And that's why you're here. If you broke that magic, then why can't you break this magic. Nobody important has ever disappeared here after all, and you're special. You'll probably be fine. That, and also the item you broke:

>Was a merchant's prized ware. You owe him a lot of money that you and your family don't have. You're hoping to fine an equally expensive replacement.

>Was that armor plate your mother was so obsessed with. Even though you think it was tacky and possibly fake, it really did help bring in business. You need something similarly impressive to replace it.

>Was a wizard's trinket. He told you go to go here and you've heard enough rumors about wizards to be afraid of what would happen if you didn't.

>>2738035
>Was a merchant's prized ware. You owe him a lot of money that you and your family don't have. You're hoping to fine an equally expensive replacement.

>>2738056
second

>>2738035
>Was a wizard's trinket. He told you go to go here and you've heard enough rumors about wizards to be afraid of what would happen if you didn't.

>>2738035
>Was a wizard's trinket. He told you go to go here and you've heard enough rumors about wizards to be afraid of what would happen if you didn't.
I miss highlighted

>>2738035
>Was a merchant's prized ware. You owe him a lot of money that you and your family don't have. You're hoping to fine an equally expensive replacement.

>>2738035
>>Was a wizard's trinket. He told you go to go here and you've heard enough rumors about wizards to be afraid of what would happen if you didn't.

>>2738057
Phoneposters are the cancer that kills quests.

>>2738073
I'm on my laptop. Relax

>>2738053
>>2738067
>debt

>>2738056
>>2738057
>you broke mom's stuff

>>2738061
>>2738065
>>2738072
>a wizard told me to

Writing for wizard.

>>2738081

The thing that got you into this mess was just some stupid ring, brought into your mother's shop by a wizard that really overestimated the sort of wares your family was peddling.

--

The day was slow. With no major events on the horizon in either Paralapolis or Noxshbaum, trade through your town was moving at a trickle, and with it: business. Today, the dull task of 'shopkeep assistant' was yours. Your siblings either had the chance to relax or were off "seeking to better themselves, which you could learn a thing or two about", in the case of your younger sisters. In order to pass the time, you put your hands to work disassembling damaged clockwork, separating out potentially usable springs and gears and other pieces. Reclaiming use from broken things, just like your mom always says.

The doors bursts open. The clack of wood on wood shatters the calm of the day. A gust of wind breezes its way through the shop, rattling loose scrap and rustling papers. Your mother's ledger is blown off the counter. She looks up to address the customer, but you're quicker to the punch.

Leaping to your feet at the opportunity to do something interesting, you size up the visitor. Before you stands a stout old man with a craggy face. Deep lines indicate to you years of displeasure. When you were a small child, your mother said that holding your face in a strange expression for a long time would make it permanent. In the case of this man, that seems to be true about frowning. His tightly trimmed beard outlines his jaw. The snow white hair casts the deep creases in his skin in stark contrast. The rest of his body is hidden beneath the folds of fine robes that have seen far more than their share of wear and tear. They were probably red, once. Now they're a mottled shade of brown, the faint memory of vibrant color lost to years worth of stains from who knows what. The sleeves and hem of the robe are in tatters, flapping in the unnatural breeze like confetti. Intricate embroidered designs are torn to pieces, whatever they were depicting lost along with robe's color.

You ignore his appearance and greet with the respect that finery would normally entail. You nod you head and bow slightly to the visitor. "Esteemed guest. Welcome to our humble shop. We trade in broken and mended things. Might I ask your name?"

The man doesn't let his shoddy appearance deter him from making a grandiose greeting. "I am the High Wizard Parvolex." He calls out, raising his arms as though to an audience. "I seek servants of the god of salvage. I was pleasantly surprised to hear of such a place this far from civilization."

>>2738273

So it turns out some people actually do care about your family's claim to fame. Who would have thought? You're not really convinced that this guy is a high wizard what with his raggedy outfit, but your family doesn't turn down any honest business. If he's here to buy the junk you sell-

"I come with magical wares to pawn." He interrupts your thoughts. He gestures behind him.

From the side of the doorway, an unruly pile of mismatched scrap floats into view. In it you see a set of armor so rusted and bent out of shape that it could put that scrap mounted above the counter to shame.

He flourishes his hand and a piece of paper appears. "I have prices mapped out, but I am open to appraisal and negotiation."

His silence indicates he is done speaking, so your mother responds. "Great wizard" She says. You think that's probably a little bit too much credit. "I'm afraid we can't really serve you." She sheepishly puts her hand behind her head, a gesture you've never once seen her do in all your years growing up under her iron fist. "While we do pride ourselves on our godly heritage, our family no longer has any magic practitioners. I'm very sorry to disappoint you, but you're not likely to find any mages in the shops around these parts. We only trade in mundane objects around here."

The wizard starts talking, disappointment palpable. His tone is much less hostile that his face would have led you to believe though. You're just happy to see there won't be any sort of fight. The sorts of folks you get in a junk shop range from 'bad day' to 'obvious criminal', so your expectations tend to be rather low. You suppose he was expecting to be disappointed. After all who would expect something positive from this town?

You tune their conversation out. In the mean time, you step over to the most interesting pile of junk you've ever seen. While it's all rusted, bent out of shape, caked in dirt, or otherwise marred, it's still an exotic collection. Curved swords, armor designs you've only seen in pictures, strangely colored metals. You reach out to the floating pile of salvage to inspect the armor you saw earlier. If you hammered it back into shape and gave it a nice solvent bath then you could recover a really nice piece.

As your hand approaches the pile of junk, the whole thing wobbles unsteadily, metal pieces rattling against eachother like a wagon in a gale. You see a flash, and then glowing lights, and then-

-the wizard grips your arm. Your meddling interrupts whatever he and your mother were talking about. She speaks first though, always quick with scolding. "Young man, just what do you think you're doing?"

>>2738276
"I just wanted to inspect that armor."

"Don't 'I just' me. You can't just rummage through a man's luggage! I can't believe-"

"Now hold on." Fortunately, the tirade is cut short by your patron saint: this old man in front of you. He gazes at you with curious eyes. He looks you up and down, even circling around you at one point without letting go of your arm, forcing you to awkwardly maneuver to accomodate him. After a moment of tense silence between you and your mother, the wizard says softly. "Hold this for me."

He produces a ring from his junk pile and hands it to you. The flash returns. Glowing white yarn shines around the ring in your hand. The pattern moves, carried around the object by some unseen current of magical energy. You notice a frayed end in the spectral thread. Mesmerized, you pluck the loose thread. A mistake. The mesh of glowing light comes apart like poor knitting. You whip your hand back but it's already too late. The thing is falling to pieces. The weave of magic unravels and darkens, arcane light lost. When the last of the glow winks out, the ring in your hand disintegrates, melting into nothing in your palm.

"Very interesting." Says the wizard, stroking his trim beard.

"What did you do!" Your mother yells. Mostly at you, you're pretty sure. "I was just saying we couldn't afford this stuff and then you go and break something. We don't know how to fix magic items. We can't buy any of this stuff. I can't believe you would.." She continues, but you let the words pass you by.

The wizard speaks up. "Well, this is quite unexpected." He give you a bow now. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, children of Salvage. If you'd like to repay me for that ring, just go to Inaudax's resting place and tell him 'Parvolex sent you'. In any case, this was an enlightening experience. Don't disappoint me." The wizard claps his hands together and vanishes into thin air, along with all of his stuff. Teleportation? Maybe he was telling the truth about his status.

You and your mother are left dumbfounded, but in addition to that feeling, there's something else. Something... magical.

>ring of tongues disenchanted
>mana 9/10

Choose one:

>+1 max mana

>Spell: Tongues

>Progress towards passive: omniglot

--

Now you're here at the Tomb of Inaudax. You don't see a proper entrance, though you're not sure you want to. You probably need to get inside if you want to clear your debt though. You wouldn't want to disappoint a high wizard.

>Call out 'Parvolex sent me'

>Touch the magical patterns on the stones

>Search for a proper entrance, assuming one exists.

>>2738281
>Progress towards passive: omniglot
>Touch the magical patterns on the stones

>>2738281
>Progress towards passive: omniglot
>Touch the magical patterns on the stones
touch da magic

>>2738293
>>2738297
>progress towards being able to naturally speak and understand all languages
Trait gained: omniglot (limited)
You can understand common phrases in languages that are similar to yours, and probably learn languages faster.

>touch the magic entrance to the deadly tomb

Writing.

You might as well hop to it. There's no sense delaying your trip any further. The wizard didn't seem particularly vindictive, but that's how they get you, or so you hear. You consulted old man Ilaz. He was deep in his cups, but he's never led you astray before. Except for that time he convinced you to buy that bronze pump-thing that made a wheel spin using steam. There was also that bottled lightning that your mother uses as a glorified lamp now. But barring financial decisions, his advice is good. You've averted dangerous encounters with wildlife based on his words about tracks and territory. When your life is threatened, it's best to listen to people with experience.

You're pretty sure those rocks have magic in them. You saw actual woven magic just yesterday, after all. You think if you saw it again you could probably follow it. Theoretically it should lead into the tomb, right? As an aside, it's quite surprising to you how literal the hearsay descriptions of magic are. Travelers talk about mages 'weaving' magic, but you saw actual magical thread woven into a pattern. You assumed that descriptions of that sort of thing were more.. metaphorical. For a moment, you wonder whether your perception was influenced by your preconceived notions, but if so, then why do the rocks right in front of you bear such similar patterns?

You're procrastinating. You need to act. You step past the spray of water and place your hand on the carved blue lines before you. For a moment, you see the glowing threads again. All along the wall, inlaid into the designs on the stones, and out into the scenery around you the threads stretch. The scene captivates you. An instant later, it's gone.

-

Your vision swims for a moment. The world twists around you and then cuts out. Your hearing and sight are replaced by silence and darkness. Whatever place you find yourself in is so dark that you can't see your hand in front of you. Imagination feeds your vision with waves of twisting darkness to make up for the utter absence of information. Eyes open or closed, there is no light. Balance thrown, you sway for a moment. The smell of damp earth and the hard ground beneath your boots are all you have to orient yourself.

You try to stay composed. You breathe deeply, but your lungs fill with heavy air. Rather than helping you clear your head, your mind feels fuzzier than before. Your imaginary visions fade out, replaced by true, unmoving, stifling blackness. The veins in your limbs fill with fire. Your head pounds. No wonder everyone who stepped foot in here before perished.

>Life-force 7/10

>>2738387
You expected monstrous creatures or conniving traps and obstacles. The idea of some dark, unfathomable death cloud never occurred to you. In your head somewhere, there was a notion that you'd be able to see things coming and react to them, leverage your godly blessing and do great things. This feels too simple. Too overwhelming; unfair. Instead, you fall to your knees. The arrogance of coming here dawns on you only now.

Perhaps some interested god heard your silent plea though, because when your hand touches the floor, the room lights up. As though rendered on top of your empty sight, glowing thread weaves its way across your vision. Visible with eyes closed or open the soft white light streams around the outline of the room you're in like a river flowing over a stone. Everywhere you look is fractally detailed. The patterns are not simplistic like those of the ring of tongues, nor are they limited by physical carvings like the stone material outside. Unfettered by distracting sensory perception, you see details within details. The silence and blindness gives way to an endless starfield of woven white thread. Wherever you focus, there is always more to see.

>Life-force 6/10

It's the most beautiful sight you've ever seen, and it's killing you. At that realization, you rapt attention is no longer a match for the pain wracking your flesh. The magic burns through your body. You feel scorched and empty. Ravaged and drained. If you don't do something, you're going to die here and now.

Broken from your trance, you look around frantically. You try to block out the pain. With the weave of magic as a sort of visual reference it's much easier to stand and balance. You reclaim control of your body, if only for a moment.

You look for something familiar in the magical weave. Something that you can actually act on rather than the unknowable doom in your burning limbs and heavy lungs. You notice that your hands pass through the magic like they would through a surface of water. The gossamer weave of light reconstitutes wherever your disturb it, but only after a moment. Soft pulses of light ripple outwards from your points of contact, doing nothing to illuminate the pitch darkness, but rendering the shape of the room in clearer relief.

You notice specific focal points where the light seems to collect and disperse. You also notice areas where the mesh of magic is less dense: darker and slower to repair itself. You broke the magic from before, why can't you break this magic? It's killing you. You have to try.

You:

>Try and find the core of the magic. The single thread you can pull to make it all fall apart, just like with wizard's ring. (Cost: 1 mana, roll 3d10)

>Have no time to waste. Rip it to shreds. You can break it faster than it fixes itself (Cost: 4 mana, roll 3d10)

>Call out desperately 'I was sent by Parvolex!'

>Write-in

Rolled 2, 9, 9 = 20 (3d10)

>>2738392
>Try and find the core of the magic. The single thread you can pull to make it all fall apart, just like with wizard's ring. (Cost: 1 mana, roll 3d10)

>>2738392
>Try and find the core of the magic. The single thread you can pull to make it all fall apart, just like with wizard's ring. (Cost: 1 mana, roll 3d10)
We am master dungeoneer

Rolled 7, 7, 6 = 20 (3d10)

>>2738392
>>Try and find the core of the magic. The single thread you can pull to make it all fall apart, just like with wizard's ring. (Cost: 1 mana, roll 3d10)

Rolled 4, 10, 3 = 17 (3d10)

>>2738404
Forgot roll

>>2738403
>>2738407
>>2738404
>Try to find the core
>20, 20, 17 vs Effective DC 15
Great success!

You really eat the crap out of this magic! Great job! Writing now.

Your deep breaths give you no relief. On some level, you know the room is cool and damp, but the sensation all throughout your body tells you you're on fire. Your balance is shot and the silence is deafening. The only anchor you have to reality, ironically, is an abstract weave of magical lights.

You feel out the magic as best you can. There's no sensation or feedback on your clammy skin, but you see the weave gently warp at your touch. Clearing your head as best you can, you think back to your one experience with unraveling magic: Parvolex's ring. Its central, loose thread was bright and eye catching. It was the first thing to really catch your attention once you had come to your senses. After you pulled it, darkness ran out from it over the other threads. They burned out like fuses.

Turning your attention to the intricate weave that surrounds you, you zero in on the bright corners of the room. The pulsing of the light draws itself to them. Now that you're aware of the pattern, it's easy to see. Those bright points are central to the magic. Everything flows into and out of them.

You walk slowly over to the nearest bright patch. Your wobbly legs threaten to drop you back to the floor, reaching out to grasp immaterial threads for balance also does nothing to help you. Slowly and drunkenly, you eventually cover the short distance to your destination. Once you're there, the rest is instinctual. You pull the brightest thread. You feel nothing in your hand, but you see the light come apart. The web unravels and burns out, starting at the core. The vestiges of light collect in your palm.

>Life-force: 10/10
>Mana: 8/10

As the magical web loses coherence, a weight lifts itself off you. You breathe in a lungful of air. The relief is more than you realized you needed. You gasp in another breath, desperate for the air you forgot you were lacking. The fuzz in your head clears. The pain in your limbs fades. You're left with a warm, comfortably exhausted feeling, like you'd get from settling down after a day of tough exercise. The wall behind you illuminates with a soft white light, revealing the cold, dank interior of this room to you.

Haphazard masonry forms the walls, ceiling and floor. The room is a claustrophobic box of unpatterned stone clearly placed for expedience rather than function or form. The builders put little effort into finding stones that actually fit together, preferring to just trust their stone binding material. Unnecessarily large amounts of mortar are used to fill uneven gaps. Perhaps they didn't even use enough, since water has clearly leaked in. You don't see any damage, but stones that sit slightly lower than their counterparts house small puddles, and patches of moss grow around the room. You think you even feel a faint spray of water near you, though that's likely just your imagination.

Much more ominous than the stonework are the skeletons. You do a double take as your gaze passes the first one over. You're still a bit dazed. Clean, fleshless bodies, equipment still intact, are scattered around the room. You've even kicked one of them apart while blundering towards the death magic. Something in the back of your head is telling you to be afraid. The stark reminder of your mortality would normally terrify you. The rest of you is still riding the high of being alive. You're too relieved to feel any other emotions. A rough count puts the number of skeletons in the room at 9, though it's a bit iffy in the corner where a few of them are piled up.

Aside from the glowing section of wall and the skeletal remains of other hapless intruders-- hey, you think you recognize that armor from the guy who came through town two years ago, he disappeared after announcing his intent to challenge this tomb. Small world. Anyways, aside from those notable things, there's really not anything in this room.

You don't really know how to leave, which is somewhat concerning. Assuming there is a way out though, you have time to find it. You packed rations and camping equipment and while you're not decked out for cold weather, your cobbled together leather armor is warm enough. Your shortsword is sharp, your boots are sturdy and you're feeling pretty good. You're feeling more than pretty good actually, beyond the relief from surviving, there's something else:

>Life drain trap disenchanted
Choose one:
>Spell: Life drain
>Progress towards passive: Radiant Life-force
>+2 max mana

Your next course of action is pretty clear to you though. You'll

>Find a way out. That glowing wall is a good place to start, you can touch the magic to see it. That's what got you into this cave

>Loot those corpses. Leaving them in a tomb is respectful enough to their bodies, right? You don't think any of their equipment is much better than yours, but they might have something magical.

>Camp here for a time. You're feeling good but you're also feeling tired. Who's bothered by a few corpses?

>Write-in.

>>2738481
What the fuck is radiant life-force

>>2738481
>Progress towards passive: Radiant Life-force
>Loot those corpses. Leaving them in a tomb is respectful enough to their bodies, right? You don't think any of their equipment is much better than yours, but they might have something magical.
Fuck it I want it

>>2738481
>Progress towards passive: Radiant Life-force
Draining peoples life is wrong.
>Loot those corpses. Leaving them in a tomb is respectful enough to their bodies, right? You don't think any of their equipment is much better than yours, but they might have something magical.
Grave robbing on the other hand is not.

>>2738486
Gods have radiant life-forces. Your life-force will regenerate even if you get hurt by seriously dangerous undead like wights of vampires. You'll also heal faster from magical injury. It's less immediately useful, but a pretty big deal in the long term that we'll likely never reach before this quest gets dropped

>>2738481
>>+2 max mana
>>Find a way out. That glowing wall is a good place to start, you can touch the magic to see it. That's what got you into this cave

>>2738488
>>2738490
>progress towards passive: god life magic
>Loot corpses

>>2738493
>+max mana
>leave

Writing for disrespect the dead.

You get to work looting these corpses. If they didn't want their bodies defiled then they should have had the decency to die somewhere other than a glorified mass grave. While you don't relish the thought of picking through the bones of skeletons, another part of you is excited by the notion of being a proper adventurer. Get into deadly situations, disrespect the dead, disrespect authority in general and start carousing or rabble-rousing. It's the sort of thing that pisses you off back home, but halfway because you don't get to be a part of it.

Morbid though it may be, this is a great start to your adventuring career. The more sensible and fearful part of your brain that tells you not mess with the dead has been quite underserved in the past day or so, and you're not about to change that. You look over all the equipment around the room, ignoring the pale white bones beneath it. Immediately you notice that everything metal is rusted to the point of unusability. Even the tip of the spear from the adventurer two years ago, which ought not to be so bad, is rough, red and blunted. There's some sort of unnatural wear going on here.

That doesn't mean this stuff is all useless though, on the contrary there's quite a bit of meaningful scrap you could reclaim. You'd like to bring a wagon out here and haul it home. Mom would be quite pleased. She's say that your great-grandfather would be pleased as well. You're less skeptical about his alleged godhood now that you've started pulling apart magic like a child's sewing project.

Speaking of sewing, the clothes of the deceased are in quite a bit better shape than their weapons and armor. Unfortunately, you're not really looking for replacement clothing. If your gear was damaged, you could definitely repair it here though. You tear off several strips of cloth for bandages or patches. You also unthread a bit of string and add it to your supplies. The adventurers' packs are notably absent of any money, which strikes you as odd. Most adventurers carry around a hoard of gold, assuming they haven't spent it on alcohol or equipment.

You continue poking around in corpses, hoping to find something magical. You're working under the assumption that anything of note would light up like the ring or the walls. After digging through packs full of rusted climbing gear, lockpicks or other useless metal implements, you're getting tired of this. You can only use so many pieces of frayed rope, and you really don't have the time to splice it onto your own coil. The scrape of bone on stone starts to wear on your nerves. The high of survival, coupled with that magically pleasant comfort, is starting to fade. With its absence comes reservations and unpleasant thoughts. You dearly hope the spirits of these adventurers actually are at rest.

>>2738540
You're on the verge of calling this salvage officially surveyed, when your fingertips brush something wooden and a flash of light catches your eyes. It's gone in an instant, contact interrupted by shifting cloth and bone, but you dig through the pile of skeletons and find a rod at the bottom. A roughly foot-long carved stick, the item lights up with magic like the wizard's ring. An incredible find!

You hoped that you'd find something as rare as this is in the supposed most dangerous place in your local region. There's not much magic to be found in the town of Ramamire, save that held by traders passing through the region on their way to Noxshbaum or Paralapolis. This tomb though, has killed at least nine people. The rumors would say more. One of them was carrying this rod.

You think it's a magical wand, from what you've heard or read about magical artifacts, but you really have no idea to use it. Wands traditionally store spells for later casting, triggered by a keyword, gesture, or in especially well made wand just a thought. Whatever it is and however it's used, though, you're sure it's magical> That means it's valuable.

Of course, you don't have to sell it. After absorbing that wizard's ring, some memories of foreign curses thrown at you by drunken caravan guards resolved themselves into actual insults. After absorbing that trap you've felt better than you've ever felt in your entire life. What would you get if you pulled apart the magic on this thing? You can only imagine.

With that in mind, you decide to:

>Keep it to sell. You can always unravel it later if you change your mind.

>Try to cast it. You think you remember some common wand keywords and gestures from a book you read while bored on shop-duty (roll 3d10)

>Disenchant it.

>Write-in

>>2738541
>>Keep it to sell. You can always unravel it later if you change your mind.

>>2738541
>Disenchant it.
Consume

>>2738541
>Disenchant it.
Its all ours

>>2738543
>wait

>>2738544
>>2738548
>disenchant now

>rod of wonder disenchanted
Choose one:
>Spell: Wonder (cast a random wondrous effect)
>Progress towards passive: Lucky
>+1 mana

In the mean time, writing.

>>2738555
>>Progress towards passive: Lucky

>>2738555
>Progress towards passive: Lucky
All the passives in the world.
We should probably get some basic spell soon though.

There's no time like the present. No point in messing around with trying to actually figure out what the thing does when you can pull it apart and gain its power from the tattered dregs. You look the weave of magic in your hand over and find the core. The thread resists for a moment, then splits gently in two. The pieces drift slowly apart, then darken along with the rest of the weave, leaving the only remnants of light in your outstretched hand.

>Mana 7/10

You don't really feel especially different this time, but by now you've had the chance to sort of understand what you've been doing. You don't really know how you're figuring it out, perhaps from the pattern of magic, or some godly ancestral memory, but you can tell what sort of magic was in that wand now that you've torn it apart. From your weird sense for this, you realize that what was in that wand was randomness, and what you've taken from it is luck. The thought pops into your head that using magically enhanced luck in a game of dice or cards is probably cheating, but you don't concern yourself with it.

Wondering at your newfound abilities, you find yourself wishing for a coin to flip or a foreign book to read. You want something to prove to you that this isn't all an elaborate hallucination concocted by a wizard to mess with your head, or just delusion born from delirious boredom. Your prayers are answered, in a sense, moments later. A ghost pops into the room.

You're frankly not sure if this is just your hallucination advancing in absurdity, or an actual godly blessing sent to confirm your mental state. Maybe it's just a lucky coincidence. Regardless, standing-- well, floating-- before you is a translucent young woman probably a tad bit older than you. She stands shorter than you, but the extra height from ghostly levitation puts you eye to eye.

Her hair is pulled back painfully tight, giving her youthful visage a slightly more mature appearance, but the effect is ruined by the huge robes that hang loosely on her slight form. The bright red hangs down below her feet. The cloth blows gently in the air, animated by some unseen spectral breeze. The oversized, baggy clothes give her the appearance of a teen playing pretend at having real authority.

You recognize her outfit as that of an inspector from Noxshbaum, but you can't imagine why they'd have issued her such an outsized piece of clothing. She's not so small that there shouldn't have been anything for her. And in any case, shouldn't a spirit be able to control their appearance? You almost laugh, but you stop yourself.

Really she's somewhat of a sorry sight. You probably pillaged her corpse, though there were no inspector's robes on any of the skeletons in this room. The soft blue glow she emits gives her translucent skin a sickly pallor and washes out the color of her red robes. There was an inspector that came by from Noxshbaum last year to survey the region right? If it was her, that's a real severe turn of misfortune. You just had a brush with the same mortality. You wonder what day she died. Is this the anniversary of stupid decisions?

The thought almost brings you to laughter again. The giddiness from not being a dead floating ghost, the comical figure in front of you, and just the absurdity of the whole situation all strike you hard. You've spent a good few seconds just staring at this spirit and all she's doing is looking disdainfully back at you. You can't take the severe expression on her face seriously at all.

You decide to break the silence. Your words of greeting? The words for an aristocrat in finery: "Esteemed guest. Welcome to our humble shop. We trade in broken and mended things. Might I ask your name?" You finish the statement with a straight face and a deep bow, gesturing at the unusable metal and worn clothing behind you. It's too much. You break into a laugh.

Your laughter is strained and cracked, lined with the stresses of the past day. The spirit, to her profession credit, lets you finish. Her severe expression remains unchanged. Once silence returns, she speaks with an echoey, distant voice.

"I am Eve Hsoppinha. I'm surprised to see anyone alive here. Well done." She says calmly, expression softening. "I don't suppose I could request your aid?"

Eve, a surprisingly normal name for someone from Noxshbaum. You suppose one of her parents was foreign, or maybe involved in foreign affairs. She makes up for the normal first name with the decidedly abnormal last name 'Hsoppinha' though. Abnormal for normal people, that is. People from their city would probably think nothing of it. When you meet her request with confused silence, she continues.

"As you can see, I've died, and now it seems I'm lost. I can't quite find my way to the realm of Death. All I've done is wander these halls since my passing, occasionally accosted by the angry echo of some other dead intruder. Fortunately, you've arrived. So could you help me?"

She looks at you expectantly, waiting patiently for a response.

>"Sure." You've got magic destroying hands, and you might be able to dredge up something about restless spirits from your memory.
>Refuse. Honestly, how are you supposed to help?
>"What exactly would I be doing? I'm not some sort of pirest, and I'm pretty much stuck here for now."
>Write-in

Anyways that was my last post for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow hopefully around 6PM PST.

Your stats for the day:
>Gained trait: omniglot (limited). You know more language better.
>Gained trait: radiant life-force (limited). Your life force is radiant. Regenerate it faster and where others wouldn't, in an emergency spend life force as mana at a rate of 3 life-force for 1 mana.
>Gained trait: lucky (limited). You are a little bit luckier.
>7/10 Mana (at 0 mana, you are unconscious)
>10/10 Life-force (at 0 life-force, you are dead)

>>2738609
>Write-in
If it's in our power to do then sure but we're going to need a guide here and she's admitted she knows this place to some degree.

>>2738609
>>2738617
this
If she asks about the magic eating thing tell her that it will probably just delete her rather than properly moving her on, we can always find a priest later

>>2738557
Why though? We can just have all the spells as permanent passives

>>2738612
checkin' in

>>2738617
>>2738618
>I'll help you if you help me, but also no promises

Writing.

Well, this is a bit off from what you were expecting. You assumed that after some trials you'd be meeting the namesake of the tomb, Inaudax. He would presumably be an eccentric wizard, and you would deliver the almost content free message 'Parvolex sent me'. You then hoped you would receive some explanation or be dismissed, at which point Parvolex would no longer care that you broke his ring. You didn't expect engage in polite conversation with a disembodied spirit.

You're not quite sure what to say to her request. You might be able to help with your magic eating hands, but you don't exactly understand how they work. You might even just obliterate her, if such a thing is possible.

You respond tentatively. "I'll do what I can to help, but I don't really know how to lead a spirit to the afterlife."

She nods. "I understand. Expertise in the matter of guiding lost souls is probably not the purview of most adventurers." Her spectral features crease into a frown. "But even so, I think there might be something you could do. Sometimes I feel peaceful, detached, like I'm about to go somewhere, only to be forcefully jerked back. I think it might be unnatural: magic."

You ponder that for a moment. You're sure you can deal with magic, you just need to find it. Though spirits are magic too right? You wonder if that's just what it's like to be dead like that.

"I might be able to help." You say vaguely.

"Yes, I believe you might." She only half registers your response. "You see, I doubt a tomb such as this has anyone living within to sustain the magic. In such a situation, it needs to be attached or fed by something nearby. There's likely something physical to break: a stone or a crystal. Moreover, such a thing is most likely stored where the tomb's main occupant is interred."

At her last line, she looks at you pointedly. When you don't say anything, she elaborates.

"What I mean to say is, the object is stored where the trasure is. Our interests align."

Well that's perfect for you. You could use help navigating this place after all. It seems like a stroke of good fortune that this girl found you. "Sounds good to me. If you could just show me around, I'll need a guide to get there."

"Of course." She says. "But for one question."

"What?" You reply uncertainly.

"Do you have climbing gear?"

Once again, old man Ilaz's advice returns to you. "Whenever you go outside, you need to be ready for every direction. Most people have forward and sideways covered: good boots, good clothes, good weapons. Real successful folks, now, they've got up and down ready too. You need to be able to ascend and descend: hooks, rope and pitons, no matter where you're going. For down you'd also want a parachute, but I don't think they have those around here." You aren't sure what he meant by that last part; you've never heard of a parachute, but sometimes he rambles. You took the rest of the advice to heart and came well prepared. You're pleased to hear that the preparation was useful.

"Absolutely." You respond, pleased.

The spirit nods approvingly. "I suppose that's to be expected from an experienced adventurer such as yourself." You think that's a bit of an overstatement, but you make no move to correct her.

"Walk with me." She says. Then she turns and floats through the glowing wall. You're at a loss for a moment, until she pokes her head back through. "It's an illusion. Just walk through." She disappears again.

You walk up to the wall and put your hand on it. It feels quite solid to you. Maybe she doesn't understand? She's an ethereal ghost after all, solid objects might seem like illusions to her. It's also lit up with glowing threads of magic though. If there's an illusion there, you might be able to break it.

>Try to unravel it now.
>Just push through, she said it wasn't real
>Explain to her that living people cannot go through solid objects

>>2740064
>Try to unravel it now.
Now you see me, soon you won't

[Also I'm going to eat right now, so the next post will be in a while (~1 hr 20 min). I was hoping to get two posts out, but I started late and wrote slower than I wanted to. In retrospect I should have just started later but whatever.]

>>2740080
nuuuuu never start later. I'd always rather have a quick extra post then a pause then regular updates.
>more = better

also yea
>unravel now

>>2740064
>>Just push through, she said it wasn't real
Save ya mana guy's.

>>2740064
>Try to unravel it now.

Hah. Solid wall or not, you know how to deal with magic by now. The gold white threads warp and twist as you press your hands into them. You carefully watch the light pulsing out at your touch. You see it flow to the corners of the weave. Crouching down and finding the brightest thread, you pull.

The thread snaps and darkens in your hand. The thought doesn't enter your mind that this attempt could end in anything other than rousing success. The rest of the weave, however, doesn't follow. The magic pulls itself back together. None of the illumination in the remaining or repaired threads is lost. Still, you don't let that deter you: you just chose the wrong spot.

Shifting your attention to another corner, you try again. No success. You try each corner, and then the edges. The threads you pluck each time are not integral. Whatever force animates the magic quickly and easily replaces them. You're left with nothing. Though your actions send ripples over the arcane surface, the liquid like structure settles moments later. After each attempt the pattern shifts gently, then flows as if you were never there.

>Mana: 6/10

Frustrated and confused, you try to reevaluate your process. In each previous instance, touching the weave created a pulse of light that led you to the thread you needed to pull. In this case, there were no conclusive paths. It was more like the light was dispersing. Or maybe, rather than dispersing, it was leaving. You develop a suspicion.

Ceasing your ineffectual prodding, you instead make your way to the edge of the weave of magic in front of you. You stand with the glowing threads superimposed onto the illuminate section of wall. Immediately beyond the threads, the wall darkens, mundane. and just observe for a moment.

You look more closely. You look further. After a moment of focus, you see the part of the picture that you were missing. It's not that the wall changes, but rather the illuminated wall ends and the mundane wall begins. There is a clear seam, and the threads of magic flow through that seam. Whatever lies beyond, you can't actually see. The pulsing lights don't collect at the edge, they drift out of and away from this room. The central thread you need to pull apart isn't here.

With that, you're at a loss as to what to do about the threads of magic. You could perhaps try to just tear them apart entirely, though you can't imagine that'd be easy. Pushing the threads apart is a lot like pushing mud out of the way. It just flows back in. You could still try though.

Before you can decide what to do, your thoughts are interrupted by the reappearance of your spectral guide. She wears a frown on her face. "I understand that contradicting the messages of your senses is difficult, but you are a human being. Do not believe in the illusion. Allow your thought to conquer your senses. It might help to close your eyes."

It seems she's misunderstood the situation. Though to be fair, you're not sure you would be able to easily just walk into a solid wall. You're also not a hundred percent convinced her death hasn't just put her a little out of it, mentally.

She continues on, as much to herself as you. "Other techniques for mundanely dispelling illusions include foolng your sensory perception. If you had another person then you could fall back into their arms, only for them to step away. Making yourself dizzy would help too. If the situation is truly dire, you could attempt to deprive yourself of air or become deafened as well, in order to give your body conflicting sensory input. My current recommendation is to spin rapidly until it is difficult to stand." She nods. Having reached her conclusion, she crosses her arms and appraises you.

You:

>Just walk through
>Rip the illusion apart. You don't need the core to turn the magic into so many tattered threads (4 mana)
>Take her recommendation, as much to make it easier as to not let her know you weren't actually trying to get through the wall.
>Write-in

>>2740309
Run and jump at it, our brain being retarded can't stop us from being retarded.

>>2740309
>Just walk through
Maybe the true strand is on the other side.

>>2740318
>just walk through

>>2740316
>run at it and jump

Wrting for try A then do B.

>>2740316
word.

Not wanting to waste any more time, you walk directly at the wall with purpose. You take one confident step. Your face smooshes against solid stone. The real metaphorical slap in the face though, is when the magical weave on the wall lights up at your contact. You fall onto your ass. Looking up, you think you can see the imprint of your head on the magic before the threads fade from your vision.

Ms. Hsoppinha, to her credit, gives no indication of amusement. She watches with a flat gaze.

You remain seated and just gaze back at her.

She makes a gesture telling you to get on with it, then adds "I recommended spinning." The ghost does a twirl in midair, flairing out her fine clothing. Upon returning to her position facing you, she holds a hand over her mouth. Is that a grin?

It's fine though. Mind over matter. You back up to the edge of the room across from the wall, sweeping a detached arm-bone out of your path. Pressing your hands against the stone, you notice another weave of magic flash into existence behind you, but you put it out of your mind for the time being. You need to build up speed and tackle the wall.

Kicking off, you take two running steps and hop off the ground, leading with your shoulder. You close your eyes for good measure. You fly through the air for half a moment, the wall that you were fully expecting to greet you is not forthcoming. Instead, your shoulder meets the ground.

You land in a heap and open your eyes. Your shoulder aches from the impact. You were half bracing yourself for hitting the wall, but you weren't ready to land. Around you is a nondescript corridor built of the same shoddy masonry as the room you came from. The walls and floor, however, seem better kept. There are no mossy patches and no puddles. A flat light emanating from nowhere and everywhere gives the room a strangely two-dimensional cast. It's hard to gauge depth properly. You see like you've got one eye closed.

Moving to stand, you notice the most striking feature of the room: your leg. Below your right knee, it disappears into the solid stone. The sight is incredibly offputting. Unlike something disappearing below the surface of a liquid, the stone is completely undisturbed. You move your leg and foot around expecting some sort of resistance, but there's only air. You pull your leg all the way through.

Accompanying the rest of your limb, your spirit companion drifts her way through the wall. "It gets easier." She explains. "Once you've gone through the illusion, it's easier to do again. Or so I hear."

"I sure hope so." You reply. You're not looking to throw yourself to the ground every time you need to leave a room.

"I do too." She agrees. "We'll be encountering more illusory walls as we progress. Indeed this whole tomb seems to be a labyrinth designed to fool the traveler into looping indefinitely."

You stand as she explains, causing her to pause. You gesture for her to continue. "Go on."

"Yes." She clears her throat. Do spirits need to clear their throat? Is it a mannerism she's affecting or is it like an amputee's phantom limb? A phantom has phantom throat congestion. "As I was saying. This whole place is rife with illusion: walls and passages alike. You find yourself believing you've turned when really you've gone straight. It's entirely impossible to navigate properly under normal circumstances. I've noted the corpses of four unfortunate visitors who likely wandered until they perished, and possibly wander still."

You can see why that would be dangerous. The impression hits you again that this place seems.. dishonest. In the tales of travelers passing through town you always hear about ruins infested with beasts that are slain in glorious combat, or traps that clever adventurers notice and subvert. A puzzle to solve or a trial of dexterity. Does this count as such a puzzle? If so, what's the solution. You decide to bring it up.

"Is there any way to sort of gauge your progress? Could you mark the walls to note where you have and haven't gone?" You ask.

"A prospective explorer likely could, though they could mark illusory and real walls all the same. I don't know how intelligent this enchantment is, but marks on illusory walls could be used against them. Still, it's a fair idea. In theory you might be able to track your progress. While wandering after my death, I had a similar idea, but I.. well," Her translucent arms gesture down at the rest of her ghostly form.

"Died?" You finish helpfully.

"Indeed." She agrees. "Though I did break free of the maze." She says proudly, but her expression falters a second after. "Only to blunder my way into a deadly trap. Another dark room where the life was drained directly out of me. I was one of two people to ever make it out of the corridors, judging by the bodies. It's little solace." She goes quiet.

>Move on. Have her guide you through the labyrinth and find out just why you need your climbing gear.
>Go to where she died. You didn't see a Noxshbaum inspector's cloak in the room you just came from. Perhaps more importantly, it sounds like there might be another trap to disarm and consume. You're not saying you necessarily want to loot her corpse.
>What really matters to you right now is finding the core of the illusion. You're past the wall now. Follow the weave of magic.
>Write-in

>>2740457
>What really matters to you right now is finding the core of the illusion. You're past the wall now. Follow the weave of magic.
Illusion is evil and gay

>>2740457
>What really matters to you right now is finding the core of the illusion. You're past the wall now. Follow the weave of magic.
Disarm illusion then loot the tomb.

>>2740482
>>2740489
>Punish the illusion for daring to cross you.

>>2740513
can we just give the good old "Hey, if you can hear me, Parvolex sent me!" a try? As a freebie while we're trying to break all of Inaudax's fancy traps

>>2740520
>'Parvolex sent me'

I'll add that. Writng.

>>2740527
inb4 it activates the active defenses

>>2740527
inb4 it gives us a sicc blowey joey

>>2740555
Ghost blowjob WOO WOO

You're not sure what to say. You've never had to console the living before, let alone the dead. "I'm sorry." You offer. Small comfort.

"Yes." She composes herself. "Let's get going. Follow me; I know the way through the labyrinth. There will be walls you will pass through." She warns.

She begins to drift off, but you stop her with a word. "Actually, I wanted to try a couple things before we got going."

"Oh?"

"Well first off," You pause, then you call out "Parvolex sent me!" The sound of your yell fades quickly, almost muffled. Perhaps the noise passes through the illusion, then is unnaturally prevented from returning? You both wait in silence for something to occur, but nothing does. After a few more moments you continue. "Parvolex is my.. employer, so to speak." You explain. "He asked me to meet with Inaudax and say that to him."

"Parvolex..." She ponders. "A wizard's name. One with the same origin as Inaudax. I'm not familiar with the intricacies of wizard cabals, but its likely they were associates during Inaudax's lifetime. You said this Parvolex wanted you to meet with the dead man?"

"Not exactly. He said specifically for me to go to his resting place and tell him 'Parvolex sent you.'"

"Then maybe the message is some sort of keyword. If they were associates, they might have set up some sort of spell intended to trigger when a third party sent by Parvolex arrived. Yes, that makes more sense. After all this is Inaudax's tomb. It's not as though you could meet with a dead man." She nods to herself, confirming her theory.

When you hear her of all people put it that way, the opposite seems true. Really it's quite obvious from looking at her-- looking through her rather. "Unless he was a spirit." You correct her. "He could be around here just like you."

"Oh!" You snap her out of her own head. "Yes. Of course. Obviously that's possible. I just forgot for a moment.." She looks away bashfully. Sadly? It must suck to be dead. "Yes. He could well be a spirit. While I doubt a powerful wizard would end up as one of the restless spirits here, there is a barrier in the lower level that I cannot pass through. If he is beyond, that would explain why I have not seen him in my time wandering."

"This tomb was made for him right? Maybe he fashioned the bindings himself. Maybe he wanted to cheat death? In fact, are we sure that he's a spirit at all? Maybe he's actually just alive down there." You ask.

"No." She shakes her head. Recomposing herself, she looks back at you eye to eye. "Noxshbaum has records of his death at the hands of a wizard named Alqatil." She explains. "The records indicate that we were informed of a 'slight difference of opinions' and a 'somewhat lethal exchange of pleasantries'." She punctuates the statements with air quotes. "Recieving that message concluded our investigation of the devastation of the nearby countryside. Those records are over a hundred years old, however, and nobody alive is available to verify them. I believe them though. The events seem to be typical of incidents involving High Wizards."

"Over a hundred years old?" You ask. "Noxshbaum still has those records? You read them?"

"I spared no effort in seeking information about this region prior to my inspection." She states. Her air of pride has returned, driving away her sheepishness at missing the obvious point from before.

"Impressive." You state. She's more diligent than you've ever been about, well, anything. You've read your fair share of history due to your family's unique occupation, but you've rarely sought it out. You're much more interested in current events and practical texts.

"You said you had two things you wanted to do." She brings the conversation back on track. "The first was to attempt to complete your mission. What was the second?" She inquires.

"Oh yeah." You look at her with a grin. "Just watch."

You walk over to the wall you came through, placing your hand on it. Even though you know first hand that the stones beneath your fingers are an illusion, they feel no less real. The rough masonry scrapes gently against your fingers. The tactile sensation of coarse mortar and smooth stone true to life. How does magic like this work? Does it tap your memory? Does it replicate the someone else's senses? What if someone touched the wall with gloves, or scraped an unknown, exotic metal against it?

You know almost nothing about how the spell works. That doesn't matter though. You know everything you need to. Inspecting the weave of light in your vision, you note the a clear path flowing from where your hand presses it. You set off in that direction. Eve drifts after you, pondering your actions.

Now that you're in the right place, it's almost trivially easy to follow the path. This weave is far more expansive than that of the enchanted objects or even the trapped room, but it behaves simply. The light flows in a direction, like a stream flowing downhill. You follow it.

You walk for about a minute, trailed by your spectral friend, when the light diverts abruptly. You know what this is: a seam. The illusory wall meets a real wall. The sensory appearance is decieving. Damn conniving illusions. There's no difference without your sight of the magical threads: just flat lighting all throughout the hallway, but you're quite confident there's an illusion here that you need to pass through if you want to continue to follow the glowing strings.

Eve notices your pause. Her ghostly eyebrows are raised, imppressed. "There is a hallway there, veiled by illusion. Is that, perhaps, what you're looking for?"

"Yep." You confirm.

"Impressive." She mutters. It's less a compliment and more of an observation. You're quite pleased with yourself.

Your pride falters when you try to push through the wall though. As before, the awareness of the illusion doesn't do as much as you'd like. You still can't get through. You hold your hands out and brace your feet against the floor, pushing, but the wall doesn't give. You even pull a climbing piton out of your bag and toss it at the fake stone. It bounces off and clatters to the floor.

Gods save you. You want primordial Fire to come and scorch this place to ash. You want the wilderness to swallow it up. You want to somehow consign it to death, where it can be reborn as a rock resting at the bottom of a sewage cloaca. This. Is. Infuriating.

"Dust grind this place into nothingness!" You exclaim. Then you go with the vulgar and more concise "Fuck! How does that even work? If it isn't real, why does it stop an unthinking, unfeeling, piece of damned metal. Where are Forge's blessing right now?"

Eve doesn't react to your outburst. Instead, she's curious. "I must confess I know little about the nature of magic." She says to you candidly. "I was quite impressed you were able to locate the illusion. You must tell me more how you do it. Are you an adept?"

You ignore her, frustration boiling over. You back up and charge full tilt at the wall. Slamming into it would at least give you an outlet for your anger. As if mocking you, however, the wall is immaterial when you reach it. You pass through, grind to a halt, overbalance, then topple over. You hit the ground even angrier than before. Next time you're out adventuring, you're going to bring a pickaxe so you can dismantle any mocking stones you encounter, real or otherwise.

Still, you're through. You'll find the core, and once you do, you'll show it what happens when inanimate things mess with you. You're a professional. You've been disassembling objects since you were a small child. It is your godly duty, passed down by your deific great grandfather.

The spirit girl drifts through the wall behind you. She makes no attempt to hide the amusement on her pale face.

You place your hand on the frustratingly solid wall you came through and draw the threads of magic back into your vision. You trace your path along the strings for several minutes. Along the way, you encounter a few more walls you need to go through. None are as difficult as the first two, but they're still inconsistent. You walk face first into half a handful. Your anger only grows. The cold, fake stone laughs silently at you.

Slowly but surely you draw closer to your destination. The enormous weave of light you've been following makes that clear. The light from your hand pulses more rapidly. It twists in more intricate eddies as the network of threads thickens. There's more magic here than at the entrance. You see complexity even greater than that of the core of the trapped room.

You reach the illusion's core. Overlaid on a nondescript wall, the only thing that sets this hallway apart from any of the others is that weave of glowing light. You're quite sure at this point that Eve can't see the threads even when you're touching them, so you wonder what she's thinking when you stop here. The flat light and unmemorable patterns of stone do nothing to mark this place as special.

You find the core. This time, there's no trick. There's a bright, glowing string right there for you to pluck. The rest of the weave orbits it, drifting along the walls. You reach out and pull. The resulting magical carnage is mesmerizingly beautiful. Even more so, it's cathartic.

There's no near death experience to distract you, and the weave on the wall is no small inconsequential knitting like the wand or the ring. You relish your personal vendetta against this thing. You rip it, and from the tear spreads darkness.

Like metal filling out a mould, shadow flows over the network of magic. Darkness devours the threads. Your act sends out a destructive pulse. You render the arcane fabric to dust. Fuses burn of light burn out and vanish behind creases where illusory walls meet real ones. You see your touch spread beyond the hallway you stand in. The illusion falls to pieces.

>bullshit illusory labyrinth disenchanted
>Mana: 5/10

Today, the contest of man versus magic goes definitively to man. You smile smugly as the false wall in front of you vanishes, replaced with a true corridor.

Eve makes a noise of awe. Appropriately so: words don't describe the elegance of the event you've just engineered.

Along with the fake walls, the lights in the room go out. You don't need illusory illumation. Yes. Fade into darkness.

Your torch unlit, the spirit girl is your only illumination. She emits a soft blue glow that your eyes quickly adjust to. The low light is a small price to pay for overwhelming, unconditional victory. The god of magic can lick your boots. You thank your great grandfather Salvage for this glorious opportunity.

Your heavenly praises and profanities are short lived, however, when you look around. The blue light marking your location is not the only light you see anymore. In all four directions, you see other blue shapes illuminating the walls. Are they growing larger?

Eve's awe similarly short lived. She sees the same things. "Restless spirits!" She exclaims. "They're mindless and hostile. I avoid them beneath the ground, but you need to run!"

"Can't I fight them?" You cry out. You look around frantically for a place to run, but the lights down each of the four corridors are only growing stronger.

"Your magic!" Eve cries. "They won't be harmed by mundane implements. Whatever you did, can you do it at will?"

"Maybe?" As much as you ascribed personality to that illusion spell, the enchantments you've been facing have been mindless. Can you even disenchant a spirit? You really don't know. You've never read a treatise on magic, nor on the various forms of undead.

You need to act quickly.

>Flee. Eve said there was a barrier on the lower level. Ask her to lead you there. (Roll 3d10)
>Disenchant ghosts. You're feeling a pretty tired (5/10 tired to be exact), but you might be able to do it. (Roll 3d10)
>Let them come. They're ghosts and you're a person. What are they going to do, wave their arms through you. You don't really understand them though, and old man Ilaz would tell you not to test angry things you don't understand. (Roll 3d10)
>Cast a spell? (You currently have no spells)
>Write-in.

While you need to react, you feel yourself soaking up the magic like a sponge soaking up water. That illusion is yours now. The perpetrator becomes the victim.
Choose one:
>Spell: Mirrored Images (Create illusory copies of anything in your surroundings. Any being unable to disbelieve will be forced to interact with them.)
>Progress towards passive: True Sight (Gain a limited ability to see through any illusion. More advanced true sight also allows you to see the true nature of any deception. Even mundane deceptions such as lies and traps are laid bare before a true seer.)
>+3 Max Mana

[Last post for tonight. I was hoping to do 6 like yesterday, but this one ended up being really long.]

>>2740679
>Flee. Eve said there was a barrier on the lower level. Ask her to lead you there. (Roll 3d10)
>Progress towards passive: True Sight (Gain a limited ability to see through any illusion. More advanced true sight also allows you to see the true nature of any deception. Even mundane deceptions such as lies and traps are laid bare before a true seer.)
They're after our gains!

>>2740679
>Flee. Eve said there was a barrier on the lower level. Ask her to lead you there. (Roll 3d10)
>Progress towards passive: True Sight (Gain a limited ability to see through any illusion. More advanced true sight also allows you to see the true nature of any deception. Even mundane deceptions such as lies and traps are laid bare before a true seer.)
Eating dead people is just rude, we'll come back with a priest later

I'll be back on Thursday around 7PM PST, maybe earlier. I'll get a twitter someday soon too.

Your stats for the day:
>Gained [whatever wins this vote]
>Gained trait: Favored enemy: illusion
>5/10 Mana
>10/10 Life-force

>>2740679
Finally caught up
>Flee
>Gain more passive

>>2740679
>Flee. Eve said there was a barrier on the lower level. Ask her to lead you there. (Roll 3d10)
>Progress towards passive: True Sight (Gain a limited ability to see through any illusion. More advanced true sight also allows you to see the true nature of any deception. Even mundane deceptions such as lies and traps are laid bare before a true seer.)

post yfw two people control every vote

>>2741094
I mean most new quests don't get many players so that's normal

>>2740681
>>2740683
>>2740733
>>2740717
>Flee
>True sight

Could you also roll 3 rolls of 3d10? I'd like to know how well your escape attempt goes before I start writing it tomorrow.

Rolled 4, 6, 1 = 11 (3d10)

>>2742370

Rolled 5, 4, 3 = 12 (3d10)

>>2742370

Rolled 10, 10, 7 = 27 (3d10)

>>2742370

>>2742391
Dank rolls

>>2742372
>>2742375
>>2742391
3rd time's the charm, amirite?

File: random_number.png (7 KB, 400x144)

7 KB PNG

How will you handle crit successes/crit failures?

also remov bannu

>>2742765
If there's a roll that's all 10s or all 1s then it'll override everything else and something crazy will happen.

>>2742372
>>2742375
>>2742391
11, 12, 27 vs DC 15
Regular failure. Writing.

>>2744321
wait, I'm confused. Even if you took the average it's like a 16.666. How failure?

>>2744321
>>2744329
ohhhh wait you're doing the 2 fails and 1 success thing. Got it. Ignore me, carry on.

Eve! You speak frantically. "You said you hit a barrier. Lead me to it!"

"Understood." Her response is swift. She gestures down the path behind you. "Take the first right then the first left. Get past the spirits and we'll meet back up." She disappears into the wall, leaving you in the darkness.

Using the approaching illumination to orient yourself, you take off at a run. You tread lightly in order to avoid falling.

At this point, the spirits in the corridor have formed a veritable wall of ghostly blue. Their overlapping figures create a chaotic mass. Several faces with blank madness stare at you, mostly human, but you think you can make out the horns of a goatman on one of the deceased and the ears of an elf on another. Tattered clothes and old armor from any number of times and places jumble together incoherently. You see plate with a northern design. Is that club of dwarven make? The fabric from one phantom's tunic hails from across the western sea.

The motley assortment blends into a white-blue mist that obscures the path ahead, but the combined spectral illumination is enough for you to keep your footing on the irregular cobbles that form the floor. You reach the spirit wall shoulder first, hoping to punch through unscathed.

Several phantasmal limbs take swipes at you. Cold fire burns through your body. Your limbs go stiff for an instant, but your momentum carries you forward. You hit the immaterial wall. Your vision goes white as you pass through. Its unearthly chill penetrates you down to your bones. You shiver. Your muscles threaten to freeze.

>Life-force: 9/10

All at once, you're through; the spectral chill and icy burns fade in short order. You continue your sprint. As your sight returns, you turn to examine your pursuers. You catch a glimpse of several magical weaves, quickly fading now that you're past them. Taut threads of light pull on each spirit. The tethers ensnare each soul and lead below the ground, down and to the right. They strain against some unseen force; perhaps the souls, or maybe even Death himself, seek to detach these dead from the mortal coil.

You'd love to help, but you'd rather not join them. Stumbling as you return your vision forward, you take the first corner at a run. Your hands brace the wall in order to turn your momentum. As you pass around the stone, you enter nearly pitch darkness. The corridors, previously opened by the unraveling of the illusion, once again feel closed in. The darkness restricts the space.

You'd pull out a torch, but you doubt you have the time to fiddle with lighting it. You instead navigate by touch and what little light comes from the hall behind you. Helpfully, but also ominously, it grows stronger as you pull away from it. You hug the left wall and walk quickly.

[1/4]

You feel the masonry turn. The rough edges of stone alerting you to a corner. You've reached your temporary destination, but where's your guide? You wait. Taking the moment to recuperate, you finally pull out your torch. Unwrapping the end, you contemplate for a moment whether the light is worth attracting extra attention and ultimately decide that you need to be able to see.You spark your flint and steel

You spark your flint and steel. The glowing hot splint ignites the pitch. The torch bursts into smokeless flame, its warm glow revealing more of the same: mismatched, haphazard stone.

You don't like wasting time. Where is Eve? Your short brush with that mass of spirits showed you quite clearly that you can't properly fight them. You might be able to detach those tethers, but something tells you that the threads core to their construction are down where they were all being pulled from. Unlike Eve, you can't travel through solid stone.

Your thoughts turn back to the task at hand. Should you call out to Eve? You gather your breath.

A blue light appearing from the wall beside you cuts your cry off before it begins. You instead let out the air in your lungs as a sigh of relief. That relief vanishes in an instant. Before you is not a young woman wearing oversized red robes. Instead you see a middle-aged man wearing century-old armor. The design comes from the forges of the east: a series of small plates riveted to thick cloth. Several of them have been torn loose over time, lost here or elsewhere during this man's adventures while he was alive.

He hefts a huge sword over his half-helmed head. His mindless fury washes over you, blank eyes meeting yours. The sword swings diagonally through your chest, passing through you as easily as the air. You crumple. Your torch clatters to the ground in time with the the heavy thud of your body. There are no injuries, but your heart freezes in your chest. Your vision dims.

>Life-force 8/10

You reach out feebly from your prone position. Maybe you can erase this spirit, or free it from its snare before it kills you. You never tried to rip a weave to pieces, but now your life depends on it. You see the threads, light rendered crisp over your fuzzy vision. You pluck. You achieve nothing. The threads you pass through don't even break.

The spirit hefts his sword for another swing. He readies his strike, but before the insubstantial steel can strike you again, Eve appears. Her washed out red robes emerge from the stonework and her eyes catch your sorry state. Before you can even think, a wail erupts. A sound like wind flowing though standing stones fills your ears. The mournful ululation fills the passage with primal emotion. Loss. Pain. Fear.

You feel the noise surging through the halls and through your body.

You also feel the wind.

[2/4]

A huge gust picks you up off the ground and throws you through the air. You fly a hundred feet, skittering against the low ceiling. Your impromptu journey is swiftly cut short. Unyielding stone slams into you. The gale holds you against the wall for a second, then fades. You drop to the floor.

Your previous assailant is whisked away beyond the same stones. You're not sure which of you got it worse. Probably you. Mundane pain replaces the chill that had set into your limbs and heart. Your vision snaps back into focus. With mental acuity comes severe aches in your ribs, arms, legs, chest and head.

>Life-force 7/10
>Surprisingly moderate bruising: everywhere.

You rise feebly to your feet as Eve swoops towards you from down the hall. Her form is blurred slightly. You blink for a moment to clear your vision, but the soft edges and missing detail remain. The embroidery along her robe is now just golden streaks. On the other hand, the rest of the hall remains in focus.

You see by the faint light emanating from Eve. Your torch is somewhere, but not here.

"My apologies." Her voice, previously echoey and somewhat distant, now sounds as though it's passing through water. It's warbly and muffled. "It seems that with the illusion gone, my navigation is actually impaired. Having an adversary to tell me where not to go had become instrumental, but I believe I've figured it out now."

"No issue." Your voice is shaky but your throat, unlike the rest of your body, is unharmed. You wave your hand downwards in a dismissive gesture. "You just saved my life. Lead on."

"Can you still run?" She asks, concerned. "It's likely that the restless spirits will still be able to find us. With the illusion gone and your inability to hide under solid ground, fleeing remains our best option."

"The darkness makes it hard." You reply. "But I should be fine." You're pretty sure nothing's broken even after the hard hit you took. The force, thankfully or not, was spread out over your whole body. Everything hurts, but no one point took a bad enough hit to fracture.

"Follow." She commands. She sails off at a running pace.

It strikes you that her travel carries more grace than that that of the other spirits, even while blurred. Her posture is straight. Her robes, rather than giving her an air of unbalanced insanity, drift gently. Where throng of mad spirits lunged at you with brutal craving, it's clear that Hsoppinha has her wits about her, perhaps even more so than you.

You take off at a run

After a short period of travel, more blue shapes start appearing out of the stonework in pursuit. Perhaps following the noise of your passage or some unnatural instinct, they're constantly able to zero in on you even as you outpace them. You wonder if the restless spirits are angry at you for going through their corpses. Even the irreverent church of Death pays the dead proper respect in order to avoid this exact thing: angry spirits. You're pretty sure these ones are unnatural though, and what's done is done.

Even the rate of your travel and Eve's knowledge of the nondescript halls is only just enough to keep you clear of approaching foes. There's always a faint light around an oncoming corner or an indistinct shape in your peripheral vision.

You decided to pick up speed when a close brush with a ghostly spear spooks a year of your life away, figuratively. You call out to Eve "I can handle a faster pace. We should speed up."

Eve's brief response reaches you, the sound still out of step with reality. "Understood."

She pulls away from you for a moment, but you keep up with a half sprint. You've become more accustomed to the uneven stone, but it still catches you every so often in the low light.

As you're finally settling into the motion, Eve's underwater voice returns. "Climbing gear!" Is all she has to say.

You shift your pack. Reaching in, you string up the grapple, keeping your run at the same time. A shape pops from the wall in front of you. You're distracted at the worst moment by the intrepid spirit's appearance. Your foot runs into a raised stone and you take a tumble. Your luck turns back a moment later, when you and your equipment slide safely between the young man's legs, skimming his ghostly breeches.

Eve pauses and looks back, concern showing through the indistinct features of her face. You scramble to recover your gear and keep running.

"Hole on the left. Coming up." Eve calls.

You spot the turn just as you reach speed. Another corridor. You grab the corner and rotate, jumping slightly off the ground at the angle of the corner. You don't land.

There was no corridor. It was just the hole. Now you're falling.

All throughout the chasm are weaves of magical light. They spiderweb across the empty space and line the walls. If only they were physical threads: you'd be caught in a gentle net. Instead you're plummenting to your death.

[4/4]

You are going to fall and die. Another inglorious end for a prospective adventurer. There is no glamor in any of the traps and obstacles set by this tomb. You have to slow down and break your fall non-lethally.

>Wrap your hands and jam a climbing piton against the wall. Shoulders are overrated. Try to slow down long enough to be able to brace yourself in a corner, then climb down.

>Eve's gust of wind! Ask her to slow your descent.

>You're not sure what that gust of wind did to Eve, but it's clear it took something out of her. You don't want her to just fall into ghostly tatters. Maybe she has another trick that can save you. All you need is a handhold.

>Maybe you can somehow grab the immaterial strings? The magic has always been insubstantial, but it definitely exists on some level. There's so much of it here that if you could just touch it, you'd certainly be fine.

>Write-in


Whatever you choose, please roll 3d10

Rolled 3, 10, 3 = 16 (3d10)

>>2744568
>Wrap your hands and jam a climbing piton against the wall. Shoulders are overrated. Try to slow down long enough to be able to brace yourself in a corner, then climb down.

Rolled 3, 7, 5 = 15 (3d10)

>>2744568
>Wrap your hands and jam a climbing piton against the wall. Shoulders are overrated. Try to slow down long enough to be able to brace yourself in a corner, then climb down.

Rolled 4, 4, 3 = 11 (3d10)

>>2744568
>Wrap your hands and jam a climbing piton against the wall. Shoulders are overrated. Try to slow down long enough to be able to brace yourself in a corner, then climb down.

>>2744585
>>2744596
>>2744600
>Dislocate your shoulder

16, 15, 11 vs DC 15
Regular success. Writing now.

Thinking quickly before your freefall can reach terminal velocity, you rip the piton you threw at the illusion out of your pocket. Even though you intended to have it ready, there's no time to retrieve your grapple. You doubt you could make the throw back up to the lip of the hole in any case.

You ride your sleeves up and grip the piton so hard your knucles turn white. Right hand over left hand, you swing the piton at the wall. Starting from your core all the way up to your shoulders, you curl your body in order to get as much leverage as possible with nothing to brace against.

In a stroke of good fortune, the piton strikes cleanly at an abnormally large patch of mortar. It might be good enough to support the structure, but the unnecessarily large portion of raw lime cement is no match for the sharpened metal. You thank the architects for choosing to use the stuff as the primary structural element.

The tip of the piton penetrates a short distance into the mortar and catches.

Your fall stops. The metal of the piton bends dangerously, even the sturdy material unable to completely withstand the force of your fall. Your left arm wrenches out of its socket and the cloth covering your grip tears. You grit your teeth in pain.

You keep hold with your right hand. Your left arm falls, dangling loosely. Pain screams from your shoulder.

>dislocated shoulder

You need to get off this weakened piton, but you don't have a hand to set another one with. The constant sharp pain in your shoulder distracts you. Your free hang wears on your grip with every gentle swing and sway. If you don't act, you're going to fall.

You start swinging intentionally. When your body is at an angle near enough to the hole's corner, you press your feet out in opposite directions to hold yourself there. Thankfully, the wall is rough: plenty of friction. Your left foot even finds a slightly protruding stone to press against.

Awkward and unsustainable as your position is, you are stable. You have three points of contact. It only now occurs to you that you have no good way to free climb down due to your dislocated left shoulder. You would need to let go of a point key to your stability in order to move.

You doubt you can muster the force necessary to embed another piton without any leverage, so you give up on the notion. You'll just have to trust that this damaged metal will hold. You shrug your pack off your left shoulder and swing it under your right so you can get access to it.

Raising your left hand awkwardly from the elbow, you're able to grab a bit of the rope attached to the grapple. Feeding the rope upwards slightly and bending your head down to your chest, you're able to grip the rope with your teeth. Having something relatively soft to bite down on really helps you cope.

[1/? I'm still writing but I figure it's better to post midway.]

Now's the tricky part. You need to let your right hand go in order to actually fix the grapple to the piton. Pushing off and up, you teeter for just enough time on your feet. You grab the rope out of your mouth. Your arm makes a quick motion as you teeter. The rope loops over the piton. You'd rather get the hook of the grapple through a hole, especially with the thing bent like it is, but you have to settle for this. Hopefully the rope doesn't slip off.

You give the rope a yank and the grapple catches. Good enough for you. You start downwards, dropping short distances each time you release your right hand. You're going to get some wicked blisters, but you don't see a better way to go about this.

The hole looks deep: you can't see the bottom. It's also very dark though, since magic threads don't provide any real light. You're hoping that the depth is just a trick of the lack of light. You've got a long hundred feet of rope, more good advice from Izal, but the real worry is your own ability to execute this climb.

It occurs to you that you could ask Eve how deep the chasm actually is, but you think if you opened your mouth you'd probably only be able to manage a scream of pain. She floats near you as you descend, helpless concern marring her features almost as much as the blurriness.

You climb to the bottom with no further event.

When your feet touch the blessed floor. You open your mouth to sing your praises to the gods. "AAAAURRRAUGH." You say, exalting the god of storms for allowing you to pass through this trying time, the god of the forge for giving these architects the inspiration to use mortar as bricks, and the god of life for blessing you with continued existence.

"Oh dear." Eve says worriedly. "Will you be alright?"

"GRAAAURAH" You confirm.

You lean against the wall, clutching your shoulder. Your hand feels raw even against the soft cloth. You've got wicked rope burn. Fortunately, it doesn't really hurt. All your capacity for pain is taken up by the empty socket where an arm should be. Your bruises are all but forgotten. You're going to need that joint back into its rightful place, but for now you just lean against the wall.

You slump down, taking a breather. You take stock of your surroundings. You're about sixty feet down from where you fell. The only illumination is the glow coming from Eve, which flickers brightly at her distress.

She floats back and forth hypnotically, worrying about what she could do. It puts a goofy grin on your face. Your expression only serves to highten her anxiety. Her normally calm demeanor shattered by the situation.

You wonder vaguely what emotions feel like for a spirit. They have no body to feel with, right? Is it all in the mind? You suppose normal pains of the body are all in the mind, come to think of it. Your shoulder hurts.

[2/?]

Even though your only light source is an upset spirit girl, the room really doesn't seem so dim. Spiderwebs, nets and knitting of magical thread all weave their way around your vision. You can see them from down where you're sitting all the way up to the top. You'd love to consume whatever enchantment that is, but it should probably wait.

Another magical light sits in your sight. The wall across from you is an open space of solid red. You're pretty sure it's not the chasm's weave, since the threads don't run across it, which means it's some other enchantment. You'd bet your other shoulder that that's the barrier Eve mentioned.

This reminds you, of course, of your original plight. You were being chased by supernaturally dogged pursuers. You'd love to hope that they lost you when you fell: you've been climbing for a while now and haven't seen a hint of them, after all. You somehow doubt that's the case though.

The wand you disenchanted weighs, if not on your conscience, then on your mind. You wonder if it's owner can find you through it. You defiled his or her corpse, after all.

Your prolonged period of rest and thought is interrupted by Eve's increasingly concerned voice. "Ok! Ok. Don't panic." You aren't panicking.

You consider explaining to Eve that you're fine, but your arm is still wracked with horrible pain. Somehow, you suspect that anything you're capable of saying would only make the situation worse. You really need to set your arm.

Before you can make the move to put your arm back in place. Eve provides you with an alternative. A crazy person's alternative.

"Alright! Maybe I can help." She nods frantically, her features flicker back into and out of clear resolution, but that does little to comfort you. You see a hint of madness creeping into her eyes. She continues, "I am medically trained, and have experience setting dislocated shoulders." She nods again, as if to affirm herself. "As a spirit, I can't touch you, but I can take possession of your body! ...Theoretically." Her voice cracks with insanity before cooling off.

You think her idea is probably pretty bad. For one, you don't know how your power works. What if trying to possess you just erases her and gives you some associated magic ability? For two, you'd rather stay in control of yourself, thank you very much.

[3/3]

It seems clear that she's going to do something drastic. Your shoulder hurts.

>Fix your shoulder and/or tell her no. It'll hurt even worse than the pain you're already in, but it needs to happen at some point. (Roll 3d10)

>Let her do it. Would getting possessed really be so bad? You can't count the number of times you've wished someone else could just finish an exercise or menial task for you. This is a lot like that, right?

>Hobble through the red barrier. You can explain yourself once you're in shape to communicate, but for now you need to get away from crazy girl.

>Actually, those things can wait. You have a hole full of enchantment to consume. (Roll 3d10)

>Write-in

[Don't forget to roll too. Technically it's better to wait until the vote's been tallied so you can't switch if you get low rolls, but who cares. It's not like you know the DC anyways.]

Rolled 2, 6, 4 = 12 (3d10)

>>2744758
>Fix your shoulder and/or tell her no. It'll hurt even worse than the pain you're already in, but it needs to happen at some point. (Roll 3d10)

Rolled 10, 4, 4 = 18 (3d10)

>>2744758
>Fix your shoulder and/or tell her no. It'll hurt even worse than the pain you're already in, but it needs to happen at some point. (Roll 3d10)
I imagine disenchanting is hard while in constant pain

>>2744763
>>2744773
I'd appreciate it if one of you would roll a 3rd time. I've still got a few more posts in me for tonight.

Rolled 3, 3, 9 = 15 (3d10)

>>2744814
I am king roller
qm say so me am king all listen now

>>2744763
>>2744773
>>2744816
12, 18, 15 cs DC 15
Arm restored. Writing now.

Before your spectral companion can do something rash that you'll both regret, you decide you need to stop wallowing in your pain. Who would have thought getting your shoulder dislocated would hurt so badly. Not even getting the life directly sucked out of you compared.

You grab a handful of dangling rope and stuff it into your mouth. Steeling your nerves and biting down hard, you grab your arm and jerk it back into place. The flash of plan shrieks through you, but you keep your feet.

You rotate your arm experimentally. It hurts, but the sharp pain of untreated injury no longer plauges you. You'll be fine. Hoping that you're finally in condition to talk, you turn your attention to Crazy Hsoppinha before she succumbs to insanity.

"Calm down." You say soothingly. "I'm fine. Just needed a moment to recuperate before I fixed myself up."

She gazes at you. She flickers into and out of focus, lending her an air of madness even as her body language returns to normal. Her wide eyes pierce you, shockingly similar to those of the mad spirits above, before they relax. Sanity returns to her ghostly visage.

This time, her embarrassment is palpable. She turns her gaze away from you and looks at the floor as she speaks. "I don't know what came over me." She apologizes. "It was like in the hall with the greatsword wielding spirit. I thought you needed urgent help."

"It was partly my fault." You console. Personally, you think it was mostly her fault, but still. "I need to get better at dealing with pain." You give her a grin.

She laughs for a moment. The trill shifts strangely between echo and underwater, almost like someone talking while drinking something. Talking while drinking something while far away and also in an empty cavern, really.

"I thought you did quite a good job actually." She responds. "That was quite the climb, and impressive impulse to stop your unexpected fall. I should have communicated more clearly about the hole. Once again, I apologize."

You ease back into comfort. The stress of the situation fades, the two of you trading humility for a moment and warming back up to eachother. You're glad things ended up alright.

You're almost going to regret releasing Eve to the afterlife. You've gone through more serious dangers than you've ever faced in your life.

I mean sure, you fell off a cliff while playing with your brothers. There was also that time when you started a minor forest fire and got trapped in the middle of it. You once angered a mother bear so badly she started climbing up into a tree after you.

Basically your life has had several brushes with mortality. But those events are beside the point. They've never been this real before. You've never suffered this much pain and injury. It's a miracle you're still all in one bruised, aching piece.

On top of that, you've been messing around with more magic than most people have ever seen in their lives. Normally you're lucky to see a court ritualist's implements as they pass through town, or a traveling alchemist's concoctions. Instead, you've disconvered some godlike atavism inside you. It's beyond your wildest dreams.

Adventuring isn't exactly what you expected, but it's damn close. Like something out of Izal's stories.

And through basically the whole ordeal, Eve has been with you.

You make a strange duo, but now that you're not in any danger, you can say you've quite enjoyed your time here. The trials feel less real now that they're memory.

Wait. Not in any danger? There are still spirits afoot. You need to get past that barrier or find some way to fight them. That's right: this is where you part ways with the young, late Ms. Hsoppinha for now.

Aside from the brush with insanity, you're sure she'll be fine. She said she could hide underground. Unlike the restless spirits, she has her wits about her, so you doubt it will much trouble for her to evade them even without the illusory maze.

With that in mind, you:

>Say farewell for now and walk through the barrier. Hopefully you'll get a chance to say a proper goodbye before you release her to the afterlife.

>Hold on. She can possess you right? It was an insane idea before, but now that she's calmed down, maybe she can sort of 'ride along' as you pass through.

>Everything else can wait. There are no immediate dangers and no urgent matters. Unravel that huge weave of magic in the hole with you.

>That barrier is in the way of Eve? You could just disenchant it. That wasn't quite the plan, but it might give you an ability you can use to fight the hostile spirits if they show up again.

>Write-in

>>2744851
>Everything else can wait. There are no immediate dangers and no urgent matters. Unravel that huge weave of magic in the hole with you.
We can remove the spirit barrier once we cisenchant the thing holding spirits here.

>>2744851
>Say farewell for now and walk through the barrier. Hopefully you'll get a chance to say a proper goodbye before you release her to the afterlife.
we need to go whine at a dead man

>>2744851
>>Everything else can wait. There are no immediate dangers and no urgent matters. Unravel that huge weave of magic in the hole with you.

>>2744858
>>2744860
>Eating now. Other things later

>>2744859
>Bye

You keep thinking spirits are going to suddenly pop out of the wall like they did while you were fleeing, but it's been about a half hour now, what with your climb, short rest and short conversation. You can afford to delay just a little bit longer.

The really important thing is magic. You were in too much pain to do anything about it while climbing, but you want to disenchant the magic in this hole. Whatever it is, you want to render it into fragments and absorb its power.

Going into this mess, you only had a vague idea of what was going on. You broke a wizard's ring. You think you get it now. Your great grandfather, the god of salvage himself, has left in your blood a mission. Find magic. Break it. Repurpose the useful remains.
Salvage has never been a large cult. It's more of a second thought. Sailors might consider the god when recovering wrecks or hoping their ship stays hale and whole. When they do, however, they first pay their respects to Forge and Storms respectively. It's right after that when they think of Salvage.

Still, there's an honest following. Not a god that gets a lot of worship, but he gets enough acknowledgement to remain known and wield some power. The blessing of Salvage is worth a lot to some people.

Those people --other than your mother-- live on the coast though. You've met a few; Ramamire is a bit of a crossroads and the shop is the only shrine to salvage in miles, but you've never really cared. That is, until now: every trap you disarm brings you that much closer to the god.

You think it was beating that illusion that really did it.

You feel around the weave of magic at floor level, watching the flow of light as you touch the various available threads. It's actually quite hard to follow: the magic imposed on the three dimensional space, rather than just the walls, and doesn't follow direct paths. It takes you a minute to figure out where the core threads are.

In that minute, Eve becomes confused. "What exactly are you looking for?" She inquires. "Did something fall from your pack while climbing? I can help you with illumination." She offers.

"It's not that." You explain. "There's something in here, like the illusory walls. I want to break it."

"The barrier?" She questions. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"Something else." You say, leaving it at that. You're pretty sure this web isn't the barrier. The strings don't go over that wall and Eve is able to pass through the area just fine.

As you speak, you find the center of the weave. Fifteen or twenty feet above you, the lights converge right at the height of the supernaturally blocked doorway. It's the centerpiece of a network of thread diagonally spanning from the floor to a point on the wall. The rest of the threads feed into this particular web from all around the stone shaft.

It's too high for you to reach, but that's what climbing gear is for. Your rope is still set up.

Grabbing it with hands at the ends of two relatively healthy arms, you begin to make your way back up. Your shoulder doesn't feel great and your right hand burns with the physical contact, but you're fine.

The rope holds well enough up to the level of the core thread. You can see quite clearly now the place you need to pluck. You consider for a moment the idea of climbing slightly higher, then leaping to the center, but that strikes you as a bad idea.

You instead opt to swing out. You push off with your legs but don't get far enough on the first try. Using your muscles as springs, you build up slightly more energy. You swing out three times, slightly closer on each attempt. On the fourth, you finally reach the thread. Grasping it with your right hand, you rip it free. The enchantment begins to go dark.

At the same instant, your final violent motion jerks the rope free from the damaged piton above. You drop like a stone.

You accelerate for an instant, as one would expect from gravity. Shortly thereafter, however, you find yourself slowing down. Even as the threads fall apart, they gather around you while you fall, propping you up like you're falling through a viscous fluid. You can't maneuver at all, but you don't need to. The magic lightly lowers you to just about an inch off the stone, then drops you the rest of the way.

You land gently on your back, nonplussed.

The weave unravels and darkens, its final act protects you less from injury, and more from looking like a fool. You're confused until you feel the magic course into you. After that, you don't look like a fool, but you sure feel like one.

>featherfall aura disenchanted

As you ponder all the effort you wasted in the past half hour or so, Eve floats over to you.

"Well done." She says sincerely, impressed. "Did you figure that magic out just now? I imagine future falls will be much less dire."

You ponder for a moment if she's mocking you but she seems too genuine. "Yeah." You say. You want to add something else, an explanation more for yourself than her, but you have nothing to say.

For the first time you find yourself wishing your companion was actually alive. If she actually had a body, she'd have known that you can just jump down this hole. You wouldn't have had to wrench your arm. You can't really blame her though. You're sure she wishes she was still alive too.

And speaking of wrenching your arm. Why not make the spell slow you the whole way down? Why introduce the safety concern of stopping midway? Who built this awful place? You take back everything positive you ever thought about the architects.

You fume for a minute, lying on the floor. You eventually go to retrieve the fallen grapple. You coil the attached rope and return it to your bag. At least it served its purpose well.

Looking up, you can't see the damaged piton you left there, but you doubt it has moved. It goes against your nature to leave behind a perfectly good, recoverable piece of metal, but you're not about to go back up there right now. You think maybe the steel wouldn't have bent so easily if it hadn't been reclaimed from scrap that was probably originally from another item also made from reclaimed scrap, but you discard that thought. It did the job. It really shouldn't have bent so easily, but you'd still like it back.

You ponder the idea of actually climbing back up just to get it, but the sight above quickly removes that notion from your head. With the weave of magic gone, you can make out the top of the hole clearly. There are a few indistinct white-blue shapes. You wonder if they saw you.

They begin to drift down. They definitely saw you, or heard you or something.

Now you really should leave.

>Through the barrier you go. You should tell Eve to hide.

>Try to take Eve along as a passenger. There's no way this could be a bad idea.

>Disenchant the barrier, hopefully to get something to fight spirits with. This is definitely not an even worse idea.

>Write-in


And also choose one:

>Spell: featherfall (self explanatory)

>Progress towards passive: hardfall (When you land too hard, the ground gets hurt instead of you. To an extent)

>+2 Mana

>>2744880
>>Progress towards passive: hardfall (When you land too hard, the ground gets hurt instead of you. To an extent)

>>2744880
>Through the barrier you go. You should tell Eve to hide.
>Progress towards passive: hardfall (When you land too hard, the ground gets hurt instead of you. To an extent)
Butt slam here we come baby

>>2744880
>Through the barrier you go. You should tell Eve to hide.
>Progress towards passive: hardfall (When you land too hard, the ground gets hurt instead of you. To an extent)

>>2744881
>>2744882
>>2744887
>Casting spells is anathema to my being

>>2744887
>>2744882
>See you. I've got a dead wizard to talk to

Writing.

"Up there." You whisper to Eve. "They've found us. I'm going, you should hide so they don't turn their ire on you."

"Understood." Eve's favored response reaches your ears. At your behest, she sinks into the floor.

You think about spirits again. What's it like to be inside a solid object, especially your eyes? Is it just dark and black? Spirits don't really have eyes technically, so how does their sight even work? Do they need light to see?

Maybe you should ask Inaudax when you run into him. You walk towards the barrier.

Passing through is a curious feeling. It's a similar sensation to having the life sucked out of you, but it doesn't hurt. Instead, it's more like a tug on your veins and organs. Something is trying to pull you inside out, but it's not pulling hard enough to actually make you feel pain. It's slightly disorienting, but it really feels quite good. The aches and pains of the day don't go away, but they feel more distant. You can tell that they hurt, but you don't really feel hurt, so to speak.

Making contact with the strings of the barrier reveals to you a half dome of magic. It starts at the doorway and extends upwards along a cavernous ceiling. You assume it also extends down into the ground, conisdering that spirits can pass through the solid stone, but you can't actually see it.

Once the red of the barrier fades from your vision, you get a good look at the room you've entered. It's a vast open area that, in spite of the high ceiling, has somehow become claustrophobic. A haphazard assortment of precious metals, gemstones, and other things are scattered about the room. Someone seems to have placed ritual objects at random in any location where there was sufficient space.

You see a massive solid blue gemstone sitting on a stone dais off to the side. Under the dais is a gold inlaid circle in some arcane pattern on the ground. Laying against the stone are tablets carved with what you can tell is an imitation of a magical weave. Much like the stones by the waterfall outside, they glow blue. You see what looks like a zen labyrinth of waist high walls winding aimlessly around the room.

You see papers with barely comprehensible writing, stone and metal circles, carvings and reliefs, glowing gems, not glowing gems, and even a small fountain, all over the place. The only adjective that properly describes the room is 'mess'. Standing in the center of all the chaos is presumably the one responsible: the ghostly figure of a wizened old man. He wears a padded, lumpy robe clearly tailored for comfort rather than style. His wispy white hair trails down to his shoulders in strings. The right-middle of his head is left with a bald patch. His beard sits unevenly on his wrinkled face.

As you pass beyond the barrier he looks over at you. "So this is the interloper who has disturbed my peaceful rest." He says to himself. The state of this room really doesn't scream 'peaceful' or 'rest' to you, but wizards are supposed to be an eccentric bunch.

"I'm quite impressed." He says approvingly, before his tone abruptly changes. "But also quite frustrated. I left a quite clear 'do not enter' sign at the entrance of my tower. You not only entered, but also destroyed the secondary 'do not enter' defenses. I cannot abide living creatures in my tower." His voice crackles with madness. "And I hate having anything at all in my restful sanctum!"

At his yell, a ragged ghostly blue light appears above his raised hands. In half an instant, the light resolves into a jagged spear, levered right at your chest. The tip skims you, triggering your sight.

You see the object's strings wind around its phantasmal form. They flow from Inaudax's hands and twist outwards, culminating at the tip of the spear. The flowing lights seem to indicate that the core of the spear is right at the tip. The direction of the pulses is quite clear to you. You probably shouldn't, but it's quite tempting.

"Find peace in the tower foyer." He says, voice tinged and unbalanced. "Other spirits are not allowed in my sanctum."

>Disenchant the spell. This is too good of an opportunity.

>"Parvolex sent me." Don't mess around

>Ok he's said it twice now. You have to know. "Tower? Foyer?"

>Write-in

>>2744901
>"Parvolex sent me." Don't mess around

>>2744901
>Disenchant the spell. This is too good of an opportunity.
Unlike others so far this one is a temporary spell so get it while the getting's good.

>>2744901
Disenchant and tell him who sent us at the same time. Because why not botg

>>2744901
>>"Parvolex sent me." Don't mess around

>>2744921
Whoops. Already started writing for both. I probably should have closed the vote but it'll be fine, you can just do both with disenchanting being more like an incorporated write-in.

Everything else you've seen thus far has been a permanent fixture. This is the only proper spell you've seen first hand since you started tearing things apart. The magic is not quite the same as your first brush with spectral weaponry: there was no magical weave in that greatsword, but it's pretty clear that this spear will be no less dangerous.

You obviously would rather not be killed by an insane ghost wizard, but you really don't want to pass up this opportunity. He's giving you the perfect chance to grab another bit of magic. You don't doubt he has something else up his sleeve after this, but you'll just tell him Parvolex sent you before he rips out your soul and leaves you to wander in the 'foyer'.

You really don't want him to kill you though. "Parvolex sent me." You say.

He makes a move as though to stab you, but hesitates at your words. You quickly take a swipe at the tip of the spear. Seeing what you've done, Inaudax sends it through you, eyes wide with fury. The thing begins scattering like mist in a breeze, but it moves towards you faster than it dissipates. The blunt end goes through you. You feel like you've just had a chunk taken out of you. The metaphysical entry wound is cold.

Although it hits you, the spell goes dark soon after. You don't feel dead, so hopefully its effects were blunted by you quite literally removing the tip of the spear.

>Mana: 3/10
>Life-force: 5/10

As the strings unravel down to parvolex and the pool of light collects in your hand, he rips his hands away like he's just been burned.

You reach a momentary impasse. He stares you down with cold fury. He raises his arms again, summoning a ragged blue light. You see the strings as they emerge, weaving themselves into the shape of a spell, only to darken as they converge. Like a poison spreading from the head, the darkness consumes the spell.

A moment later, your hands burn. You whip them back as thogh you can somehow avoid the connection, just like Inaudax. Your momentary connection frays your soul. The burning runs up and down your veins for an instant but then fades.

>Life-force: 4/10

>spectral spear disenchanted.

"What. Did. You. DO!" Inaudax's voice rises into a scream. He creates another weave of the same spell, this time pushing energy into it to the point where flowing light outpaces the darkness and drives it back. Another spear forms, and as the threads of light properly bind together, they fade from your sight, out of contact.

You're worried for a moment that he's going to run you through with it, but he lowers it shortly after.

"Of course Parvolex sent you!" His eyes are wild. "Isn't it illegal to collect money from a dead person? I just want to rest in peace. It says so on the signs!" He works himself up into a rage. His ghostly form flickers, burning bright with white light. Nearby pieces of paper burst into, though you personally feel no heat. The room is cool and damp: completely placid. You think you hear the drip of water somewhere.

Inaudax on the other hand looks like he's going to blast apart like a superheated piece of pottery with air trapped inside. He becomes indistinct and you're forced to look away fromt the light. Then the room returns to its eerie, flatly illuminated state. Some switch flips in his head and he cools off, literally. "At least Parvolex had the decency to send an apprentice. My name is Inaudax, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

There are several things wrong with his understanding of the situation, but you're going to correct none of them. The right thing to do here is probably to introduce yourself. You start "My name's -" but he interrupts you.

"Anyways. Parvolex's money is in the back room. Look for the box labeled 'Parvolex's money'. I would greatly appreciate it if you would take it and leave." He speaks in a cordial tone, but in the next sentence he actually turns cheerful, a stark contrast to the content of his words: "Once you see Parvolex, inform him that I never want to see him or any of his associates ever again, and that if I do, I'll curse him and everything he loves with the utmost of my power."

You struggle to come up with an appropriate response. Fortunately, you don't need to.

"Touch nothing and leave forthwith." He adds. "As I said before, I do not abide the living in my sanctum."

>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"

>"Quick question. What was that you were saying about a tower?"

>Do not poke the crazy spirit wizard. Go to the back room.

>Write-in

Also choose one:
>spectral weapon (summon a ghostly weapon, without a necromancer's touch it'll do nothing to the living, but against spirits and their ilk it works like steel against a mortal)

>Gain progress towards passive: Out of Step (limited ability to interact with things slightly beyond the mortal coil like they're wholly there.)

>+1 max mana

[Last post for tonight. I'll probably be back on Saturday around the same time. I'll make a twitter soon too I swear.]

>>2744942
>>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"
>>spectral weapon (summon a ghostly weapon, without a necromancer's touch it'll do nothing to the living, but against spirits and their ilk it works like steel against a mortal)

>>2744942
>Write-in
Try to get close enough enough to the giant blue gem to steal the enchantment by asking about him binding his soul here.
>Gain progress towards passive: Out of Step (limited ability to interact with things slightly beyond the mortal coil like they're wholly there.)

>>2744942
>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"
>"Your tower has cause me great pain and suffering I demand recompense on a personal level, give me magic stuff so I can eat it."
>Gain progress towards passive: Out of Step (limited ability to interact with things slightly beyond the mortal coil like they're wholly there.)

>>2744942
>friend
>passive

>spectral weapon (summon a ghostly weapon, without a necromancer's touch it'll do nothing to the living, but against spirits and their ilk it works like steel against a mortal)

>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"

>>2744942
>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"
>"Quick question. What was that you were saying about a tower?"

>Gain progress towards passive: Out of Step (limited ability to interact with things slightly beyond the mortal coil like they're wholly there.)

Get ALL THE PASSIVES!!!

And I think there is no way out but the way we came, and the ghosts need to be banished for us to safely leave. So demand to have our ghost friend released.

I vote for the spear spell. If the wizard ghost gets pissy then we will need to have a way to put the fucker down.

>>2745187
this

>>2745187
this is how you get murdered by a wizard.

>>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"
Reason with him, if we tell him she was instrumental to breaking into his sanctum he'll probably want her gone too. If he can't release her off of whatever is binding him to the material maybe he can bind her directly to an object so we can remove her from the range of the ghost catcher.

>>2745187
All of this is a terrible idea and you should feel bad. Not only are we in no position to demand anything but our only hope of actually defeating this wizard would be to disenchant whatever is holding the spirits here and hoping he can't linger on his own.

>>2744942
>"A friend of mine is one of the spirits outside that barrier. Is there some way you could release her?"
>Gain progress towards passive: Out of Step (limited ability to interact with things slightly beyond the mortal coil like they're wholly there.)

>>2744942
Hey OP question for you. I get the feeling that a rank of the passive is about 1/3 as effective as the active. Is that about right? Like, we'd have to eat 3 featherfall traps and put them in the passive to be about as effective as just casting featherfall?

not asking for spoilers, just curious about how effective the passives are vs their active counterparts

>>2745767
>1/3 as effective
[Did you read my mind? Passives having 3 stages of progression is the plan for most of them when I come up with them. Yeah you're basically correct. The power for 3rd stage passives might be a little higher, but it depends on the ability and the spell.

Also, aside from being always on, the other benefit of passives is that they're more flexible than spells. When you disenchant a spell you don't learn it like a proper wizard would, it's more that you copy it, so without extra training you'd be limited in how you could change the spell. With passives, you're still somewhat limited, but less so than with spells. It is harder to be creative with passive abilties though, so there's a tradeoff there too.]

>>2747053
>>2745767
[That said, this is a provisional system. These are things I imagine to be true, but because I have no idea what I'm doing, if in practice they don't work out or play badly, then I'll just change them.]

>>2744947
>"I broke into your house and got hurt. You owe me."

>>2744946
>Disenchant a random important-looking object

>>2745072
>What tower?

>>2744944
>>2744947
>>2744949
>>2744961
>>2745072
>>2745672
>Can you release my friend from eternal imprisonment?

>>2745187
>>2745347
>I demand that you release my friend.

--
>>2744946
>>2744947
>>2744949
>>2745072
>>2745672
>One day these abilties will be useful

>>2744944
>>2744961
>>2745187
>>2745347
>I want something to actually be able to show for all this magic

Writing for:
>ask nicely
>passive

"I understand." You say, playing the part. "I'll just get what I came here for and you'll never see me ever again."

"Good. Yes." The spirit responds dismissively, already losing interest in you. He turns his attention back to whatever he's working on.

"There's just one small thing." You mention. His attention snaps back to you and you mentally wince. You continue before he can saything else. "One of the spirits outside is a friend of mine, you see. She'd rather not be imprisoned here, so if you could release her to the afterlife I'd really appreciate it."

He ponders for a moment. Rather than the anger that you expected, what you see on his translucent features is instead genuine confusion. "Why would anyone want to go to the afterlife?" He asks you. "What could possibly be worse?"

Well that's not quite the answer you were expecting. Stopped halfway on your trip to the treasure room, you answer him. "I wouldn't know." You say humbly. "But I would guess that she doesn't want to go insane, wandering the hall for all eternity."

Before he can begin to think that idea over, you press him with a further request, hoping to end the conversation quickly before his temper turns. You suspect there's something about being a spirit that makes someone emotionally volatile. Maybe it comes with being dead. "If you could give me access to the spell holding her, I'm sure I could dismantle it." You offer.

He turns up his nose at you and makes a dismissive noise. "Hmph." Spirits don't exhale right? Is it just an emulation of the real thing or is there some sort of spectral air that they interact with? "That is out of the question. The soul snare is essential to my continued existence on the mortal coil. Would Parvolex let you stick your hands near his soul?" You wouldn't know. "The nerve of apprentices these days. After you tell him about the curse, please also explain to him that your etiquette is lacking, and you require remedial lessons."

"Right." You accede. "I'll make sure to do that." You still haven't gotten closer to solving your quest to free Eve. Maybe if you knew more about the enchantment. It only covers the tomb right? You haven't heard any rumors of ghosts in the surrounding area. "But back to my friend." You say. "What if she just left the range of the soul snare? Would that work?"

"She can't just 'leave'." He scoffs at your inquiry. He mutters to himself "Parvolex always did skimp on necromantic education, the fool." Then he raises his voice back to conversational levels. "How would you like a small lesson in undeath?" He asks, smugness infusing his question for some reason. "Of course, only if you're willing to embarrass your master by learning from a 'jumped up corpse puppeteer' rather than him."

That explains the tone.

"Sure." You agree. Why not?

His expression becomes inordinately pleased at your response. Contrast to his death threats from earlier, he looks almost like he could hug you. "Come. Sit." He says.

You walk tentatively over to the center of the room and take a seat on a broken piece of stone that might have once been the mount for something. He waves his ghostly hand in a short arcane gesture. Wind wafts through the room, carrying the scent of wet cave air. The damp breeze whisks the papers Inaudax was using off the table. They scatter randomly across the room.

In their place, the wizard summons a soft blue light that quickly resolves itself into the shape of an orb. "The soul snare enchantment" He explains, pridefully "places a tether around each spirit in the area, protecting them from the cruel machinations of Death. Not even the pull of the god himself can steal a spirit away from the magic."

You basically got that part from the name of the thing, and the presence of a bunch of disembodied dead people.

He continues. "However, holding a spirit here isn't enough for my purposes. Unlike Parvolex would have you believe, my genius is unparalleled. You see, the soul is a somewhat fragile thing. It needs the energy of life to keep itself moving, lest it settle into oblivion. A trapped spirit will simply exhaust itself and cease to exist. Nobody wants that. It is, in fact, the one thing that necromancers and Death can agree on."

You're not quite sure you understand. Souls are out of your league. He continues his lecture though, not really leaving any time for you to interject with a question. You're not sure you would even want to. While he seems quite pleased to share his knowledge, if he found out you weren't actually a wizard's apprentice from your ignorance, or if his temper turned suddenly, then you'd be in serious trouble.

"Normally one would use their own life energy or keep some sort of farm to feed the spirits, but I don't abide life in my sanctuary."

You're pretty sure that you count as life, but he doesn't add anything more about your presence so you don't bring it up.

"Instead, my soul snare takes minimal energy from the outside world and transports it here, then it efficiently uses that energy to keep the artificial soul within spinning. The soul holds the binding, supplies the spirits in my tower with energy, powers all the enchantments, and continues to be my crowning achievement. It's creation was a clever trick that I won't explain." He gives you a wink, as though you're both privy to the same secret. "I can't tell you everything, after all." He gives a frail laugh, his whole figure shaking with the amusement.

You sort of followed that. You get what he said about what's happening: there's magic, it uses power. You don't really get the process though. Artificial soul? What does that even mean? What exactly is it doing? You feel like you should have understood more from what he was saying, but you suppose that's what comes with not actually being a wizard.

"So now you see why your friend can't just leave." He concludes. "She'll just have to content herself with these halls. A much better fate than being wiped clean by death or consigned to oblivion if I do say so myself."

You don't get it. What did any of that other than the tether have to do with her not being able to leave. Your original understanding still stands: the tethers have a range, if you leave that range then you aren't tethered anymore.

"I still don't get why she can't just go past the range of the tethers." You say.

He frowns. "The snare's soul, obviously. It's a binding. It controls all the spirits here-- myself included actually, but I control it so I also control myself. The rest of the world doesn't exist for us outside of the range of the soul. If we went out one side then we'd just end up on the other."

That makes a bit of sense, but it still seems iffy. "What if I just carried her out, or ripped up the magic of the tether?"

"Well if you bound her, then the stronger of the two would retain its hold. You wouldn't be able to break her binding, certainly not without breaking the soul snare, which would be the height of foolishness." He gives a cocky wave of his hand.

You wonder how much of your abilities he understands. Could you really not break the tether alone? When you went through the throng of spirits, you're pretty sure you could have ripped one of those weaves apart with a lot of effort.

"But if you could, then she'd be unbound. Unbound spirits are immediately captured by the tyranny of Death if they're 'at peace'." He makes a disgusted face, the notion entirely unpalatable to him. "Restless spirits like the ones above will probably burn themselves out, especially in a lifeless place such as my tower. Myself and other coherent spirits might be able to hold on for a while. Without an alternative source of energy, however, we'll eventually be too weak to resist Death's pull and we too will succumb." He explains helpfully.

The way it sounds to you, it seems like Eve would pass on if you broke the binding holding her. You could also disenchant that soul-snare, but Inaudax has made it clear that he needs it. You definitely don't want to anger him. You also kind of want to say a proper goodbye.

Beyond that, you're not entirely sure you'd be fine with killing him. As unpleasant as he seemed when you first met him, he's been overall quite friendly. You suppose everyone likes talking about what they love.

What Inaudax loves, however, is imprisoning spirits eternally, and you're not sure you can get behind the idea no matter how well intentioned it might be. No, you probably would be fine with killing him-- ending his undeath, rather. If you did destroy the soul snare though, hopefully he'd disappear quickly or be too distracted to kill you.

He said he'd be coherent enough to hold on for a while, but what was that about alternative energy sources? You wouldn't want a curse to follow you out of this tomb. Maybe you should ask about it. You might also want to actually get going though.

>Ask about energy sources. If you're planning on disenchanting that soul snare, maybe you can find a way to drain his energy. If not, it's still useful information.

>Just head to the back of the tomb. It's time to get whatever Parvolex wanted and leave.

>Request permission to destroy some of his stuff and take the magic inside. You wouldn't have thought it a good idea before, but he seems to like you.

>Write-in

>>2749163
>Ask about energy sources. If you're planning on disenchanting that soul snare, maybe you can find a way to drain his energy. If not, it's still useful information.

Butter him up while we're at it. Maybe mention that he's a much better teacher than Parvolex.

Also Is that you Soma?

>>2748934
Those choice summaries are art

>>2749163
>Ask about energy sources. If you're planning on disenchanting that soul snare, maybe you can find a way to drain his energy. If not, it's still useful information.
Complain about how Parvolex never lets us play with any interesting magic.

>>2749193
[Alas, I am not the late Soma. Banished Quest is my favorite quest though. Rip in peace.]

Maybe we could teleport Eve out of the range of the snare?

>>2749254
The Spell would likely simply fail as the specified destination wouldn't exist for Eve.

>>2749218
Your writing and mechanics are very similar so I had to ask. You should consider smaller speedier updates btw, that is, if you want more players. From the player perspective, an hour passing between choices is quite a lot (consider that you'd probably only make 3-4 choices per session) Others will probably disagree with me but as a fellow QM I think you have a great quest that's getting hurt by the update times.

>>2749193
>>2749216
>Ask about energy sources.
>Tell Inaudax he's a way cooler guy than that boring, definitely your master and not some wizard you met for two minutes, Parvolex

Writing.

"You know. You're a much better teacher than Parvolex." You croon at Inaudax, appealing to his ego. "I'm still alive, so I don't want to bother you too long with my presence, but if I actually was dead, I certainly would rather have you as my master."

"Why thank you." He gives you a grandiose bow. "It's only common decency to indulge a curious student. Who are any of us to not pass our knowledge on to the youth?"

"Thanks." You reply. "I'm sure you're quite busy, so I really appreciate you taking the time to explain things to me. I have another question though."

"I am quite busy." He agrees enthusiastically. "But feel free to ask me anything you want. Maybe you can stick it to Parvolex and pick up Necromancy?" He says hopefully."

"Maybe." You offer. "You mentioned other energy sources for unbound spirits. What are those? If I wanted to say, drain a restless spirit, how would I deprive it of energy."

"Ah yes." He purrs his words. "All spirits need some source of life energy. The most common one is their body, but that's not applicable if they're dead, obviously."

"Obviously." You agree nodding along. He nods with you.

"Of course there are undead with bodies: vampires, zombies and other physical undead. They cannot produce sustenance for their spirit so they consume life's blood, flesh, or other physical sources of energy in order to sustain their soul. Similar to them, ghasts consume life energy, however they lack a body."

"So ghasts can interact with the world directly?" You interrupt for clarification.

"No." He elaborates. "They exist a step past the mortal coil and leech directly from the spirits of the living. Many restless spirits end up becoming ghasts if they have access to enough victims."

You think that makes sense. Those spirits above were certainly hitting you somewhere. You imagine that ghasts probably work similar to that life-drain trap you dismantled.

Inaudax continues, naming more types of spirits. "Sirens are capable of enticing the living into giving up their life energy, sometimes dominating them or possessing them in order to share their soul. Geists are spirits with souls that are aligned to something concept or domain. They're capable of turning the object of their soul's affinity into energy even while dead. You often find such creatures in places of faith, turning the beliefs they held in life into fuel for the continued existence of their soul."

That explains a lot of haunted castles and churches you've heard about. You've got a new piece of information to drop next time you meet some adventurers at the bar. Really this is all incredibly enlightening. No book that's ever passed through your shop has ever had this much clear information about souls and spirits. Wizards should write this stuff down.

Inaudax's lesson resumes over your moment of thought. He continues classifying spirits with names you thought were interchangeable or had't even heard. "Eidolons are sustained by divine will. They're quite rare because few gods wish to earn the ire of their colleague Death. Shades aren't actually undead. They are instead the imitation of a soul caused by a large gathering of malignant energy in the world. Priests of death would have you believe they're a side effect of necromancy, but they can't prove a thing. I say they're a natural phenomenon that doesn't fit what Death wants you to believe about what is and isn't life. It's all propaganda. But I digrees."

Death seems to come up a lot in matters of undeath, which you suppose makes sense. Really it seems like his church cares about little else. Back home the priests of death are some of the most rowdy regulars in the various taverns. They only ever get serious when someone actually dies and they have to put them to rest.

You quite like them. They're somewhat morbid people: irreverent about dangerous matters and constantly joking about dying and the dead. Still, they're always friendly to you when they come around the shop to drop stuff off, or when you come around for a game of cards.

You suspect Inaudax would have a different opinion based on what he's said.

He makes a dismissive gesture before continuing his discourse. "Revenants are undead that have reanimated their own bodies due to some unfulfilled desire, and are capable of sustaining themselves via their will to see their final wish through. They are often short lived however, lasting only as long as their conviction. Some are able to last for a long time. They might, for example reside as an undead protector in a place important to them, similar to a geist."

If they just burn out, does that really make them different from restless spirits? You suppose the distinction is 'whether they produce energy or not', but it seems to you like they're basically the same in practice. Why don't more restless spirits become revenants? Is it that revenants lack the mindless rage you've seen in the spirits here?

"Also similar to geists are banshees. They are animated somehow by memory. My colleagues argue that they're a type of geist, but its a hotly contested issue. I'm currently researching the matter. My goal is to turn memory into useable magical energy, you see." He begins explaining stuff about transmutation of energy and so on that goes way over your head, before he catches himself again for digressing. He rattles off a few more names for undead and explains how they're similar to or different from the rest.

Thinking about it, if the names of undead aren't commonly used properly, then do they really mean anything? You can say a parish is haunted by a geist, but if someone else calls a swamp monster a geist and everyone knows what they mean, doesn't that make both things geists regardless of the 'official' classification. You consider bringing it up, but you're interrupted by the part of the lecture you were hoping for.

"In order to deprive a spirit of its energy and remove it from the mortal coil, one must first identify the nature of that spirit. Of course, you could assault it with any life-draining spell, but that's a thoughtless solution." The prospect seems to annoy him. "Once you've identified how a spirit is powered, you want to undermine the source of their energy. Attack the ideals of a motivated geist. Evacuate an area being marauded by a ghast or vampire. Once they cannot regain power, their every move will bring them closer to departure."

That will help you if you ever come up against a spirit in the future, but it isn't quite what you wanted. "What if I want to quickly drain an unbound restless spirit?" You ask. "Faster than if I just waited it out."

"Well." He considers. "Aside from just draining its life directly via a spell or enchantment, the best thing to do is force it to use its energy as much as possible. Put up spiritual barriers, trick it into assaulting illusions, fight it like you might fight a boar that's been stuck and is bleeding out."

That makes sense. You were hoping for something more direct, but you suppose that being an unnamed restless spirit really means that there's nothing specific it has as a weakness. The answer is basically just to survive.

On the topic of surviving the assault of an unbound spirit, tou're feeling quite weak right now.
>Mana: 3/10
>Life-force: 5/10
>Moderate bruising: everywhere
>Aching shoulder

If you're planning on doing something drastic, a rest is probably a good idea. Even if you aren't, it's still important. You've got camping supplies and enough food, the question is whether you have the time and a safe place.

>Get on with it. Go to the back room, get what you need and get out.

>Ask Inaudax if there's somewhere you can rest. He said he hates the living, but you think you could convince him to give you some space. If he won't let you stay in his sanctum though, you'll have to hope restless spirits don't find you. Maybe Inaudax could help with that?

>Ask more questions? (write-in)

>Write-in

>>2749287
You're definitely right. When I started writing this quest, it was actually my goal to keep updates small, but that went by the wayside quickly simply because it's hard. I often feel as though I have more I need to say, or don't have any meaningful choices to give with smaller updates.

>>2749496
>Get on with it. Go to the back room, get what you need and get out.

>>2749496
>Ask more questions? (write-in)Is it possible to shelter a soul within my body without getting possessed?
>Ask Inaudax if there's somewhere you can rest. He said he hates the living, but you think you could convince him to give you some space. If he won't let you stay in his sanctum though, you'll have to hope restless spirits don't find you. Maybe Inaudax could help with that?

>>2749522
>Leave

>>2749510
>Ask a question
>Rest

Asking a question is pretty easy to combine with either option, but resting and grabbing the stuff to leave are somewhat incompatible. I hate rolling to decide a tie more than anything in the world but I also don't want to delay any longer to wait for another vote. Is one of you willing to switch? Neither option is especially commital right now.

Rolled 2 (1d2)

I've been writing for asking the question in the meantime, but since there doesn't seem to be a tiebreaker vote, I'll just roll.

1 is leave
2 is rest

Whichever one wins though, I'll still write for part of the other and just favor the winner where it's necessary.

>>2749634
rest

With Inaudax's lecture concluded, you've learned what you wanted to about fighting spirits. The conclusion you've reached however, is that you're in no state for a fight. Disenchanting the soul snare at the core of this tomb is not an option.

That means, however, that freeing Eve at present is out of the question. Unless you can somehow break the magical weave that ensares her without breaking the overall enchantment, you're out of luck. Furthermore, Inaudax said such a thing would be impossible. You suspect you might be able to break it even so, based on what you saw on the spirits you passed through, but haven't tried anything like it since you got here.

You'd rather come up with a better solution, and who better to ask for help than the engineer of the problem himself. "Is it possible to shelter a soul within my body safely without getting possessed?" You ask him.

He thinks over the question. "Not quite." He responds after some time. "Housing multiple souls in a body always leaves each of them vulnerable to the others. While it can be done, you would risk damaging either soul, having the weaker consume the stronger, or mingling the souls and likely ending up with severe soul sickness due to their incompatible motion. You'd essentially be inviting a Siren into yourself. However, what would you be trying to accomplish with such an act? Is it possible that you're asking the wrong question?"

You consider whether you ought to tell him. You're hoping to defy his spell and ferry one of his entrapped spirits out of the area. "I'd like to prevent the spirit from fading." You hedge. "And I'd also like to be able to remove them from a binding." You hope that he either doesn't care about or doesn't realize what you're asking.

"Ah, becoming possessed would certainly be the wrong way to go about this. The solution is simple: bind the spirit. A simple spell to tether their soul to yours will do. If you seek to defeat another binding, then simply infuse your own with more power." He offers you a solution.

"I don't know how to bind a spirit though." You say.

He frowns. "Unfortunately, I have not the time to teach you. I know Parvolex has no love for necromancy, but you'd do well to learn some if you plan to consort with spirits. You wouldn't want to risk your own soul doing something mad."

It's ironic that the spirit wizard is warning you not to consort with spirits. Even more so when you consider that he bound his own soul and is telling you not to do anything mad. That sounds like something mad to you, frankly.

His answer is unfortunately not what you were hoping for. You have no way to bind a spirit. You're pretty sure that the best option you have is to disenchant the soul snare, which would render learning such a spell unnecessary. Ultimately the answer is unsatisfying.

"I understand." You finish the conversation. "I'll avoid doing anything dangerous. Thanks for your time. I'll be leaving you shortly. Only.. Do you have somewhere I could rest? I'd rather not confront the restless spirits again in my current state."

"Oh yes." He says cheerfully. "The bottom of the elevator is a perfect spot."

You look at him, perplexed. Elevator? He mistakes your expression. "Well you obviously can't rest inside the sanctum. There's important work that a living soul might interfere with. You understand. The spirits are unlikely to come near the barrier in any case. It's excruciatingly painful for them." He waves his hand disdainfully, as though the spirits outside are beneath him.

"Of course.." You agree. "I'll just pick up Parvolex's stuff and be on my way." You'll just have to rest outside and hope they don't want to mess with the nearby barrier.

"It was nice meeting you." He says cheerfully. "Don't forget to remind Parvolex about never contacting me again."

You don't know how to feel about that. You decide to leave without another word. You make your way towards the back of the sanctum, considering your next course of action.

You still have no solid solution on how to free Eve. If you do decide to pull apart the soul snare you want to be rested. Freeing her isn't what you came here for though, so 'Parvolex's money' comes first.

Exiting Inaudax's sanctum from the back, you find yourself in a cluttered room full of a motley array of storage crates, chests, shelves and even a wardrobe. Most of the contents are probably completely inaccessible without performing some sort of excavation.

The only thing that seems appropriate for a wizard's tomb is the stone sarcophagus. However, the object is covered with papers and boxes. When Inaudax arranged this place, he clearly cared little about maintaining any sort of reverence for what you assume to be his body. This is his tomb after all.

You're looking for a box labeled 'Parvolex's Money'. You step carefully through the labyrinthian stacks of crates and chests, doing your best to avoid disturbing anything. Inaudax said not to touch anything, and the last thing you want to do right now is anger him by accidentally disenchanting something. Maybe you'd be more willing to take risks like that later, after you've had some rest.

As you perform your search, you find yourself with a fairly major problem. The language of all the writing is almost completely alien to you. You've certainly never seen it before in your life, and you can only puzzle out the meaning of scant few words. The most common one being 'Inaudax', and the next most common being 'storage'.

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, however, your attention is captured by an unassuming wood box with unfamiliar characters carved hastily into the front. Something in your head is telling you that the first word is 'Parvolex'. You've never seen anything like it before, and you're pretty sure the rough etchings form barely legible characters, but you know that the word is Parvolex. It's just too 'name'ey to be anything but a proper noun pronounced Parvolex. You don't know how to describe the feeling of knowing this information. You just get it.

You make the safe assumption that the next word is 'money' and that the character between denotes possession. You take the box of the shelf. Nothing happens.

Something in you was expecting an enchantment. Shouldn't a wizard's box be magical? You decide to search for the missing wonder amongst the contents of the box. You're disappointed again. Inside the box are stacks of gold coins. Sure it's a lot of money, but you somehow were hoping that 'money' was a euphamism, or that wizards traded in something more exciting than precious metal. You close the box and stuff it into your bag, pushing it to the bottom so it doesn't get in the way. What a let down.

The last thing you want to check in the room is the soul snare enchantment. You didn't see anything in here that looks like the orb Inaudax conjured up. There was a similar thing on a raised dais in the previous room, but you were led to believe it would be in here. Peering into corners and up on top of stacked crates, you eventually find the thing shoved away past the sarcophagus.

The purple ball pulses with magic, points of light tracing their way around the surface of the smooth gemstone. The object's unassuming position undermines its mystical appearance. It rests wedged between the stone of the sarcophagus and some random crate labeled with words you can't parse. A single sheet of paper rests on top of it.

You opt not to mess with it for now. Maybe you'll come back later once you're rested.

You leave. Making your way carefully out of the storage, you arrive at the bright red barrier. Inaudax continues his studies, seemingly oblivious to your presence. You leave the room, ready for the strange pulling sensation on your soul this time.

Arriving at the bottom of the hole you climbed down, you begin setting up camp. You drink from your canteen and chew on jerky and cold bread. You worry for a while about finding a place to relieve yourself, but ultimately decide that that's an issue for when you wake up.

Settling in, you find that the aches and pains of your travel are hard to push from your mind with nothing else to focus on. You have the vague worry about restless spirits and you wonder where Eve is right now, but ultimately your only goal at present is to get comfortable. You'll decide what to do when you wake up.

You lie down on your thin cot. The uneven stones beneath force you to shift awkwardly, compounding the discomfort caused by your injuries. Still, despite the unpleasantness, you're able to get to sleep quite easily. Tiredness you didn't realize had been building up overtakes you all at once.

-

Mana: 10/10
Life-force: 6/10

A drip of water falls directly onto your face from the ceiling far above. You awaken with a start. The solid stone room is bathed with red light. It's silent save for the faint patter of water. Standing over your seated form is a blank eyed specter, swinging a sword down at you.

Adrenaline spikes.Sleep banished, you push yourself sideways. The rough cot slides, interfering slightly with your launch. The ghostly blade sweeps past you. Your timely roll avoids the cold burn of immaterial steel. It was a stroke of good fortune that you didn't wake up with a spectral sword freezing a hole in your chest.

You're still aching and sore, but you feel a lot better: less drained. Still, you weren't hoping for a fight just after you woke up. How much sleep did you even get? The dark tomb gives you no indication of how much time has passed. Your bodily functions tell you 'not much time', but you haven't the sort of experience or discipline to turn that into a number of hours.

Pondering the quality of your rest or the position of the sun in the sky doesn't behoove you. You have a restless spirit to face. The glowing blue creature swoops towards you, swinging the sharp, translucent edge of its blade at your body.

>Try to punch the spirit. You should be able to do that now, right? (Roll 3d10)

>Find the weave of the tether binding it to the mortal coil and rip it apart. It'll be a good test to see if you could do the same to Eve. (4 mana, roll 3d10)

>Don't get into a fight while you're still groggy. There's a barrier right behind you that will protect you. You can deal with this spirit later.

>>2749865
>Find the weave of the tether binding it to the mortal coil and rip it apart. It'll be a good test to see if you could do the same to Eve. (4 mana, roll 3d10)

>>2749865
Try to touch the spirit with the tip of our sword and then run behind the barrier. Need to find out if our passive also affects our weapons.

>>2749874
Second

>>2749874
>>2749879
Rip the binding apart

>>2749878
Test the sword

Please roll for me 3d10

Rolled 8, 1, 10 = 19 (3d10)

>>2749897

Rolled 9, 6, 4 = 19 (3d10)

>>2749897

Rolled 3, 6, 5 = 14 (3d10)

>>2749897

>>2749902
>>2749903
>>2749915
19, 19, 15 vs DC 17
Success. Writing now.

Fearful energy suffuses you. Your first instinct at the rude awakening is to lash out. You consider scrabbling for your sword in the hopes that you might be able to strike the thing now, but then you come up with a better idea.

What if you really can free a spirit from its binding. Inaudax said a restful spirit would burn itself out in short order without something to fuel its existence. If you could cut off its connection to the soul snare enchantment, then it should disappear.

You just need to get close enough to touch the magical threads. You're sure you can tear them apart. The core thread is just the easiest way to go about it. Random tearing didn't work well on the illusion, but you also didn't try especially hard. You just need to do more damage.

You scramble to your feet and dodge another telegraphed swipe from the mindless warrior. Contrast to his simple movements, his armor marks him as an elite swordsman. Filgree designs decorate the pauldrons and vambraces. You recognize them as hailing from the Aubiufao kingdom. They denote some important position in the royal guard, though you can't recall what if you ever knew. It's an old design and you care little about the military hierarchy of the place. They're too far to the east; few travelers from the region pass through Ramamire.

The clothing is enough to tell you that this man should be possessed of some skill. He should severely outclass you, but his movements are predictable. The madness that has overtaken him in death has clearly impaired him severely.

You've done enough sparring with your siblings and whatever guards or adventurers were willing to humor you that you have a passable understanding of how not to get hit. At home you dodge bruises. Here you're dodging arcane, burning chill in the core of your being. It's the same concept. Against this foe, it's actually easy thanks to his handicap. This will be a much more impressive tale when you relay it to the drunks at the bar.

You move to close on the spirit. A wild slash forces you to jump aside. Another strike overcommits the floating fighter. You duck under him, reaching for where you expect the tether to be. Threads of glowing light flash into being.

You get started. Making no attempt to understand the weave, you start pulling. Ripping apart feathery strings of light like pulling straw from a mattress. You see the weave of magic start to fray, but your progress is slow. You pull the threads away like wet mud out of a hole. The weave refills. Your efforts are further impaired by the counter-efforts of your ghostly target.

You duck under a sideswipe. You rotate around. He's able to float, but has no mind to leverage his advantage. You step side to side, avoiding three clumsy swipes. You're constantly behind him, in his space and forcing him to move awkwardly. SYou do well, but you can only fight so close for so long without directly attacking an enemy. He never has to pull away. Eventually he gets himself in front of you.

You're in a helpless position: you have no weapon and he wields his sword at a range where knowing the position of his strike will do nothing to help you avoid it. He swings. You dive through him. You hand swipes through the strings of the tether as you go. The cold passes over you but you emerge unscathed. The spirit freezes unnaturally, confusion evident even in its alien movements.

The threads weaken as your fight progresses. Little by little, the net gets thinner. You focus on a single cross section, attempting to sever it entirely. Pulsing lights grow frantic in the magic, emerging from the points where you contact the thread and flowing up from the enchantment's core itself. The regeneration is neverceasing, but you strip the magic away ever so slightly faster.

Finally, for a half a moment, a single thread remains. You reach out with violence. Your hand feels nothing in the empty air, but the golden white light severs. The connection between the net of magic and the core is completely broken. The threads on the spirit darken in an instant. Fading to black, then disappearing entirely.

The threads from the enchantmant writhe desperately. The light reaches outward, twisting in search of its quarry. A single wild strand makes contact with the spirit warrior, but you see it and sever it before it can accomplish anything.

>Mana: 6/10

Seeing with your mundane sight, you notice the faint blue glow diminishing. The red barrier's light takes over the room. The restless spirit blurs and begins evaporating into mist. You relax, triumphant.

A sword takes you through the chest. Cold fire stops your heart. Your knees slam into the ground. You slump forward. Frozen, you can't even muster the vitality to turn your head and see what's happenning. All you can do is mentally brace for another strike.

>Life-force: 4/10

The next strike doesn't come. Slowly, warmth returns to your heart and limbs. You push yourself off the ground. Your assailant is gone. Victory hurts.

You look around for a moment, hoping to gather the severed magic, but the threads of light are gone, vanished or pulled back to the enchantment they came from. You've taken nothing.

The spirit is gone though. Well and truly. It must have finished evaporating into ethereal mist. You freed the soul of that adventurer to the afterlife. You'll have to tell the death acolytes when you get back. Assuming you can convince them, they'll surely buy you a drink or three. They might buy you one anyways.

You're looking forward to going home. You got what you came here for. It's funny now. All your fears about the ire of the wizard who walked into your shop are gone. It doesn't feel real. After he left, you went through the day with your mom in a panic. When dusk fell, you gathered all the gear you'd put together for some adventure you'd never gotten around to planning. You left. You wonder what your mother is thinking. She's probably worried sick.

You could go home right now. You should even be able to free Eve, once you find her. You sort of wanted more treasure, like a proper adventurer would get, but all the 'proper' treasure is in Inaudax's sanctum. Still, you can gather up all the old clothes and rusted metal from the entrance. You'll be able haul it out with you and then jury rig a sled. That is, unless you want something else from your visit.

One thing at a time though. There are more spirits to avoid. You need to find Eve. There are also other things you might want to disenchant. The trap that killed Eve isn't the one you disabled, for example.

You make a decision:

>First priority: find Eve without attracting more attention. You'll climb up and sneak around. As long as you're careful, you should be able to avoid spiritual foes.

>First priority: find the entrance again. You don't think you'll be able to retrace your steps, but there are no more illusions so you can make your way through the corriders without worry of getting lost.

>First priority: find the trap that killed Eve. The way she described it, it was a lifedrain trap. You want to disenchant another.

>Fuck with Inaudax's stuff. You want to disenchant the soul snare. You want to disenchant the barrier. He was nice to you, but he's also a somewhat insane murderous necromancer. Someone needs to send him to Death, and if it's you, you'll benefit quite a bit. What's the worst that could happen?

>Write-in

>>2750062
>First priority: find the entrance again. You don't think you'll be able to retrace your steps, but there are no more illusions so you can make your way through the corriders without worry of getting lost.

>>2750062
>First priority: find the trap that killed Eve. The way she described it, it was a lifedrain trap. You want to disenchant another.
Our life force will be the most radiant

>>2750062
>First priority: find the trap that killed Eve. The way she described it, it was a lifedrain trap. You want to disenchant another.
GROSSLY INCANDESCENT

>>2750066
>Find the way out

>>2750071
>>2750075
>Find magic to eat

I've been writing but I forgot to close the vote. Post very soon I promise.

>>2750062
>First priority: find the trap that killed Eve. The way she described it, it was a lifedrain trap. You want to disenchant another.

Leaving can wait. Eve will find you when she finds you. What's important right now is that there's another trap somewhere in this tomb that you know will be useful. You need to get up there and render it into raw magical ability for yourself.

You pack up all your gear with purpose. Now that the adrenaline has worn off, you can really feel the aches of adventuring. Your limbs are stiff from sleeping in the cold. Your body is sore from leaving your armor on. Your bruises hurt. Your shoulder aches. You imagine you probably smell quite bad as well.

You raise your thin cot off the cool stone and roll it up. Collecting your sword, you note that it has developed a patch of rust that wasn't there when you got here. There must be something about this place. The tomb is moist, but not even the most stressful environment for metal can create that much rust in this little time. You'll have to fix it when you get home though. You anticipate a lot of rust removal in the near future.

You don't even need your climbing gear to get to the top. The walls are rough and uneven. You climb chimney style up a square corner. You even have the opportunity to recover your damaged piton. You extract it lovingly.

Reaching the top, you secure all of your equipment. A cramped portion of your bag prevents any metal from jangling by holding it tight. You strap down your sheathe so it doesn't move around either. It's important to attract as little attention as possible. You enter the dark corridors.

Your progress is slow going, but there's no hurry. No hostile spirits chase you and your destination is an unknown location. The darkness doesn't help with navigation, but since there's nothing to fool your senses, you can eventually get anywhere by just hugging the right wall or crossing if you get back to somewhere you've been before.

The only issue would be if this place was too big to circumnavigate in a reasonable amount of time, but you can't imagine Inaudax would waste so much space on nothing, especially when he had an illusion mucking the area up.

-

You walk in darkness for a long while. Sliding your hand along the stone wall, you start to get a bit of a feel for certain areas as you wind your way around. There are clearly some places that have been breached by underground water sources, or roots or something. The air goes from wet to dry, cool to neutral and so on. All throughout the labyrinth, you're accompanied only by the sound of your soft footsteps.

A snag in your navigation that you anticipated but didn't fully appreciate the consquences of, is the presence of hostile spirits. You see them coming. Their blue glow denotes their passing clearly in the darkness. Unfortunately, they occasionally force you off the right wall.

You have to pay a lot more attention to where you're going than you'd like. While the darkness helps with avoiding foes, it doesn't help with navigation. Every place already looked the same. The black halls only exacerbate the issue.

You plod onwards. In avoiding spirits, you make some headway in your secondary task: finding Eve. There were only twenty some odd other spirits in the place, so you're bound to see her eventually. Every time thus far, however, the blue glow has yielded only to unfamiliar figures. You did recognize the one goatman, his seven foot form sporting curved horns.

The stories didn't lie about how unsettling the rectangularly pupiled eyes are on a humanoid face. It didn't help that they were the features of a potentially extrememly dangerous foe.

You continue in a direction that you're pretty sure is further into the tomb for some time before you're met with a strangely familiar sight. A glowing pane of stone. Tucked away in the far corner of the labyrinth, a side hallway is illuminated by its illusory light.

You know from experience that something to do with that patch of stone is fake, but also overlaying the light is a glow of red warning. It's faint and easy to overlook, but the sight of it prickles the back of your neck. It confirms what you already know: an illusion is here.

It's interesting that this illusion is separate from the primary illusion you destroyed. The reason becomes apparent when you approach. Off down the hall to the side, there appears to be a staircase leading down. You easily recognize the sight as false. Your supernatural instincts and knowledge of the tomb structure laugh in the face of the illusion.

The touch of your hand to the stone reveals threads of light. Your eyes follow the flow of energy to the top of the staircase. The core appears to be suspended in midair above the first step, but you suspect that it acutally lies flat against a stone wall. There is no passageway.

This wasn't the spell you were looking for, but nothing's going to stop you from ripping it apart. It was foolish to leave an infant, weak illusion here undefended where it could easily be found by its natural predator: you.

You step forward confidently, but a hand grabs your shoulder and pulls you back. "Wait!" Eve whispers loudly. Its the sort of whisper you do when you're making fun of your sister while pretending she can't hear you. You assume the purpose here is to not attract the attention of any hostile spirits. The sound doesn't carry as far as a voice.

"What's up?" You whisper in return. Your attention is drawn to her hand on your good shoulder. "How are you doing that?"

Eve looks down at her own hand, only now realizing what she did. "I don't know." As the two of you ponder the occurrence, the phenomenon ends. Her hand passes through your shoulder, chilling it for a moment before she pulls it back.

After a second of thought, you explain. "I think I'm the one who did that, actually." You say, realizing what happened. "I unraveled a ghostly spear, so now I can touch spirits." It feels weird to put it in words. You understand it, but it's actually hard to phrase properly. The words in your head or more primal, like a picture rather than a statement. It feels more complicated than your explanation.

"What?" Eve looks at you with a confused expression, before blinking it away. She shifts the focus and says "That's not important. You can't go there. It's a trap."

"Well of course it's a trap." You say, relaxing now that you no there's no danger. "It's lit up, so it's obviously an illusion. I'm going to break it."

"You don't understand." She doesn't drop her serious expression. "This is where I died."

Well it looks like you found your destination after all.

>Time to get cracking. Disenchant the illusion.

>Try to find that life drain spell even if it means walking through the illusion. It's a more serious danger.

>Regular disenchanting can wait. You should tell Eve you found a way to release her to the afterlife.

>>2750137
>>Time to get cracking. Disenchant the illusion.

>>2750137
>Try to find that life drain spell even if it means walking through the illusion. It's a more serious danger.
Have her tell us exactly where it is.

>>2750137
>Try to find that life drain spell even if it means walking through the illusion. It's a more serious danger.

>>2750137
>Try to find that life drain spell even if it means walking through the illusion. It's a more serious danger.

>>2750140
>Disenchant the illusion

>>2750142
>>2750147
>>2750148
>Disenchant the life drain
>also ask her if she knows where it is

Writing. Last post for tonight

"You can't go any further." She says, distraught. "I don't want you to die here like I did." The blue emanating from her flickers. She's getting dangerously emotional. It would be bad if she tried something crazy. Misguided good intentions are one of the most deadly things out there.

"It'll be alright." You soothe her. "Whatever the magic spell that killed you was, it'll help me. I can break it and gain it's power."

"You'll be ok?" She asks fearfully

"I'll be ok." You assure.

She composes herself, comforted by your words. Her expression assembles into something neutral. "Before we get interruped by anything else, I have something I want to say." She waits for a moment, then after you remain silent, she continues. "I want you to know that I've enjoyed our time together more than anything in the past year. I know that's not a hard bar to pass, considering my.. condition." She gestures down at herself. "But I value your companionship. Rather than releasing me from the mortal coil, I would prefer that you take me with you on your future adventures." She sighs for a moment, releasing stress that you didn't realize she had. Her flickering light subsides. "That is all." She concludes.

You're actually quite glad to hear it. There's something about your first adventure that really brings people together. Your next adventure just won't be the same without your spirit friend. You've also faced more lethal danger in your short time together than you thought you ever would in your entire life.

There's a big issue. You're not sure her request is even possible, especially based on what you learned from Inaudax about spirits. You know you can free her now, but she'll be left with no way to sustain her soul. You know no necromancy. You can't bind her.

She'd be left with becoming some special sort of undead. You need a unique soul to become a geist, so that might not be possible. Would she want to leech off others as a ghast? The idea you had about partial possession would make her a siren, but that's not safe for either of you. Maybe as a last resort.

But then there's another question. Do you really want to do this? If she was alive, it'd be an easy answer, but she isn't. Doing anything other than freeing her to the afterlife would be blasphemy against Death. Isn't it right for her to find peace in the cycle of rebirth?

You don't have a good solution now, but you do have a spell to disenchant. Maybe it'll give you something that'll help. Would strengthening your life-force make the possession more stable?

"Glad to hear it." You say. "I don't think you can just outright leave, but I'm sure we can figure something out." You can go over the options later. "For now, I need you to tell me where you died."

"Understood." Her face bears no expression. You can't tell what she's thinking. "I died approaching the staircase. As I stepped to it, darkness overtook me. I awoke as a spirit."

"Got it." That's all you need.

You walk slowly forward, hand on the wall. Hopefully you'll catch the enchantment before it starts draining you, but even if you don't, you've felt enough attacks on your life force that you think you can mentally prepare yourself for another.

Eve follows inches away from you. Her face bears no expression, but you can sense the concern. Hopefully she doesn't do something rash.

You hit the enchantment before you see it. The world goes dark for a moment, but your touch springs the threads of magic into your view. Their guiding light overrides the unnatural waves of darkness. You resist the feeling of being burnt from within. You refuse to fall to your knees.

You focus on the pulsing threads. The core is at the corner of the room. You're still able to percieve the red warning of illusion on the wall at the end of the corridor. You can't see the staircase that isn't there anymore though.

You push forward towards the weave's center. Worried about what Eve is doing, you call out "I'm fine! This'll be over in a second." At a higher level, you're quite confident in your ability.

Your primal, animal instinct disagrees. It feels your life draining away and screams at you to flee. Even though you know you'll be fine, pressing further becomes harder and harder. Your limbs are weak from injury and the effects of the spell. Your body wants to pull you away.

Life-force: 3/10

When you finally reach the core, you've almost lost sight of what you were trying to accomplish. You came here first before anything else because you sought the magic power within this trap. You wanted to be stronger. You anticipated it, but then, Eve gave you the next step down from a confession of love. There's nothing you can really do for her right now other than free her, but what if this spell could help? And below those things at some lower, more vital level, lie your instincts. Survival. They're what got you through your first trial. They threatened to overtake you just now.

You take the gold thread from the center of the enchantment. Darkness suffuses the weave as it fades from your vision. Your mundane sight returns. The remainder of the enchantment coalesces into golden threads in your hand. You consume its power.

What was your real goal when you pulled out the central thread?

>Power. Self-improvement. You wanted to get stronger. That's what you found out on your way through this tomb. You want to make the most of the opportunities your ability gives you.

>A solution for Eve. She wants to be in the world still. Go on adventures. Her life was cut short, and you wish you could do something about it. Even just a little would be enough.

>Survival. Just like when you entered the tomb. You had other ideas while walking into the enchantment, but when your vision went black and your veins caught fire, instinct took over.

Your stats for the day:
>Obtained Parvolex's money
>Recovered broken piton
>Mana: 5/10
>Life-force: 3/10 (you're guaranteed at least 1 back from the enchantment though)
>Disenchanted life drain trap (progression choices pending)

[Last post for tonight. Thanks for playing. I'll return Monday or Tuesday. I'm not sure on my schedule for the next few days just yet, but I'll post again when I am. I'll also make a twitter at the same time.]

>>2750193
>Power. Self-improvement. You wanted to get stronger. That's what you found out on your way through this tomb. You want to make the most of the opportunities your ability gives you.

>>2750193
>Power. Self-improvement. You wanted to get stronger. That's what you found out on your way through this tomb. You want to make the most of the opportunities your ability gives you.
Disregard bitches, acquire power.

>>2750193
>A solution for eve

Damnit, i either want her as a familiar or at peace so we may consume the essence and grow in power.

Both are good ends

>>2750193
>Power. Self-improvement. You wanted to get stronger. That's what you found out on your way through this tomb. You want to make the most of the opportunities your ability gives you.
Self power is the solution to all problems, either we rip apart spirits until we figure out how to bind eve, or we become so R A D I A N T that we march down the tower and bully the deadfag until he teaches us

>>2750193
>Power. Self-improvement. You wanted to get stronger. That's what you found out on your way through this tomb. You want to make the most of the opportunities your ability gives you.

>>2750193
>A solution for Eve. She wants to be in the world still. Go on adventures. Her life was cut short, and you wish you could do something about it. Even just a little would be enough.

[I made a twitter account: https://twitter.com/wlvdeh
I'll run the next session tomorrow around 5PM PST. There'll probably be a break partway through, ideally after at least two posts.]

>>2750201
>>2750204
>>2750208
>>2750237
Power

>>2751584
>>2750207
Help out a friend

Writing. I'll also post on twitter once I actually post the post.

When you last walked into a trap like this, it was all you could do to just stay alive. You were disoriented. Fire burned through your veins. Tendrils of darkness ripped the life directly from you. You acted on instinct, and all your instinct cared about was living for another moment. Yet, when it was over, you felt something more.

It wasn't just the high from a brush with death like you thought. It was magic. It infused you. You felt more vigorous: the life you lost came back and then some. That feeling is what you've taken away from your journey so far. It was-- is-- unlike anything you've experienced before in your life.

Sure, you came to this tomb because you felt like you had to. You created a problem. You needed to solve it, but since you've been here that's changed. You've gone out of your way to dismantle and consume the magic in your path. You ripped that illusion apart rather than let Eve guide you through. You took the time to disenchant the featherfall weave while spirits were searching for you. And now, you sought this trap out before anything else. Because of all those decisions, however, you're more knowledgeable, more perceptive and more resilient than before. You'd do the same things again in a heartbeat; the bruises will heal.

Of course, you're staying within reason. You didn't risk angering the resident ghost wizard by destroying the enchantments important to him. You also actually went and retrieved the money that the other wizard, Parvolex, wanted you to get. You've avoided unnecessary conflict with hostile spirits. Overall you've been quite conservative. When necessary, that is: your left shoulder still aches and your right hand is still raw.

The threads of light collect into your blistered, reddened hand. The energy ripped from you during your approach through the trap returns. Your vision sharpens, clarity you didn't even realize was missing restored as you reclaim your lost life force from the spell.

>Life-force: 4/10

You turn your attention away from your thoughts and back to the area around you. The whole room is artifically illuminated. Unreal light suffuses the illusory surroundings. A red taint of warning underscores the scene, leaving you with a sense of unease. Knowing the nature of the illusion around you doesn't help you relax the instinct.

Joining you in the room is your ghostly companion. Eve floats uncomfortably close to you, her intense gaze meets yours. Seeing that you're safe and coherent, she allows herself to relax.

"It seems everything was alright after all." She concedes.

You grin. "What'd I tell you?"

Now that the situation is calm, you've got another enchantment to destroy. You pretty low on energy, but you don't anticipate any major engagements for the forseeable future. There's really no reason to not pull it apart.

>Mana: 5/10

Well actually there might be one reason. Eve's corpse, along with one other, is supposed to be in here somewhere. Seeing it might upset her fragile emotional state. It might be better to tell her about the afterlife before you disenchant the illusion.

That raises the question of how much you want to tell her though. The simple truth: you can free her but she'll pass on, isn't the whole picture. There are more drastic options. You might want to withhold potentially dangerous information, but she should at least know that she can't leave the tomb if you don't unbind her.

You could also ask her to leave for a minute before you reveal and loot her corpse, but once the illusion's gone you'll probably be plunged into darkness. You have another torch but that has the potential to attract its own brand of negative attention.

>Disenchant the illusion now. Conversation later.

>Tell Eve about the afterlife now: the basic truth. She'll know her time is limited once she's free, but you'll hold off on explaining how she might defy the will of death.

>Ask Eve to step outside while you reveal some gruesome sights.

>Write-in

Also choose one:
>Spell: Life drain

>Upgrade Radiant Life-force (limited) to Radiant Life-force (partial)

>+2 max mana

>>2756660
>Tell Eve about the afterlife now: the basic truth. She'll know her time is limited once she's free, but you'll hold off on explaining how she might defy the will of death.
>Upgrade Radiant Life-force (limited) to Radiant Life-force (partial)

>>2756687
>Don't say anything untrue

Writing.

Yeah you should probably tell her the bad news before you go dredging up traumatic memories. You can only imagine what it'd be like to see your own corpse on the ground. Better to tell her what's happening while she can evaluate it with a cooler head.

Standing in the uncomfortable light of the illusory room, you start the conversation.

"You mentioned not wanting me to free you." You bring up her request from before to frame things. You pause, waiting for her to acknowledge the statement.

"Correct." She affirms. "You said that I could not leave, but that we would figure something out."

"Right." You launch into a synopsis of the previous hours. "I spoke with the spirit of Inaudax himself. He explained to me that an artifact called a 'soul snare' traps you and all the other spirits here. I discovered earlier that I can free a spirit from the artifact, similar to how I destroy these traps." She senses your tone and allows you to continue. "The problem, is that once a spirit is freed, they'll run out of energy and fade from the world. You would pass on into the hands of Death, then be reincarnated."

She nods, then seeing that you've stopped, she speaks hesitantly. "I.. see." She frowns for a moment. "I am either trapped, or I am dead."

You remain silent, allowing her to mull it over.

Her expression fades entirely. Her face is a blank mask as she thinks. "Is there another way?" She asks, half to you and half to the heavens. It's as if she's pleading to Death himself for mercy. "There has to be another way!" Bright light washes out the room for a moment. You squint. She flickers. So much for a 'cooler head'.

Her blank expression twitches. You can see the despair creep onto her face. Should you tell her about the types of undead? It's probably just a false hope. She couldn't become a geist or a revenant. Would she even want to become a ghast? Tormenting her like that probably isnt' worthwhile. It might not even be safe. But should you make that decision for her? Maybe it's right to tell her everything and let her decide.

You try to offer what small consolation you can before you opt to say anything more. "I'm sorry. I can only imagine how hard it is to be dead. Maybe there's peace in the next life." You don't have anything else you want to say. All you can give right now is the hollow empathy.

She barely registers your words. "What if we stole the artifact? Can it be taken?" She half yells. Wildness has entered her eyes. "You could grab it, and we could flee. I could do everything in my power to protect you from reprisal. If I see Inaudax, I could tear him apart like the restless spirits would."

"I could carry it with some effort." You offer. "But I don't think that's safe." Madness mars her youthful visage once again. Her pale, ghastly skin twisted in an unnatural expression. "For either of us." You add.

A flicker of sanity enters her eyes for a second. "You're right." She seems to concede. "That would be dangerous for you."

You sigh in relief. She's not going to--

"I will just have to kill him more creatively." The madness hasn't left her. She's just more in control of it. "You took down the traps. Could you take down the barrier below?" You hesitate to respond. You specifically chose not to do that out of fear of reprisal. Eve doesn't wait for your words. "I can gather all the restless spirits. They are predictable and easy to manipulate. They and I will work together to tear him to pieces. You can flee. Should we succeed, you can recover the artifact before you depart."

She's gone crazy again, but her plan has some merit. His soul would probably be consigned to oblivion, right? The fate he said Death and necromancers both hated? Maybe Dust would be pleased, the Thief too, come to think of it. With Inaudax gone, you could easily take the artifact with you, or dismantle it. The question is whether the plan can even work.

"Even if I can open up his sanctum, he said that he controls the artifact and therefore the spirits bound by it." You point out a flaw, hoping to talk her down.

"If he could command them to stop, then why does he need the barrier?" She argues. "There must be some danger. I've been assaulted by the restless. I know the damage they can do. It is that which he seeks to avoid." She concludes.

Her argument makes sense, but the plan is still outlandish. For one, how do you flee up a sheer wall in any reasonable amount of time? There is a temptation though. You considered fighting him yourself and decided against it, but with a cadre of spirit warriors? If Eve really could lure them down there...

This feeds right into your desires. You wish you could disenchant that barrier. You wish you had free reign on that sanctum. This is an opportunity. You might even be able to fight with them. All together, wouldn't you have a good chance? You see her insane eyes though. They don't inspire you with confidence.

>It's a crazy plan, but it just might work. Agree. Make preparations. You'll need more rest (and you still want to disenchant this illusion), but this accomplishes every goal you can imagine. It's just going to be hard.

>This is even crazier than the crazy options you didn't tell Eve about. Offer the alternative methods of undeath instead. Your idea for possession would sustain her without the two of you having to fight a High Wizard. Sharing your life force can't be more dangerous than that.

>Give her a hard no. You're sorry, but you're not going to risk your life on this. (Roll 3d10)

[Grabbing dinner now. Next post will be delayed.]

>>2757018
>It's a crazy plan, but it just might work. Agree. Make preparations. You'll need more rest (and you still want to disenchant this illusion), but this accomplishes every goal you can imagine. It's just going to be hard.

[I think tonight's not a good night for anyone, so I think I'll delay until tomorrow or Thursday where I'll actually announce the quest in /qtg/ .]

>>2757128
The thread is also past the time bump limit, so it doesnt pop up high in the pageview.

Well I think the story thus far is amazing.

Also flat no..
She is desperate and if theres one thing baldurs gate 2 taught me is dont mess with lich type undead

I forgot to include it this time, but keep in mind that for any narrative choice including this one, you always have to option:

>write-in

>>2757018
>Remind her that while we are capable of eating spells unless hes feeling suicidal he can easily wipe the floor with us, and also shes a ghost while hes a necromancer, shes kind of his specialty enemy

Drop ghost girl.
Back to wizard not keen on nectomancy.
Get paid or equivelent pat on head from wizard thats not dead and is possobly going to teach us things pet us break more magic for the passive gains...
Ask about possibky destroying lich wozard.
All of the passives.
Full life full mana possibly some more cool things from objectives met.
Quest on or return to ghost girl she can survive for another week month year whilst we build up our passive gains...
Flat no..
Do not want to climb back down a cliff only to possibly be chased back up cliff.
Have you ever dislocated shoulder?
Do even lift bro?
Eagerly anticipating next writing.
This may be rude cos i am from phone and drunk and there may be a sticky for this but i dont have a dice with that number what do i do if you asl for roll..?
Is it rude for me to comment cos of phone and complete newb status?
Should i just lurk more..?
Have followed entranced from beggining of quest..
You had me at the first disenchanted magics

>>2757843
There is indeed a sticky.
>>2
>Dice rolling follows /tg/'s format (e.g., "dice+2d6" without the quotes in the options field rolls 2d6).

Dice+2d6

Like this

Type dice+2d6 in options

Sorry

Rolled 1, 3 = 4 (2d6)

Rolled 7, 9, 4 = 20 (3d10)

>>2757018
>Give her a hard no. You're sorry, but you're not going to risk your life on this. (Roll 3d10)

>>2757018
>This is even crazier than the crazy options you didn't tell Eve about. Offer the alternative methods of undeath instead. Your idea for possession would sustain her without the two of you having to fight a High Wizard. Sharing your life force can't be more dangerous than that.

Rolled 10, 7, 9 = 26 (3d10)

Hard no.
No to being possessed by her no to her sharing your life force like some sort of ghost parasite .
No to attacking an undead wizard when she could barely deal with a random ghost by herself

>>2757018
Supporting hard no