Centoriel

As we play, occasionally we'll close a thread and open a new one to keep the size of threads (and relative complexity) down to a dull roar. Here's where we store the closed posts from the history of Errant Road.
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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Sareth »

Briefly, Lillith debated offering Sasha something for her discomfort. The woman did look somewhat ill, and Lillith had some decent herbs she could make a tea out of capable of soothing upset stomachs and other, related ailments. But it hardly seemed the time. Not with a pair of Veracian warrior priest times looking down their noses at her, and a Tsuirakuan with one of their unnatural, and obnoxious freaks of nature sneering as well.

"I mean spiteful," she responded to Argus' question. "Irritable. Looking to take back their own after years of oppression." She shot the two Veracians a look. "I mean they are not pleased by what has happened, and they are eager to correct the abuses done to them. This land is sick."
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Graybeard
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Re: Centoriel

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Wow, Sister Rose thought. This group has suddenly turned into an emotional powderkeg ready to blow. Any group where Argus is the most composed and stable one around is seriously scary. Sasha's suppressed rage is so strong that I almost don't need the spell to sense it ... and it's not like I don't have some half-elf issues of my own. No... not that again. She forcibly shoved that last thought back into the walled-off corner of her mind, where it and its cousins had been confined for the last five years, and closed the mental door.

"Excuse me for a moment," she said, and walked a short distance back up the road (wouldn't do to get too close to the bear's den) before turning off into the brush. As soon as she was sure nobody was looking (or at least nobody could see, looking or not), Rose did something she never did in public: she knelt to pray.

Five minutes later, she was back among the still-tense group, not really feeling better, but at least having done her best to tap into Luminosita's wisdom -- not His power, which of course was unavailable during Departure (not that she needed it anyway, unlike the pseudo-mages in the Orthodox branch), but wisdom, which was a different matter entirely and never went away. And she was also carrying a certain small artifact that she'd noticed half-buried in the dirt while she was kneeling.

"Does anyone recognize this?" she asked, dropping the small but surprisingly heavy cylinder on the ground with a dull thud.
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Drannin
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Drannin »

Curious, Argus walked over and knelt over the cylinder, taking in its appearance. It was rather ornate, with various runes and tracings carved into it. Somewhat magical... potentially a module of sorts that hooked on to a much larger mechanism. Interesting...

"Where did you find this? Are there any others?"
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Graybeard »

"Where did you find this? Are there any others?"

"I don't know," Sister Rose said. "This was the only one I saw. I noticed it when I went away to ... think."

As Lillith, Argus, Sasha and Brother Miguel clustered around the strange, dark gray object, pondering its possible significance, something dawned on Rose. Lillith had been reacting badly to the presence of two people from the Veracian Church -- yet there was only one in priest's robes, Miguel. Nobody could possibly confuse Sasha or Argus with a nun or priest, so that must mean that her own disguise hadn't been adequate. On reflection, she thought she knew why: she'd inadvertently created her shirt in the exact same color as Miguel's robes. Careless, she scolded herself. It's too late now, since I've already said that I'm a nun, but maybe I can do some damage control. Wonder if I'll have to do any more spellcasting in the next half hour? She decided she wouldn't, so ...

Positioning herself so that only Miguel could see her, she summoned mana and her green eyes glowed, just for a brief moment. Instantly her outfit underwent a very subtle change as she introduced a tiny bit of green to the shirt's color -- not enough to give an onlooker the sense that she'd changed it (unless he/she saw the spellcasting), but another three or four such minor "adjustments" and she wouldn't remind anyone of a nun. Let's see if that helps.

Miguel looked puzzled for a moment, then comprehension dawned in his face, and Rose realized that her minor alteration had had an unexpected side benefit: Miguel wasn't thinking about his memories any more. The pain drained away from the man as though a plug had been pulled. Rose smiled inwardly as she rejoined the circle.

Miguel, for his part, was back to a degree of mental sharpness that he hadn't had since the first time Lillith mentioned her name, and he noticed something that he hadn't seen before. He bent to pick up the small cylinder, puzzling at its weight; it fit easily in the palm of his hand, yet seemed to weigh at least five pounds. It was the densest object he'd ever hefted. And those runes ...

"You know," he said, "I'd just about bet that those runes are dwarven."
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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

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If she had noticed Rose's little trick, Lillith made no mention of it. Instead, as Miguel hoisted the item and made his comment, her eyes widened a little. "Dwarven?" she replied, stepping in a bit nearer to take a closer look. "But that would mean..." She shook her head. "It would have to be thousands of years old, wouldn't it? But this has some very fine markings on it. I would have thought anything that fine might have been erased by time by now, don't you?" She glanced up at Miguel with a smile that quickly erased, apparently as a result of her remembering who she was talking to.
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Drannin »

Argus considered Lilith's question. "Dwarven artifacts are famous for being resilient. Some objects have shown absolutely no degradation despite thousands of years of neglect. Something about their construction being a lost art. Die-cast, I think. Whatever that means." Argus pondered a little longer. "I'm just surprised to see a dwarven artifact around here. Most of the relatively intact ruins are much farther north. Maybe it was part of someone's collection...?" He shrugged.

Meanwhile, Harker was starting to stagger around. Definitely something...tangy... in the wood. He felt kind of dizzy... and happy.
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Re: Centoriel

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"Right," Brother Miguel replied, nodding at Argus. "We know of other dwarven artifacts that have images of dwarf faces that are so well preserved, and were so detailed originally, that you can see individual beard hairs. It's one of the ways we know what the dwarves looked like, at least some of them, anyway." And please, don't anybody point out the resemblances between those faces and what the Orthodox branch will be putting on display in Emerylon at the end of Departure... "If the artifacts were painted, the paint is long gone, of course, but at least some of the time, the underlying matrix is still in good shape."

"Which gets me wondering about this thing," Sister Rose observed. "I didn't notice this little bit of color until just now. What do you make of it?" She pointed to two small splotches of a purplish pigment on one flat end of the object, offset from the center. With a little imagination, one could almost imagine a third splotch, in a position that would have created a symmetric pattern about the center of the flat end. "Do you think this is original, or something that somebody painted on it later?"
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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

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Lillith nibbled on her lip. "I don't know. I don't think I've ever dealt with anything dwarven before. I didn't brush up on it either. I didn't think I was going to find any down here." She shook herself. "Don't you... people have some way to tell things about it magically?"

The spirits might have been able to tell her something about it. But that would require her to try another ceremony under the watchful gaze of the intolerant, in order to try to speak with spirits that were very agitated. Even if she had been able to convince the spirits to play nice, the spirits still might not know. Or might not want to say.

She stepped back away from the object and glanced around. She wasn't sure what the right course of action was. So long as she didn't do anything further to cause suspicion, they should let her go her way. But the longer she loitered, the greater the chance she might give them reason so suspect her. What to do?

Ah.

"Didn't you say you were looking for someone? Maybe he released that giant thing I saw earlier. If you hurry, maybe you can catch him?"
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Drannin »

Argus blinked. Now there was an uncomfortable possibility. Would Father Egbert really... "She has a point," Argus confessed. "The sooner we get to the site where the golem emerged, the fresher any evidence will be. In any case, I can try to do a reading on that device while we're under way."

"Heehee... show me daaa eveydance!" This was Harker's slurred speech. Argus' startled glance revealed that the beaver was staggering around with... well... a loopy expression on his face. What the...
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Re: Centoriel

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Sister Rose looked disapprovingly at Harker. Too bad she'd invested mana in the slight Polymorph modification; she knew a Sobriety spell that looked like just the ticket, but didn't have the energy back yet to cast it ...

No matter; an intoxicated beaver wasn't really high on the list of things to worry about at the moment. "You may be right," she told Argus. "My intuition is that Father Egbert didn't cause the release of that golem, but it's hard for me to believe that it was totally coincidental. We should at least check the site out while there's a lull in the rain. It's only about five minutes ahead, based on where we first saw that glow."

She saved the strange artifact in a small bag; it'd be interesting to see what Argus could come up with, and intuition was also telling her that it might be handy to have the thing around in the future. As she mounted the wagon, she raised an eyebrow at Lillith, non-verbally posing the question: are you coming with us? And she wasn't sure which answer she was hoping for.
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