Kirumi Tojo's Palace | The Ultimate Maid's Failures

[kandata]

By now everyone may be used to find themselves in bizarre locations, between going into palaces and visiting Nekyia. It might not come as a surprise that it has happened again.

What might come as a surprise, though...is how empty this place is.

All around you there's nothing more than a large, gray, featureless expanse. In the distance there seem to be bars, curving upwards to gather so, so high above you, possibly hundreds of miles above, so high it’s hard to distinguish.

It’s a cage. So unfathomably large. You could escape, were you to get to the edges of the cage, but...it would take forever. No matter how you look at it, you're trapped. The atmosphere is so...hopeless. Devoid of anything even remotely positive.

Not that you want to hang around for long, do you? After all, this is someone's palace. Not a place to stick around at. What to do, though?

It’s all so...empty. Silent. Featureless. A flat expanse of hard gray tiles.

Gather together, everyone. Gather and choose a direction. North, East, West, South. All directions look completely identical, but could it affect your time in this place, somehow? Probably not. But all treks start with the first step. Perhaps, if you get moving, you'll progress?

Comments

[kandata]

[Go North! Best of luck!

Walking to the north, the atmosphere turns foggy, hard to see through. Odd, since there had been no mist visible from anywhere before! The floor seems to turn from tiles into a dirt ground. Still very gray, but there's unmistakably dirt. Hm?

A portion of the dirt seems to be...a little raised. Curved upwards, a mound about the size of a person.

Ahead, a yard or two away from it, there's something in the fog. Joshua can see a silhouette of something big and wide, about chest-size for him, but it's hard to see what it is through the fog]

[finalmix]

[ ......... a raised dirt mound about the size of a person?

joshua is like 90% sure he knows exactly what that is and he is not touching that. nope! someone else can go dig if they want to but it will not be him sorry not sorry,

anyway, at least there's something else to investigate, which is perfectly fine by him. time to venture into the fog then - which under regular circumstances would just be danger flags all around and within a palace even more so.

if he uses a bless spell to form a pseudo ball of light torch, does that help to dissipate the fog a little and what does he see-- ]

[kandata]

[Funny! When Joshua formed a pseudo ball of light, suddenly something closes around his hand harmlessly. It's a wood lantern, the sort you'd see lighting up temples and the such. Making light materialized the lantern.

Perhaps it's fitting, because once that happened, the shape in the fog can be seen.

Yeah.

The name is unreadable, faded away. There are no plants on the pots. It's as if nobody has bothered to take care of this at all.]

[finalmix]

[ so helpful. he's not used to blank slates being this helpful!

anyway he is going to be keeping the lantern, because surely this will be useful when the entire group congregates again, right ]

[ but also, when the shape comes into view, joshua stops.

fitting, then, that he is one of the ones to stumble upon this unmarked grave.

is this just a standalone grave? are there others nearby?

more importantly: is there anything that joshua can use to clean up the grave a little bit, ]

[kandata]

[Keep the lantern, it's all yours!

No other graves nearby. This seems to be the only grave -- alone, in the middle of a blank expanse. Quite depressing, really!

There doesn't seem to be anything nearby to clean up the grave. If you intend to clean up the grave, Joshua, you'll have to use anything you might have on yourself! Or your own hands, if you wish]

[finalmix]

[ there are Implications about the lone grave right in the middle of the foggy expanse, but anyway. that's way too much to unpack right now but joshua has some Thoughts.

anyway, since there's nothing much to clean off the grave with but he at least feels compelled to do something, he's passing the lantern over to shalem for a moment just so that it frees his hands and he can dust off some of the dirt that's on the name stone.

he's being respectful about it, at least. ]

[kandata]

[Dust off the grave, Joshua, with those hands! The more he dusts off, the more he finds his hands get caked with black and white dust. Odd, that!

The name...there's a name there. Before Joshua and Shalem can focus on it, though, sensations invade them:

Momentary elation, but there's a undercurrent of melancholy underneath it, and a voice comes out from the mound Joshua left alone]

...I can be someone better now...!

[When they blink, they find themselves back with everyone else. Feel free to share with everyone what you found!]