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AGELESS Campaign Episode 2 - Temple of the Cat-Goddess
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<blockquote data-quote="Silver Moon" data-source="post: 5233743" data-attributes="member: 8530"><p><strong>Chapter 45, "Who is gonna stick their arm in that mouth?" (Episode Two, Chapter Five) - Wednesday, September 6, 1882, 5:30 P.M. </strong></p><p></p><p>The door opens into the room with relative ease as the stale air inside mingles with the better air in the hallway. The room is fairly large, thirty feet in diameter with a thirty foot high ceiling. The floor has a tile fresco inlaid of the cat goddess Bast. On each of the three other walls is a metal rod near the ceiling, from which dangle tatters that were apparently once great tapestries, which would have been twenty-five foot square. On the wall on either side of the door are rods with the remains of a pair of ten-foot wide and twenty-five-foot long tapestries. Nothing else is inside the room. </p><p></p><p>Ruby wanders around the chamber to the remains of the tapestries and looks them over, searching the area. "I wonder what happened to these? I mean, everything else in here is in good shape." Lawrence coughs in the stale air. "My guess is they fell apart due to age. Hmm. It doesn't look like there is any other doors in this room. Let's take a quick look." Mina says, "Probably either mice or insects inside the cloth. Once the door was sealed the tapestries would have been the only organic material left for them to eat until they died of dehydration." </p><p></p><p>A search of the room reveals no other doors. Nanuet remains in the hallway, just peeking into the room. "No way out huh? Let's see where else this hallway leads." Nanuet waits to see if the others follow before continuing cautiously up the hallway with Maska. Fish quickly inspects the tapestry mounts/rods before following Nanuet into the hallway. "Nan, let's check out that room. Bring the torch!"</p><p></p><p>Continuing to make 'cobweb torches', they continue another twenty-five feet further down the corridor to a '+' shaped intersection with another door ten feet down the short corridor to the left, a blank wall at the corridor's end ten feet in front, and a wide open arch-style doorway to the right leading to another room that appears to be another thirty-feet square although the vast sheets of spider webs obscure the far wall. </p><p></p><p>As the party is watching a trio of black spiders, six-inches in length, scurry diagonally up a sheet of webs twelve feet into the room. The multitude of webs between them and the party prevent a more detailed identification of the exact type of spider. Fish comments, "Well, dem bugs certainly found something to eat! What say we burn 'em?" Lawrence lifts his torch. "Yeah, better them than me. I don't want to get caught in their webs. Let's start at the bottom of the web."</p><p></p><p>Once lit, the flames moves quickly, flowing from sheet to sheet of webs through connecting lines. As the light and heat sweep into the room the spiders scatter, and it appears that there are far more than three, as dozens of six-inch-long black spiders climb up and away. This proves to be fatal for them as the flames rise, as burning spiders begin to fall to the floor. The smoke itself flows out and into the back of the chamber.</p><p></p><p>After around five minutes the full thirty-foot-square room is cleared of webs and the flames move through a ten-foot diameter archway at the far wall and into the next web-filled room. That room appears to also be thirty-feet wide but only twenty-feet deep. Several more flaming six-inch spiders fall to the ground. There is then a ear-piercing scream.</p><p></p><p>A large object crashes to the ground, flames surrounding it. It too is a spider, but considerably larger, the body being nearly four-feet in length and over two-feet wide excluding the legs. It is aflame, but still far from dead as it quickly begins to scamper in the direction of the party forty-feet away from it. Harden swallows hard. "Lord preserve us!"His hands brush across his chest and come away with the Colt Lightenings. He steadies his shaking hands as the monstrous spider scurries towards them, waiting for it to close the range. The reports of the twin guns is very loud in the enclosed space...</p><p></p><p>Ruby exclaims, "Well, this is considerably disgusting. I'm not exactly a fan of the spider..." Seeing Hardin pull his guns, she pulls her too but checks her hasty loading from earlier while he shoots his fancy guns. If the spider is still living when he is done, she will shoot at the spider too. The creature continues to move towards the party as Hardin's bullets strike it. It finally comes to a stop a mere three feet before the group not long after the revolvers are empty, where it slumps and continues to burn. </p><p></p><p>"I wonder what a creature that size eats in a place like this?" Nanuet says kneeling down to examine the body of the spider closely. "And I wonder if there are more of them." Harden frowns as he re-loads..."I put enough lead in that critter to stop a rampaging buffalo...sure didn't die too easy..." He glances around to see if there are any more... No other creatures are visible and the fire appears to be out in both rooms, with the smoke dissipating. </p><p></p><p>Ruby says, "It was a good idea to burn the webs. Luckily there wasn't anything else stuck in them that we burnt though. I wonder... how were they surviving down here so long with no food source? Or they must have had a way in and out. So I guess we should keep searching around to find it." She takes a closer look at the areas they just cleared out, especially looking for any signs of false or secret doors. Fish shadows her, checking for the same.</p><p></p><p>The first room is empty save for the small number of remaining strands of cobwebs that the fire did not touch. The second room has a large pile of bones in the far corner, most of which appear to be skeletons of rodents of various sizes - mice, rats, rabbits and a ferret-like creature. Lawrence scatters the bones with his foot. "Well, I reckon that these were what those spiders were eating. Much better than me."</p><p></p><p>The remaining smoke is filtering out from the ceiling through a pair of ventilation shafts, one in each corner of this room, and each measuring twelve-by-eight inches in size. One is covered by a metal grate, the other is open, with a rusted metal grate lying on the floor beneath it. </p><p></p><p>In the center of the far wall of this room is a metal door made of bronze, that stands eight feet tall and three-and-a-half-feet wide. Cast into the door itself is a human-sized molded relief of Bast, the Cat-Goddess. Her mouth is open, and looking beyond her bronzed fanged-teeth one can see a keyhole inside at the center of her mouth. He peers inside the mouth. "Huh, I haven't seen a key anywhere about. I'd be scared of putting my hand in there to pick the lock, though. Those teeth still look sharp." He pokes at one with his gun.</p><p></p><p>Fish examines the rest of the bronze door, avoiding the nasty-looking mouth for the moment. Finding nothing of note in the door itself, Fish extracts his little mirror and takes a peer at that mouth. It appears to be a regular keyhole. Hardin chuckles..."Who is gonna stick their arm in that mouth?" Mina says, "It isn't absolutely necessary that anybody do that right now, there are other still places to investigate back in the main hallway." Then let's go. There's plenty of time for a visit to the sawbones."</p><p></p><p>Ruby takes a look at the rusted grate that lies on the floor and the ventilation shaft it came from. "I wonder if time did this or something else?" As she is searching her eyes dart back to the keyhole in the cat's mouth. The lure of that was just too great and pulling on her. Abby says, "Let's be quick about it. I don't like leaving unknowns behind us, each room should be searched thoroughly. We have to come back through here and I don't want something biting us on the ass." </p><p></p><p>Investigating the left corridor from the intersection, it goes for another ten feet to another stone door with no obvious mechanism for opening. The other forward corridor ends abruptly after ten feet. Fish spends some time searching for hidden doors along these corridors. Fish locates the cracks to indicate a hidden doorway along the dead-end corridor along the far wall and side. The doorway begins two feet above the floor and looks to be four feet high and two feet in width. </p><p></p><p>Ruby searches around to find how to open the door, getting a lift up to get a better view. Ruby senses an aura of magic radiating from around the cracks of the hidden doorway. "Hmmm..." Ruby tapped on her full lips as she studied the door, "There may be a trap here or the door is just magically sealed. Let me check for a trap." Ruby carefully checks the door and area for traps or a way to open it. Ruby detects no traps Lawrence states, "Hmph. What if we just push it? Or maybe it's connected to the cat statue with the open mouth." "Good point, you very well may be correct about that." </p><p></p><p>Ruby pushes on the door a few times to see if she can move it. Pushing has no effect. Mina states "Let me try a 'knock' spell." She makes the incantation and focuses the energies at the doorway. Ruby senses the magical aura shifting in intensity. The stone then slides back and pivots to the side, creating an opening into the next darkened chamber. Lawrence says, "Nice trick, Mina. Does that work on normal locks, too?" "A different variation of the spell does," she replies. Lawrence whistles, "That could put locksmiths and thieves out of business."</p><p></p><p>Climbing through one at a time, they find themselves in a long corridor moving forward. Unlike the previous area, this section is empty of cobwebs with a minimal of dust. The corridor runs for is straight for forty feet before it apparently opens into a larger chamber to the right for the next forty feet before ending in a stone door. On this more immediate corridor there are three doors as well, one fifteen feet out and to the right and two on the left, at five and twenty-five feet. "Let's try the closer door first and work our way out. Agreed?"</p><p></p><p>"Fine with me," Abby agreed. "Everyone keep your eyes open now, this area looks like someone or something comes 'round and keeps it from gettin' dusty." She makes sure to take note of what the doorway looks like on this side and how it may operate, knowing they will have to come through here again to get home. Hardin grins his crooked grin. "A kitty cleaning staff?" The first door contains a small ten-foot square room with several metal rings of various sizes and heights imbedded into the far wall and ceiling. "Well, that's interesting. Almost like they kept something chained up in here." </p><p></p><p>Taking care to tread lightly, Fish inspects the door on the right. He does not see anything apparent about the door other than a standard bronze handle and no lock of any sort. Fish pulls/pushes on the handle. Like the previous room, this one is also ten-foot square. The room is empty, although from indentations and a small pedestal on the floor it appears that there was once a two-foot diameter object in the upper right corner. </p><p></p><p>"Prisoners, I'd say. Could have been animals of some kind I suppose, text and research tends to heavily edited to avoid talking about anything that might have been magical. Idiots." Fish proceeds to the third and final door, inspecting it first and then attempting to open it if he discerns no lock or trap.</p><p></p><p>Another ten foot square room is on the opposite side of the door. In the center of the room is a round metal brazier, four foot in diameter, that has what appears to be a fire currently burning in it, except that no smoke comes from the fire and the flames are purple in color. "Uh, that is really odd, no?" Ruby steps closer to inspect the purple fire. She concentrates on it to detect if it's magical. </p><p></p><p>Ruby detects a magical aura. Mina moves forward and says, "That's Bast's Eternal flame, it is clerical in nature. The ruins that I visited a half-century ago had a brazier like that in one of the Priest's chambers. They were used to burn scrolls on which prayers to Bast were written." </p><p></p><p>Moving down the corridor beyond the rooms they reach the large room off to the right. Shining their lantern they see that it runs the full forty-foot width of the remaining corridor and one-hundred feet out with a curved arch on the opposite wall. Four pairs of stone pillars support the fifty-foot high arched roof. Centered on the opposite side of the room twenty feet from the far walls is a large round twelve feet diameter stone pedestal standing eight feet high. </p><p></p><p>Mina exclaims, "I've been here before! This is Champollion's dig!" She gestures back to the previous room and says, "That room with the purple flame, it was the same one that I saw before, it just looked different without any of the other furnishings in the room." She points back across the big chamber and says, "And that pedestal, atop it sat a thirty-five foot tall statue of the Cat-Goddess Bast." Lawrence says, "Champollion? Who's that? And what was he digging for? I guess that means you're in familiar territory, Mina." </p><p></p><p>Mina says, "Jean Francois Champollion is considered by many to be the founder of Egyptology. His primary expertise was in the deciphering of hieroglyphics. Sixty years ago he managed to decipher the Rosetta Stone, which Napoleon had found during his earlier invasion of Egypt. Through that stone the secret to reading all of the ancient Egyptian writings was made possible. </p><p></p><p>Champollian is a linguistic genius, fluent in most of the languages of the world, both present and past. The College of France made him their Professor of Egyptology. He spent much of the 1820's exploring Egypt, which is when James and I met him. That was when he showed us this dig here in ancient Bubastis. Years later he caused great controversy by moving ancient Egyptian antiquities to museums in France. He justified it by saying that it was the only way to keep the treasures safe from thieves. I imagine that is where the Bast statue is now."</p><p></p><p>She gestures to one of two doors along the left side long-wall of the large chamber and says, "That would be the door to the surface exit. Champollian commented to us that he hadn't found the second exit, as the priests would have had one to use for emergencies. Based upon the fact that he apparently never discovered the section that we entered from I would guess it is somewhere that way." </p><p></p><p>"Thomas Young did much of the earlier work," Abigail added. "What Champollian realized was the hieroglyphics represent phrases rather than single words or letters. These emptied rooms make me want to cry. So much of their meaning is now lost." Abigail sighed and looked around the room. "We'll want to use that unknown exit. There may be nothing left to steal but that doesn't mean the main entrance isn't watched." Mina says, "Yes, going out the known exit might be bad. Smell the air in here, torches dipped in oil burned in this room recently, probably earlier today." </p><p></p><p>Lawrence states, "I've read that thieves looted many tombs soon after the burial. So I can see his point. Anyway, what's done is done. Let's go look for that secret door." They backtrack, but for the time being still leave open the magical door between Champollion's ruins and those that they found. From the "+" intersection there are two options, the chamber with the metal doorway with the cat mouth keyhole, and the short corridor with a still unopened single stone doorway. Ruby senses a magical aura surrounding that door. "Lady Wilamina, Miss West...what do you think?"</p><p></p><p>Mina examines the door on the wall and says, "Let me try something." She waves her hands and recites an incantation in the Ancient Egyptian language. A number of Egyptian symbols then materialize on the doorway. After studying them for a short while she declares "This is it, the back-door out of here. However the phrases indicate that it has been warded against the 'great evil from below', whatever that might mean, and that only the 'pure of heart' can open it." "Well, that disqualifies your granddaughter!" thinks Benjamin to himself.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Silver Moon, post: 5233743, member: 8530"] [B]Chapter 45, "Who is gonna stick their arm in that mouth?" (Episode Two, Chapter Five) - Wednesday, September 6, 1882, 5:30 P.M. [/B] The door opens into the room with relative ease as the stale air inside mingles with the better air in the hallway. The room is fairly large, thirty feet in diameter with a thirty foot high ceiling. The floor has a tile fresco inlaid of the cat goddess Bast. On each of the three other walls is a metal rod near the ceiling, from which dangle tatters that were apparently once great tapestries, which would have been twenty-five foot square. On the wall on either side of the door are rods with the remains of a pair of ten-foot wide and twenty-five-foot long tapestries. Nothing else is inside the room. Ruby wanders around the chamber to the remains of the tapestries and looks them over, searching the area. "I wonder what happened to these? I mean, everything else in here is in good shape." Lawrence coughs in the stale air. "My guess is they fell apart due to age. Hmm. It doesn't look like there is any other doors in this room. Let's take a quick look." Mina says, "Probably either mice or insects inside the cloth. Once the door was sealed the tapestries would have been the only organic material left for them to eat until they died of dehydration." A search of the room reveals no other doors. Nanuet remains in the hallway, just peeking into the room. "No way out huh? Let's see where else this hallway leads." Nanuet waits to see if the others follow before continuing cautiously up the hallway with Maska. Fish quickly inspects the tapestry mounts/rods before following Nanuet into the hallway. "Nan, let's check out that room. Bring the torch!" Continuing to make 'cobweb torches', they continue another twenty-five feet further down the corridor to a '+' shaped intersection with another door ten feet down the short corridor to the left, a blank wall at the corridor's end ten feet in front, and a wide open arch-style doorway to the right leading to another room that appears to be another thirty-feet square although the vast sheets of spider webs obscure the far wall. As the party is watching a trio of black spiders, six-inches in length, scurry diagonally up a sheet of webs twelve feet into the room. The multitude of webs between them and the party prevent a more detailed identification of the exact type of spider. Fish comments, "Well, dem bugs certainly found something to eat! What say we burn 'em?" Lawrence lifts his torch. "Yeah, better them than me. I don't want to get caught in their webs. Let's start at the bottom of the web." Once lit, the flames moves quickly, flowing from sheet to sheet of webs through connecting lines. As the light and heat sweep into the room the spiders scatter, and it appears that there are far more than three, as dozens of six-inch-long black spiders climb up and away. This proves to be fatal for them as the flames rise, as burning spiders begin to fall to the floor. The smoke itself flows out and into the back of the chamber. After around five minutes the full thirty-foot-square room is cleared of webs and the flames move through a ten-foot diameter archway at the far wall and into the next web-filled room. That room appears to also be thirty-feet wide but only twenty-feet deep. Several more flaming six-inch spiders fall to the ground. There is then a ear-piercing scream. A large object crashes to the ground, flames surrounding it. It too is a spider, but considerably larger, the body being nearly four-feet in length and over two-feet wide excluding the legs. It is aflame, but still far from dead as it quickly begins to scamper in the direction of the party forty-feet away from it. Harden swallows hard. "Lord preserve us!"His hands brush across his chest and come away with the Colt Lightenings. He steadies his shaking hands as the monstrous spider scurries towards them, waiting for it to close the range. The reports of the twin guns is very loud in the enclosed space... Ruby exclaims, "Well, this is considerably disgusting. I'm not exactly a fan of the spider..." Seeing Hardin pull his guns, she pulls her too but checks her hasty loading from earlier while he shoots his fancy guns. If the spider is still living when he is done, she will shoot at the spider too. The creature continues to move towards the party as Hardin's bullets strike it. It finally comes to a stop a mere three feet before the group not long after the revolvers are empty, where it slumps and continues to burn. "I wonder what a creature that size eats in a place like this?" Nanuet says kneeling down to examine the body of the spider closely. "And I wonder if there are more of them." Harden frowns as he re-loads..."I put enough lead in that critter to stop a rampaging buffalo...sure didn't die too easy..." He glances around to see if there are any more... No other creatures are visible and the fire appears to be out in both rooms, with the smoke dissipating. Ruby says, "It was a good idea to burn the webs. Luckily there wasn't anything else stuck in them that we burnt though. I wonder... how were they surviving down here so long with no food source? Or they must have had a way in and out. So I guess we should keep searching around to find it." She takes a closer look at the areas they just cleared out, especially looking for any signs of false or secret doors. Fish shadows her, checking for the same. The first room is empty save for the small number of remaining strands of cobwebs that the fire did not touch. The second room has a large pile of bones in the far corner, most of which appear to be skeletons of rodents of various sizes - mice, rats, rabbits and a ferret-like creature. Lawrence scatters the bones with his foot. "Well, I reckon that these were what those spiders were eating. Much better than me." The remaining smoke is filtering out from the ceiling through a pair of ventilation shafts, one in each corner of this room, and each measuring twelve-by-eight inches in size. One is covered by a metal grate, the other is open, with a rusted metal grate lying on the floor beneath it. In the center of the far wall of this room is a metal door made of bronze, that stands eight feet tall and three-and-a-half-feet wide. Cast into the door itself is a human-sized molded relief of Bast, the Cat-Goddess. Her mouth is open, and looking beyond her bronzed fanged-teeth one can see a keyhole inside at the center of her mouth. He peers inside the mouth. "Huh, I haven't seen a key anywhere about. I'd be scared of putting my hand in there to pick the lock, though. Those teeth still look sharp." He pokes at one with his gun. Fish examines the rest of the bronze door, avoiding the nasty-looking mouth for the moment. Finding nothing of note in the door itself, Fish extracts his little mirror and takes a peer at that mouth. It appears to be a regular keyhole. Hardin chuckles..."Who is gonna stick their arm in that mouth?" Mina says, "It isn't absolutely necessary that anybody do that right now, there are other still places to investigate back in the main hallway." Then let's go. There's plenty of time for a visit to the sawbones." Ruby takes a look at the rusted grate that lies on the floor and the ventilation shaft it came from. "I wonder if time did this or something else?" As she is searching her eyes dart back to the keyhole in the cat's mouth. The lure of that was just too great and pulling on her. Abby says, "Let's be quick about it. I don't like leaving unknowns behind us, each room should be searched thoroughly. We have to come back through here and I don't want something biting us on the ass." Investigating the left corridor from the intersection, it goes for another ten feet to another stone door with no obvious mechanism for opening. The other forward corridor ends abruptly after ten feet. Fish spends some time searching for hidden doors along these corridors. Fish locates the cracks to indicate a hidden doorway along the dead-end corridor along the far wall and side. The doorway begins two feet above the floor and looks to be four feet high and two feet in width. Ruby searches around to find how to open the door, getting a lift up to get a better view. Ruby senses an aura of magic radiating from around the cracks of the hidden doorway. "Hmmm..." Ruby tapped on her full lips as she studied the door, "There may be a trap here or the door is just magically sealed. Let me check for a trap." Ruby carefully checks the door and area for traps or a way to open it. Ruby detects no traps Lawrence states, "Hmph. What if we just push it? Or maybe it's connected to the cat statue with the open mouth." "Good point, you very well may be correct about that." Ruby pushes on the door a few times to see if she can move it. Pushing has no effect. Mina states "Let me try a 'knock' spell." She makes the incantation and focuses the energies at the doorway. Ruby senses the magical aura shifting in intensity. The stone then slides back and pivots to the side, creating an opening into the next darkened chamber. Lawrence says, "Nice trick, Mina. Does that work on normal locks, too?" "A different variation of the spell does," she replies. Lawrence whistles, "That could put locksmiths and thieves out of business." Climbing through one at a time, they find themselves in a long corridor moving forward. Unlike the previous area, this section is empty of cobwebs with a minimal of dust. The corridor runs for is straight for forty feet before it apparently opens into a larger chamber to the right for the next forty feet before ending in a stone door. On this more immediate corridor there are three doors as well, one fifteen feet out and to the right and two on the left, at five and twenty-five feet. "Let's try the closer door first and work our way out. Agreed?" "Fine with me," Abby agreed. "Everyone keep your eyes open now, this area looks like someone or something comes 'round and keeps it from gettin' dusty." She makes sure to take note of what the doorway looks like on this side and how it may operate, knowing they will have to come through here again to get home. Hardin grins his crooked grin. "A kitty cleaning staff?" The first door contains a small ten-foot square room with several metal rings of various sizes and heights imbedded into the far wall and ceiling. "Well, that's interesting. Almost like they kept something chained up in here." Taking care to tread lightly, Fish inspects the door on the right. He does not see anything apparent about the door other than a standard bronze handle and no lock of any sort. Fish pulls/pushes on the handle. Like the previous room, this one is also ten-foot square. The room is empty, although from indentations and a small pedestal on the floor it appears that there was once a two-foot diameter object in the upper right corner. "Prisoners, I'd say. Could have been animals of some kind I suppose, text and research tends to heavily edited to avoid talking about anything that might have been magical. Idiots." Fish proceeds to the third and final door, inspecting it first and then attempting to open it if he discerns no lock or trap. Another ten foot square room is on the opposite side of the door. In the center of the room is a round metal brazier, four foot in diameter, that has what appears to be a fire currently burning in it, except that no smoke comes from the fire and the flames are purple in color. "Uh, that is really odd, no?" Ruby steps closer to inspect the purple fire. She concentrates on it to detect if it's magical. Ruby detects a magical aura. Mina moves forward and says, "That's Bast's Eternal flame, it is clerical in nature. The ruins that I visited a half-century ago had a brazier like that in one of the Priest's chambers. They were used to burn scrolls on which prayers to Bast were written." Moving down the corridor beyond the rooms they reach the large room off to the right. Shining their lantern they see that it runs the full forty-foot width of the remaining corridor and one-hundred feet out with a curved arch on the opposite wall. Four pairs of stone pillars support the fifty-foot high arched roof. Centered on the opposite side of the room twenty feet from the far walls is a large round twelve feet diameter stone pedestal standing eight feet high. Mina exclaims, "I've been here before! This is Champollion's dig!" She gestures back to the previous room and says, "That room with the purple flame, it was the same one that I saw before, it just looked different without any of the other furnishings in the room." She points back across the big chamber and says, "And that pedestal, atop it sat a thirty-five foot tall statue of the Cat-Goddess Bast." Lawrence says, "Champollion? Who's that? And what was he digging for? I guess that means you're in familiar territory, Mina." Mina says, "Jean Francois Champollion is considered by many to be the founder of Egyptology. His primary expertise was in the deciphering of hieroglyphics. Sixty years ago he managed to decipher the Rosetta Stone, which Napoleon had found during his earlier invasion of Egypt. Through that stone the secret to reading all of the ancient Egyptian writings was made possible. Champollian is a linguistic genius, fluent in most of the languages of the world, both present and past. The College of France made him their Professor of Egyptology. He spent much of the 1820's exploring Egypt, which is when James and I met him. That was when he showed us this dig here in ancient Bubastis. Years later he caused great controversy by moving ancient Egyptian antiquities to museums in France. He justified it by saying that it was the only way to keep the treasures safe from thieves. I imagine that is where the Bast statue is now." She gestures to one of two doors along the left side long-wall of the large chamber and says, "That would be the door to the surface exit. Champollian commented to us that he hadn't found the second exit, as the priests would have had one to use for emergencies. Based upon the fact that he apparently never discovered the section that we entered from I would guess it is somewhere that way." "Thomas Young did much of the earlier work," Abigail added. "What Champollian realized was the hieroglyphics represent phrases rather than single words or letters. These emptied rooms make me want to cry. So much of their meaning is now lost." Abigail sighed and looked around the room. "We'll want to use that unknown exit. There may be nothing left to steal but that doesn't mean the main entrance isn't watched." Mina says, "Yes, going out the known exit might be bad. Smell the air in here, torches dipped in oil burned in this room recently, probably earlier today." Lawrence states, "I've read that thieves looted many tombs soon after the burial. So I can see his point. Anyway, what's done is done. Let's go look for that secret door." They backtrack, but for the time being still leave open the magical door between Champollion's ruins and those that they found. From the "+" intersection there are two options, the chamber with the metal doorway with the cat mouth keyhole, and the short corridor with a still unopened single stone doorway. Ruby senses a magical aura surrounding that door. "Lady Wilamina, Miss West...what do you think?" Mina examines the door on the wall and says, "Let me try something." She waves her hands and recites an incantation in the Ancient Egyptian language. A number of Egyptian symbols then materialize on the doorway. After studying them for a short while she declares "This is it, the back-door out of here. However the phrases indicate that it has been warded against the 'great evil from below', whatever that might mean, and that only the 'pure of heart' can open it." "Well, that disqualifies your granddaughter!" thinks Benjamin to himself. [/QUOTE]
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AGELESS Campaign Episode 2 - Temple of the Cat-Goddess
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