The skull does not shatter when you drop it to the ground: it thumps, and rolls, and touches your naked foot, and that's the point that you scream.
You just touched a fucking skull. Holy shit.
After finding the skull, all you really want to do is abscond, but there's no way out of here, as far as you can tell. You could try slipping down the pipes, but you don't know how far they go - and if you got stuck..
No, no. You decide to sit and wait for the grub you're starting to recall to reappear instead.
The sitting part turns out to be metaphorical, because morbid curiousity wins out in the end over your growing nausea. (All the niches are filled with bones. Why are they filled with bones?)
You explore, and you steadfastly ignore the wall niches as you do, and the way it feels like the bones are staring at you. There's so much stuff in here, easily four rooms worth of things crammed into this tiny space carved between the walls, and you're grimly curious to find out if all of it is as old as the wall-hangings and the bones hidden away in the walls.
At first, it goes well: you decide to play it safe, and examine the weapons. Most blades made in West Alternia prior to the evacuation had a design and microchip carved into the bottom of their handles, for easy, tamper-proof identification. Older ones, prior to the intrastellar colonisation movement, just have stamps. There's plenty of the prior, but several examples of the earlier.
(If you had your books, and your husktop, you might be able to discover more - but your knowledge of weapons, without references, only extends to that rule of thumb. You'll have to try and fix that. These look old, but stamps can be forged, as you well know.)
Curiosity has you backtrack to the masks, where you studiously ignore the prosthetic horns. (They're perfectly normal - you even have an set made from your docked horn clippings, on Sipara's insistence - but you have a sour suspicion as to their origins. The skull you touched was hornless.) They're like theater masks, big and garish and exaggerated in their features, with eyebrows more akin to fuzzgrubs and fangs that take up the majority of the face.
They look new, unlike everything else: the paint is vibrant in the way of acrylics, not worn or faded at all, and you can see the brush strokes across some of the surface. Mostly, they're made of plaster and clay, but one looks different, with a surface more smooth and shiny than the rest. You unhook it carefully and pull it down to see.
The texture feels strange. It warms under your curious hands, accepting the heat with ease, but it's definitely not plaster. Leather, maybe, but no sort you've ever seen, and it's soft as velvet. You drag your thumb across it, the sensation reminding you of something, and on a whim, you hold it close and sniff.
[pheres's internal dialogue at this point is just FUCK :( FUCK FUCK FUCK] [fuck!!!]
You just touched a fucking skull. Holy shit.
After finding the skull, all you really want to do is abscond, but there's no way out of here, as far as you can tell. You could try slipping down the pipes, but you don't know how far they go - and if you got stuck..
No, no. You decide to sit and wait for the grub you're starting to recall to reappear instead.
The sitting part turns out to be metaphorical, because morbid curiousity wins out in the end over your growing nausea. (All the niches are filled with bones. Why are they filled with bones?)
You explore, and you steadfastly ignore the wall niches as you do, and the way it feels like the bones are staring at you. There's so much stuff in here, easily four rooms worth of things crammed into this tiny space carved between the walls, and you're grimly curious to find out if all of it is as old as the wall-hangings and the bones hidden away in the walls.
At first, it goes well: you decide to play it safe, and examine the weapons. Most blades made in West Alternia prior to the evacuation had a design and microchip carved into the bottom of their handles, for easy, tamper-proof identification. Older ones, prior to the intrastellar colonisation movement, just have stamps. There's plenty of the prior, but several examples of the earlier.
(If you had your books, and your husktop, you might be able to discover more - but your knowledge of weapons, without references, only extends to that rule of thumb. You'll have to try and fix that. These look old, but stamps can be forged, as you well know.)
Curiosity has you backtrack to the masks, where you studiously ignore the prosthetic horns. (They're perfectly normal - you even have an set made from your docked horn clippings, on Sipara's insistence - but you have a sour suspicion as to their origins. The skull you touched was hornless.) They're like theater masks, big and garish and exaggerated in their features, with eyebrows more akin to fuzzgrubs and fangs that take up the majority of the face.
They look new, unlike everything else: the paint is vibrant in the way of acrylics, not worn or faded at all, and you can see the brush strokes across some of the surface. Mostly, they're made of plaster and clay, but one looks different, with a surface more smooth and shiny than the rest. You unhook it carefully and pull it down to see.
The texture feels strange. It warms under your curious hands, accepting the heat with ease, but it's definitely not plaster. Leather, maybe, but no sort you've ever seen, and it's soft as velvet. You drag your thumb across it, the sensation reminding you of something, and on a whim, you hold it close and sniff.
It smells like skin.
Holy shit, the mask is made of skin.