An adventuring party recruited from Osirion teleports into Azir on the 8th of Desnus. Rahadoum's recruiting contact in Osirion wrote ahead to note they were expected. Couple of guys he's known a long time - a wizard, a ranger - and a new guy, sorcerer, probably to replace the cleric they usually travel with. They spend two days in Azir getting oriented and head out to the front. The ranger wears an unusually high quality amulet of Nondetection; the sorcerer wears a headband for intelligence, which is a bit unusual as sorcerers usually don't need it to cast, but some variants do; they are otherwise unremarkable. Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, no reading, which could mean neutral or 'hiding it'. They work quickly and effectively, manage resources reasonably well, get recommended to higher-ups for a closer look on that account.
Moondance is still looking around with solemn awe, as though standing in a grand temple.
"Nothing tried to bite me. I guess it might look for Gifts? But I'd bet not."
Vanyel, as the person best able to shield himself, makes a case that he should go down next, and then does so.
"...No offensive spells, still. Just a really ridiculously thorough amount of shielding–" He stops.
A floating magic lift, clearly once meant to transport objects up, maybe all the way to the surface. A number of doors. One open door with an empty room behind it.
"I - think - that these might be the rooms where the rest of Urtho's weapons are kept," he says, hesitantly.
" - wow. Yeah, that seems plausible.
Super expecting now that one of them is metaphorically the Starstone. Somehow."
"That seems possible and also I'm really dubious it's a good idea to go poking our heads in rooms with potentially world-destroying weapons in them. I don't think they'll be trapped or anything, that seems stupid when there's a weapon in them, but - I don't know, they might be fragile or unstable after so long."
"I don't know. I definitely don't see any way down from here, but - there were some other doors around the room up there, maybe some of them still go places."
"Do we figure it's safe for me to sweep for secret doors, knock on things to see if they're hollow, etcetera..."
"Er, maybe don't knock on the doors or near them, but," quick mage-sight scan, "floor should be safe. Honestly Urtho sounds like the sort of person who might make his fortress full of secret passages, so."
"We can go in two groups. Moondance and I will go with Karna, then we will have two mages and both of us are Mindspeakers. If your group stays with Vanyel, he is a Mindspeaker and also several of you have magic. I think we ought be reasonably safe."
"Usually I'd want healing in both groups but we can get to you pretty fast, probably, if we need to."
" - right, sorry. Those seem like good groups, then." They're also the people who serve this goddess and people who don't, but he is not going to make a fuss about that, it's their territory.
Vanyel can try to help Hagan look for secret doors? If there are any, they're totally non-magical, so mage-sight doesn't help.
Yeah, you usually search for secret doors by pouring water on the ground and seeing whether there are seams it runs in, and running your hands along the walls and floor searching for cracks, and tapping everything for the sound of hollowed spaces or hidden mechanisms, and using Goggles of Minute Seeing to look closer at anything that looks off.
There are, in fact, some minute cracks in the floor! An octagonal section big enough to fit a person through, and arranged around it, four round coin-sized pieces of stone, all the exact same colour as the surrounding white marble and exactly flush with the floor. The octagonal bit sounds maybe hollow underneath.
"Trapdoor's here," he announces. "Maybe you enter a code here, not sure."
"Maybe we press down on these little ones? If I had to guess it'd be an order with some sort of significance, hmm... Could be East, South, West, and North, I remember that being a ritual thing for the Shin'a'in."
The stones are too far apart for a single person to reach, but Vanyel can move to crouch by one of them, and they've got four people in total here.