Quest The Chamber of Final Repose - Halloween Event Escape Room

Jhinn opened his eyes and turned his head and everywhere he looked a wash of green drowned his gaze in its high tide. He pressed his palms to the cold stone floor and pushed himself up, rising like an ancient and slumbering creature the world had forgotten but some unseen, eternal warden bid to wake. Swordless was he, but he yet retained his armor.

He glanced about at his present circumstance, the strangeness of the statues, the sarcophagus, the alien plants and the quiet oppression of their glow. His tail he swished in frustration. He muttered under his breath, "I will repay this trickery as is fitting."

But that, perhaps, would wait for another day.

Now he set himself to the task of scouring his odd prison, for knowledge and—if he could discern it—escape. First he went gently, tracing his hands over the watchful carved stone of the mother and father, along the lid and edges of the sarcophagus, here down the vines and there in the alcove and all about the spaces less defined by serpentine light. Then, more roughly, with measured kicks and palm-strikes and rams of his shoulder, he tested various spots in the room.

And he discovered something, mayhap, that was not meant to be discovered—if indeed this room was intended to be a prison for him. The twisting and spiraling vines in their innocence, or perhaps in conspiratorial malice, concealed the one wall less sturdy than its kin.

Jhinn threw his weight against the failing wall. Once. Twice. These each gave encouragement to the third, and yes, the third did see the collapse of his cage, and stones tumbled to ruin. A new path stood revealed.

"He who expects the rough road is either content," and he stepped through, "or delighted."

Pim admittedly held some expectations of what her reality would be like upon awakening from her deep slumber; those being very similar to what she had experienced before going to bed. A warm kitchen, a snug bed inside a tidy closet near the pantry...

She did not think these expectations were particularly too much to ask of space-time as a whole, but as she awoke to find herself in unfamiliar -- and rather unpleasant -- surroundings, she considered that maybe the unseen entities that wove the strands of fate might have made an error in their calculations.

"Hello?" her voice echoed uncertainly in the dimly-lit chamber before dissipating into the cold stone. She shot up, suddenly in a panic when she realized that her faithful companion Smokey was nowhere to be seen.

She called out to him several times, receiving only silence in response. Had he been left behind? Or worse, had he been taken prisoner by rogue fate-weavers?

Pim took a deep breath and sat on the sarcophagus to think. Now was not the time to be rash. Now was the time to be methodical. This was simply a puzzle. She liked puzzles...usually.

The halfling poked around at the plants and stonework, taking mental note of everything. She picked some of the glowing plants and wrapped them around her wrists to light her way as she moved around.

Where there were plants, there was water. Where there was water, there was erosion.

She prodded at some of the old stonework the roots had nibbled their way through, and found that some of them were not as strong as they outwardly looked. A way out, perhaps.

For whatever reason that Kilien could not presently fathom, the looming darkness encased by stone felt strangely familiar. Not quite like home, but near enough. The sensation of claustrophobia had long since run dull in his bones and after years of waking within a chamber of stone with no light and nary a visible door, it had instead become a source of comfort.

Safety.

Behind this closed door, his mind told him in the eddies of his subconscious, they can't touch you here.

Except here wasn't quite there, was it?

In the dark his eyes flashed a pale, moony gold. The shivers of change's onset were gone... which meant he'd woken up not just in an unknown place but on the other side of the full moon. His hands lifted to press the tangle of brown from his face, smoothing down and plying over his beard as his feet moved, not as steady as he'd prefer, across the short distance of the first chamber. He reached the wall and the open doorway and there he paused before the brink to lean and think.

Memories of the immediate past escaped him, but he could recall his arrival to Elbion clearly. Could see Vittoria leant against the ferry's rail as the grand walled city sat before them across the glittering waters of the Cairou.

Something about shopping.

The pads of his fingers closed around the greenery that clung to the walls. Not his walls, they'd never played host to plants before.

As if he knew what that meant.

He pressed through to the next chamber, greeted by a silent sepulcher. Kilien met the quiet with a sigh, fingers lifting to drum along the stone top.

"Don't suppose you know a way outta here?" he asked the unknown tomb's occupant. Schrodinger's corpse, perhaps.

One moment Spear Thistle was scheming about all the ways she could magically mess with the Allirian city guard, and the next she was in a musty tomb that stunk of mildew and forgotten undergrowth.

“Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! Where is this, who put me here?!”

The purple haired pixie frantically fluttered around trying to find an obvious exit but couldn’t spot any.

“Ugh this place is so gross and icky and junk, does an unseelie live here or something? Probably not since nothings complaining about how sad life is yet.”

Spear thistle flicked her wrist and turned the lighting of the room from a sickly green into a warm and inviting red.

“There, that’s like marginally better I guess, still smells like goblin pits though.”

With another flick, the room began to smell faintly of flowers and freshly cut grass. Spear Thistle breathed deeply of the descended air

“Ahh”

“Well, now with the essentials out of the way how the heck am I getting out of here?”

The pale elf sat up like a lever being switched on. In this situation that should have inspired a dread seeping into his bones he felt a sort of nostalgia. For a moment he half expected to find that one of his sisters had played a prank on him again.
The dull glow of the vines against the damp stone was quite comforting in a way. The smell could be better.
He inspected the vines more closely. Nuir wasn't sure he had seen this particular kind before so they collected a bit into a vial.

Nuir surveyed the room like he would a patient. Measured and orderly in his assessment. The wall crawling with the most vines seemed to promise a way out beyond the walled exit. Perhaps he could even squeeze out if he pushed the vines aside just right, though to where he wasn’t as certain. Most of all he noticed the statues, they gave an eerie impression down here. Was this the grave of some noble? Something about it struck him as odd to be just a bit of a memorial. Or perhaps it was a site for something else. Nuir shrugged a little. The contents of the stone sarcophagus likely would have revealed a hint.
He hummed absentmindedly.

Nuir quietly considered if it was worth the effort of heaving stone around or if he should instead squeeze out and be on his way. Curiosity his true weakness, causing him to linger.

A tunnel lay before him. Once it may have been a hall, some scant skeletal remains of hewn stone unclaimed by the earth peeked here and there, but to Jhinn's eye which beheld the passage in the present day the grandeur of the past was all but a shadow. Those selfsame plants from the sarcophagus chamber weaved through the walls and the ceiling, and their dim lights were as the eyes of some horde of cavern-dwelling beasts leering. They were the sole company for the lone tiefling, illusory though that company was.

Or so it seemed for a time.

Jhinn stopped. Twisted his back foot to strengthen his stance. He stood still and frozen, and held his very breath. His ears then corroborated the accusation of his eyes. No wind traveled down this tunnel yet the vines and their progeny of leaves trembled.

"And so I am content."

All at once the vines commenced their assault, like giant snakes bidden to war. Jhinn had no weapon, but the Tief within him, cultivated in his own expressions, he could call upon. His arms surged with strength and vigor, his legs pulsed with nimbleness ready and anticipating, and he braced like a wrestler preparing to receive his opponent. Lashing vines struck at him, like the tearing limbs and gnashing jaws of a Malakathian beast. But their malice came to no avail; Jhinn struck them down, slammed them aside, ripped them whole, writhing and wriggling, from the wall. A great frenzy and clamor filled the tunnel.

And when it was done, when he bid the Tief away, there came the returning tide of exertion's ache. He sat then cross-legged upon the floor. And he would rest, and breathe.

Vel’duith shook free from her reverie, stretching languidly, then blinked in momentary confusion. She was not in the library anymore… but a crypt? And not the catacombs, either, judging by the fetid humidity and the verdant growth erupting from one of the walls.

She stood slowly, each movement as silent and deliberate as possible, her eyes cautiously scouring the scene, marvelling both at the beautifully carved pair of statues and the aura of powerful transmutation magic emanating from them. She wondered a brief second at what treasures might lie within the equally beautifully carved, gilded sides of the sarcophagus - as a onetime rogue, she could hardly help herself here - but something about it warned her away. Her life was worth more to her, she decided, and she had no tools at hand to pry the massive lid open besides. Mother was no longer threatening her with worse ends for her to risk curses, death, or undeath for mere baubles to be impassively catalogued and resold to grace the sitting-room of some vapid first-house maven.

Curious… the wall opposite the status had been undergrown by plants, and it looked crumbly enough that one might simply push their way through it. The dirt-strewn trigger-stones in the floor just before the wall gave the dark elf momentary pause, however, as did the round, moss-obscured eyelets on the adjacent walls that had nearly fooled her as being ornamental carvings in the overgrown wall-joint. Some manner of javelin-trap, perhaps?

Vel’duith stepped to avoid the trigger stones, mentally prepared a simple warding-spell in case something suddenly emerged from the sarcophagus or the archway, wrapped her arms in her mantle, rocked backward, then thrust her meager weight forward into the weak spot of the wall in one swift movement.


Stepping gingerly through the hole, Vel'duith heard the rustling sounds and cursed under her breath. Head whipping left and right, left and right, she scanned the path ahead as vines reached out from all sides. Eyes widening, the dark elf whipped out her shortsword and a dagger, taking a zig-zag path to force the vines to extend after her to where they might be easier to hack away, avoiding hacking toward the walls where she might break or jar her weapons loose from her hands. For several minutes, the drow danced her way through the passage in a focused flurry of spidersilk, braids, flashing silver and polished adamantine, the greedy vines lashing, grazing, and abrasing her at every turn, yet never quite managing a full hold before a keen dagger tip or sword blade pruned them back in the very nick of time. Breathing so heavily now that she almost felt faint, the drow feinted back, then took a leap through the end of the passage, somersaulting up into a purely adrenaline-fueled, loping run until she finally heard no more rustling behind her. Pausing in a horse-stance to catch her breath, she gripped her weapons pale-knuckled as the throbbing pain from the lashes on her arms and legs finally caught up to her panic-numbed nerve-endings.

Whatever the vines were, it was clear their intended prey was large and grounded. Spear Thistle, on the other hand, was small and could fly. It didn’t take much for the nimble fae to avoid getting snagged, and flutter to a spot in the room that the vines struggled to reach. Regardless, the attempt on her life left Spear Thistle quite annoyed.

“Hey! What’s wrong with you, you stupid plant! I’m a spring court fae and you’re a part of nature, we’re like, on the same side you idiot!”

This appeal to arbitrary allegiance did not sway the plant in the slightest. It just kept lashing at Spear Thistle, or at least trying to as she had no trouble avoiding any of the vines from up above the middle of the room. All the while, Spear Thistle tried to continue shoutting the vines into submission, with similar levels of success.

“Ah screw it, this is just an annoying waste of time. Trying to reason with plants sucks Goblin butt and it attacked first so I’m in my right to practice self defense.”

The small Sidhe plucked at the laylines around her and drew power from them in a display of impeccable magical fluency. Twisting the threads of the worldly arcane she composed a spell into existence that formed around the source of the lashing vine colony. Even with the actual ‘performance’ still yet to come, the air in the tomb began to warm and flickers of magic thread became clear to even the backed eye.

“Behold, oh fiend, the incredible and powerful Art a fae- Yada,yada get bent loser.”

Flames enveloped the base of the vine colony with terrifying majesty. The vines flailed helplessly before falling to the ground dead in but a matter of seconds. Spear Thistle then just moved the spell along the walls of the room, scorching every plant whether predatory or passive. Once she was done the spell’s tie to the laylines was severed and the flames vanished in an instant.

Spear Thistle looked around the room now of burnt vines, smoldering roots, and scorched walls. She was quite proud of how well her spell had preformed, and assured herself that this was a reasonable display of ‘self defense’.

With one shoe in hand, Pim had gone around knocking on the bricks making up the walls, hoping for the tell-tale hollow echo to indicate a passage beyond. Someone had built this underground structure, after all, so unless a cave-in had destroyed the connecting passages...

She tried not to consider such thoughts. They already threatened to suffocate her beneath cold fear.

She froze in the middle of testing a particularly brittle brick when she heard something. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, barely perceptible in the dim ambient glow. At first she couldn't discern what was creeping around on the walls; until a tendril slithered around her arm and started to squeeze.

Pim wasn't sure whether to exclaim in confusion or shriek in abject terror, so she uttered a sound somewhere between the two as she slapped the cheeky vine with her shoe and back-pedaled from the wall. The vines continued their reach. Seeking. Hungry.

While her empty stomach shared the feeling, she had no intention of becoming fertilizer today. Ducking away from the ravenous flora, she fished around in her pockets for anything that might be of use. All she found was a nub of a charcoal stick that had wedged in a corner.

Sometimes an artificer just had to make due.

She dodged and smacked away vines as she pinched the charcoal between her fingers and inscribed a spell onto the only item she had available – her shoe. She expected the spell would be quite unstable, and so once finished she ducked behind the sarcophagus. Pim covered her ears and threw the slapdash shoe-bomb at the weak brick with a spoken command.

“I really hope this –”

Boom!

Elven ears twitched slightly as he realized that a new sound had been added to the vague drip drop of condensation. It was so quiet at first that it took him a moment to even notice despite his good hearing. An unusual sound of something moving around all about.

Indeed proving double that their weakness was curiosity Nuir headed toward the rustling.
He moved closer to one of the vine covered walls only to find that from the recess of the walls the plants were wriggling and seeking like snakes.
Nuir reached out a hand to run his fingers over a bit of vine as if to determine if it were really an animated plant or merely an animal that looked like a plant. Surely a mobile foliage might have some useful properties for potion making and curses of paralyzation.
Belatedly he realized that the little vines reaching out and blooming towards his outstretched hands were attempting to ensnare him.

Nuir had to yank his arm away quite hard to slow the encroach of the fauna on his person. Being a man of little physical strength there came a fierce wrestling match and much swearing in Antikatherean as Nuir attempted to pry the vines from his arm and the plants tried to get more of a grip to tangle him. After far too long of unsuccessfully wrestling, Nuir pulled the dagger he kept for self defense from his belt. He reluctantly cut and slashed the vines until they relented their grip to retreat, shamefully rather than knowledge Nuir acquired a cut on his arm where he had nicked himself in the pitiful struggle.

Darkweaver said:

Your eye catches something. Something that should not be. Wriggling in the walls. Soft, wrinkled sounds, mimicking in discordant buzzes the noise you make. At first, you might think it a rat. But how could a rat survive down here, with no obvious exit or source of sustenance?

Then, you see something else. Something wrong. A bloom of leaves rustling as if a wind passes through them. Yet you have found no breeze to brush against your own cheek.

You are struck with alarming clarity. The plants themselves are moving. Animated, stirring like a once slumbering predator, now awoken.

You manage to pull yourself away, before lashing vines can constrict around your limb. They curl like ropes bundled up by unseen hands. The very walls seem to reach out for you here. There is no escape from them.

You will have to fight.

Click to expand...

"Woah!" Kilien flailed mightily, arms swinging against the tug of vines, "Hey now!" and nearly leapt out of his own trousers when he felt a vine coiling right up his leg.

"Ladies... I'm taken!" some prancing about as more vines sprouted from floor, ceiling, and other walls, "She takes competition very seriously!"

Well shit, this wasn't good. The more he struggled against them, the more they tightened. His left arm was starting to pulse from the leafy tourniquet and his others limbs felt like they weren't far behind. Reaching for his belt, Kilien pawed haplessly at where his dagger's sheath usually sat on his hip only to recall he'd given it to Vittoria to wear after depriving her of mana.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

He tried to reach for his wand, securely tucked away within the hidden inner pocket of his jacket ... but he couldn't reach it.

A vine curled around his neck and his hand instantly snapped to grab it.

"NOH-" he growled, straining, eyes bugging, face paling, "NOT ... TODAY ... ANIRIUS ..."

Suddenly the plants felt still, a curious prickling sensation in the palm of his hand presently grappling with the vine on his neck. It fizzled through his veins, turning into the familiar act of mana drain, just with a slightly different ... flavor?

Slowly, they slacked, wilting in his grip before snapping from their rooted stone clingings and crumpling to the floor about him like a frayed spider's web. Dry, crunchy, giving off the faint smell of chives. Kilien, frozen, slowly looked about and then frantically began swiping the dead vines off his body.

Vel’duith’s eyes widened for a split second, appraising this next horror with a laconic arch of a snowy eyebrow and a slight twitching grimace. Then she launched up out of her horse stance into a full sprint, riding a second wind of sheer desperation.

She hopped atop the narrow tile seam left standing on the floor, barely slowing her frantic pace, cantered a bit forward, her arms thrust out to the sides like wings for balance . A falling block grazed her right forearm, sending her shortsword skittering. She winced as her arm wrenched downward, tilting to barely keep balance and resume her pace, and then she immediately dropped her dagger to counter balance herself. She vaulted left-handed over a tumbling statue, regaining the rail with a wobble, then back into her dashing pace. Javelins clattered left and right in her wake, urging her to dig faster and faster.

Reaching the end of the rail and the apparent tunnel out of the collapsing room as another statue fell from the right, the drow somersaulted over the statue’s back, her right shoulder clipping a jutting edge, sending her crashing with a painful yelp and rolling hard into the tunnel like a lumpy log. Coming to a stop, the dark elf kipped up to her feet, staggering on into the tunnel.

Realizing her right shoulder and arm still worked despite the beating they had just taken, Vel’duith murmured thanks to Seelah, yanked a broken javelin out of her cloaker mantle, then shook a pair of darts from her sleeves into her hands in preparation for whatever perils lay ahead next.