IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE
SESSION 15A: THE LABYRINTH’S MACHINES
January 12th, 2008
The 5th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty
Taking another turn down a hallway led them to a complex of three large chambers. In the center chamber, a massive apparatus of machinery had been built up in the middle of the room. Nearly ten feet across, it extended from the floor to the ceiling.
The far wall of this chamber was inset with a large, ten-foot wide sheet of smoky, opaque glass flanked by two doors.
To the left and the right, the other two chambers of the complex lay down short halls. In each of these rooms, short flights of stairs led up to large, coffin-like boxes of metal lying on the floor. To either side of these boxes were thick, metallic rods thrusting up from the floor with large, bulbous ends.
For now, Tee skirted around the machinery and checked out the doors. They were unlocked, leading to a small side chamber from which one could look through the smoky glass and observe the outer chamber. The northern all of the side chamber was covered in a morass of machinery – wires, glass tubes partially filled with liquid, convoluted gearworks, and the like.
Ranthir was fascinated. He had never seen anything like it before. It quickly became apparent that both the equipment in the side chamber and the main chamber was actually sunk into the floor, and probably connected to each other.
Tee moved to the coffin-like metal boxes. She discovered that their lids could be rotated to one side, revealing an interior surface coated with twisting tubes of glass. These formed coccoon-like depressions – one apparently shaped for a humanoid; the other for a large dog or wolf. Both were outfitted with manacles.
Ranthir, meanwhile, believed he had puzzled out the strange activation method used by the equipment: Several metallic spheres would need to be “spun up” by hand and then, while those were still in motion, three levers would need be flipped, and, at last, a button pushed.
“Should we try it?” Elestra asked.
“I don’t think so,” Dominic replied, glancing nervously at the mountainous mass of machinery in the center of the room.
“We have no idea what it would do,” Tee agreed.
“I think we should do it!” Agnarr grinned.
Tee sighed. Elestra seemed immediately caught up in Agnarr’s infectious enthusiasm; Ranthir was more than curious to discover the purpose of the machinery; and Tor was indifferent as long as proper precautions were taken.
“Where do you think is the safest place for us to be while doing this?” Tee asked Ranthir.
“Well, the machinery appears to have been designed to be operated from this side chamber,” Ranthir said. “I think we should be safe enough in there.”
“All right,” Tee nodded. “In that case—“
“Unless, of course, it explodes.”
Tee sighed again.
“Perfect!” Agnarr said. “You’ll all wait in there. I’ll go climb in the metal box over here. Maybe it’ll make me a dog!”
“No!” Tee grabbed Agnarr by his iron collar and dragged him into the side chamber.
The others followed, but Ranthir hesitated. “From in there we won’t be able to see what’s happening with the coffins in the other chambers. Perhaps I should instruct one of you in the workings of the machine, and stay out here myself to observe.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Tee said. “It’s like you said: They designed this machinery to be operated from this side chamber. There was probably a reason for that.”
Ranthir thought about it for a moment and then began fumbling through his pouches. “Does anyone have a mirror?” He pulled one out from his own belongings. “I have one myself, but we’ll need two.”
Tee had one. Ranthir took it and positioned it, along with his own, so that they could watch the coffin chambers through the one-way glass of the side chamber.
Once he was finished, he followed the rest of them into the side chamber, the doors were shut, and Ranthir carefully began spinning up the machinery.
This took a little over a minute, but when the final button was pushed the effect was immediate: Liquid began to flow through tubes. Gears turned. Pistons pumped. The noise rose into a cacophony…
…and then arcs of purplish electricity began to leap between the bulb-tipped rods protruding from the machinery in the center chamber and the rods in the coffin chambers. From there, the arcs converged on the coffins themselves. The electrical bolts danced with a horrible beauty, filling the three chambers with harsh light that seemed barely dimmed by the smoky glass. Tee’s mirror was struck by a stray bolt and melted into slag. Ranthir gulped.
And then the storm began to die down. With a long, high-pitched whine the machinery slowed and then stopped. Once it was clear the entire affair had come to a stop, they moved back into the outer chamber and carefully examined the coffins: Nothing seemed changed, although the metal was now slightly warm to the touch.
“So what did it do?” Elestra wondered.
“Without occupants for the coffins, most likely nothing,” Ranthir said.
Agnarr opened his mouth, but Tee cut him off: “No. It’s not going to happen.”
COLLAPSED TUNNELS
Leaving the mysterious machinery behind, they continued exploring the rooms in this corner of the complex. Outside a nearby door, Tee spotted a broken, rusty sword lying on the floor.
Opening the door revealed a room lined with empty stone shelves. Several large, fist-sized stones lay on the floor. At first they looked like the smooth and rounded stones from a riverbed, but then Tee’s sharp eye caught a metallic glint. Picking one up, she discovered it to be made of both stone and metal. She gathered them up for later study – there were sixteen of them in total.
In the back corner of one of the shelves she also found what appeared to be a broken wand of some sort… but it had an appearance similar to the machinery in the room they had just left. Whatever it was, it had clearly been broken in half.
Beyond that, the room appeared to be completely empty. But Tee noticed that – where the stone shelves came together in the corners of the room – there was a gap between the shelves and the walls. Climbing up and looking down into these gaps, she spotted a quiver of arrows. With Agnarr’s help she was able to shift the shelves and retrieve the quiver – which contained a total of twenty arrows, each made with shaft of milky-white glass. She had never seen anything like them, but added them to her own quiver.
Around the corner from this room they found two flanking rooms that were similar to the antechambers where they had found the thick, dangling black cables hanging from the walls. The cables were also found here.
Near one of the cables, lying on the floor, was a black, metallic hand. It looked as if it might have been broken off from some sort of life-sized statue. Ranthir picked it up and began studying it. He had just noticed that the joints of the hand were fully articulated when he carried it out into the hallway. The hand almost instantly sublimed into a cloud of caustic black vapor that burned his eyes and his skin. The cloud spread quickly, washing over several of the others before they all managed to stumble away from it.
“What happened?!” Tee demanded.
“I don’t know.” Ranthir said, coughing thickly.
The black cloud seemed to be drifting toward them, so they moved away quickly.
This led them to a room with another bluesteel door in it. Ranthir spent nearly twenty minutes trying to guess the password for this door, but without any luck.
They did discover, however, that one of the halls leading out of this room looped them back around to the southern hallway leading out of the chamber with the dry fountain and the three hound statues.
Taking the other hallway out of the room with the bluesteel door took them to a long gallery in which six-inch thick metal rods ran between the ceiling and the floor. These rods had been arranged in two rows leading down the length of the gallery and were completely covered in strange runes. The far end of this gallery had collapsed in a solid wall of rubble and rock.
Ranthir, upon examining the arcane runes inscribed on the rods, declared them to be archaic alchemical symbols. Their purpose here was unclear to him.
TO THE LOWER LEVEL
Having been blocked by the collapse, the only places on the upper level they hadn’t explored yet were the secret doors to the north (which they couldn’t open) and whatever lay beyond the blockade east of the fountain chamber (where they didn’t want to go).
So, at long last, they were ready to explore the lower level of the complex. They decided to return to the staircase in the northwest corner of the complex (the one flanked by the antechambers with the enigmatic black cables).
Returning to the stairs, they could look down and see the perpendicular hallway and the door they had turned away from before. Now they descended the stairs, but turned away from the door after verifying that it was locked – preferring to ensure that their flanks had been scouted before opening the way to fresh danger.
Both directions, it turned out, looped around in a square. There were two more doors opening onto opposite ends of a long room with low stone shelves running along its walls. Various pieces of ancient and scarred wood were scattered here and there – suggesting that the room might have once been a storeroom of some sort.
Agnarr led the way into the chamber… and was promptly surprised when the entire ceiling seemed to fall on him. In reality, a patch of poisonous green slime had grown on the ceiling. Revived by the warmth of their bodies, it had fallen upon its fresh prey.
The only thing that seemed effective against the sticky, viscous slime was fire – and Agnarr was burned several times as his comrades worked to carefully burn the slime off of him. By the time they’d succeeded, the barbarian was already feeling the slime’s effects – an extreme lethargy seemed to burn away at his muscles; his breathing was labored; and his heart pounded in his chest. But, after examining him, Dominic said that he would be all right – although it would take some time before he was fully recovered.
This looped hallway also opened out on a massive, low-ceilinged chamber. It was at least two hundred feet across and filled with an eery, silver, sepulchral light emanating from countless small glowgems set in the ceiling.
Most of this chamber was filled with a large, but shallow, pool of dark, silvery-grey liquid. A ten-foot wide walkway circled the pool, with various hallways and doors leading out of it. A bluesteel door could be seen along the recessed southern wall of the chamber.
In the center of the pool there was a raised platform surrounding a large pit of some sort. Several tall rods of iron topped by large brass balls were positioned around this platform. An arch of stone rose over the pit and, at the apex of the arch, a huge throne wrought from intricately detailed and gothic steel stood.
They were all leery of the strange pool, but also intrigued by the glowgems in the ceiling. Agnarr took the boots of levitation from Ranthir and used them to reach the ceiling. He pried out one of the gems and dropped it down to Tee.
Tee was able to identify it as a normal glowgem, although one that seemed to be failing with great age. Despite its deteriorating condition, she guessed that each of the gems would still be worth at least 5 gold pieces on the open market.
There were hundreds of the gems studding the ceiling, and Elestra was immediately excited at the idea of prying them all loose. But the others pointed out that this would be a major undertaking – and they still weren’t sure what other dangers they might find on this lower level.
They decided to return to the door at the bottom of the stairs they had come down – it seemed like an easier undertaking than pursuing the dozens of hallways and doors leading away from this pool.
Before they left, however, Agnarr wanted to check out the pit in the center of the room. He pulled himself along the ceiling until he was almost directly over the pit. From this vantage point he could see that the pit was virtually bottomless – a sheer shaft plunging straight into the earth.
Agnarr glanced back to where the others were gathered more than a hundred feet away in the hallway. He didn’t want to shout out what he had found, not knowing where his voice might carry to down here. After thinking about it for another few moments, he made a decision: Using the tip of his greatsword he pried out another of the glowgems and then tossed it down the pit.
Despite the utter silence which pervaded these abandoned hallways, Agnarr could not hear the glowgem strike any surface. Several seconds after throwing the gem he thought that, perhaps, he could make out a faint flash of silvery light in the depths of the pit… but he couldn’t be sure.
Shrugging, he turned and made his way back to the others.
