Scene #7305: CI DkS: Forgotten City of Light-S

Owner	Pose
Priscilla	It's dangerously close to a complete sunset by the time it's possible to return to the mysterious inscription that began this. For the most part, it's literally almost impossible to tell the difference. The sun in the morning, at its height, or its lowest, doesn't make a difference to the pitch darkness anywhere beneath the trees. If the things that live there obey any concept of a day and night cycle, it isn't apparent. There's only the slow shift to a slightly deeper chill, and the sinking feeling that it'd be best not to stick around much longer. A concerning number of the glowing path-marker stones have disappeared from their already sparse trail in the interim, but having already been to the strange monument once, it isn't made impossible to find it again. Due to a dire lack of surviving mega-architecture, or the giant having put a building-sized arrow through the canopy, it's still exactly the same way you'd found it. A pale, triangular stone obelisk, bathed a multitude of washed out, reflected colours from the luminous garden around it. A waist high field of naturally biofluorescent flowers, which stretch on in a far more orderly fashion than the twisted, centuries old growth around them, ancient and unwholesome, should allow. The nonsense mosaics on two sides are still no clearer for the adventure, and still equally smothered in plant life. The blank face continues to expose its only detail; the single inscription is even more uncanny for its clarity, after having seen the state of other works in other areas. It reads: Only those bearing half-light may enter.
Starbound Flotilla	"Worried. Everyone be especially careful here. We have a tough time with detecting complex spaces and time energies, and that's the more relevant danger." "Yeah, yeah, don't worry, and I packed my lunch too." "Floran appreciatessss warn! Would appreciate more sssun, blech." "It's a forest. I'd have thought you would understand how trees work by now." "Focus. Compress pressure, Star 2, Star 3, you two run icebreaker." "Yeah, we can use you to test for weird maaaAAAaaagic ahead of us, huh?" The half-light? That must have been byproducts of the materials they gathered. The branch, the bell -- other things associated with that golden light. Will those, being borne by the group, permit them the entry they're seeking? Seft is the one to step forward and test the theory. It's an important object in Lordran. Hold the plot device and then touch it because that makes the important things happen!
Tomoe	Well this was it they were at the end of the road for this quest. It was time to see this through to the end. "I agree, Seft we need to watch ourselves with this." She gets why Biteblade likes sun after all they are a plant, right? She hangs back looking over the obelisk. "The half-light..." She will attempt to think this over for a moment then look to the group she stands ready to tackle Seft out of harms way.
Yuuki Kuran	"The path-stones are missing..." Yuuki observes curiously, squatting down to inspect the ground. A puff of breath and a wave of her fingers scatters the ground cover before her gently -- but the stones are gone. She can't find any of the missing ones no matter how hard she searches. "Well, perhaps the half light was the stones we lost along the way..." Yuuki murmurs thoughtfully, before shaking her head. No. She's pretty sure it's not that. Joining the others at the inscription while she dusts off her hands from forest dirt, the quandry seems clear: "Do we just all hold bits of the objects we collected? Or is it more of a collective 'bearing'? I hope it's a collective bearing, otherwise it'll make hand-holding logistics harder." Yuuki already was working out the complex 'who holds which hands' for the Flotilla in her head. "Mmm, but if I want to hold George's hand, and Tomoe will hold any hand, but Albert..."
Starbound Flotilla	Albert? The ape grunts and offers the end of a rappeling rope that he has clipped to the harness in his battle-researcher garb. Good enough, right? "Unlikely to be necessary." He explains. "Probable threshold authorization system, non-trans-spatial."
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki looks at the rope and reaches forward to take the rope-holding hand instead gently, to squeeze. "That sounds like not a no, Albert." Her hand slips away. "But it's fine, you're right. I probably shouldn't think quite so hard!"
Priscilla	Arriving at the obelisk with a branch, a bow, and a bell, along with their assorted sundries, it might seem potentially auspicious that there were three sides to this thing, ostensibly only meant to catch the sun while it once had access to it. The thinking is less logical in that direction when one considers there being multiple branches available, arrows to the bow, and the apparatus necessary for the axle and chime to work. Still, their relevance cannot be denied. Merely bringing them into the area, the flowers that grow up around the monument, possibly unnaturally, fluoresce brighter, subtly leaning towards those who carry them, as if bent by a breeze. No amount of merely bringing them close, nor arranging them in a specific way around the faces of the obelisk, has any greater effect. There are only six possible combinations of that, and so the limitation is easily discovered. There is also, shortly after you arrive, a lot of bending and shuffling and crashing of foliage. It'd be alarming, even severely threatening, were it not so overt. Any kind of large and terrible predator wouldn't make that noise so brazenly, and any kind of monster that intended to charge through the trees heedless of being noticed would do so a lot faster. The utterly absurd bass of the voice you hear, to the range of straddling the lowest of human hearing, makes it obvious in advance who is coming to meet you, and also, makes it a wonder you haven't heard a tree snap in half and fall over yet. "Aha. I see thou art returned. With no great mishap, I hope." Well, at least he has to be able to hear. It's still so dark and dense outside the glowing field that you couldn't spot even a giant if you tried. "If you struggle with these old verses yet, I offer mine remorse for the vanishing of these old memories. But I implore that you ponder the following. The sorceries of light hath yet to come even close to rediscovery, by even the most skilled of scholars, yet long ago, these elementary spells were but commonplace to the peoples who once lived here. Beyond only a tattered scroll here or there, all that is left to find of them are the more perverted for their age. It should be no easy task, for a common sorcerer, nevertheless a common thief, to hath entered a sanctum so cryptically sealed." Then there's a big, gianty grunt from squeezing a huge barrel chest between a mere ten foot opening in trees. Crunch.
Starbound Flotilla	"Focused. So... it has to be some sort of elementary magic. So we need to focus on essential functions, basic behaviors of the objects." Seft buzzes under her breath thoughtfully as she looks up to their kind guide. "Affirming. Thank you for the help. I'll do all I can to put it into action." She turns to her allies and they converse among themselves. "I got nothin'." "Hmph." "Well it's not my fault. None of this shit works in halves. It's a set of three and three, you can't halve three." "Half of six is three." "Three of which, furball? Shut up." "Numbersss not relevant." "Huh?" "Ssstop think in numbersss. Arrowsss, branchesss, axel-and-chime." "Understanding. Numerically arbitrary. So the light is produced by this?" "How? How would you get a bell or a branch or a bow to make light?" "Angry. I was getting to that. The pieces have functions." "Ahhh, each piece has its own function, yes. The Bow exerted that quite unusual force, that spatial warp. The Bell commanded time. And the Branch altered people in some fundamental way -- or perhaps an illusion." "That wasss a phassse." "It was a what? I'm sorry, I can't hear you through cannibal teeth." "It was a phase, and you are an ass-hole." "Such a foul use of your articulate sibilant." The feuding continues, but Seft has considerations already established. Unless stopped, she intends to approach this the most rational way she can imagine. The bow exerts force. The Bell alters time. The Branch altered people. Maybe the Bow could be used to interact with mechanisms in the past -- a past accessible through the Bell. And then the Branch could allow them to achieve some kind of passage? She has to try it at least. Thoughtfully, she wanders a bit, chiming the bell gently and tugging the bowstring to see if it produces a visible effect of some form of mechanism, magical or material, in motion -- or if it simply seems to be the chaos one would expect of these things.
Tomoe	The items recovered by the party were reacting to this place or was this place reacting to them? Either way, it looks like they should be her the flowers glow brighter now as they get closer, they move towards those who are carrying the relics. She'll take another step then something is coming she hears it long before she sees it, then there's a voice she hears a voice someone was coming. The good news it's not a foe she listens to what he has to say and thinks about what the mountain of a man has said. The starbounders get into an argument. She leaves them to it as she flanks Seft she won't move to stop the Glitch from attempting the solution. "Well here we go Seft I had issues with puzzels." She looks to yuuki for a moment and she also seem to be thinking now could Yuuki be on to something? The young lady is sharper than Tomoe is, and Tomoe's aware of that.
Yuuki Kuran	Gough wonders if there were any 'great mishaps'. Yuuki waves him off. "A few mild ones, some misunderstandings, and a rather embarrasing bit where I thought one time-thing was a different time-thing. It was my fault for not grasping the nature of the past as we saw it. Spectres of lost things like images in picture-frames, or a camera roll viewed in reverse." She wears a wistful smile. "But I am surrounded by intelligent and driven friends, so it's not all bad." Gough's doubt that the light artes crypticness could be rediscovered gets a light laugh. "Well, if anyone could decipher the code, it's the Captains of the Flotilla." It's around that time Biteblade and Moonfin get into a verbal spat. Yuuki momentarily takes MORALE damage. Only a little. She has a lot of morale capacity.
Eryl Fairfax	"Excuse me a moment." Eryl vanished for a bit as everyone headed back to the cryptic riddle. He eventually returns, finding his way through the dark with his implants, now clutching a couple of the white birch branches. "These seemed treasured by this civilisation. And we saw that they cast a strange light when lit. I'm sure someone here has a means of generating flame quickly..." Once the branch is lit, Eryl holds it aloft, casting the light upon the engraved words.
Starbound Flotilla	Albert hoists -- yes, that same napalm, the one he wanted to use before on the tree. His face twitches in some imperceptible, inexplicable way. That's right, baby! It all comes full circle!! "Hmh." Is all he says. He'll put it to use the minute Eryl asks, cracking one grenade's contents over the branch lightly to turn it into an ad-hoc torch.
Priscilla	The quarreling amongst the Flotilla has no bearing on the hurdle at hand, and continues without interruption or effect. Seft taking it upon herself to try is the one rewarded. Very specifically Seft. Perhaps in a way that only Seft could quite be. Flexing the bow has no response for her, but ringing the chime around the obelisk does. Outside the perimeter of flowers, just on the borders of the mysterious, abandoned 'garden', the ancient layers of forest floor boil away. Generations of moss and mulch evapourate into morning mist. Twisted roots sink into the ground like tightened threads, pulling worn, stained grey and green stones with them, until they lock neatly together. Rays of weak golden sunlight fall through the leaden haze, and bleach the marks of age away. The garden is surrounded by a small, outdoors court, where little white granite bricks underfoot form a perfect level of interlocking spirals, and rings of tall, glowing reed-like plants are neatly arranged between concentric circles of young white birch trees, currently in bloom. The world revealed is very small, terminating abruptly about thirty meters away, where a razor thin line exposes a cross-section of the Darkroot at its border, weirdly letting one look at the insides of some trees. The building that the court is ostensibly laid out for is, included in the area, but only partially; its front-facing wall extends some short distance into the circle, but the sides that turn in from its corners are only exposed for a few meters, becoming currently inaccessible. The exterior seems to be not much more than a sequence of right-angled stone beams embedded into a sheer face, repeating at slightly different lengths, without any stairs, doors, or even a straight walkway to be seen. It suggests that the entrance would unfortunately be around the other side, or perhaps higher up, where its verticality extends outside a seemingly spherical range and disappears altogether. Seft feels a hefty portion of her internal energies disappear with the last ring, though a warm, pleasant kind of glowing feeling fills in its absence, kind of like a fuzzy sense of approval and reward for something deeply personal. Eryl -- probably heretically -- having flame struck to the branch of the surviving elder tree some distance away, produces a second effect. Between two of the building's heavy and undecorated stone beams, a small section of wall fizzles away, turning ghostly translucent within the radiant area of the impromptu torch. There was no marking or inscription on it; it was evidently a closely guarded secret before. However, behind that, a true entrance is revealed, and it is firmly shut. Gate-like double doors wrought of white wood and elaborate golden frame and banding stand in the way, without handle, and they certainly don't push inward to anyone's first, logical try. It's recessed a short ways in, allowing for a short 'tunnel' a few meters deep to exist in the shallow arch, all around which old, curling text has been blackened into the stone. The style is distantly runic, but essentially incomprehensible, and though the lines continue in perfect rings across the floor, up and down the walls, and joining together at the peak of the arch, closer inspection reveals that they do appear to be broken up into very short 'phrases', no two of which are exactly the same. There's a very faint aura of off-white light about them, extremely difficult to see with both the sun and the makeshift torch's radiance on them.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki gasps when Eryl GRABS HIS TORCH AND BURNS IT with the help of Albert, a priceless forest artifact being lit as tinder! She gasps again, far more oblidgingly as the walls begin to melt away. "Why, it's so good you're here, Eryl. I'd never have done something like that. And yet, the way forward is revealed." She gets as far as patting the Grandmaster warmly on the back with a hand before the melting-away secret passage illusion reveals... A door. "Oh, well--" That's not got a handle. "... Dang. Maybe it opens from the other side?" Yuuki asks, placing her fingertips against the seam of the door and focusing. If it was simply a function of pushing the door open from the other side, or unbarring it -- Tugging psychically, she fumbles with the backside of the door. No mere BAR will stop a Normal Girl from progressing.
Tomoe	The Flotilla is arguing a bit but they don't seem to be interfering with things as they do it. It doesn't do anything to hamper Seft's own efforts, she remains near Seft, ready to protect her if it comes to it. She's not sure what's going to happen but for once? Nothing seems to jump Seft or her. The bow does nothing but when Seft hits the bell that does an effect. She'll take a moment to look round to see an effect much like what happened at the tower. Eryl has opened with his rather ballsy stunt of burning the Artifact. Now the trick will be getting it to open. Once she makes some progress she'll look over the runic writing on the wall, she will get out her phone and try to take images of it. Scholars in Priscilla's employ could find this of use to them or at the very least lost history being recorded. "Heck of a stunt there Eryl...I'd never think of destroying a quest item like that to move ahead." She will get back to let Yuuki attempt to work the door not wanting to get in her way.
Eryl Fairfax	Pleased at having solved at least one part of this, Eryl strides into the little tunnel, only to be confronted by another door. "Hrm. Frustrating." One word to sum up this entire trip really. He begins to regard the runes on the walls, trying to parse them but having to squint around the time-displaced sunlight and torchlight. "Hmm... it's too /bright/ now. Can't make it out." He offers the torch to anyone willing to take it. "Carry this away until the secret entrance disappears. Hopefully I'll be able to read it in darkness."
Starbound Flotilla	"Not gonna see fuzzball stop being smug about getting to light that fire." "A long vindication is the most satisfying." "Have to admit, I'd be smug as hell too." "Floran isss getting tired of this place. Light goesss on. Light goess off." "Makes me think of a rave, honestly." "Thoughtful. Wait... maybe that is part of the 'half-light'?"^r"Hmh. We will see." "The door gonna stay if we back this fire off, pal? If it doesn't, we can do some business about that. Moonie, you got that, uhhhhh... Paper-house shit, right?" George says, approaching Eryl from one side. "It is called shoji, you philistine, and yes. If you intend to adjust the light, perhaps hylotl architecture may help more than waving the torch about." Says Moonfin, from the other. George takes the torch, but Moonfin offers his own modulation of the light through the screens of his people, constructed in various ways to test the effects. "Thoughtful. Are we supposed to make use of this? It seems like two of these have been used, but the bow wouldn't work for me..." She makes frustrated little buzzes as she presses her chin against her knuckles in pondering. "Curious. Does anyone else have any ideas for how to make use of the bow here? We did find it in a series of doorways that were meant to be impassable."
Priscilla	Hooding the extremely definitely culturally unacceptable torch under a paper lantern screen helps make the odd qualities of the inscriptions more noticeable. Specifically, each of them is limmed with a fairly strong white glow, not radiating from the black letters, but 'painted' along the outside of them, like a chalked background upon which the runes are drawn, but phosphorescent. They all look to have been done very slightly differently, written either with a slight variance in tools, or by different hands. Yuuki's telekinetic yanking on the doors causes then to shift outward by an inch and clunk stubbornly to a stop. It definitely feels like they open outwards. The locking mechanism appears to be between the doors themselves, actually very close to a modern deadbolt, but an extensive series of them up and down the seam, probably attached to some elaborate leverworks inside. It might be possible to rip the whole thing out of the walls with some extraordinary force. There doesn't seem to be some kind of magical super-seal on them, or at least it wasn't possible to recreate one if there was, but the 'gold' is exceptionally, unnaturally durable, and the swirling arboreal patterns they make over the wood wouldn't allow anyone present to squeeze themselves through should they incinerate said wood. Finally, the distntly cacophonous rustling and creaking and crunching comes to a halt, followed by slow, heavy footfalls, and a slight shaking through the earth. The armoured giant stoops his way into the clearing, then straightens up, places both oversized hands at his lower back, grunts, and slowly bends it in a way that conjures up a series of cannon-like crunches, amplifying Old Man Back to its extreme. Walking in at eye level with roughly the third storey area of the weird building, he crouches down and leans sideways to get a look at the door. "Ahhh, how dimmed memories of these old stones come into focus. These long ago familiar patterns and gardens. 'tis only a shame that these streets remain empty. But there is no conjuring back the dead, temporarily or otherwise. Though, thou hast made considerable progress in thy deducements already. Is it the gates that stymie thee, or what must lie beyond them, should those signs be of significance?"
Eryl Fairfax	Eryl regards the runes, and listens to Gough as he peeks in. Tapping his foot, he rubs his chin. "We have shown half-light," he says, looking at the white birch torch. "But it does not say 'show half-light' but 'show YOUR half-light.'" He has another branch. Considering it for a moment, he holds it up and brings it down on his knee once more. Last time, it disguised him as something from the environment. Here, what would it do?...
Starbound Flotilla	Seft approaches, considering the light. With nobody else rushing to do it, she'll also experiment. Eryl pursues the branch further, but she moves to prod at the bow -- drawing it at various positions near the door, to see if the door itself or its runes might react. The rest of the Flotilla can do little besides use their expertise in matters of space-based navigation to try to cross-reference the inscrutable runes with matters pertaining to the sun, which always seemed to be a significant factor here. It's the best they got, something of a hail-mary addition to the experimental efforts.
Yuuki Kuran	Feeling out the inner mechanisms of the door - pulling until it is taut and the full heavy bar-mechanism is 'exposed', at least to her senses - gives Yuuki plently of time feel useful while Gough approaches. "Actually, you can bring back the dead if you're really, really specifically powerful. Priscilla managed it, and it's why I was ready for it deeper in the forest. But now..." She laughs sadly. "I have been stymie-d a lot this trip. I'm just not suited to puzzles. Especially when I don't want to mess with things too much, because everything here is precious." Even the stinky swamps of death and the terrible poop ogres. "I could... probably open the door, but why put the main door behind an illusion that costs something dear, only to lock it from this direction? I don't get it..."
Tomoe	The runes are pretty but this is a distraction with her recording of them finished? She will put her phone back into her inventory. A moment later she'll step back and watch as Yuuki seems to be making progress and then the door stops. It looks like it's mechanically locked. That much she can tell and looks like a doozy of a look. Or it could be a large number of them she's not sure from her vantage point. She will however take a look at this, as she's getting ready to try other measures such as trying to use a light spell like a cutting laser? The telltale rumble of their guide arriving is heard and she looks up. "It is a shame, but we can at least uncover more proof of their exitance..." She will look at the door for a moment think over what their guide has said. "Yeah the gates are barring our path wait ... " She pauses again looking up at Gough and she's about to say something, but it seems Eryl is several steps ahead of her on this and he goes to break the branch over his knee.
Priscilla	Cross-referencing with what they have, the Flotilla find no meaningful symbology associated with the runes and anything of solar significance. They read more like literature, but then actual passages would have words repeating over and over like any common language does. There's scores of them, so they must be unstructured, individual words from a large catalogue of possibilities. The bow remains stubbornly useless for now. Eryl smashes the branched over one knee again. He is immersed in a wash of glittering golden motes, like powder snow. He takes on the chameleonic appearance of . . . himself, but presented in subdued, almost monochrome hues, very slightly translucent, and limned in a strange fresnel of white light identical to the runic words all over the doorway arch. It is essentially a completely worthless illusion, without anything else to blend in with, like the random clutter of the swamp; though it would imply that either there once were things of this type to pretend to be, or that the archway overrides the natural compulsion of the birch to seek some harmonious integration into its surroundings. This is, however, a sufficient option for the door. When he approaches it, the faint white glow from his ostensibly only mostly-corporeal form illuminates a previously invisible -- or perhaps intangible -- pair of handles, which luminesce in the same way, which seem to solely exist within his specific proximity. It may or may not be kind of a hack, but it allows them to enter. Gough scratches his chin with the sound of scraping quarry rocks, his contemplative noise mostly heard in the ribcage rather than the ears. "Riddle though it may be for us now, once I reckon it to be mere protocol. The meaning of words lost to time. But I doth recall, now, what was once said about the golden sorceries of Oolacile, first and last of their kind. Once the scholars didst ponder their 'Light' to be something removed between Fire and Dark. A lesser, subtler element of our world, woven in. They wouldst say that 'light is time', and 'time is space', though they knew not of its opposite, discovered it not before their great and terrible fall." "That they wouldst hath built a cipher and safe such as this, couldst only lend great credence to the importance of what lies within. A greatest safehouse. A last bastion. A vault meant to be entered only twice, perhaps. Worry not for it. At least, not overly so. It is long passed. Asides. With the urgency of which the Lady Lord speaketh of this, day by day, I doubt it wouldst trouble her so. Hah." The door beyond leads to a darkened corridor. Pitch black. Bringing lights near it corrects any initial assumptions. The floor is all that comprises a way to walk, and the blackness all around it is a fathomless fall, the distance beyond light wall to wall impossibly contained within a building no wider than a larger housing block. A single ray of light falls on some terminus far, far in the distance, from where a hole cannot possibly be, if this esoteric fortress of mysticism is truly secure. There is nothing barring one's walk to the end, save the fact that they never arrive. The walkway is visible for no longer than the reach of their light, before disintegrating into the darkness. The gleaming end is too far away to see clearly, and could be any distance at all, dependant on its brightness, like a star in the sky, and thus impossible to tell.
Yuuki Kuran	"Oh! Gosh darn it!" Yuuki 'swears', stamping her foot petulantly. "Half-light was just some magic this whole time? Well that's not a puzzle, that's like a teach expecting their own thoughts to get parroted back at them. It's not a riddle, it's just something you know or you don't." Thankfully, Eryl uses the incredible power of Using Any Consumables At All like a complete madlad and affects the opening of the door. Truly, Eryl is the eternal MVP. "I'm going to have to make up a gift basket, now. Eryl, do you like cheese? Wine? You've been so helpful, and I really must thank you somehow..." Yuuki walks and walks and walks and walks on the path, totally oblivious to the infinite nature of it.
Tomoe	Eryl's plan works he shimmers becomes almost monochrome in appearance and then the door will open for him. Was it a hack? Or the proper way? There's no way to know now. Still, the door is open it's time to make a push for the end of it. Well, what she thinks is the and of it. She will soon be heading for the door as Gough offers some useful food for thought as she goes in. She pauses for a moment. Something comes to her as she starts walking down the path for the light. "Seft, try shooting the bow at the light, we might get something from that." Is it a good idea? A bad idea? Who knows Tomoe certainly doesn't know but it is something to try. She keeps making for the light maybe there's a trick to it as well? Still, she'll have some time to try to figure it out. She looks over to Yuuki for a moment as she walks. "... yeah heck of a thing isn't it?"
Eryl Fairfax	It worked. This whole puzzle is designed to keep out those who do not know this land's sorcery. Now Eryl can't help but wonder if the loss of their art was intentional. The final safeguard to keep whatever is hidden here locked away. "Getting to the end of this will be reward enough, Hand Kuran. I'm not here for pay. This is important." The path stretches ever onward. Eryl walks along it, his implants mentally crunching the distance they've covered. It's too much, too far. "What's going on?..." Light is time, and time is space. "Everyone." Eryl gets to the front of the pack and offers his hand backward. "Link hands. All lights off, including the torch." If light is time is space, then darkness is the absence of those. This path demands walking in true blackness, which is why he takes point. With his implants, he can keep a straight line even with no visual reference.
Starbound Flotilla	"Such pride in their work. Perhaps a bit distasteful." "Big ssspace pot comesss down from UFO to talk black shit about kettle." "What in the world is that intended to mean?" "Stow it, the both of ya. Look, he figured it out." "Pondering. But, that doesn't seem quite legitimate, does it...?" "Nah, I know a door-hack when I see one. It wanted him to do a real fancy phase-shift thing, but he just illusioned it instead. Which is savvy." "Hmh. All it takes is a broken door to get you liking the enforcers?" "Hey, first of all: Fuck you, friendo. Second of all: Game recognize game, even if it's a cop, that's just how it is." The bickering gang progress and make their way into the Mario Sixty-Four Staircase of a walkway. George kicks rock into the abyss and shudders a bit. "Everybody got their ears checked recently?" He asks, laughing slightly and getting out a cigarette. "That, you see, is the nature of culture, Director." Moonfin says as he walks more calmly. "Culture is the means by which all teachers may have their thoughts known to all students. This lost culture is lost answers to such provoked echoes." Seft leans her head, one of her eye-displays halving contemplatively at what Tomoe says. "Curious. Firing at the light with it...? Well, un-progressing hallways are certainly one thing it worked well with. Maybe I could..." She raises the bow, attempting to draw it back, but she's expended a lot of her power! No dice! "You're holding it wroooooong, let Floran tryyyyy!" Biteblade calls out. She snatches the bow urgently, nocking her own heavy arrow on it. Then the call: Lights out? "Ooooh! Maybe good idea! Floran can ssstill hit!" "Hm." Albert grunts, finally resuming exactly what Yuuki may keenly recall. He won't hold hands. No, here we have regular soldier men, not holding hands, standing two feet apart because they're not civvie. He hands off one of those tactical connectors he uses for rappelling; the whole Flotilla links up. Biteblade draws the bow back, shutting one eye tight to line it up perfectly. The whole Flotilla shut down their armor's electrical systems to take out running glows, and kill every light they have. Except for one gleaming, luminescent glow in the dark, lined up perfectly with an arrow and a shot down the "hallway". Pchew!
Priscilla	Gough waves in a placid, big giant way as you enter. He would not fit through that door in a billion years, so he sits down with a groan and a big hefty crunch, to resume whittling wood into the shape of something or other. Extinguishing the lights, predictably, leaves you in almost perfect blackness. There is only the gleam some indeterminate distance far, far ahead of you. There is no light behind you. You've either gone far enough it's disappeared, or it stopped being part of the path a while ago. It should be a worrying state of affairs, and being completely unable to see one's hand in front of their face, never mind the person next to them, shouldn't help. Biteblade nocks and pulls the bow. She gets the feeling that she is lacking some kind of requirement in firing it, possibly being the arrow, possibly something else, but not enough to be completely dissuasive. It has a surprisingly light draw weight, flexing more easily than a useful bow should, but it bends in a strange and difficult to control way, given the fact it's limbs are made of intertwined branches, rather than solid, flat wood. As she pulls back the almost invisible string, staring down the bow's sight line becomes intensely disorienting. This is because the cable slackens and those holding hands almost bump into each other, as the light at the end of the walkway surges closer at a slightly nauseating pace, as if pulled back by the bowstring itself. When she fires, it rapidly un-crunches itself again, but not faster than the arrow; it strikes somewhere at the two hundred meter mark, and is followed by a loud, glassy crack, which echoes despite the lack of walls. You're left completely in the dark. And, as per Eryl's assumption, walking along, after a few minutes, eventually reveals a new light. Faint and gold-orange. One that actually grows closer over time.
Eryl Fairfax	"It really is like those old computer games," Eryl remarks as he hears the stretch and release of the bow. "How would we ever know to use that here?"
Yuuki Kuran	"Wow, Biteblade, you shot out a star." Yuuki encourages, clapping lightly with close-in wrists to create a 'pappappappap' sound. "Oh, look, we're here." She did not even notice the lost forever in darkness part.
Tomoe	Darkness, can't see her own hand infront of her face or anyone, she's done this before. Even so? It still has part of her brain freak out a bit. She keeps going trying to keep with everyone as bes she can. She takes note of the light ahead. "Yeah I know the sort maybe the relic we haven't really used yet?" It's the best thing she can think of.
Starbound Flotilla	"Grit and grace, pal." George answers Eryl. "Leave nothing to waste. This isn't even religious weird magic culture, it's literally security system design. If a security person in a position of power knows about a technology, they'll go, 'I want one of those things to be one of our locks!' Even though it makes no sense." Big drag from the cigarette as George glances down to the invisible abyss. "It's a good way of getting investors and getting projects funded, and it's dogshit for gettin' security through obscurity. Enjoy your weird old-time game logic being real stuff."
Priscilla	At last, coming so close to that warm light in short order, you're lead to a final arch identical to that one outside, and through it, a diamond shaped room of only modest proportions. The light radiates not from torches, flowers, or some contrivance of magic, but from the floor, where a perfectly circular hole has been bored through the thick stones at the center of the diamond, making a pitch black circle, and where the floor is still(?) slightly molten around it, smouldering like fresh coals. Some tiny slope inherent to the floor has caused some of it to drip, painting a long, thin streak from the black circle's lowermost region, as if bleeding. The patterns surrounding it are largely esoteric, but those on the walls around them are remarkably straightforward. At each of the room's cardinal corners, there is something like a solid, rough granite lectern, and atop it, an empty, hooked stand for a scroll. By one of each, there are the accoutrements for storing a bow, laying out a sword, and stowing away a cane or rod, and by each one a standing rack for a coat or cloak. All three storages are empty, but only one rack has been emptied of its attire, the other two still bearing untouched white tunics and pants, pale grey traveling coats, dark leather boots, bright purple sashes, and thin, silvery circlets designed like interwoven branches. One of the walls is appointed with the instantly recognizable silhouette of Gwyn, chiselled in sharp, simple lines, underneath a radiating sun, and before ranks of identical knights. He is, however, facing away from the viewing, giving only the sight of his back, at which there is a more elaborately drawn sign depicting a crescent moon pierced through with a sword. Writing underneath it is, for once, translatable, with what the Concord has of Lordran's 'high Latin' equivalent. The same is the case for the wall counterclockwise to it, depicting an equally tall figure swathed in layers of hemmed robes, cradling a flame in its cupped hands, immerses almost up to the knees in what is probably water, and for the wall clockwise, which depicts a towering mass of skeletal remains, contrived into the vague appearance of a humanoid figure, seemingly welcoming a procession into its arms. Directly behind you, the archway is framed by a familiarly eerie sight; what seems to be a solid pillar, or wall, or nebulous bookend, of precisely and elaborately interlocked humanoid figures, fitted together like a mountain of jigsaw pieces, reaching out in every direction, designed to look as if they're crawling out of the dark of the doorway. The writing under the robed figure's wall, inscribed on its empty scroll stand, says 'Turned to Cinders'. The writing under the skeletal figure says 'Grave of Gods'. The writing under Gwyn's turned back says 'Fear the Dark'. It looks as if this room, when it was last accessed, was entered by only one person, who had collected its treasures -- its supplies -- and left. Though the literature may be scattered now, the impression is distinctly one of triangulation, given the slight, geometric unevenness of the room, from a culture that was clearly very good at perfect shapes, and the way that the smouldering, molten drip in the floor points to the 'northeast', rather than cardinally at one of the stands, or the doorway.