Duty Session 169: Totally Typical Tomb

"Graveyards always sort of creeped me out," Att Syne comments, approaching the fenced-in expanse of tombstones and memorials. It's noticeably dimmer here, even during the afternoon. Plant Hwyaden has nothing to prove by trying to fight undead at night. Might as well let the time of day help them out. Of course, it doesn't seem to be doing anything for the unnatural fog: there's a rolling wall of mist, moving slowly in and out like the entire area was breathing. It's appropriately creepy.

"But when there's no bodies in them... well, that just makes it eerie, doesn't it?" Att steps into the fog bank, staff tapping against a cobbled path. "I wonder if they commit things to the earth even if there isn't a body."

Red eye-lights come into sight all around. Skeletons start to loom out of the visibility-limiting fog. Att nods, lifting his staff and calling, "Spirit of stone!" An earth elemental drags its way upwards, the grass scattered across its hunched form's shoulders and upper arms practically glowing with how green it is. It lumbers off to attack right from the get-go, moving in to get the attention of the multitudinous chaff.

"No. That makes it an empty warehouse." Plant Hwy-a-den First Generation Whis-key Sow-aa observes in deadpan, eyes half-lidded and expression devoid of giving a hoot.

"If it *had* corpses in it, it'd at least be a museum. But an empty graveyard is like an empty port: totally useless. What can you even 'commit' to the earth if there's nothing there? Do we bury their bar tab?"

Whis makes a disgusted face. "You go after the relatives with the bar tab. That's just business."

Skellingtons begin to meanace the party, but being as Skeletons can't be from inside people in Elder Tale because there's no proof that the skeleton is inside the body in the first place. "Begone, themed trash!" Whis calls, heaving up a boulder and tossing it into the middle of the pack of rattling bones.

"We're here for looting, not scooting!"

"They're not so bad.... Well, they're not so bad when they're overrun more than they should be." Kauchemar feels not the least bit creeped out, but this sort of scene is her kind of thing, being the Guild's closest thing to a practicing necromancer. Of course when you're going into creepy dreadful places you bring your creepy dread mare along for the fun and shenanigans.

"Looks like the boneyard is just full of numbskulls out here," she muses at the skeletons rising with their dimly lit eye sockets.

"Themed trash is right." Kauchemar has little interest in dealing with basic skeletons, so takes her shield and flings it at the nearest cluster of skeletons in her way. Once it's done spinning and smashing through them it comes back to her, but just remains floating at herself instead of held. Having possessed weapons that can move on their own does have its perks.

     "Ah, honestly, I'm kind of getting the hang of it," Shin says cheerfully. He's playing with one of his Cards (they're punchcards) as the skeletons appear, spinning it between two fingers. "There's so much weird stuff in this game that graveyards don't even bother me anymore. Honestly, they didn't bother me too much to begin with."

     "I..."

     Shin hesitates.

     "...spent a lot of time in one when I was a kid. Although it wasn't one of these." He taps the card against the side of his head as the undead start appearing. "Honestly, European graveyards are weird. Who makes these things look so unnerving? There's no sense of organization or anything, nowhere to leave offerings...just stones."

     The eyelights start cropping up. Shin places the belt on his waist and snaps the card in.

                             INSTALL: QUAKE!                            

     A Rockrab spawns in around Shin's right arm, claws clicking together, carapace clacking into a gauntlet-shield. Shin brings the crab-gauntlet down into the ground; it shakes the earth, a shockwave rippling outwards into the skeletons.

     "It's like Christians try to make it as weird as possible."

Rocks fall, skeletons die.

Well, it's slightly more dramatic than that: shockwaves knock them down while the elemental tanks, and a widening circle of destroyed undead begins to generate as chunks of stone and boomeranging possessions (it's a pun) smash them to bits. They really are trash mobs. This early on in their quest of the... day? Week? Weekend? We'll say weekend -- their quest of the weekend, nothing like that is going to do more than set the tone.

It's spooky, by the way. The tone.

"I've never been to a Japanese cemetary, so I guess I can't comment. Even without a corpse, maybe they bury grave goods, though. Precious objects associated with the living. Then there'd have to be a good reason for all this undead, though... I wonder if it's a magical physics thing, or just a thoughtless trope?" Att is meandering towards the mausoleum in the midst of the mist.

He stops, turns, and looks at a hillside nearby. "Barrow over there," he says. "That's a tunnel, guaranteed." He points his staff. Strange place for a passage to be...

"They may not have dead bodies to bury, but the Landers still honor their dead with ceremony and rememberance." Kauchemar pauses to rub her chin thoughtfully. "Though buring former items of the deceased as a tribute that attracts forelone presences would be a more fitting justification than 'convenience environment for undead spawns'. That might be something to look into."

The train of thought is interrupted by Att pointing out the oddly placed tunnel. "Now the question would be is that part of the setup, or did something else come and dig their way in. Ooooo, the unknown possible horrors makes my spine tingle in more ways than just potential doom~"

First she shifts down to her 'human' form to not take up too much room in the tunnel, then sets about using her ghost shield like a dozer shovel to clear some of the rubble out of the way so the others can make sure the passage doesn't bury them alive.

     "No, I don't think they do. Have you never been to a European cemetary?" Shin raises an eyebrow at Att. "There's one at the Christian Church near where I used to live. I had to pass by it every day on my way to high school."

     He crouches down at the hillside and pokes it with the Rockrab gauntlet. "I mean, I'd figure you must've at some point in your life. You aren't Japanese, right?"

     Att mentions a tunnel. Shin shrugs and sticks his hand (and the Rockrab) against the ground. It shakes slightly, knocking away earth.

     A beat.

     "Oh, you mean *Landers*!"

     "Ha ha, I was wondering! Maybe they're monster corpses."

Tone dial set firmly to SPOOK, Whis carries along, dragging a tombstone behind her like a piece of extra-heavy loot from the outer area. It grinds, 'ghhhh', slate along the ground with snapped off bits being rounded off by friction, her fingers pinched into the crescent at the top.

"Skeletons are skeletons. You can tell a game isn't made in China when it has real, spooky skeletons and not weird zombies with hats on and ghosts and stuff."

A beat, as Whis turns to Shin, dropping her gravestone with a loud THUNK as Att goes to begin redstone automation.

"It's... it's just a monster. Nothing leaves corpses. Unless you mean 'a totally normal human's skeleton' is some sort of weird monster bits."

"Maybe a flaming skeleton."

"Not on main, dude," Att asides to Kauchemar in vague admonition.

"Yeah, I meant landers. Sorry! Train of thought jumped tracks." Att begins messing with the wall. He's tapping at it with a hammer and chisel here and there. "That's right; I'm not. And I've been to European ones before, sure, and American ones. The difference is pretty stark. Usually it's just in age and maintenance, though." Tap, tap, tap. Att does delicate work while Shin and Kauchemar do important things like preventing them from being buried alive, or moving heaps of rubble. Eventually, Att taps one more point, nods, and waits.

Nothing happens.

Until Whiskey drags the tombstone over, anyway. She hits something like a tripwire he'd setup with a favorite debuff spell. The wall crumbles as the thorny 'wire' snaps. Her tombstone loot(?) is nevertheless intact. "I've got a big chunk of bone from when we were clearing out Giant's Seat, but, no, no corpses. You're probably right about the presences," he adds to Kauchemar. "If there's no actual material to raise, then..." A big ol' shrug.

Att starts down the passage. It slopes gradually, then more severely. They're definitely descending into the bowels of the earth, here. "So what's different about a Japanese cemetary," Att asks, after a moment's quiet walking. "I guess I kind of assumed they weren't as sprawling, but I never really thought about it enough to look."

A beat. A slight grinding noise. "Did you hear that?" Att turns, looking up and back.

Cue Indiana Jones music.

Kauchemar feigns a hurt expression at the vague chiding from Att, then follows the rest of the group descending into the now open passage way. It slopes. And slopes at a sharper incline after a bit.

And then the rumble reachs their ears.

Kauchemar puts a palm over her face. "They used the most cliche possible trap for the situation, didn't they?" Turns her head just enough to glance over her shoulder. "Yup, they did."

And like that the Bard is NOPE right on down the passage. She's NOPE so hard that she moves fast enough to actually Blink in and out of view several times before finally reaching the bottom and finding enough space to the side to get out of the way of the impending crushing. "I prefer the musical kind of Rolling Stones thankyouverymuch!"

     "Hear wha-"

     Rumbling.

     "Ah."

     The Install card is quickly removed so as not to weigh him down further. Shin starts running.

     Quickly.

     Unfortunately, he's still fumbling for his cards when the boulder bears down on him. He gets...well...

     Bould over.

     Shin lays there on the floor for a moment, groaning, a red line all the way down his back. He's only got enough HP to survive because he's a Spirit Caller. If he had been a Summoner primary...

     Well, he'd probably be dead right now.

The incredible power of Whis just... physics interacting with terrain via other terrain is shown off.

"Oh, I guess this is my lucky stone???" Whis observes, before spotting Kauchemar's reaction to the passage. Unlike the alacritous bard, the flatfooted druid turns and sleeping gazes into an onrushing boulder--

And gets not bowled, but rolled over. Luckily, it's a near thing, the large tombstone she had been carrying smushing against her back and side as the boulder carries over and ramps off her to hit Shin on the way down the tunnel.

"I'm ooooookayyyyyyy--" Whis calls down the tunnel, which sounds echo-ier and spook-ier becuase of the air cap the boulder causes.

DAH DUH NAH NAHHHH
DUN DUN NAAAHHHH--

Continuing in the style of the day, a rock falls, and everybody almost dies.

Well... not everybody. Att pulls himself out of a crevice after it goes past. Kauchemar just straight-up outruns it. Shin bodily tanks the whole thing, and also Whiskey, who is effectively a pinball.

It works out.

They make it to the bottom, where there's time to recover HP. The boulder has crushed a path down the middle of something like a rough-hewn cathedral, with a huge bone organ at the far end. There are skeletons everywhere. Most of them are in stone pews. The theme here is obvious.

"Okay, uh..." Att looks at the sheet music, then immediately shrugs and turns to Kauchemar. "I can't read sheet music. Your turn."

Kauchemar's attention is immeadiately drawn out of post escape breath catching by the organ made of bones and and such. "You know, this reminds me of something..." She points at the sheet music. "And that is -very- suspicious. All the Landers I've seen handle music has been through oral traditions." She looks the music over, then cracks her knuckles. "But this is easy enough." She presses the first few keys.

Nothing happens. No sound, other than ominous rumbles that might be another trap, or just something not triggering like it's suppose to. "That's not good..." She steps over to the side and leans to look back. "Shit, the air mechanism has broke apart."

She hustles back over to the keys, shifting into her full Were Fang form as she does. Holds her hands up dramatically. "I can probably do this, but if one of you can give it a boost of air it'd be appreciated." She starts to play the keys again.

At the same time she opens her mouth wide an unleashes her hellscream, using it to help vibrate the pipes and get air flowing through them.

Hopefully it'll be enough to get the secret properly unlocked this time!

     Shin peels himself off the ground and groans. It takes him a minute of testing to make sure his body is in an OK state before he answers Att's question from earlier. "Organization, mostly. Shinto graveyards are a lot more organized. You have paths, you have monuments. You have places for offerings. You keep an offering-place at home, too. It's not a one-and-done thing. You don't go there to remember every so often; you go there to ask for help. It's not sprawled out, either, it's very clean."

     Beat.

     "Although I guess it *can* be a little creepy at night."

     "But that's because of the ghosts."

     He says this matter-of-factly as he and Kauchemar examine the organs.

     A card snaps into his hand.

                              INSTALL: REPEL!                              

     The Rockrab disappears. Shin sweeps a cape around his shoulders, attaching it in the front where the scarf would go. The cape is evidently made up of a bunch of Hurricane Butterflies. They beat their glowing wings lightly. It's a cape of eyes all down his back.

     Shin sweeps the cape around and a blast of air carries him backwards from the wings. The air shoots up into the bellows to get it started again.

It works out all the way into the next chamber, with Whis' superior compact shape surviving the interaction with a boulder by just taking it on her strong shoulders and carrying the orb, like Atlas.

For like half a second, until it ran over Shin. You see, folks, this is what is meant by the benefits of a low center of gravity.

The room beyond, which disappears the boulder into a falling floor puzzle surrounding a broken organ, draws a displeased grunt out of Whis.

With a snap of her wrist she summons up her staff, held just short of the bent mistletoe crook at the top. Her free hand hovers over the leafy cap, an earthen green-brown sphere of light expanding beneath her palm.

"Seize and twist, root and furrow, here I call ye fangs of the earth. Loop and entwine at my call - and banish both foes and harm: Thorn Calamite!"

The tomb groans and rumbles ominously, though the effect is subtle: from the 'missing' hole in the floor, thick roots with burrs twist underneath the floor, resolving into a fully reinforced area with a small missing spot where one can walk along treetrunk-thick cords of interwoven plant-growth.

"Begone, falling floor puzzle. You won't be missed because I hate you and all of your acrobatic challenge kind."

The floor puzzle is basically a thing to loathe. Whiskey makes it easy to move back and forth across it -- well, easier, anyway; it's still unstable and slidey and terrible -- and the cape of wind-blasts provide the air pressure that Kauchemar needs to make a... horrible screaming sound??

Well, it works. A grinding sound reveals a staircase, to go even deeper! It's conveniently placed against a wall with a stable walkway over to, too.

"Huh, okay, that's --" Att misses a beat when he registers 'because of the ghosts.' "-- kind of neat," he finishes, after that beat. "Ghosts, though? Well... I suppose if we didn't worry about that sort of thing, we wouldn't build walls around places like that." Att hops onto the roots and works his way over to the path down. "Thanks Whis."

There are no traps on the way down the stairs. It's spiralling, and kind of a hike. Eventually, it opens up into a ledge over... a pirate ship?! It's just sort of sitting in a stony drydock in a big ol' cavern. Att stops for a second, shakes his head, and then keeps going onward. The telltale gleam of gold in the distance is enough of an impetus to get over there. The pirate skeleton on the throne surrounded by gold is very, very telling.

"Okay, combat stances," Att says. He draws his sword and starts pre-buffing. "We're going to get jumped the moment we try to touch this stuff." Which is why he won't until they're good to go. It'll be at least a minute before he goes, "Okay. Readyyy..."

*poke*

     How is there a ship down here?

     *How is there a ship down here?*

     Shin will never get an answer. What he will get is an oversized skeleton. What he will get is a bunch of skeleton pirates. What he will get is a room full of treasure.

     "TRANSFORM!"

                                CODE: ALGOL                                

     It's a fast transformation, mercifully, as 'Algol' runs out of the red light, knocking aside skeletons with swift blows. He's clearing a path for everyone else to get to the boss - hammering them aside with roundhouses and knee-smashes, karate-chopping through joints, the whole nine yards.

     When the battle is done, he snaps his hands across the belt, and 'Algol' disintegrates into Shin. He kneels down and picks up one of the coins.

     "Woah."

     "That's a lot of money."

As she finishes playing the required keys Kauchemar flashes Shin a thumbs up for the assistance before hoofing it across the vine suspensions Whiskey made to hold the floor mostly together and into the next chamber.

Which is a pirate ship. Drydocked in an underground grotto. With the skeleton of a 'pirate king' perched over his treasure. She slaps her hands together. "NOW I remember why this is familiar.... Which means Att is absolutely right about what is going to happen, and I don't even need Divination to confirm it." Get ready? Gladly. She traces a glowing purple circle in the air, and then reaches 'into' it to summon the sword that goes with her shield. This is not the standard pirate fair, but she's not going to risk not having some proper protection. Because sure enough as soon as the treasure is touched they're descended upon by a mob of undead pirates and skeletons.

So OF COURSE this is when the Bard goes into an actual musical number, all while blocking attacks with the shield and waving her arm along with her rhythm to direct the ghostly sword in hacking and slashing through the mob.

" o/~ Sailing the seven seas of metal, We thirst for blood, your ship is in our sights
Taste a broadside from our cannons of steel, Before our cutlasses of metal you shall kneel! o/~"

Kauchemar makes her way towards one of the larger skeletal foes, literally dancing around his heavy but slow swings. And not missing a beat in her performance either.

"o/~ We are Heavy Metal Pirates, We sail across the sky
In our battleships of cosmic steel, We're the terror up on high!
We are Heavy Metal Pirates! Our cutlasses are true! o/~"

The Nightmare Bard takes a step back as she thrusts out her hand, and her haunted sword smashes through the bone thug's ribcage from -behind- to land hilt first in her hand, and she does the 'turn to face away and strike a pose' as he crumbles to dust and pixels.
"o/~ So give us all your treasure, Or soon we'll come for you! o/~"

"No no." Whis begins, at the bottom of the spiral staircase and aboard the Sunken It's Totally Pirates genre-shifted 'tomb', with dripping bay and entirely implausible ship-in-a-bottle.

"Don't waste an invitation, Att." Whis deadpans, before reaching forward to grab the Skeleton King's bony hand, draw him up from his throne repast, and immediately powerbomb his ribcage into the deck, scattering bones everywhere.

When they begin reforming, Masked Ranger Algol begins using MEGATON Nin-POW and Kauchemar begins singing.

A good time is had by all non-spook based life-forms!

"We'll come for them anyway, Kauchemar. As long as there's the shining light of a quest marker, senseless violence will follow after it."

ONE EXTREMELY SWASHBUCKLERY BATTLE WITH SKELETON PIRATES LATER
(THERE WAS SWINGING FROM THE YARDARM AND PUNS INVOLVED, I PROMISE)

Att hefts a sack of cold, hard cash over his shoulder and hums a little victory tune. "Now..."

Slow pan back to the stairs. "... we walk all the way out."

S i g h .