Coldeven 13: Rooms of Forgotten Import (Day 11)

Today was strange, We traveled through many rooms that provided a lot of material for thought. (However, not any kind of useful thought, like thinking about ways to escape our predicament.)

The first room we found was a lab. Like many rooms in this area, it probably belonged to one of the old celestial jailers, now long since dead. It's not the first room like this we've found, preserved by magics, undisturbed by the frightened denizens of this forgotten place. Mostly, we used it as an opportunity to refresh our inteventory of odds and ends such as tindertwigs, antitoxins and sun-rods. I was excited by the find of a nice magnifying glass, because I always wanted one. Maybe I'll be down here long enough to find a use for the stupid thing. Eaora was also very happy to find some scroll and potion-making materials.

But I did pause for a minute while we were tossing stuff into our sacks to wonder about the celestial whose room this used to be. By all accounts, the celestials are pretty good, which is another way of saying that they put a great deal of emphasis on the big picture. (Spike's Law of Goodness, which I've mentioned before.) But regardless of how good a guy he was, his stuff is now ours, and pretty much without us giving too much thought to it. There's an important lesson in that I think, so I formulated a new rule.

Spike's Looting Consideration: Dead People Don't Need Things

Occassionally there are things lying about that used to belong to someone who is now dead. I've found, sadly, that sometimes I even had a hand in the previous owner's death. I've noticed, however, that when people pick up these things to put them to further use, that often there is a bit of guilt attached to the action. There needn't be. Either the person in question was allied with your personal aims or opposed to them. If he was allied with your aims, he would doubtless want you to have his possessions so that you might better carry them out. If opposed, you doubtlessly want his goods not to fall into the hands of those who he would more naturally consider allies. Either way, there's no reason you should have problem with it, so set the guilt aside.

Having thus set my mind at ease, I also took a set of high quality lockpicks that he had in a drawer.

Shortly after that, we actually met one of the Inevitables that we'd been warned about, a being by the name of Morsak. I'd been worried (after the somewhat evasive description we'd been given by the Celestials) that any Inevitable we met would be a supremely powerful, supremely arrogant, jerk. Luckily for us, Morsak, while he did seem a little chilly, was helpful enough to warn us that the rest of the Inevitables that lay the way we were headed were going to be supremely powerful, supremely arrogant, jerks. After a short discussion, we turned back. I let my friends do the talking, since I got the impression that Morsak didn't really care much for me.

After that, however, things got really weird.

We found a room with a large (and valuable) rug, a hook hanging from the ceiling, and a sword mounted on the wall. The room felt very important, there was a palpable aura of immenence, like something truly monumentous was capable of happening there. We fiddled with things for a bit, and nothing happened, so we moved on. Considering the circumstances, it seems likely that I will die still wondering what purpose the room was waiting for.

Then we found a room with thousands of tiny alcoves, each of which contained a candle and was labeled with a name. Eaora suggested that each of the alcoves represented one of the Celestials that were assigned here. Only nineteen of the candles were still lit. BB, apparently moved to a rare bit of emotion, observed that it was very sad. I let out a small chuckle, and had to hurriedly explain that I was thinking about Spike's Looting Consideration and how much stuff that meant we could take. With my friends all glaring at me, I retracted the statement, but I still think it's kind of funny.

After that, in quick succession, we found a room with an ancient legal document that appeared to be the charter for this hellhole, a room full of rugs and pillows where there was a dead archon, and a small room with cushioned chairs sitting around a table with a crystal embedded in it. It turned out that we couldn't get out of that room until we all sat in the chairs and were "shown" some of the history of this place. It was making me very uncomfortable, so I tried not to pay too much attention. I was only partially successful at that, however. as it felt like the damn crystal was trying to crack my head open. Strangely, despite the ordeal, we all felt pretty good afterward.

It had become clear by this point that all these rooms, meaningless though they may be at this point, were once considered pretty important. Amazingly, they were in fact protected by an intricate series of traps and tests. Somehow though, we started on the wrong side of those tests, and as we progressed, we worked our way back through the tests, which were strangely impotent because of the direction we came at them from.

Just as I was beginning to think that the day would end without any sort of true menace, we encountered a group of four barghests. We defeated them fairly handily, and found a place to rest. The troubling thought that occurs to me as I recount the various things we saw today is that we failed to understand what most of them were for. In fact, most fixtures of this place are nearly impossible to figure out. Even if we find the exit, will we recognize it for what it is?