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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.
If pushed in that order, the stones do allow themselves to be depressed into the floor. There's a loud creak from somewhere but the octagonal bit of rock doesn't actually move.
"I could give it a shove." He does so with Fetching instead of his hands, in case it tries to bite back or something.
With another groan, the section of stone drops lower into the floor.
"I think it's just really old. Maybe if we pour water here again it'll lubricate it a bit..."
"Or rust it." He tries to see if he can get a view of the mechanism. "I guess if it does rust it'll be after we leave, so worth a try."
One side of the shape has sunk deeper than the other, and has maybe slid a bit sideways into some sort of slot under the floor; the crack on the opposite side is a few millimetres wider.
Sure, if their party is sufficiently prepared that they have grease on them too, that does seem like a better idea.
Vanyel can help shove it in there with some detailed Fetching pushes.
Greased, the stone slides neatly out of the way.
There are more stairs. Very narrow ones. They appear to go quite far down.
"Mind if I put a spot of paint in this place so if we come back to it later we know it's the same place?"
"In case it's the kind of dungeon that changes around as you move through it," he says, adding a red dot on the ground. "Most aren't, but it takes a minute and saves you ten hours sometimes."
"Is that a thing in your world? It sounds really hard with our kind of magic, although," brief exhalation, "I'm hesitant to put anything past Urtho, I don't have the faintest idea how the floating spell works or how it's still active at all."
Vanyel sends a mage-light down the stairs ahead of them.
"The sort of wizard who'd built sixteen superweapons for fun would in our world absolutely build a tower that changes around behind you but it does seem like the kind of thing that's easier with our magic." And they can descend the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs is another big, round room, only slightly narrower smaller than the vault above though with a much lower ceiling, but this one, rather than being bare and minimalist, feels downright crowded, workbenches and shelves everywhere, all of them absolutely covered with stuff. Glassware and jars, still intact, showing dust and residue where chemicals had once been. A table dedicated to wood-working, with a lathe, clamps, vice, and assorted tools. Another station for metalworking, and one for glassblowing, with several beakers and more complex apparatuses in various states of completion.
The shelves are loaded with incomplete projects, scattered with notes and diagrams. A fine sheen of dust covers everything, but surprisingly little. (There haven't been any humans around to shed dead skin cells in millennia, after all.)
Here too, the air is perfectly fresh and breathable when Vanyel checks.
Most of it is! Almost none of it is recognizable, even to Vanyel.
"If we go slowly I can at least tell you if things are going to explode. ...You can touch that brooch, if you want, it's not magical at all."
It's a beautiful piece, half-completed, in the shape of a hummingbird; the inlaid mosaic of tiny agate-pieces as feathers is mostly unfinished.
"Maybe he was one of those bizarre people who only need four hours of sleep a night, I know a Herald like that. And - I figure he didn't have time, after the war."
He leans in to try to read Urtho's notes, and is stymied by the fact that it's both in an extremely archaic form of a language he barely knows how to read in the first place (Shin'a'in and Tayledras use a different script from the Valdemaran one, ideographic rather than a phonetic alphabet), and also that Urtho, apparently, had the worst handwriting.