Session 116: All We Have To Decide Is What To Do With The Time--

Previously, Across the Horizon…

The good news is that Linnet was not eaten by an amorphous blob of melted glass, nor was anyone else.
In fact, the orb just needed somebody to love, or at least a bit of a magically-induced fire to absorb instead.
This curiosity dispatched, our brave adventurers tackled the next one, that being the intact building here at the ruined university. This building featured monochrome masks, though not Espers. Yves learned that the masks were not alive but once were, though the manner in which he communicated this to the group surprised them. Instead of their voices, the crew of the Starfall communicated in floating text, as no sounds nor colors could exist within the confines of the building.
The smaller subjects logged (if not understood) left our brave adventurers with one short-term goal remaining right in front of them: the large building. The central facility of this unknown Alternan university. A place of forbidden knowledge, open to outside observers for perhaps the first time in three hundred years.
We join our brave adventurers as they prepare…

**

The weather in Alterna remains the same as it was when they arrived; clear, though a faint gold mist permeates the air. No flocks of electric starlings harass the adventurers, nor has Orrey fallen into any adventure holes. Yves has tried to talk to the architecture, but that's less unusual here than it has been elsewhere in Ducorde.

"I'm just saying," says Yves, demonstrably, "that if we try talking to horrifying and aggressive beings of incomprehensible natures while they're trying to eat us, but before they finish eating us, sometimes it works, so it's not a bad first step!"

"While I admire your dedication to negotiations, I have doubts as to whether spending time negotiating after being attacked is as efficient as possible. Historically speaking, aggressive creatures, beings, or nations respond to talking only after being shown that their targets are difficult to defeat or subjugate," Orrey explains. "Usually by stabbing," he finishes.
"I mean... it worked with that blob. It needed, like, company! Hot company, but not hot company like us hot, like, you know, literal hot..." Yves waves vaguely back in the direction of the no longer fluid blob. Building. Blobding. "So we should keep it on our tactical list of options. I did go to the seminar, you know, and read up on tactical options. That wasn't on there. But it could be."
Isa is diplomatically silent.
"I'm not even going to try to guess how much of that is Speaker business and how much is just...Yves." Bast shades his eyes from the suspiciously placid Alterna sun as he surveys the central building. "You're the judge of when to try talking to unfriendly ancient things. Just try not to get eaten. Much."
"I've never been permanently swallowed by an incomprehensible being to date!" Yves declares proudly.
"Luckily, we avoided Atomos." Orrey says.
"That bat trick is really handy, yeah." Bast conjures up a half-grin at the memory.
Yves does a little dramatic gesture like not being eaten by Atomos is, in some way, to his personal credit.
"Where do we go from here?" Orrey says, scanning the area around the University. "Main building time?"

The building dominating this plaza must have once been a marvel. (To everyone except Yves, the memory of its splendor is clear.) Four short wings spreading out from a central main structure form a cross in the center of the triangular plaza, and some of the domed ceiling still persists even three hundred years after the destruction of the ancient empire.
"It's a big fancy building, or used to be fancy, and so it seems like the right place to check next," Yves says agreeably.
The uneven ground surrounding the plaza is a testament to both the skill of the university's architects and the sheer cataclysmic force of the death of Alterna.
Bast leads the way to the nearest wing, picking out a path over the disturbed ground that offers the best options for a sudden retreat. "Remember, we saw something moving in there. Be on your guard."
Yves nods very seriously to Bast in a way that probably means he will in fact be on his guard. Some sort of guard. Prepared? Yes. Tactical, for sure.
With her visor down, Isa's expression is unreadable. But her posture is a well-known one, alert and watching the area. The Frost-Fair Blade stays tucked under her elbow, ready to bring into play if needed.
Before heading in, Orrey reaches out for assistance from Kuganepo's Ingenuity, praying out loud.

"Anybody see the robed people walking around in there?" Orrey asks, eyes wide.
Bast, frozen in his tracks at the front, nods without speaking.
"I still only see the things that are actually here," Yves says. "I think."
Isa shakes her head in the negative, but freezes nonetheless.
"Not sure if they're really there or an illusion or a time warp event." Orrey says. "But I definitely see people. Not horrific glass building monsters."
"If we can talk to someone..." Orrey says hopefully.
"Well, they don't seem to be coming out to meet us. Let's see if we can get a closer look," Bast decides.
"Stealthily, Cap'n? Or Isa style?" Orrey grins at the Dragoon.
"Maybe the horrific glass building monster used to be a lot of people, but got changed in the disaster," Yves says thoughtfully. "I suppose it would be difficult to find out."
"Let's start quiet. This isn't the sort of place normal people just hang around."
Bast eyes the opening in the nearby wall and steps carefully through the rubble and into the building proper, crossbow in hand.
Isa salutes Orrey, but out of respect for the stealth mandate she stops short of clanging gauntlet against helm.
(The last time the adventurers traveled to Alterna they met Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, intrepid underground newspaper reporters. This reinforces Bast's point.)
Yves swaps to having thinky thoughts about horrible possibilities of the past with horrible effects on the present just in his head, on account of the stealth requirement, and picks his way onward carefully.


According to the interior of the massive university, Alterna saw the birthplace of the open floor plan, as the research center features large rooms with multiple tables and desks inside of each. Specific dimensions are impossible to determine, however, as centuries of natural neglect and magical entropy have wreaked extensive havoc at an architectural level. The central room at least had no other floors above it, so the rubble littering the ground merely fell from the skeletal remains of the domed ceiling high above. Furrows two inches deep and three inches across trace patterns on the ground just as the colored stones in the remembered city set paths to points of interest. From the gray stains, however, these furrows once carried liquid throughout the building. Two rifts mar the ground, carving eight-foot-wide trenches in the natural stone floor. The air venting from the north and the west trenches smells of sulfur and chlorine, respectively. The sun’s rays fall on bookcases stripped bare by fire, their contents lost to ash.
People move about inside, bustling from station to station. They all wear long robes of silver and crimson, each emblazoned with a crest of a sea creature with a large sail on its back, along with a motto written in a language lost to time. The people here work at tables that are not there, their hands grasping at tools that exist only when their fingers close on them.
Bast, after a closer look at the anomalous parts of the scene, turns to Yves and Orrey and gestures at the proceedings with one of his better "Do you have any idea what's going on here?" expressions.
"That sea creature and sails makes me think Thalatte." Orrey says. He pulls out his sketchbook and quickly sketches the symbol and the motto, regardless of being able to interpret the language.
"Probably doesn't mean anything that they're wearing my colors," Isa says, her voice a little too loud when helm-amplified.
Yves looks around closely, and then offers Bast a broad shrug in return. "Maybe we should've packed some breath filters, given some of the smells around here. But it's probably not too harmful after all this time, so long as we don't open sealed rooms or anything."

"Oh!" says one of them. "Travelers! To Alterna? After all this time?" (Orrey's eyes go WIDE.)
She is a hair over five feet tall, with short orange hair pulled tightly into small pigtails. She looks to be in her early twenties. She does not break stride en route to another shattered table, but she cranes her neck to observe Yves and Isa, who have found a bright and shiny patch of ground to stand on.
"Yes!" says Yves, and then immediately looks guilty because he is not being stealthy.
Bast's head whips back around to the source of the voice, and his crossbow stops just short of aiming directly at her. He blinks slowly. "...we weren't expecting to find anyone here, to be quite honest."
"That's to be expected--"
She ceases to exist.

Yves looks appalled, and claps both hands over his mouth.
"Can't be that easy..." Isa murmurs.
"Who are you?" Orrey directs the question to everyone else in the room.

One of the other figures grunts, observing this predicament. Six feet tall with long flowing red locks, she wears thin glasses on an upturned nose, a light dusting of freckles on her cheeks. "She'll be back in a minute or two," she says. "I think she lost--"
She ceases to exist.

Yves asks Orrey, "Are we doing this?"
Where there were six people, there are now four. They are all human. While they all observe and regard the party with interest, no one breaks stride to greet them or brings arms to bear. They continue doing their work.
Bast glances at Orrey. "...is them talking the problem here? We could try writing."
"Where you from?" a third person asks. Cobalt blue braids contrast against her dark skin. Her brown eyes do not glance down at the fine instruments under her fingertips, scientific tools that exist only so long as they are in contact with her skin.
"A lot of places, really," Yves says tentatively. "Have you been here, at work, this whole time?"
"Almost three hundred years now," she grouses. "Give or take."
"Are you stuck here?" Orrey asks.
"Do you at least get lunch breaks?" adds Yves.
"Lunch?" Any further comments vanish with her.

"Okay I really need to stop asking questions," Yves says.
"I figure you've got three more," Isa points out.
Bast looks at the three. "...don't take it personally, but could you please stop talking for now before any more of you vanish?"
The fourth, a white man with a sculpted mustache and gray dancing with the brown in his beard, glares balefully at the adventurers as he gesticulates in the direction of the first woman who vanished.
He folds his arms, not in response to Bast.
After a moment, he throws his hands up, and then points angrily at the empty air.
"How about yes/no questions where they just nod their head?" Orrey asks Bast.

"Suit yourself," the fifth person says. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. She hasn't grown into her frame yet, let alone the robe. Her blonde curls struggle with flyaways despite the dry air.
"Yeah, let's try that. So are they disappearing for you too?" asks Bast.
"Yep," she says.
"Will they come back? You can just nod or shake your head." Orrey says as nicely as possible.
"Can't. I mean yes." She sighs. "I mean no, I can't--"
She is gone.

"They seem to be locked into their movements." Orrey says. "Damn. They disappear quickly when they start talking. Did she mean "yes" they'll come back? I think that's what she meant."
"Well I hope that's not permanent, or I'm going to feel even worse about this," Yves says.
The sixth has barely been moving this entire time, leaning against a full wall that has become a half wall. A mop of green curls over sparkling blue eyes and an impish grin he must have had at birth. "You'll get it in time," he chides. "I believe in you."
"Are you stuck here?" Orrey tries again.
He grins. "Eternally."
"Do you want to change that?" Orrey asks.
Yves starts counting on his fingers, with a small frown.
"Why?"
"We might be able to help?" Orrey asks, glancing towards Yves.
He smiles and says nothing.
"I mean, I don't usually deal with these sorts of people," Yves mutters. "They're pretty normal, aside from the age and vanishing and being locked into repetitive actions and other minor details like that."
"You know there's a word for that, Yves." Isa says.
"...mundane?"
The fourth person continues to work, poring over documents that don't exist over a desk that has slid ten feet to the west and also decayed into rubble. He continues to glare silently, as well.
Isa leans towards Yves, and the fact that she knows the exact pitch necessary to make her helmet resonate means she was, in some sense, prepared for this. "Ghoooosts."
"...okay, yes, also a good point," concedes Yves.
"Are you all adherents of Thalatte?" Orrey asks, fiddling with his holy symbols.

They both startle, jerking from their positions at the desk and the wall. Their expressions do not shift from burning disgust and mild amusement, but their body language is anything but.
The sixth takes two steps back, looking to the north, further into the heart of Alterna. The fourth turns to run.
There are no sounds from outside. The sky is the same dull midday color.
Bast, halfway to checking out the nearest rift in the floor, looks over at the sudden activity from the residents.
The sixth launches into the air, flailing wildly. The fourth bends over double at the waist, only with his heel hitting the back of his head, sailing forward past Orrey.
They are gone.
All is silent.

"And that's that," Isa finally says.
"...is... uh, that's when they died, huh," Yves says in a small voice.
"Ghosts."
"I'm guessing it repeats." Orrey says sadly, then shakes himself out of imagining whatever horror just happened...way back when.
"Think we'll get different answers if we wait for them to come back?" Isa asks. She seems less perturbed.
Bast quietly looks at the direction the ghostly blast came from, trying to gauge what the original damage would have been and what came after.

The university hall holds only the five adventurers now. They are alone among the intellectual rubble and the grooved floors. The smells from the rifts have not improved.
"I mean. Uh. Maybe? It seems like a lot to make them do that again. I wonder how often they do."
Giving up on long-gone explosions for now, Bast finishes his walk to the western trench and peers over the lip to see the damage.
Orrey wanders over to the bookcases, looking for any remnants left on the shelves.
"Is there a duration that is long enough to make three hundred years not horrible?" Isa asks.
"Maybe you get used to it after a while," Yves says weakly.

The western trench, heretofore known as the Sulfur Trench, goes down for at least a hundred feet, if not further. The smell comes in waves, luring observers into a false sense of security before reminding them that sulfur is really unpleasant, especially when it emerges into their sinuses with a nearly audible plop.
"Or you don't remember," Isa says, trying to be optimistic for Yves's sake.
"But they said it had been a while since anyone else had stopped by," Yves says wretchedly, "so unless they mean, like, since this morning, they must be aware. At least some of them don't seem too upset? But how would we tell?"
"You could ask them," she replies. "Before they're...gone."
"Do you think it's worth using up their words on it?" Yves braces himself a bit. "But I could at least ask if there's something we ought to fix. Or find. That they know of, anyway. Otherwise it's just a matter of tracking down the sources of horrible smells, which, okay, that's pretty much what I was planning on doing next, before finding out they could answer us."

The Chlorine Rift has something different; a small box, black and shiny, precariously balanced on a thin strip of crumbled masonry, above the widest part of the rift.
Yves uses all the willpower that is present within him to not poke the precariously balanced box. Not even a little.
"We should ged thad box." Orrey says, holding his nose, then - "WHOA WAIT!"
Bast's eyes narrow slightly as he estimates the distance to the box, then takes a few steps back - then stops at Orrey's half-cough, half-shout. "What?"
"It seems...evil. Maleficent, even." Orrey says.
Bast looks at the box again. Then back at Orrey. "...any more details on that?"
"Nope, just a feeling. If we grab it, we should be ready for whatever malice aforethought it has." Orrey says.
"I agree with Orrey," Yves says. "That box has, like, bad intentions? So we should probably put on gloves or something before grabbing it." He looks hopefully toward Isa.
No books survived the fires that destroyed the shelves that occupied Orrey's attention before the matter of the The Box, but there are other piles of destroyed desks and tables that could hide all sorts of potential treasures.

"Is that a don't fuck around with the cursed box evil, burn it where it is and never look back, or might be useful to check out even if it bites?"
"Hard to say, really." Orrey says.
Yves shrugs uncertainly. "I mean, it wouldn't be the first malicious thing we've poked, even in the last few weeks."
"Glass building today, even." Orrey adds helpfully.
Bast gives the assembled company a wide shrug. "I'm not getting anything from it myself. Your call." He takes another step back and tests his jets on low power.
"Wait, Yves is connected with the Espers and Guardian Forces. I'm connected with the Twelve. Isa, are you getting a funny feeling about it?" Orrey looks over at Isa.
"No," Isa says after a moment's consideration, "but I'm not...attuned to that sort of thing. Also there's a long-dead general grumbling in my ear."
"Might be a mask. An angry mask." Orrey says.  "I vote we go for it."
"If it's the bad kind of malicious, we can just pitch it back," Yves says, with the implication that there are good kinds of malice out there.
"Bast, can you...throw it to me? Without holding onto it for too long," Isa suggests.
"Anything else we want to check here first, in case the building comes down?"  Bast appears to be entirely serious.
"Let's check the desks first." Orrey says.  He heads over and sees what there is to find.

"Hazardous Materials Storage," says the second voice right in Orrey's ear as he nears the desk.
They have returned.
Orrey jumps, turns, and looks at the source of the voice. "Elaborate?"
"It's where we store hazardous materials. From the experiments--"
She is gone.

Isa holds up a cylindrical flask of blue liquid. "Hazardous, huh? Orrey, catch," she says, giving no time before lobbing it towards him.
Yves has gone poking around through the desks of Material Which Might Or Might Not Explode, and finagles open a container to beam inside. "Oh, look! I got... hm. Well. I got. Things? Things of some sort." He pops a number of small items into his satchel.
Orrey snatches it out of the air and examines the flask.
Bast wanders over to poke through the desk next to the one Orrey is investigating.
"Isa, you shouldn't have! Thanks!" Orrey smiles and tucks the Ether into his pack.
There is no other chatter from the Alternan researchers as they once again begin hitting their marks. The fourth continues to glower.
The lid Bast is lifting cracks in half in his hand, and he lets out a quiet cough as he waves off the puff of coal dust rising from the break. After a second, he looks over at Orrey.  "Know anything about these?"
In the ruins of the desk, two books appear to be largely intact: Rikuta and The Wings of the Phoenix: An Analysis of the Afterlife.
"I hope you don't mind a little bit of looting, since it seems like you can't use these things yourselves, under the circumstances," Yves says earnestly to the nearest researcher. "But do, uh, speak up succinctly? if you do."
Orrey pulls out the lined spherical symbol of Thalatte and Communes with the Goddess. "Is there any way to help these souls?"

"Those belong to the PI," the third person says. "Watch yourself."
Orrey sends his thanks silently and turns to the party. "While I have no idea HOW to do it, we CAN help them."  he checks out the books Bast found and flips through them quickly.
"Private investigator?" Yves hazards.
"Principal Investigator," the first person says. "That's me. Abby Riegel! Nice to meet you." She picks a writing instrument up out of nowhere and slips it behind her ear.
"What were you investigating?" Orrey asks. "And what went wrong?"
Abby looks to the third person, who answers for her. "Dark Matter."
"What are you doing?!" the fourth person explodes, speaking for the first time. "Tell them nothing!"
"It's nice to know what not to do, based on the experience of others," Yves says tentatively.
"Was that the explosion?" asks Bast.
"Great Crystal," the sixth person says. "Only thing possible."
"The Crystal did explode as far as we know," Orrey confirms.
"Oh, thanks--" Abby's dripping sarcasm stays behind after she goes.

"I'm guessing you already knew that." Orrey sighs.
"If not they're about to be surprised..." Isa's mutters echo further than she's used to.
Bast, quiet again, examines the stained furrows in the ground to determine where the liquid used to come from - and where it was going.
"How many others have come in here and spoken with you?" Orrey asks.
Bast paces along the longer grooves, measuring their length, estimating their direction. Finally, he looks up from the floor. "Storage in the outbuildings, liquids channeled to equipment in here. Open troughs and a building full of flammables...seems like an interesting life in the Hazardous Materials section."
"Oh, well, that's not so very unusual when you're doing experimental chemistry," Yves says, at Bast's report.
"Alchemy," the third person corrects Yves. ("Alchemy! Even better!")
"What's the difference?" Orrey asks Yves.
"One or two others," the sixth person replies to Orrey. "Most people die first."
"...is having your experiments where you can accidentally step into them an important part of the process? Would explain the dying, though."
"Rikuta," the fifth person says to Orrey and Bast both, one answer serving two questions. "We don't have the time."
Orrey opens the Rikuta book for a more thorough look.
Yves leans over Orrey's shoulder, because, hey, books!
Orrey gladly shares.

A cursory glance through the first few pages tells them that this is a thorough and practical guide to Alternan Alchemy, detailing how to mix and combine materials to form entirely new concepts.
"This is much more up your alley, Yves. I'm already lost." Orrey hands the book to Yves and goes diving into the second one about the Phoenix.
Yves accepts the book, and reads eagerly. "Oh, this could go wrong in so many ways!" he says, with delight. "But I'm sure it's fine most of the time."
"Might be an answer in one of these books on how to help here." Orrey says optimistically as he skims through as quickly as he can.
Bast glances over at the box perched over the Chlorine Rift, but doesn't mention it. Yet.