Operation Peacemaker IC

[EleventhHour]

Sonia

She pauses a moment, staring ahead, then looks back at everyone else, "Well? Come on." She takes a hold of the next door handle, and gives it a pull.

[Cogwheel]

After the keycard is inserted, the door swings open quite easily, revealing a corridor, about 100 feet in length, and 15 in width. On the far side is a door, with a keycard slot next to it, though the exact type required cannot be read from here. The sides of the corridor have similar doors lining them - seven in all - though these do not appear to be locked in any way.

The heavy, thudding footsteps echoing through the corridor, however, may prove somewhat more urgent. The source of the noise is what appears to be a small clay construct - "small" by the standards of golems, at any rate, as the creature is about the size of a human - wearing a chain shirt over a white robe. It seems to be mindless, only walking back and forth across the corridor slowly. Discovery, however, may end poorly - in one hand, it carries an enormous bronze bell, no doubt capable of making a great deal of noise. Currently, it is about halfway down the corridor, and its back is, fortunately, turned.

Spoiler

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In 3 rounds from now, it will turn around. If you make enough noise, that might work too.

[DragoonWraith]

Charade
Charade looks at the golem, and then at its companions. Blinking rapidly, it points to the golem and its mystical blade, formed from its own arcanic 'flesh', slides forth. Charade points the blade at the golem and nods, clearly asking if it should go over and attack the golem.

[technophile]

Sebastian looks at Charade, then back at the golem.

"I don't know if that's the best idea, friend; unless we can drop it in one shot, that great bell will cause an awful lot of noise. We could try slipping into one of these side rooms before it turns. I doubt bluffing will work on a golem, they're not as easily fooled as our friend outside."

[Balketh]

Tale
Stepping out of the chamber feeling... Disturbingly clean, Tale gazes around. The hall is long and narrow, and doors line it. Seven, Tale determines after a quick count. Then he spies it, the creature patrolling the hall.

Looking up, strangely, Tale ponders the situation. Slowly, his head tilts down, and he gazes at something in his hand.

Without even a word to the other, Tale pushes gently past Sebastian, edges past Charade without touching it, and takes exceptionally long strides at a quick pace down the hall, heading straight toward the golem.

Tale's hand brushes his sheath once, and is suddenly in front of him, out of sight of the others. Within seconds, he stands behind the Golem, on an angle.

With his empty hand, he taps the Golem's shoulder roughly. His right hand whips up suddenly, level with the head of the golem. His head obscures whatever is in his hand, but the clicking sound coming from his general location is not a good sign.

"Hey, buddy." He intones grimly...

[Cogwheel]

The golem stands to attention, whipping around to face Tale. The words do not seem to register - only his presence. A thin cone of green light emanates from the visor-like slit in its head, bathing the object in tale's hand - the keycard, as it turns out - in an emerald glow. After a few moments, it answers "Authorization detected. Welcome to warehouse 81. You may proceed."

With this done, the automaton turns around and resumes its march. The others seem to have been accepted together with Tale, as it does not react to their presence. They are heavily armed, but the golem apparently takes no notice of this. Even this advanced model, after all, is a rather simple creature. Examining the adjoining cells is, likewise, quite unlikely to provoke it.

[technophile]

Sebastian shrugs. "Well, that was handy." His face registers no apparent emotion, but he carefully files away that Tale knew exactly what he was doing.

"Our stuff is in cells 7 and 13. I'm guessing 13 is on the other side of that door down there..."

He moves quickly down the hall, giving the golem plenty of room as he passes it on the way to the last (seventh) door. Taking a deep, calming breath to slow his heartbeat, he opens it.

[Cogwheel]

As it turns out, Sebastian's caution is nothing if not unwarranted. Two shelves line a rather small room, each housing a few tools - spanners and the like, as well as a select few items useless to those without the Mark of Making - and one sphere, two in total. The spheres resemble, as far as one can tell from knowledge of previously seen maps, Eberron itself. Admittedly, a rather fanciful depiction, as a red dragon is wrapped about the middle, while a golden one hovers over the ring of Siberys, and a coiled black-and-purple wyrm sleeps where Khyber would ordinarily be.

About it, rotating slowly but seemingly without anything connecting them to the rest of the device, are twelve moons. The planes. A thirteenth one, the realm of dreams, is represented by a violet sphere, remaining still, and far from the others. The room, meanwhile, appears to be entirely unguarded: Its contents may be taken freely.

[DragoonWraith]

Charade
Charade follows Tale around and chitters with excitement at all of the new things. It takes special time investigating the orrery, walking around it, bending down and stretching up to look at it from all angles, blinking rapidly the entire time. It is extremely, perhaps uncharacteristically, quiet during the investigation, but when finished bounds off to check out the other things in the room - including the spanner and various gear that mean nothing to one without the Mark of Making. This does nothing to diminish its excitement.

[Balketh]

With a grin plastered over his face after the obscure interaction with the golem, Tale turns triumphantly toward the others, almost stepping on part of Charade in the process.

Stepping back, he watches as Sebastian enters room 7, and with his happy grin turning slowly to a wicked one, Tale points over Sebastian's shoulder.

"That's it. Grab it, grab anything useful, and let's get moving." Stepping out of the small store room again, the young man stares down the hall, at the far door. He grimaces.

"People, we need to check the other rooms. That door is B-level Access. This card is only A-level... Which means we're looking for another keycard." With that, thudding footsteps bring Tale to Door 1, closest to the exit. With a breath, he looks back at the others, before opening it, and stepping in.

[DragoonWraith]

Charade
Charade makes sure to check each room for anything interesting.

Spoiler

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Taking 10 on whatever Search checks are necessary; I have a +2 modifier.

[Cogwheel]

A quick search in room 1 reveals that it is filled with partially built constructs - golems, iron defenders, unfinished warforged.. the works. Gradually, you become aware of a ticking sound from somewhere in the room. A brief look around the room reveals that it originates from the floor - though there is no clock anywhere in the room, you see the shadow of a clock on the steel floor, slowly ticking away.

[Balketh]

Tale steps into the room tentatively, gazing around slowly. The ticking instantly begins to grate on his nerves, if only because he cannot immediately locate anything that looks like it would be the source.

A slightly longer, more thorough glance around the room sees that Tale's eyebrow raises hard. In silence, he kneels, brushing a hand on the floor. It makes a soft, scraping noise, to which Tale quickly retracts his hand. Gazing at the shadow without a body, the young man rises, and gingerly reaches a hand out to where the shadow's body would be, unsure if he will find something there or not.

"Cannith warehouses..." He shakes his head and mumbles softly, trying to find the owner of this poor, lost shadow.

[Cogwheel]

Tick.

The clock catches for a moment, the hands whirring backwards when Tale touches the wall. The entire shadow seems to dissolve into a pool, and leap at Tale's back, seeping into him. Within moments, it is gone, save for a vague grey glow about him, and an odd, barely perceptible chill.




Tale

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Tick. Tock. The sound of the clock continues for a few moments within Tale's head, echoing slightly, then comes to a stop. It is instead replaced by a faint hissing. A hissing, as Tale realizes after a moment, identical to the sound of sand passing through an hourglass. This is replaced, once again, by a faint chattering. A hundred voices, perhaps more, talking in unison, each in a whisper.

Yes. This one. This one is hardly ideal, but we make do. We will. You have been accepted...

Tale feels his mind being searched through for a moment, and a sliver of knowledge taken from it, examined briefly, then put back. With this done, the voices complete their sentence.

...Tale. Meet us where there is light, and there is no light. Where there is time, and there is no time. Meet us at the lamp post. With this message delivered, the voice fades, and in its place is a somewhat more familiar sound.

Tick. Tock.

[Balketh]

For the briefest moments, Tale had actually expected things to go normally. He had expected there to be just a plain ol' invisible clock there, ticking away merrily. He would have knocked it over, it would have clattered and made a racket, but above that, the day would have progressed smoothly.

Things never go normally any more. What's worse, is Tale doesn't know if they ever did. He just can't remember, his memory isn't there any more.

Instead, that cold, cold chill ran down his spine. This is alarming for many reasons, the chief one being that he is always cold to the touch. The thought of something making him feel colder scares him, and this is just the start of his troubles.

The shadow crawls up his arm, wrapping around the limb, slithering up his shirt and seeping into his skin. All the while, its as if Tale is frozen in Time, eternally reaching out to see if that clock is really there, his face just beginning to register shock as he realises its not; everything about him is at a standstill.

The shadow disappears, and he glows softly, briefly, as if he had been in a freezer for a few hours. Even a cold chill rolls off him.

Then, for those few, silent seconds, all is still with Tale. He breathes not, moves not, blinks not. No one is present in the room bar himself, and none can see into it. Later, that is a fact Tale will realise he is thankful for. Something in him falters, and grinds to an outright halt, and for a split second, the young man feels utterly naked. This passes in the same second, however, and no one is any the wiser to it, not even him.

Finally, he manages to breathe, taking a deep, quick breath, before sitting up on his knees, his hands falling limp in his lap. The same, horrified expression remains on his face as he registers what just happened in his head. He shakes it slowly, as if expecting something to happen, but... It doesn't.

The sound. The sound in his head... Long after the main 'event' had ended, another sound fills his head. Incessant, unnecessary, repetitive. It doesn't stop. It persists. It is a sound he has come to fear, a fear of the unknown. Slowly, both hands raise, and press to his ears, to try and block it out. Doing this only serves to make it louder.

"Stop... Stop it... Stopit stopit stopit..." He chants, his tone growing in anger quickly.

"Stopit-stopit-stopit-stopit-STOP IT! AAAGH!" A piercing roar emanates from the once-quiet storage room marked 'One'. Perfectly timed after that is, at first, one quaking THOOM, and the sound of clattering metal as things fall from their shelves where Tale is; not unlike the sound of a bomb going off in a metal room. Shortly after the first, is a second, matching THOOM, the horrid sound of metal on metal filling the halls. Perhaps most disturbing of all, is the rapid succession of hits that come right after; THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM!

"STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!" This is all that can be heard, roaring from Tale, in sync with each shaking THOOM.

If any are in the hall, they are certainly treated to a sight. With both hands on his head, Tale charges out the room marked 'One', and slams into the door of the room marked 'Two'. The door buckles inward like paper, ripping all but a thread from the hinges, clinging to the wall for dear life on its one remaining screw. Tale collapses to his knees, with his head pressed to the ground, hands clenched over his ears.

"Stopstopstopstopstop..." He whimpers almost silently now.

With a now clear view into the storage room marked 'One', the others can see, and they can understand, what caused the 'Thoom' sounds.

There is are three deep dents in the metal of the back wall of the storage room. Two are vague indentations of fists, and the middle one, while much deeper, and yet featureless, its origin is still obvious.

The last, and most starkly obvious thing about the three dents is the blood. In a slight radial splatter, there is a thin layer of blood in each dent, most predominantly in the centre one.

"Stop it... P-please..."

[Cogwheel]

The racket from room 1 does not go unnoticed. The alarm golem, apparently not completely deaf, turns around and looks at Tale for a few moments, before resuming its rounds. Room 2, fortunately, is a considerably safer room to collapse in. There are tools here and there, and a broom in the corner. The room, overall, is largely empty, and beyond this - and, as of a minute ago, Tale - there is nothing. There is a loud click, audible even to those outside the room, followed by a short, quieter whirring sound, akin to gears turning.

Tale

Spoiler

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Even after Tale's first request for silence, the ticking sound grows quieter. There is no response from its source, from any of the voices that spoke within his mind, but by the time he enters room 2, there is nothing. For the moment, all is silent.

[EleventhHour]

[Sonia]

She begins down the hallway when the noise starts, a terrible noise to hear, and it takes her much more personally than it may have others, her hands clapping to her ears as she wanders forward, trying to escape the sound, and the shouts of what sounded to be Tale. Lost, wandering down the hall, almost tripping over the golem, before grabbing onto a random doorknob (Room 6), and trying to open it. In the meantime, her skin melts back down to it's ordinary smoothness, and the Dragonmark fades into nothingness, before she slides into the room, and shuts the door behind her with her hands to her ears. Hopefully Tale is alright... He'll be alright... Charade was there. I don't think anything effects... whatever Charade is.

[Cogwheel]

Room six contains three things. The first is a suit of armour, hanging from a peg on one wall. A suit of chainmail, with the symbol of a lightning bolt on the shirt, and a series of copper wires coiled about it. Another is, on top of a few crumpled, empty bags, a small device. It appears to be made from a metal of some sort, and hums constantly, vibrating in place.

The third is a box. A wooden crate, at a glance, but with plates of steel along the edges. As Sonia enters the room, it floats a few feet into the air, sprouting limbs of hazy blue energy, almost mist-like in appearance. The crate's lid flaps open for a moment and, against all conventions of how such an object might ordinarily act, it speaks, albeit in a bored, rather weary voice.

"Yes? What now?"

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The little device is small enough to fit in your hand, for the record, while the box is 5 feet in every direction.

[DragoonWraith]

Charade
Charade follows Tale into the other room, blinking at him in silence. It is very confused, but assumes this is some hitherto unknown behavior of living things, just one of many things it does not understand.

[Balketh]

Finally. Finally. It stops. It goes, and all is quiet. With a sickening slurp, as if someone had tried to pick up Charade from the floor, Tale pulls his head from the floor. A patch of blood sits neatly where his forehead once sat. The skin spanning his forehead is bleeding, though any cuts are difficult to see amongst the smeared blood. His knuckles are similar.

Rising slowly, taking shaky breaths, Tale turns, and stares down at Charade, still with wide eyes.

"Y-you... Always s-so bouncy... And c-curious..." He stammers, his glare almost filling with anger, but it doesn't for a reason Tale keeps to himself.

"T-try not to do wh-what I did just now... D-don't... Go p-poking things you d-don't understand... C-curiousity killed the Charade. N-never forget that..." With a slow step, the young man, still bleeding rather freely, edges past the glowing, blue thing before him, his stare going off into space.

It's almost as if Tale is on auto-pilot. His stare is mostly blank, his mind far away for now, yet he still moves with some purpose. With a shaky hand, he grips the handle for the storage room marked Three, and opens it slowly. Stepping in, he closes the door slowly behind himself, and gazes around, standing stock still, afraid of a repeat episode to the first room.

"R-right..." He stammers softly, clearly still shaken by something.

[Cogwheel]

Room 3 is, once again, mostly clear, as if chance is doing its best to provide him some respite after the clock. In the corner of the room are four boxes, each filled with small stone spheres. Featureless, smooth and all coloured a dull grey, rather reminiscent of ioun stones. The words "message stones" are written on each crate. There are no instructions, but Tale's footfalls seem to sound faintly from every one of the stones, creating a quiet echo.

[technophile]

Sebastian carefully picks up the ornate spheres, wrapping them in some rough cloth before sliding them into his pack.

"Halfway there, " he mutters to himself. And then Tale's roar and the booming sounds interrupt whatever he was saying.

He springs back into the hallway, his huge bow appearing instantly in one hand as he pulls an arrow from his quiver with the other. As he moves swiftly down the corridor, he watches the alarm golem for any hostile motion.

As Tale launches himself violently from Room 1 to Room 2, Sebastian takes a quick glance into Room 1, noting the bloody dents in the walls. Then he turns and looks into Room 2, noting the sticky pool of blood on the floor.

And here I thought this was going smoothly, he grumbles silently.

"I'd say that's good advice," he says in response to Tale's words, still watching the alarm golem and the far door for any signs that things are about to get interesting. "Touching anything you don't understand is a good way to end up a smear on the floor or worse, in a Cannith warehouse." Although his eyes don't leave the hall, his tone is ... pointed.

[Balketh]

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I'm going to move on, assuming that, as it should be, Sonia does not hear the sound, as said sound is only in Tale's head.

Slightly disoriented from the powerful headache he now has, Tale winces as the stones in the crates before him echo any sound made. Shifting over as quietly as he can, the young man picks up a stone from each crate, and inspects them closely.

He taps one, then the other. Placing one against his ear, he gently taps the stone on the wall. The sudden, but brief, recoil indicates he could hear that tap very well.

Slowly, so as not to fall over, Tale pokes his head out into the hall.

"People, I've found some Message Stones. They're... Well, they're quite useful. I'm not sure how many we should take, I'll figure it out in a moment..."

With that, Tale slips back into the room, and begins quietly inspecting the stones, trying to learn their inner workings through very soft sounds and a process of elimination.

[Cogwheel]

Thankfully, the process is made considerably easier for Tale. The stones are clearly labeled - that is to say, each one has a number written on it, from 1 to 8. Ringing one end of the stone are seven buttons, small sections that slide back into the stone itself, each numbered. A few moments of experimentation and unfortunately large amounts of noise reveal their workings - each stone in a set, by default (clearly, some have been tampered with) send no sound to other stones in the set. Instead, they only transmit sound to those in the set that have a number corresponding to the buttons currently pushed into the stone. It is a rather old idea, certainly, but the Cannith magewrights seem to have improved on it.

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So basically, you have a set, from 1 to 8. You can control which stones it messages. For instance, you could make stone 1 send messages to all of the others, or just 2 and 7, and so forth.

[DragoonWraith]

Charade
Charade grabs two of them, sets them to each to respond to the other, and then chitters excitedly into both at the same time.

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Assuming they work like microphones/speakers, crazy feedback should be happening about now.