Saturday, November 12, 2022

• We gather Saturday night in the freehold with the plan to head into the Dreaming again to check one of the other doors
• Sunday we head through the door that lead to a room full of scrolls, accessed via the pantry in the kitchen
  • Along the way we check some of the other spaces we haven't been to yet
    • Off the church space is a storage room full of barrels (which are full of wine and beer)
      • From there, the next room is a small bedroom with three beds
    • Off the stables is a waddle and dob plaster walled bar
      • There is a set of double doors off this room
    • Off the bar is a laboratory with Arabian looking brass alchemical equipment
      • There is a double door off this room
    • On the other side of the bar is a well-appointed bathroom
  • We detour back through the graveyard into the northwest corner and find a storage room
    • Blaze and Agnes find a morgue (circa early 1900's) off the center-most northern room
      • There's definitely the skeletal remains still on the table
      • There is a big stone door here

Through the striped doors into the Dreaming

• We go through the striped double doors and into the room we peeked into when we were first exploring
  • We have no cell signal here at all, and have the general sense this place is in the Near Dreaming, and may have been a Freehold at some point but isn't now (likely because the balefire went out a very long time ago)
  • Ancient clay jars, splintered wooden crates, and fragile scrolls line the walls
    • There is a distinct air of antiquity about the place
    • Agnes is certain this is Roman era, probably northern Egypt
  • We find amphora, a brass stylus, bronze fibula and the remains of a toga, an intricately carved piece of ivory (probably a sex toy), a carved stone scarab, several pieces of smashed marble statuary faces, a small carved depiction of Zeus
    • Moira snags the stylus and scarab, Agnes the carving of Zeus
  • There is one door on the eastern wall
• We proceed to the next room which is full of books, all written in dead languages like ancient Greek, Coptic, and Latin
  • The books are early folios where scrolls have been copied into or broken up and bound into the books
  • Moira figures that the texts range from early Roman to late Roman, based on the pigments
  • There are three doors off this room
    • Southern wall, west side
    • Southern wall, east side
    • Eastern wall
• Through the west side, southern door is another room with one wall mainly containing scrolls and the opposite containing folios
  • The Western wall contains three doors
    • Through the northmost door is a small, well organized workspace with bookbinding equipment
    • Through the centermost door is another bookbinding workspace
    • Through the southmost door is a room with shelves for provisions and a cot; a small cell for resting
      • Moira opens a large amphora which looks like it was the receptacle where all the bookworms and other bugs that were pulled out of the texts were discarded…and over the thousand of years all their tiny insectoid spirits have coalesced into some terrible undead bug swarm
      • I enchant a folio with Summer to lure it out and trap it in another room, and then Moira uses Pyretics to engulf it and burn it to death
  • As we go back to the second room, Moira and Agnes are bickering and notice the moonlight streaming in through the hole in the roof being eclipsed by some large form
    • It's a sphinx, and it starts speaking in Arabic then English
      • It calls us "interlopers" then "Changelings"
      • Light plays across it, like fiber optics in the fur, tracing circuitry patterns
    • We do not have a riddle contest with the sphinx, because if we did they would be obligated to kill us if we didn't get it
      • We can't ask questions, because questions can be riddles
    • The sphinx says their name is Cogetera
    • It tells us we're in Alexandria
    • It pirates content from the internet
    • It "gives us permission" to make this place into an active freehold
• We go back to the second room, and through the eastern south door
  • There is an ancient forge/kiln that was probably the balefire hearth at some point
  • There is a clockwork woman standing rigid in the room, and while she doesn't have blades for hands, she otherwise looks identical to the clockwork figure from our vision
    • There is some sort of latent, but inactive chimerical energy about her, but we can't figure out how to activate her
  • We figure we can try channeling Glamour into her, but want to finish exploring first
• We go through the one door on the southern wall of the previous room
  • There are frescoes along one long wall
    • They appear to illustrate the tale of Pygmalion, but the fresco deviates, showing Galitea tearing Pygmalion apart in their marriage bed
    • The frescoes repeat this story multiple times with some variations (usually the statue is female, sometimes male, and in some the statues are beheaded)
    • The frescoes bring to mind the heads of the shattered sculptures in the first room
    • They range across slightly different styles across different ancient ages
  • A single door to the south
    • Through this door is a large reading room with five windows along the southern wall that open onto a view of the Dreaming version of Alexandria
      • We can see the lighthouse of Alexandria in the distant
    • In a back corner (in the south western corner) is a nesting area with bits of sandy colored dog fur, making us think that it's where a group of dogs sleep though none are present
      • These absent dogs probably come and go through the windows
  • A single door to the east
    • This is an exterior door that leads into actual Alexandria, our cell phones pinging with signal
    • It's in the back of a cluttered alley in a slum
• We again return to the second room and open the door on the eastern wall which reveals a relatively large room
  • It is crammed full of shelves, which are themselves absolutely overstuffed
  • It is very tight, the consideration being for cramming as much into the space over it being easily navigated
• We go back to the room with the forge and automaton
  • We notice she's missing her left hand and part of her forearm
  • Moira thinks that it would be best if we could find her missing arm piece, and it would take an investment of Glamour to power her up
• I wander off while the others are talking about how to relight the forge and root through the dog nest and find the arm!
  • Which definitely has a resonance like one of the keys
  • And oh look, there are a bunch of jackals coming through the windows…crap!
    • I bumble my way out of there narrowly, but make it back with the arm
  • Moira thinks the key within the arm might be why the automaton is inactive
• Moira works on reattaching the arm while Blaze and I gather up wood by breaking up wooden shelves from the bookbinding room
  • The rest of us invest glamour into the automaton
    • Blaze makes a friendship bracelet out of her string cheese
    • Agnes carves some scrimshaw
    • Aoife uses twine to make a four leafed clover
    • I sign my name repeatedly on scraps of parchment
  • She powers up!
    • She says "you are not attackers of the Annex"
    • She says the last people she talked to were Eshu, and it was during the reign of Constantine
    • She was damaged by time and finally the jackals
  • She is called Pneumatic
    • The Eshu added the key to her arm after her creation
    • A mage created her during the Ptolemaic period, but she wasn't activated until later
    • She predates the Shattering
  • She confirms the frescoes are a warning, and mentions that it is against the Face in the Stone
    • She was one of the principalities of the Fomorians
    • The jug that Blaze has was evidently invented to stop statues from accepting the Face in the Stone's presence
  • The Red Plain of Kureksarra is where the final battle in the War of Trees was fought, and where the Red King of the Fomorians decided not to unleash the Triumph Casque of Sorrows on the Dreaming
  • She wants to deal with the jackals
• After dealing with the chimerical jackals, we go through the door, Pneumatic unlocking it with her key
  • She says she can disguise herself to look human