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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ConnorSB" data-source="post: 1255285" data-attributes="member: 14273">I'm aiming for a 1000 words a day, which is about how long I make my updates anyway. So here's #3."Problems"Kel stared at the sage, startled. “Wha… what?”“I’ll need time to study it, Kel. And the proper books. If you could see your way back out into the waiting room, I must take a trip to the vault. In fact, go get lunch. I don’t know how long this may take.”“Uhh… alright, Dronosus.” He sighed and hopped of the desk. He went to the door, but turned and took a look around the room. Dronosus had his back turned; he was shuffling off to the door in the back of the office, the one with the private stairs to the vault that every office here had. Besides the desk and the door, the floor was bare. The walls, however, were lined with bookshelves. They were a mess, books stacked every which way and scrolls of parchment crammed into the corners. Kel put his hand to the door, which was actually simply a piece of the translucent wall, framed in purple, and it opened outward silently.He stepped through, and suddenly the wall was visible again. For the instant that he had one eye in the office and one in the waiting room, the wall became blurry, a purple haze in Kel’s mind.Jora had turned in her chair to face Kel.“You’ll probably want to cancel your master’s appointments,” said Kel. “He said it would be ‘a while.’”“Oh,” said Jora. “You can have seat over there.” She pointed a finger, snakelike, at a kobold sized chair set tastefully against the left wall.Kel nodded, walked, and sat. And sat, and sat. This did not bode well, he thought. He didn’t really want Dronosus to look at the stone in the first place, and now it wasn’t even in Kel’s possession anymore. Who knew what the ogre-mage was doing with it, deep in the vaults of the Pavilion of Sages?It was a quiet wait. The tempered glass walls provided a good damper on the noises of the city outside. But they echoed the sounds from within, and for a long time the only thing to pass through Kel’s ears was the scratching of the assistant’s pen and her quiet humming. It was an old tune, with many names and many subjects, but for Kel it was “The Ugly Elf and the Pretty Orc,” which provided a humorous twist on the two races’ eternal struggle. He could remember his mother singing it to him and the other eggs, so long ago. Kobolds were the only civilized race born by egg, and for reasons no one quite understood, most kobolds became active and aware long before they were hatched. By the time they emerged from their eggs, most could understand speech. Kel certainly could.As he sat, it floated to the top of Kel’s mind that he was humming along to the tune as well, mouthing the words; Jora was looking at him. “You know the tune?”“My mother sang it to me en embryo. It was always my favorite.”“Mine as well.” She smiled. “Are you hungry?”It was then that the office door flew outward, wreathed in flames.Dronosus’ assistant flew over the desk, pushed by the explosion. Kel bolted to his feet. She hit the floor limp, unconscious, maybe dead. Inside the office, an inferno raged. Kel stared at the flames as they hungrily devoured the books and scrolls within. He heard the sickening sound of wood collapsing, and knew that the office was unsaveable. The building was stone, and heavily protected against fire. Each office was in its own sort of stone cubby. The doors to the stairs at the back of each one were metal, and reinforced with magic besides.Regardless, fire was not good, and even the chance of it spreading in such a facility was unacceptable. And smoke was filling the room. Kel backed away from the blaze, picked up the Jora’s fallen body, and, dragging her outside, began yelling. “Fire! Fire! Fire in Dronosus’ office!”The guards in the pavilion below turned. They started yelling, and one ran off to a set of steps leading down into the vaults. Kel took Jora’s body in his arms and moved away from the burning office, along the walkway that encircled the inner walls of the pavilion. He reached the steps down and took them carefully. As he did guards appeared from the vault stairs and ran across the pavilion and then up the steps past him. The first one paused until Kel assured him the woman was all right. After three flights, he reached the ground. He put Jora down on the grass of the courtyard, cradeling the back of her scaled head. He put his hand over her snout, felt her hot breath against it. She lived. He looked up at the office, and prayed that Dronosus and the tablet hadn’t been inside.Suddenly, a gout of smoke belched from the building. A guard emerged suddenly from it, stumbling backwards and hit the railing of the walkway in front of the smoking office. Another figure emerged. Violently, it shoved the guard over the edge. He screamed as he fell, and hit the stone path that encircled the edge of the building with a sickening crunch. The figure leaped from the causeway, dropped the thirty or so feet gracefully, and landed softly, on all fours. The furry creature grinned with a mouthful of knives before bounding towards the lone reptile-man…</blockquote>

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