DUNGEON CRAWL

[wants_the_phd]

CLOSED Kim Dokja, Lyle Above, Nessa, Linnea
WHEN Around day 31
WHERE Labyrinth

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Comments

Pre-game mingle

[azdaja]

[You stand in the inner courtyard, next to one of the giant stone walls. When you press a certain stone, a hidden door opens with a heavy scraping sound, revealing stairs descending into the dark. Curls of mist swirl out into the sunshine and dissipate, but there's no doubt more where that came from.]

[Have you made your preparations? Do you know your mission?]

Re: Pre-game mingle

[wants_the_phd]

[Linnea is here with literally nothing but the clothes she's wearing.]

As... some of you know, I've asked Lyle to help me retrieve my stuff. I know the rest of you have your own reasons for being here, though.

My main goal is to get my stuff and leave without losing my mind. I'm counting on the rest of you to contain me if something goes wrong, Emperor forfend.

I dunno how deep you guys are planning to go. I'm not great in a fight, and I'm averse to getting hurt if I can avoid it, so I may tap out before that. But I do know some basic healing magic if you need it when you come back out.

Re: Pre-game mingle

[warpweft]

I knew you were just playing hard to get.

[Didn't this girl turn down a contract with her like two days ago?]

Re: Pre-game mingle

[downdraft]

[here in the outfit she picked out for him. it seemed suiting.]

In and out sounds great to me. I also love not getting hurt.

INTO THE LABYRINTH

[azdaja]

[You descend the stone steps into the darkness, down, down, down. The air gets progressively more stale and clammy the lower you get. The temperature drops, as does the amount of ambient light, the farther you get from the door to the courtyard.]

[The bottom of the stairs opens into a round room with a low ceiling. Pillars set around the room have little crystals set into them, each emitting a faint blue light. The crystals aren't much on their own, but all together they cast enough illumination to see.]

[There are doorways to the NORTH and WEST. Pockets of mist twine around your ankles as you walk through them, but the air here is still and all the miasma has settled along the floor.]

Re: INTO THE LABYRINTH

[warpweft]

Hmn.

[Nessa shakes her leg a bit as they walk through the small layer of mist pooling on the floor. She glances to the WEST.]

It...might be coming from that direction?

[Then she glances NORTH.]

I can't see any over there. Yet, anyway.

NORTH

[azdaja]

[North of the room is a winding corridor. It looks to be in relatively good condition for the most part, but there are more plumes of mist here and there. In places where the mist is the most dense, there's a strange slime on the walls.]

[More glowing crystals are set into the walls here and there. You can see where you're going, but it's hard to see down any of the numerous branches that seems like they lead down different hallways.]

Re: NORTH

[wants_the_phd]

[Linnea knows where she's going so she's leading the way down the hall, continuing north.]

LINNEA'S ROOM

[azdaja]

[The hallway terminates at a dead end.]

Re: LINNEA'S ROOM

[wants_the_phd]

[Linnea puts her hand against the stone wall and it shudders for a second, before it appears to start getting sucked into her palm like a cloth going down the drain. The false wall peels away from the edges of the corridor and compacts itself into a tiny wooden cube that she catches in her palm.]

[A cloud of mist pours out of the room like the wall was the only thing holding it back.]

[Once it clears, you can see the space is a little chamber. There's a mattress on the floor that was clearly stolen from the dorms, and there's a nest of dried-out rose vines forming something like a dome around it. It looks like a bird's nest just big enough for one dragon to wriggle inside.]

BACK DOWN THE CORRIDOR

[azdaja]

[As you retrace your steps back toward the round room at the base of the stairs, you see someone standing in the hallway up ahead.]

[They're kind of waifish. A teenager, maybe? Pink hair drapes down over their shoulders.]

[You can't tell from this distance whether they're male or female, and when they look over at you, their face is indistinct. But you get the impression they're wearing glasses, and that their expression is one of absolute malice. How dare you! In their labyrinth!]

[They make a gesture like they're reaching up toward the ceiling. They curl their fingertips in the air and yank downward, and the ceiling comes crashing down before them in a torrent of miasma and reeking slime.]

/2

[warpweft]

[Girl? Cute girl? Cute girl with pink hair? This requires investigatio--]

Re: BACK DOWN THE CORRIDOR

[warpweft]

OH HELL'S BELLS!

[Nessa stumbles backwards and falls right on her butt when the ceiling explodes.]

Re: BACK DOWN THE CORRIDOR

[downdraft]

[Lyle has defenses against miasma! He has a good Initiative bonus reaction time when it comes to being attacked! He's just spent a lot of time in caves and around rocks..!

None of this helps when a big chunk of slime SPLATS under a chunk of ceiling and splashes onto his shin]

Ow!? —fuck!

Shit!

NORTHEAST CORRIDOR

[azdaja]

[Perhaps surprisingly, the mist doesn't seem to have made it in here. The stone walls are in good condition and the light crystals are glowing softly in their sconces.]

[Halfway down the hall, leading SOUTH, is an iron door that's slightly ajar. It seems it's ajar because there's some heap of something on the ground that's preventing it from closing all way.]

[The far end of the hall seems to lead to a room to the EAST. You can't tell from this distance what's in there, but a faint green light is illuminating pools of mist within.]

Re: NORTHEAST CORRIDOR

[plotrevised]

[Kim Dokja has wrangled Nessa this far and...

...

wait, shit. where are they now? which way did they come from?]

SOUTH

[azdaja]

[This room is just FULL of dead fish dudes. It looks like there was a major battle in here, but it's over now. Most of the bodies show signs of disease -- inflamed gills, big gross boils, bandages soaked through with something dark, etc.]

[There's some mist in one corner of the room, and wherever it's sitting, the room itself seems to have decayed. The metal of their weapons has rusted, but only the parts the mist is touching. The bodies seem rotten, even though you can tell these guys died recently from the context clues. One very specific context clue in particular: there's someone in here that's still alive, though only just. They're laying on the floor in the middle of the bodies, suffering from terrible wounds.]

[Actually.... don't you know that guy?]

[There are exits to the WEST and EAST]

[kaizou]

[HEY, DON'T YOU KNOW THAT GUY?

Having a cyborg body means that Gigan gets the "benefit" of both his organic matter and his augmentations decaying together from the mist. Normally it would probably only be one or the other! But not in this place—the flaky rust creeping up the length of his claws flows seamlessly into the ragged flesh of his arms, as easily as they normally merge together. Both his claws and his arms are stained red with blood that both is and isn't his own. His feet, too, and the spikes on his tail, and the saw on his belly—they all look eroded, like they might crumble to dust if he tried using them.

But clearly, he has indeed used them. That's a whole pile of bodies he's struggling to breathe in the middle of, and they didn't just keel over dead from the mist alone.

The light of his cybernetic eye is on, but dim and flickering, and it's especially hard to make out moving behind the cloudy mess of his visor. That too looks corrupted somehow, like patterns have been etched over it with acid. It can't be easy to see through anymore. But the eye moves anyway, jerkily, fixing on the group as they enter the room.

His beak creaks open, but a froth of strange white foam bubbles out before any sound can.]

EAST

[azdaja]

[You leave the room full of dead monsters and head out into another corridor. The mist is starting to get thicker here, to the point that it starts getting a little harder to see through. In the places where the mist is thickest, the stone walls look corroded and the light crystals are burned out here and there, leaving it a little darker. There are some mushrooms growing here along the walls.]

[There's a strange noise up ahead, like a whole bunch of rustling fabric.]

[Proceed down the hall? Y/N]

Re: EAST

[downdraft]

One sec.

[holds up his hand, hold on, and casts a Gust of wind down the hallway]

SUN DOOR

[azdaja]

[As you approach, you can see that the wood of this door is extremely rotten and mist is flowing out between the cracks and missing pieces. But it's noticeably flowing, as in, there's airflow, and it's coming from behind this door.]

[You so much as touch the handle and the door just crumbles into a heap on the spot, letting an entire wall of mist fall upon you like an avalanche of clouds. Breathing or not, you'll need an 8 or higher to avoid the effects, dense as it is. It's like mist has been flooding this room for a while, condensing.]

[Once the fog clears, you can see this is a small, round room, and every inch of it from floor to ceiling is corroded from the effects of the mist. There's slime and fungus and pock-marked stone on every surface... except for one.]

[In the middle of the room is a small podium. On top is a plush, velvet pillow with tassels on the corners, and square in the middle is an orb. It's about the size of an orange, made of what looks like clear glass. But the inside of the orb looks like a sky. Truly, it's as if you're looking through a glass window into an immaculately blue sky. Soft, pure sunlight radiates from it. Everything within about 3 ft of this orb has no trace of corruption on it at all. The velvet pillow looks as clean and perfect as if brand new.]

[There is one exit to the SOUTH]

Re: SUN DOOR

[downdraft]

[Lyle doesn't need to breathe and he shouldn't be able to choke, but when the mist hits him he only gets to take one step back before he's doubling over and coughing violently.

it sounds wet.]

Re: SUN DOOR

[warpweft]

[Nessa is initially defensive against the rush of mist. The first thing she notices is the absolutely sorry state the room is in. It almost makes her want to avoid it entirely until she looks at the center and sees...

The pedestal.

She blinks once. She blinks again. And then she walks towards it without saying anything. Halfway there, she hooks a thumb into her mask and pulls it off. She immediately breathes in the mist. It's already affecting her by the time she gets to the podium. This time, it broadcasts a memory to the other three explorers, making them briefly inhabit the past of a Nessa much younger than the one in front of them, not older than 8 or 9 years old.

When the memory fades and everybody returns to the present, Nessa is standing next to the podium, her hands on the sides of it. Not touching the orb, just the podium itself. She's pulled down the collar of her clothes, revealing....a glass orb, with a soft violet light coming off of it. With hundreds of stars swirling around inside. Nessa is leaning closer to the podium, so the orb implanted in her chest is close to the one in front of her.

Sky and space. Right next to each other.]

SOUTH

[azdaja]

[Mist hangs in here like a fog, extremely potent. Anyone not holding an orb, or who steps outside the orb's light, will need to roll a 9 or higher to avoid effects.]

[This is a huge room, currently occupied by the biggest fucking snake you've ever seen in your life. You could ride this thing like a horse. Or, you might have, if it were alive. It's extremely expired. It's tail end is looking okay, but the decay gets worse and worse closer to the head. By that point it's just a straight-up naked skull, which is hard to see due to how thick the fog is, there.]

[Strangely, along the southwest corner of the room is a place where there doesn't seem to be any fog at all.]

[There's an iron door to the EAST.]

Re: SOUTH

[warpweft]

Okay. We're almost into the next room. On three, everybody take three steps forward and stop.

One. Two.

Three.

[Nessa has insisted everybody stay in the orb's radius. The orb's radius is three feet. So Nessa has insisted that everybody kind of. Squish together. She is at the center, holding the orb. She is also the shortest, so she can't see shit.]

Okay.

Have we entered the next room yet.

And if so, somebody please describe it for me.