoth ivory, alchemically enchanted high society dress clothing has been taken apart and used as pragmatic tarps and wash cloths, and artifacts without a purpose directly related to survival are essentially incredibly pretty junk, left untended where they haven't been taken apart. There is a treasure trove here that none of the natives have any interested in; magitech and artifice essentially untouched by time, and lying in dusty corners and overgrown lots for its utter lack of meaningful use. Moonfin's assumption must be right on the money. There are signs that items from outside the dome have been dragged in here across many, many, /many/ years, in all shapes, sizes, and applications. Some of it is nearly as old as the flattened Warstriders in the streets, while some of it is still under partial disassembly, and all of the missing pieces seem to be along the same lines: the nuts and bolts of pins and cabling, power supplies, circulation devices, projectors, hearthstones, and similar. Most of the storage he'll find is plugged into a variety of civilian, transport, and military vehicles, or the personal affects stripped off countless ancient skeletons. There is, here, at last a functional integraphic holo-map, which gives a no-doubt heavily used and more helpful view of the surrounding area. Apparently, this is a place wedged between some kind of towering administrative center, and a very large shipyard/factory complex.
Staren	Staren wasn't sure what to he'd say when he expected a lone Solar craftsman holding out for millenia in an improvised shelter. Now there's a whole .../population/ of people, and frankly, if they don't already know that their city is in the underworld it will probably panic them, and the certainly aren't going to approve of Bloody Revelation's plan. He's a bad liar, caught out of his element as he looks around at all the people asking questions. At least his golem face can't show emotion. Eventually, Staren remembers a bit of truth that's probably agreeable. "I don't know if you know this, but the Skullstone archipelago has fallen under the control of a powerful deathlord, and we seek to use the Brass Leviathan to fight him." Who knows if that will even mean anything to them? What's a Deathlord? "Uhhhhh... a powerful necromancer, a ghost of one of the Solar Deliberative, who has turned the archipelago into a society where those few ghosts he favors oppress the living." How goes the war? "Uhhhh... I... don't know anything about local history. I'm just... an artificer from very far away, who has some interest in seeing this Deathlord stopped." Can we leave? "I... am not sure we will be able to come here a second time. It was very difficult to reach... if you wish to leave Creation, I will see what I can do, but..." he hangs his head. "I cannot make any promises. If things work out, we'll eventually help everyone in Creation and the Underworld, but... I don't know how long it will take."
Starbound Flotilla	Moonfin is so conflicted. The idea that so many people could live the way that the Hylotl do and just fundamentally disregard the nature of art so intensely is distasteful to him, but he still has to highly respect the fact that they /do/ live this way. For him, he (incorrectly) feels like they should be thriving more than they are, having come from just such a society. But on the other hand, perhaps he shouldn't speak so harshly. After all, the Hylotl before the Floran Wars were rather different as well. Hmmmm. A map. They'd been in the factory, right? He tries to map things out in his head. Does this mean this will let them get to the administrative building? Somewhere where those codes could likely be found? He tries to line the map up properly, and locate where the administrative structure might be, and anything that might have been dragged here from it to give a sort of compass direction. He needs to see if the dome contains it, or is squashed outside of it, and he definitely needs to find the way in and search it for the codes. He feels restless and uncomfortable around people who remind him so much of his own people while reminding him so much of the Florans. The idea of bringing them back with them is further unnerving to him. He thinks it over thoroughly, imagining submersibles that might be fit for the task as much as he can. It's an uneasy thought, but at Wandering Dog's urging, he at least tries to think of it.
Wandering Dog	As they approach the people, and see what are clearly Dragon-Blooded, Wandering Dog takes a few moments as he's overwhelmed with their questions. What are all these people? How long have they been here? Certainly a long time. Which means they're probably from when the Deliberative ruled. Which means they've never tasted real freedom. Wandering Dog's heart knows what he wants to do. He wants to bring these people up with him. He knows he can't, not right now, realistically. Staren brings up the point that Bloody Revelations will never let him bring them with him. But if he can help these people...he'll do it. And so, to start, he needs to introduce himself, and the truth. "My name is Wandering Dog, originally of the Skullstone Archipelago, if you've heard of it. Not sure if it's been around a while. I'm a martial artist who has come with him for those reasons, but I imagine you guys don't know what's happened up there. It's been...well, a very, very long time since the Solar Deliberative reigned. They fell forever ago." He doesn't tell them why, not yet. "The world's a freer place. I know you won't understand all at once, so I'll say something that you can." At this point, Wandering Dog moves to remove his helmet. He's slightly pale himself, and has sea-blue hair. An old, scarred man, but one with somewhat regal bearings. He might not be /clearly/ a Dragon-Blooded, but by the fact he's in the armor and is down here, they can probably assume he is such. "What do you people seek? Do you seek to leave this place? Supplies? Whatever it is, I'll do my best to help you taste the freedom I do. I don't have a vessel today to do so. But we'll have a fleet shortly enough." And then, a pause. This is the perfect time to ask, Wandering Dog realizes. "Do you know where we can find Deliberative access codes? We don't have any access to such. In fact, if you have a leader, we'd like to see them and explain this all. It's a lot to take in, I know."
Azure Armature	The wonders of the First Age, used as scraps and sailcloth. With the resources of this scavenger city, Armature could build an entire legion of battlestriders, power a major metropolis and keep an entire council fat and happy on relics and materials. But it wasn't the objective. She'd have to... To... Drawing up, gaze scanning and inventorying just the things she can, Armature 'jogs' (thumping the whole way) towards Wandering Dog. He was the face, and he could most likely get them what they wanted. The codes. The mission. "I'm having a slightly hard time putting a use-valuation on the things they're taking apart here, Dog. But they're your people --" She gestures around. "We're from the surface, where there is another war being fought. We seek the codes of the Brass Leviathan, because its owner is dead and heritor missing, to use the weapon against the dead keep Skullstone and the dark lord that resides there."
Bloody Revelations	The sequence of events talking to people goes something like this: "Never heard of Skullstone. Where is it?" with possible comprehension if given naval coordinates. "What's a Deathlord?" followed by Staren's answer. "Wait, a Solar /ghost/?" with some surprise. "The war is won, then." with a distinct lack of real excitement. "What of now then? If the Deliberative is cast down, what became of the Celestial Exalted? What of Creation? What of Heaven?" and various clamouring for news. There is no question of 'how long exactly'. They are entirely aware of where they are, and an oral tradition is enough for them to know it has been Long Enough. The tales they can relate of what they actually know certainly describe the catalcysmic chaos of the Usurpation, where the shattered remains of an entire continent the Elites have walked a tiny part of were sunk to kill a handful of Solars, and yet when even that chaos exploded out of control and Creation itself broke at the sheer concentration and intensity of mass death, they had worked side by side to secure some tiny bubble of light and life in this place, Saigoth's, last moments. Since only the Dragon Blooded pass down Exaltations through blood, it lines up that all senior Solar Exalted that would have important political positions here would have died of old age. Despite how long their culture has existed here however, they want to leave. Badly. They're not at the bottom of the ocean; this is the Sea of Shadows. Water aspect or not, they are living humans, and they're not meant to exist here. Nothing they can gather from the outside is edible, the water itself can't be filtered to be safe, they can't recover their Essence in any way but slowly nursing ancient hearthstones, and it takes layers of special magic they invented themselves to foray into the depths without having all their Essence slowly sucked out by the water until they drown and die. The machinery and enchantments holding this place up are utterly ancient and failing. They lack the knowledge to do more than replace parts, and they don't know exactly how long it will continue to function, but by their accounts, they've used up almost all the replacement parts that are within their range, limited by how far they can swim before the hostile conditions of the Underworld demand they turn back, not even covering the entire metropolis, never mind reaching to the surface.
Bloody Revelations	All of their knowledge is thus restricted to these depths, and the things that exist here, which is certainly unique in almost the whole universe, but of very niche and limited use. Oddly, they appear to be entirely unaware of how ghosts actually work, and count no ghosts amongst them whatsoever, despite the incredibly low probability of reincarnating down here. The one thing they do recognize is the name of the Brass Leviathan, which gets immediate response. /That/ thing was famous even in their ancestors' time, as something built by a mad Solar to honour the Lunar admiral Leviathan (the very same one that now owns Luthe, by all description), where a terrestrial god was magically lobotomized and imprisoned in a state of the art battleship AI core as punishment for disrupting a tea party with a scheduled storm, of all things. It was apparently a big motivating point behind the western support of the Usurpation, and they happen to know a few details about it. Specifically, they've raided the close surroundings (including the administrative complex Moonfin is scoping out) top to bottom, and know where to find ancient naval records in it. They caution that the Sea of Shadows has long since absorbed every last mote of energy in the place, so it'll be difficult to enter, and the memory crystals will have to be powered up somewhere else. They actually get offered the opportunity of a guide team. If anyone tells them what they want the Brass Leviathan /for/, they immediately become intensely enthusiastic about the idea of killing Leviathan, apparently a name spoken with some venom in old stories to scare children, and they seem surprised and alarmed he is somehow still alive. They have absolutely no idea what an Abyssal Exalted is either, if it comes up. They've never heard of the term, and nothing about it is familiar to them.