And so it was that Cadfael, after a solid nights rest, was awoken by a rapid knocking on his door.
"Cadfael, get up! We're leaving!" shouts Barry, who has, of course, no idea if Cadfael is up or not. "You've got twenty minutse to get ready."
Since Cadfael, by habit, sleeps in his clothes, "getting ready" involves no more than putting on his coat, tucking the pen and paper he set beside the bed back into his pocket, and brushing his teeth.
Which he does.
Following this, he opens the door. If Barry, for some reason, felt the urge to stand around for about five minutes of listening to silence, Cadfael stares at him blankly. Failing that, he heads down to the lobby.
Barry isn't there, but when Cadfael is in the lobby, he finds the two guys from the car lounging about. They spring up when he enters the room, however.
"Hey there, buddy. The car is out the back. Quickest way to get from A to B, hands down. We didn't introduce ourselves earlier, huh? I'm Cale, and this is Kale."
The two men abruptly bow, then straighten. "If you'd just come this way," they continue, without preamble, and then they turn and head outside to the car.
Magical transport for a mission like this suggests one of two things to Cadfael: either his presence at this mission is very important indeed, or these people have an incredible amount of confidence in regards to the Cabal.
Or both.
With little other option at the moment, however, Cadfael follows the two.
The car is looking better than when Cadfael last saw it. It's shinier, or something. Barry isn't around, but the two guys are hopping in the car. "Get in," they say, gesturing to the door. "We'll be dropping you off and coming back. You'll be meeting the dig coordinator on landing, so you'll be in good hands."
As he gets into the car, Cadfael casually pulls out a notebook, and starts to doodle as he settles into the seat. An informed observer might realize that the doodles are, in fact, any number of almost-completed defensive runes, each needing only a stroke or two to finish off.
Of course, there's only one living informed observer in this respect, and he's doing the doodling.
And also, clinically, trying to determine if this car is going to blow up, and how much warning he'd have if said explosion were to occur.
If the car was going to blow up, Cadfael determines, it would require some outside force working against it.. he thinks. Truth is, it's hard to tell. There's a meshing of technological and magical theorems working, here. It looks relatively stable, but Cadfael isn't used to seeing the two work together.
However, it doesn't look like it's going to blow up, at least not with some outside force working on it. Cadfael can't be 100% certain, but he's pretty sure.
That would be more reassuring if Cadfael's experience didn't suggest that using magic tends to provide a lot of inimical outside force, sooner or later.
Nothing to do for it, however, and so he stares at Cale and Kale.
With a crackle, the engine revs up, and the car shoots away, doing it's trademark lightning-thing.
A burst over energy and the sound of a thunderbolt later, Cadfael feels like his stomach has almost leaped straight clear of his body. A moment later, the feeling stops, and the car slows down.
"We're he-re," chant Cale and Kale together. And indeed, you have moved from the inner-city-streets of Tokyo (which were miraculously undamaged by Cale's reckless driving) to outside a dusty-looking tarpaulin that stands a short distance away from what appears to be a cliff edge.
Inside the tarpaulin, it looks like someone has set up a makeshift office. There's a desk set up with a laptop on it, a couple of drawers and a filing cabinet, as well as a motorbike and a fridge. There's also a few people hanging about there, including a face you vaugely recognize, one Donald Melba, a mage of sorts. He looks up at the car, looking somewhat surprised.
With a final pen-stroke, Cadfael finishes one of the runes on the page -- a simple one to detect lies. After activating it, he opens the car door, and gets out.
Melba's eyes are met as Cadfael nods, every so briefly. "Melba," he says. "Left Cabal?"
"My desire to leave co-incided with their desire to throw me out," replies Melba, dryly. He's telling the truth.
"It's a long story."
Tucking the notepad back into his pocket, Cadfael looks around with Mystic Sight, taking stock of the area. "Runes?"
"Straight to business, eh?" asks Melba, smiling a little. Only a little, though. He's a dusky man who you know has seen more than a few things that would cause others to go mad.
"They're in the main dig tunnel. It's been sealed off, so nobody can go near it. I'll take you there myself."
With that, Melba gets up, and gestures for you to follow him down a ramp into the main dig area.
Cadfael follows wordlessly.
Melba heads down a ramshackle wooden ramp that creaks as your feet impact upon it. When you step on it, you can also see the digsite in its entirety.
It's really quite large and impressive. Set throughout a canyon, the site is filled with tents, holes, and small-scale machinery. Cranes and trucks and the like are moving everywhere, and tents and tarpaulins are strewn throughout the area. Portable buildings have also been brought in, along with caravans, making the whole place look like some kind of campsite- if it wasn't for the large holes filled with people digging strewn about here and there.
Opposite you, on the other side of the canyon is a large, gaping maw into blackness- a giant cave that has been cordoned off by a chain-link fence.
"That's where we'll be going," comments Melba. "Since most people who have ventured in there have died, I suggest you activate whatever protections you have avaliable for yourself. We're still not entirely sure of what the.. er, runes actually do. Which is why you're here, of course. But you knew that. Heh."
Studying the area with Mystic Sight, Cadfael asks, "Died how?"
"There were many ways," says Melba, shaking his head. "Some were burned to death. Others emerged, afflicited with poisons and diseases that we could not find a cure for. Some simply entered and never came out."
There's a certain lack of possible responses to that. Lacking a generic Rune of Prevention of Cursed Death, Cadfael pulls out the notepad covered in almost-finished protective runes, and starts heading towards the cavern entrance.
OOC: Man, three days. I feel so crap. -_-
Melba follows Cadfael into the tunnel. "This early part we excavated months ago," he says. "The actual traps are a little further in."
The cave quickly opens out, and soon your feet are walking on sculpted stone bricks in the ground. Scaffolding keeps the cave walls up here- there are lightstands placed around to provide vision, as the light from the sun is mostly blocked out by this point. As you progress, more and more of the ground is made of these stone bricks instead of dirt, and you notice that to the sides, there are crumbled remains of stone walls.
"This place used to be a courtyard to to a temple, or some such," says Melba. "A short way from here is a stone arch that leads into the temple chambers proper.
At least, as far as we can tell. The archway is where we're stuck."
"History?"
"Of this area?" asks Melba, who then continues; "We're not really sure. Some people are saying that as these ruins are so similar to those of ancient Greece and Rome, that this must show that those nations reached America at some point.
But this doesn't check out. The site is too far inland; why have there been no other ruins found elsewhere, anyway? There are many theories, and little proof."
Without saying anything else, or even looking at his companion, Cadfael heads toward the arch.
When Cadfael reaches the archway, he sees that it is set in stone. It's more simply an open space in the shape of an arch that leads into a large chamber. There are runes on every stone brick of the timeworn arch, and with a moments inspection, Cadfael realises that some of the runes are strengthening and enforcing runes- likely used to enhance the walls of this place, so that drilling in or destroying them would be nigh-impossible. He notes how similar the rune structure is to his own; while he has never designed this sort of enforcing rune before, it's not something that's beyond him.
The other runes, however, are more difficult to discern. The rune structure isn't anything Cadfael is very familiar with, but the runes are more built off edges, lines, and squares. The system isn't obvious to him- it would require some study.
Mystic Sight, naturally, does not discern the purpose of the runes by itself. However, Cadfael does notice one thing- there is a standard spell on the arch. It appears that if anyone passes through, a message will be automatically sent. To where exactly, however, he can't determine.
A vague thought crosses Cadfael's mind that it might be appropriate to share his revelations, but it's hard to give much credence to that theory.
Instead, he simply stands there and stares at the complicated runes, unblinking. One of the skills picked up (carefully instilled) over his life is the ability to learn, deduce, and reason without using paper or speaking aloud. In utter silence, and without movement, he starts working on a theory that would explain the runes.
The runes are traps- Cadfael can easily determine that much. He can see that they work with the physical world and not a mystic or a mental one, so if triggered, there will be quite visible effects for him to see.
The inherent problem is that the runes can't power themselves. They need to be activated by some other source, and this implies that someone or something is around and willing to do that. It's not a far stretch of the imagination to look at the messaging spell, and consider that it somehow sets off the runes by itself.
The details of the runes themselves are very strange, Cadfael's existing knowledge aside. These runes are directly geared to harm people, obviously, but Cadfael can't tell exactly how. Poison? Fire? Without activating them, there's no real way to guess.
Also, because Cadfael has been inspecting for some time, he can detect some faint magical residue from this area, as if spells have been cast here repeatedly before. Clearly, the runes have repeatable surges or renew themselves, somehow.
This is deeply fascinating to Cadfael. None of the rune theory he knows has been able to explain why it is that runes fail after being powered once; before him is the counter-example. Runes that didn't have to be redrawn before each usage... An extension of linear theory? Shouldn't be stable over distances long enough to interface sufficient power. How do they compensate for the decay? Perhaps the repeated wave motif is an amplifier....
The portion of Cadfael's mind devoted to runecraft (a very large chunk) falls into a quiet murmur of non-stop speculation, freeing the rest of his attention for the more immediate problem of contract resolution. "What do you want?" he asks Melba, without looking away from the arch.
"To get our people through without killing them," replies Melba, blinking.