between then and know

[intricate_engineer]

It was a trap.
Glen should have seen it coming, but she'd thought the offer might be genuine. Wasn't the possibility of immortality worth the risk?
Well, not this time.
Her pendant, her way out, was broken.
She tried to use it anyway.

Comments

[pythbox]

The ceilings are high enough that it shouldn't be too bad.

Burning continues. Different pieces of wood have different characteristics as fuel, sometimes very different - some of them burn fast, while some hardly seem to burn at all. Maybe some of the wood is fake, and made of non-flammable materials.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen takes notes.
It's hard to judge differences in color in the dim light, but records what she can, taking note of the smell of the wood and the different patterns of grains.


She drinks some water and morosely swallows her "dinner".
She's going to get sick of these pills really fast.

But her hunger is forgotten, when she turns to the books and the tools.

She picks up the tools first.
She can't place the silvery brown leather, but maybe some of the other materials will be easier to identify.

[pythbox]

At a glance, all the metal in the tools seems to be the same stuff, a steel-like substance - perhaps it is steel, perhaps not - that also matches the material in the round metal plates.

Anything with a handle has it wrapped in that silvery leather. It's held up very well over however long it's been here; none of it seems cracked or stiff.

On closer inspection, those long sticks seem to be various sizes of paintbrush, with steel-ish bindings holding the brush heads to the leather-wrapped handles. Rather than having bristles, the brush heads seem to be made of a dense spongy material shaped into a number of different configurations. Some blunt cones, some cones with rounded points, some chisel-like wedges. It's hard to tell what exactly the brush heads are made of; there aren't too many ways to manufacture a dense sponge like that, and there are no signs that it was cut or molded or otherwise shaped into its present form. As far as it's possible to tell by looking, they might as well have grown that way on extremely well-standardized plants.

Taken in context, perhaps some of the other less-identifiable tools might be paint scrapers or similar; the metal plates could even be palettes. Why someone felt the need to bring a painting kit (and no paints or canvas) to their poorly defended stronghold when fleeing mysterious terrifying monsters is a separate question, and no obvious answer presents itself.

Whatever those brush heads are, they're either unused or very well cleaned: there is no paint residue on any of them, and they're all the same shade of pale blue. In fact, there's no paint on anything.

Among the tools is a small bowl or jar, wide and round with straight vertical sides and a rim that might be shaped to fit some sort of lid, made of a blue-grey stone not otherwise found in the vicinity. It's as inexplicably pristine as the rest.

And one of the mysterious leather-wrapped rods turns out to conceal a small knife, capped like a pen rather than sheathed like a weapon. The blade is not quite two inches long, straight and narrow, with the sharp edge turning a forty-five degree angle at the end to meet the dull edge and form a point. Unlike every other example of metal in these tools, it's also very, very blue. Blue like a butterfly's wings. If she tests it, she'll find that the tiny knife is extremely sharp.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen taps the bowl gently with the tip of her wire cutter and tests the knife on a piece of wood.

[pythbox]

The bowl makes a quiet little sound somewhere between a tick and a chime when tapped.

The knife makes marks in the wood very effectively. It's too small to be a really efficient tool for cutting large pieces of wood into smaller pieces, but its strength and sharpness are more than equal to the task.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen tests the knife on the leather and the steel-like metal.
She also pours a few drops of water into the bowl, rolls them around, and checks the water for residue or a change in color.

[pythbox]

There was a little bit of dust in the bowl and now there is a little bit of dust in the water. It doesn't seem to be particularly interesting dust - the same stuff that's distributed here and there throughout these rooms. Besides that, nothing comes of that experiment.

The blue knife scratches the leather and makes an unpleasant skreeking noise but no marks when scraped against the metal.

[intricate_engineer]

She doesn't want to test the bowl in the fire yet, so instead she dips one of the paintbrushes into the water and runs the tip across the floor.

[pythbox]

Now there is a line of water on the floor, very precisely drawn, and the head of the paintbrush is wet and a little dusty from contact with water and floor respectively.

[intricate_engineer]

She'd been hoping some trace of color had remained in the sponge, but it seems the brushes were very well cleaned or unused.
The bowl will be useful for boiling water. She can used heated stones and the tongs.

Glen's exhausted. She can explore the surrounding area in the daylight.
She should try to sleep, if her hunger and worry will let her.

[pythbox]

Nothing is going to interrupt her if she does manage to sleep. The night will go on for a while, getting colder as it does, and then the sun will rise and the temperature trend will begin to reverse; but inside the hill she will be somewhat insulated from these fluctuations.

[intricate_engineer]

She does manage to sleep eventually.
Her computer wakes her eight hours later. She has a moment of disorientation as she tries to place her surroundings. She groans when she remembers, and sits up.

She's starving. She swallows an emergency ration tablet. It doesn't help.
She drinks some water. It doesn't help either.

She stumbles to her feet and goes to the mouth of the cave.

[pythbox]

Early morning sunlight throws long shadows from the dead trees. Nothing moves, except for the wind.

[intricate_engineer]

Well, she's not going to run out of wood.
She steps out into the sun to judge the temperature.

[pythbox]

Warmish. Likely to get warmer. The light breeze brings a bit of a chill to the air.

[intricate_engineer]

That seems mildly promising. As long as Glen stays inside at the heat of the day, she shouldn't sweat away all her water.

Glen retreats inside to grab her bag and the sealed books.
She adds in the flint, the bowl, and a few of the tools she deems useful. You never know what will happen.

She sits in the sunlight and removes one of the intact books from its bag.

[pythbox]

This is the larger of the two. It's bound in a familiar silvery brown leather, the cover engraved with a strange geometric diagram of circles linked by straight lines. Sixteen circles in total, but five are more prominent than the rest.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen opens to the first page.

[pythbox]

It has words on it. They aren't in any language she's ever heard of, of course, but they are words, written very tidily in an unfamiliar alphabet.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen isn't worried by this.
She'd have been more surprised if the words were in a language she could understand.
She takes out the translator and slowly turns the pages of the book, one by one, giving the translator information to work with.

When she's finished with this book, she'll take out the smaller one, and let the translator record it too.

[pythbox]

The first book contains quite a few diagrams and illustrations. Some entire chapters seem to consist mostly of abstract figures drawn in beautiful coloured inks and enclosed in neat circular outlines, each accompanied by one or two paragraphs of text and a legend labelling the colours used.

At the very end of the book, the final appendix begins with a copy of the sixteen-connected-circles figure from the front cover, each circle filled in with a coloured ink and labelled with a name. This is followed by a lengthy and currently indecipherable chart, of which the first sixteen entries are marked in the same coloured inks as the correspondingly labelled circles. If she thinks back to opening the chest, she might recall that these sixteen colours also match the marbles that rolled out of it.

(The second book has more of the feel of a journal, in contrast to the first book's professional tone. Whoever kept the journal had very neat handwriting most of the time, but they still can't compare to whoever wrote or printed the first one. Interestingly, although the journal-keeper wrote no charts and drew few illustrations, here and there the journal contains one of those abstract circle-enclosed diagrams.)

[intricate_engineer]

Glen finishes going through the books and sets the translator down. It could take a while, depending on the complexity of the language.

The diagrams will provide some context, but it won't be enough. The translator will need to rely partly on trial an error. It's so much easier to decode a language when native speakers are available.

If the translator doesn't make any progress in the next few hours, Glen will return to the books herself. For now, she wants to explore the surrounding area. She drops off the books first.

[pythbox]

The surrounding area continues to be just as dead and just as flat as it was yesterday. It will be very easy to find her way back to this hill, because it's the tallest thing in sight from any direction.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen decides to climb to the top of the hill.

[pythbox]

From the top of the hill, she can see:

The shorter hill off to the west, with its pool of slightly gross water.

A black blotch in a dip in the ground to the northeast, which might be a pit or a discoloration or something else, it's hard to tell at this distance.

A faint glimmer far off to the east which is either quite a lot of water or a mirage.

A dark smudge close-ish by to the south, near enough to be categorized pretty definitively as a hole in the ground.

As for the hill itself, it is much the same on top as it was around the sides: a mix of dry cracked earth and solid grey rock, with many smaller rocks distributed throughout the former.