tushanshu_logs | EVENT | INTERMEZZO | Palace Exploration Log

Entry tags:

EVENT | INTERMEZZO | Palace Exploration Log

Characters: ALL!
Date: Sept 28 and onward
Location: Palace of the Landed Sky, Keeliai
Situation: In the wake of Malicant's bold taunt, and the death of the Emperor and five hatchlings, the Palace is left abandoned and open for the Foreigners and kedan alike to explore.
Warnings/Rating: CONTENT WARNINGS are noted in the various subject headers, please take note of them!

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zwischenzug | (ˈzvɪʃənzuːɡ) | intermezzo | n. (in chess):
1. A tactical move interpolated into an exchange or series of exchanges to improve the outcome.
2. "in-between move". An unexpected move tossed into an expected series of moves. (German)
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Where once the Palace of the Landed Sky was a majestic and beautiful thing to behold, it now seems to pulse with negative energy. The outer walls are crumbling in most places, unsteady and fallen into disrepair. The walls of the Palace itself remain for the most part sturdy, minus a few fallen stones and the ruins beside the Courtyard.

The Palace is empty. Though some bodies can be found scattered haphazardly about the halls, most of those who were working in the building have disappeared entirely. There’s no question as to whose doing it was.

Small groups of kedan have also ventured into the Palace in order to loot whatever rooms they can get into, feeling confident that the reward will outweigh the risk of facing off against Foreigners who may feel the need to repel them. Mostly they'll be in groups of 3-5, though individuals or larger can be encountered as well. Some will engage the Foreigners in hostilities and some will grudgingly be sent on their way without challenge, depending on how bold they feel.

No banners, rugs, lanterns, or furniture within the Palace remain in pristine condition (with the exception of Eshai’s room). Everywhere one looks, items are torn, scratched, or smeared with blood. Even the interior walls are often cracked or caked in what one hopes is only blood. Perhaps more unnerving are the ‘veins’ that run through the walls, floor, and ceiling. These thin black tendrils, equal parts within and without the surface they spread across, are textured and feel like pine needles to the touch. These veins run throughout the Palace, yet never seem to thicken, intensify, or coalesce in any one room or area.

Though the walls are still made of white marble and the floor remains interlaced with rose quartz and mother-of-pearl, the shine has gone from them and something of the life and light they brought has withered away. Though the structure remains intact, it feels in some areas as if the walls have closed in, making the previously grand rooms now seem shrunken and constrictive. An air of eerie calm and discomfort can be felt from the first step on. The building is not the Palace anyone remembers.

LINKS
Throne Room | Eshai's Room | Storage Armory | Library
Ritual Chamber | Prison | Courtyard | The Turtle's Head

OOC NOTE
The Palace becomes available to explore as of the 28th, but will remain accessible until further notice. Please direct any questions regarding this log to the QUESTIONS section in the original OOC post.

There will also be a State of the Shell post coming soon to address the current status of the city and its key players. Thank you!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Whether accessed through the main entrance in the Throne Room (beware the Dust) or the alternative route excavated by the possessed kedan during Malicant’s time in the Palace, characters will descend into a pitch black dungeon. While characters can create any variety of light, the shadows of the prison seem to tug at the light, making its effects more dim than one would expect. The more light that is created, the more the shadowed effect seems to lessen; it is residual magic which will fade over time.

The smell of death and rot will hit your character the moment their feet hit the floor. Those who have visited the area before will find the Prison is both completely familiar and strikingly different. Its structures remain entirely identical, though with the same cracks, smears, and veins as above. The most unsettling difference is the graffiti scrawled across the walls in various cells. To anyone who can read kedanese, the messages spell out desperate messages with statements like “they’re coming,” “there are only a few of us left,” and “the experiments are getting worse.” While some messages are written in what seems to be ink, others are scribbled in what can only be blood. A few scattered cells also contain the dead remains’ of unknown kedan who were locked up and left to die.

Characters familiar with the Prison may be surprised to find their powers are no longer nullified, working as well as they might in any other part of the Palace or in Tu Vishan in general.

Characters may catch glimpses of ghostly images in their peripheral vision, though the image will disappear if they try to view it directly and will not respond to any efforts made to engage with them. A character sensitive to death may notice that a great deal of torment and agony occurred in the area and recognize the images as the spirits of the kedan who were experimented on here.

When Dante got a chance to investigate, he was drawn to a path that looked the most newly carved. It looked like it had been tunneled through, not built, which meant that it was an area the enemy would have needed quick access to.

He almost immediately wish he had picked just about anywhere else to go, but he remained stoic. This wasn't the first time he's had to deal with sights as gruesome as this, as horrid as it was. For now, he was a bit more worried about finding a consistent light source. The lantern that the shell's technology forced him to use was running out of oil at an alarming rate, and those inscriptions looked important.

Edited 2014-10-04 02:41 (UTC)

The stairs from the throne room took her down into hell. The smell of blood and bodily fluids overwhelmed her senses and the darkness only added to the sense of evil that arose from ahead. Her enhanced vision was good to a point, allowing her to see enough of the gruesome details that her stomach clenched for the third time that day.

But soon enough even her vision was not good enough for the impenetrable darkness that hung over the prison. There had been no sign of the spirit that had prompted her to leave Skulduggery and descend down into the monster’s lair, but death and pain hung heavy in the air, so thick that she wanted to turn around and flee to the surface.

But she couldn’t, not yet. She took a deep breath and called upon her powers, dim lights filled the entire place, the souls of the deceased prisoners. Their anguish was overwhelming. Their forms blurred as if they could not hold themselves together. They were everywhere, in the cells, in the halls, drifting, trapped in the place where they had died. It wasn’t right, they should have been able to move on.

She spun around, drawing her blade as a bright, defined soul came into view. It crossed through one of the tortured souls and the weak soul dissipated only to reform a moment later. She shifted, ready for an attack, then the soul registered.

“Dante?”

Sensations like the one this area seemed to give off were more familiar to Dante then anyone should be comfortable with. It was the sad consequence of his line of work, or rather, a sign that he should have been there a lot sooner. There's still a part of him that was disgusted an horrified by it, but if he listened to that part of him, there would be no way he could get anything done. By now, it's just an unfortunate reality to him.

Dante couldn't directly manipulate or see souls the same way that Valids or full-blooded demons from his own world could, so he was oblivious to the approach, and all he saw of the souls was the same brief glimpses that anyone would see. It wasn't until he heard footsteps and a voice that he stopped to say something.

"Didn't expect you to wind up in this part of the castle. I can't see that far, but I hope for your sake you're not too overdressed to get your hands dirty." He's in no mood to be intentionally annoying for once, but he's not above making the odd verbal jab anyway, if only because he doesn't know how to fully turn off that part of his brain. "I think I've seen parts of hell that were more pleasant to be around than here."

His voice came out of the darkness, confirming what she already knew. She sheathed her sword and sighed heavily, "Considering what I was wearing the last time you saw me, you might consider me overdressed."

It was a weak attempt at lightening the otherwise considerably dark circumstances, but she had nothing better and Skulduggery had yanked all the fight out of her with his interrogation. She shook her head, still watching the souls as they drifted, aimlessly through the prison. "It shouldn't be like this, not on the living plane. The suffering shouldn't linger, the anguish shouldn't hang in the air and the dead shouldn't be walking the hallways."

"I guess that means you shaved your legs then? That amount of hair on a woman is just gross." He tries to inch towards a dog joke without provoking her ire. She actually quipped back instead of attacking him, so that was a good sign.

But onto more important matters. He couldn't see much more then glimpses, but he could still see enough to tell that Valdis was right. That meant that there was something otherworldly at work, which would mean that he was in the right place, at least for his usual line of work. "So how do you suppose this all happened? I imagine it would take a pretty nasty piece of work to keep the dead hanging around like this. Well, apart from the nasty piece of work we're supposed to kill."

Valdis rolled her eyes at his words, but no retort came to mind, so she said nothing. She reached out a hand to touch one of the spirits, but it didn't react, as if it was only partially there.

"Those who die violently sometimes hold onto the world," She withdrew her hand and looked at it, "But I have never seen anything on this scale. But the enemy is supposed to be from the death plane, so perhaps his power has infected this place and is holding their souls here."

Anton, also, had found the carved tunnel, and followed the dulled, unintelligible sound of voices until he recognised to whom they belonged. Valdis he had already spoken to, but he hadn't seen much of Dante since his gist had been loose, and it made Anton pause for a moment before stepping into the room, catching the end of the conversation.

"Necromancers can perform such an action," he said, glancing around in the dimming light. He looked at his torch with a grunt, and fished a scalpel out of his pocket to deepen the light-sigils, making them brighten until the shadows were chased away. "I only know of one Necromancer in the city, but this ... seems too inelegant for him."

Not even Wreath would leave so much torment around, as if on display. He was a Necromancer, not a sadist.

Despite not speaking much to Anton, Dante didn't really think much of the incident, if only because murder attempts by close friends have become something of a regular occurrence in his life. At the very least, Anton had a legitimate reason for doing it, unlike the lot he hung out with back home. If anything, he had so much he wanted to ask. He just needed a good time to slip "what the hell was that thing you turned into" into a conversation. Sadly, these last few weeks have been far busier than he's used to dealing with.

"So from what I'm getting, this is just another reason to kill this son of a bitch." Of course, he went straight for the simple and brutish answer, but after what the enemy did, he can't help but have a one-track mind. "So I guess the question now is, why bother? All something like this would do is piss people off. I mean sure, 'ol Mal is a sick bastard, but keeping the dead around like this? Seems like a bit much for another one of his little taunts."

Now that there was more light, Valdis' eyes wandered, settling on the writing scrawled in blood, the bodies that lay within the cells. "No." She replied. She broke the lock on one of the cells and walked in to examine the writing more closely.

"The souls are blurred, as if they are only partially present. I know little about Necromancy, especially what it might be like in your world, but I believe these souls are held here for some other reason."

She stopped to consider Dante's words, "It's not a taunt either, more like a consequence of whatever they were killed for."

She turned away from the bloody writing and knelt by the body in the cell. The kedan's corpse was emaciated, but decomposed enough that she couldn't tell if there were any wounds that caused its death. Though her attention remained on the kedan, she gestured to the writing, "Can either of you read that?"

Edited 2014-10-09 21:05 (UTC)

The fact that Dante barely batted an eyelash at Anton's presence helped soothe some of the tension Anton had only been vaguely aware he had. "If he can be killed," Anton pointed out, holding his torch aloft so it lit more of the area. "Stopped, perhaps, but killed?"

He moved further along so the light shone into the cell Valdis had entered, and looked at the writing, and shook his head. "I have not yet had the opportunity to learn kedanese."

But he looked closely at it, until he felt sure he'd remember the words later. "Souls contain power," he said, as an aside, a continuation of the previous topic. "It could simply be that containing them here was intended to help boost the power of those present here. It could also be that their presence is a side-effect of the taint in some fashion."

"Guess we'll just have to find out now, won't we?" It was pretty easy to hide the flash of worry and grief that briefly shot across his face, thanks to the dim lights. He didn't want to even imagine that this thing could turn out to be another Mundus. "The last thing this universe needs is another unkillable creature hell-bent on killing everyone. Especially since we might not always be there to put it away again."

"Should be pretty easy to find someone who can." Dante starts copying the symbols onto a pad of paper to the best of his ability, squatting down in front of the writing to work in the poor light.

"So these souls aren't all here?" The idea that souls have power definitely holds credence to Dante. Half of his weaponry works because of exactly this, and he's had a fair share of demons try to kill him for his soul. "If they're only partially here, then maybe our little houseguest took what he needed then left the rest here. I guess the only way to find out is to see if there's a something that's being powered somewhere around here."

Valdis was only half listening to the other two as they conversed. The lingering sense of death and agony in the room had begun to affect her. The red slowly seeped into her eyes, the darkness feeding off the negative auras, but she maintained control.

"If that is true, then we need to be careful, but if he was using them to power something then we wouldn't be seeing them as individuals, but as a mass." She stood and walked back over to the wall, as if to look at the writing again.

"There are enough souls wandering this place to greatly increase my strength." She whispered to Anton, her eyes still bright red, "We already know that he is strong enough to mess with our abilities. If he uses souls the same way I do, then he may be too powerful for us to defeat."

"Evil is a never-ending force to be always fought," said Anton. "If we are not present, others will be. Someone will always fight the darkness, and rage against the dying of the light." He said it with simple reassurance, because as far as he was concerned it was true. It was one of the reasons he wasn't worried about dying himself, and leaving tasks undone. Someone would be there to pick up what he had left.

When Valdis came to his side he glanced at her, noted her eyes, and the responding warm twist in his chest was almost soothing in comparison to the days when he hadn't been able to feel it at all. "No one is too powerful," he said, but quietly. "Even if they fall beneath their own weight. Belief in power grants it more. Don't give him the benefit of that fear, Lady Valdis. It will only shackle you."

"I'm just saying that the fewer problems they have to deal with, the better. Can't have evil itself running around with a bone to pick, can we?" As the one who was once left to clean up oh-so-many messes, Dante didn't like the idea of just saying it was the next bunch's problem. Yes, someone will rise to the occasion, but that may be after they were put through hell. Better to just fill the problem full of lead and hope that does the trick.

"Well, I guess there's one way to find out. Think busting them out of this hellhole would help us any?" Which is his way of saying he stopped knowing what he was talking about roughly five minutes ago. He hastily finishes transcribing the writings.

"I'm not afraid," She replied quietly, "More confused at the moment."

Dante's voice drew her mind away from the problem of the enemy and back onto that of the souls. "Blowing a hole in the place will just cause a mess," she said, shocked by his lack of understanding. Though really, she mused, his lack of understanding shouldn't have been a surprise. "The souls are being held here, we can't break them free."

"If we had a Sensitive it might be possible to move them, or at least exorcise them," Anton added, glancing around as though he could see the ghosts from anywhere other than the corners of his eyes. "Or at least communicate with them. I do not believe we do, however."

Necromancers didn't have much dealings with ghosts--they needed something physical to use their magic on. Otherwise he might have suggested Wreath. As it was ... "Perhaps if it was consecrated, but I doubt that would be possible until after our enemy is defeated."

Anton glanced around once more. The prison was making him feel unsettled, but so too was something else--if Valdis was here, then where was Skulduggery? "Lady Valdis, where is Skulduggery?"

Edited 2014-10-20 05:11 (UTC)

Valdis had no idea what a Sensitive was, but she agreed that there was nothing that they could do until after the enemy was gone.

"He's upstairs in the throne room," she said, feeling a little ashamed that she had left the Skeleton alone after promising Anton that she would stay with him. "He was examining the throne and promised to wait."

"Then I had better join him," Anton said, "before his shallow reserves of patience deplete. Thank you for watching him for me, Lady Valdis. Dante--your lantern appears to be running out." He handed his sigil-lit torch to Dante and bowed to them both, and then retraced Valdis's footsteps. Skulduggery would be anxious to move on by now, and at least Anton could give him the satisfaction of some information in return for waiting.

After a brief discussion with Skulduggery in the throne room, Gene and Tony had followed Valdis down into the prison.

The stairs were dark, and Tony, with his suit's power core lighting the way, took the lead. And yet despite the arc light, the shadows seemed to... cling. They seemed thicker, deeper, more persistent than they should be. Tony turned up the brightness of the beam a little, and the effect lessened, and he wondered if he hadn't just been imagining it. He shook his head. They'd only been in the Palace five minutes, and the place was already creeping him out.

They passed a man going in the opposite direction, which gave Tony a bit of a start, but he didn't stop to chat and obviously wasn't Valdis (by virtue of being a dude), so Tony shrugged and kept descending.

The sound of voices became audible as Gene and Tony reached the bottom of the stairs. Apparently the man they'd passed on the stairs wasn't their only unexpected company.

When they entered the room, they found two more people already there, neither of whom Tony recognized - though presumably, the woman was Valdis.

Tony had a hard time focusing on them, though. He was too unsettled by the prison itself. The blood and grime and creeping black tendrils, the scrawled graffiti, the bodies... He immediately regretted turning his arc light up so high. The shadows, creepy as they were, at least would have hidden some of... this.

He was glad that the armor hid his face as he took a few moments to pull himself together.

"What is all this?" he asked the pair, homing in on the graffiti in the cells. It was easier to focus on that than on the decomposing corpses, and he was too disquieted to bother with introductions.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

EVENT | INTERMEZZO | Palace Exploration Log

PRISON - [content warning: blood, death, vague torture references]

Dante | Open | Same CWs

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