pneumatik's WotBS 1 - The Scouring of Gate Pass

[Rhun]

Hollister frowns and shakes his head. "No, it isn't written in the tongue of elves..."

[Theroc]

"I might recognize it, but if you know seven languages, chances are I won't either. Won't hurt to look though, right? The scrolls aren't magic ready to explode, are they?"

The young boy was eager to help, but reluctant to get himself exploded by magic with which he was not particularly familiar. He had a few potions, but that was about as ambitious as he got with magic.

[Thanee]

“Considering the drawings, the dwarven or gnomish tongue comes to mind, but I do not know either,” Lytha chimes in.

[pneumatik]

Hollister slides the empty scrollcase towards the voice and a moment later it disappears. "Done and done," the voice says.

As the group looks over the sheets, no one immediately recognizes the language. The best anyone can do is Hollister thinks it's an outer-planer language because it looks vaguely similar to ignan. The drawings are for a large underground complex. The annotations on the drawings are in the same language as the text.

"That's going to take hours for us to copy, and I need to leave the city tomorrow morning," Shealis says, interrupting your study. "We should have paper, ink, and writing implements upstairs. If you want a table and chair you'll have to make something out of the doors and wood parts in here, though." She looks at the guards. "Brew a large pot of strong tea," she says.

The sheets that filled the scrollcase are divvied up. Each one is almost a foot wide and the range from three feet to ten feet in length. The copying work is slow and tedious. Since none of you read the language you need to copy each character specifically. It's a good thing you all slept late today, because this work is going to take all night.

OOC: After an hour or two of work you can estimate that you'll finish up in the early morning before sunrise. At that point you'll be pretty tired. You'll be able to stay awake but will have to make fort saves every hour to not be fatigued. If you sleep before becoming fatigued you only need four hours of sleep if you're not worried about getting spells back. Once you become fatigued you need eight hours of sleep to no longer be fatigued.

[Rhun]

OOC: pneumatik, since Hollister's detect magic should have still been functioning when they got the case open, was their any magic from the scrolls and paper themselves?

[Theroc]

OOC: Also, is the entire party working on copying this stuff?

[pneumatik]

OOC1: It's my assumption that the whole party is helping to copy.
OOC2: Detect magic only lasts for concentration, which lapsed when Hollister cast knock from the scroll. He didn't see any lead in the scrollcase and it was less than one inch thick, so if there were any magic on the paper Hollister thinks he would have seen it when he scanned the unopened case.

[Rhun]

OOC: Fair enough. With that said, I think Hollister would try giving the copies to Shealis, and keeping the real ones...just in case.

The wizard directs his companions to bring light while he lays out the paper, ink and pens. He rolls out his bedroll to make himself comfortable, and lays a flat piece of wood across his crossed legs to make something of a table. Then he sets to work copying the documents. While it would certainly be exhausting and take time, he was use to such things from penning his own scrolls and adding spells into his spellbook.

[renau1g]

Korrin siddles up next to the wizard, "Ah, this reminds me of when I was a boy. Ol' Headmistress Hermalyn would make us practice our cursive until it was perfect, ahh, I don't miss those days" as he joins him in their copying exercise.

[Rhun]

Hollister smiles at Korrin. "My first master wasn't too concerned with neatness. You should have seen his tower...quite the mess."

[Theroc]

Rae laid himself down with another portion to copy, silently and diligently working with the attention to detail he'd honed when scoping out potentially good places to liberate of their valuables... after all, when mapping out a plan for the Thieves Guild to use to case a place, you did not want to make errors, or make things obscure.

[pneumatik]

Torrent pours herself a cup of the hot tea one of the elven guards brings in. "Ah, a night of copying unreadable scribbles while lying on the floor," she says. "One of the prime reasons I became an adventurer."

OOC: Hollister

Hollister, if you want to keep the originals with the party you need to either tell Shealis before you're finished copying (which should happen tomorrow in real time) or wait until the copying's done and then just try to keep the originals. But we need to rp it out.

[Thanee]

“Don't you wizards learn spells for that? I heard you use books to keep your spell formulas. Seems pretty tedious to copy them this way.”

[Rhun]

Hollister chuckles. "Ah, the secret life of the wizard...much more work and tedium than the typical mundane would expect."

[pneumatik]

Most of what people refer to as "adventuring" is actually pretty boring. It's not exciting to pack for long trip, or to spend a couple weeks walking through fields and forests. It's the pay-off that makes it worth the boredom - money, loot, fame, or doing good deeds. Still, you have trouble remembering a more boring evening than this one. This scroll had better be more valuable than it looks.

Finally, with cramped hands and heavy-lidded eyes, you're finished. "Finally," Shealis says. She starts to collect the original sheets. "Larion and I are leaving now. We'll get away from the city before we rest. You are welcome to rest here if you like."

[Rhun]

"Do you have a way out of the city, Shealis?" asks Hollister. "We would like to get out of here ourselves, but we are unsure of just how to accomplish that..."

[pneumatik]

"We have a way out for two elves, human," Larion says.

"Yes, we part ways here," Shealis says. "Considering our relationship started with you trying to kill me, I think everything has gone well. I sincerely wish you all well."

"I have an idea on how to get out of the city. Two now, actually," Torrent says. "We'll make something work."

[Rhun]

Hollister glares at Shealis. "Fair enough, wench. But get in my way again, and I can promise you I won't be as forgiving the next time." He holds his icy stare on her for another moment, and then turns back to Torrent, considering her words. "Let's get on with it, then. Lead on."

[Arkhandus]

Liiros helps copy the scrolls, though his penmanship is poor by elven standards since he rarely needs to write anything. In the morning, as they finish copying the strange symbols, he wearily asks "Do you think we might rest a few hours before moving out, or should we try escaping this doomed city before the Scourge is invited in? Given how fast the city council capitulated, I doubt they will stall overlong before allowing the Scourge to barge in and run amok as if they owned the place."

[Thanee]

Lytha just watches the wordplay silently, she had nothing to add to the discussion at the moment. She thought that Larion was being quite arrogant, while Shealis seemed genuinely friendly, and as such the response of the human wizard to her surpised Lytha, but she didn't know the full story and there was probably more to it.

“We all have a common goal, as far as I am concerned,” is all she says, leaving the drawing of conclusions to the others.