The avatar returns to the Sanctum, switches out of cat form so it can pick up the staff and javelin, and retraces its steps back to the ruined doorway that leads into the shaft. Once through, it finds itself on the rather steep set of benches that form the amphitheater overlooking the shaft. From here, the stairs that lead down from the south entrance are visible just above the edge of the alcove.

Then, with a flick of the staff's mechanism...

The beam of light brightens tenfold as the avatar is whisked into the past. The air in the room is warm and clear, and the walls have returned to their polished, cream-colored state. Over near the south entrance, the avatar can see--if it leans out of the alcove slightly--a small square hole in the wall, out of which pours a weak but steady stream of water. This collects in the shaft: what was once a bottomless hole has now been filled like a flower vase. Even about a third of the stairs that curve on the shaft's west wall are submerged in the glimmering pool before they end. On the north wall, the plaque is now gleaming gold, but the words--though deeply cut and clearly enscribed--are apparently in some alien language.

CAT FORM (Kass' ability) becomes available at 7:58 PM tomorrow.

The kitty-avatar hopes lithely over the door that it demolished as a humanoid, and heads a bit down the darkening hallway. It follows the grey source of light to the second door, where the crumbled stone lay at the foot of the rusty framework. Peeking over, there is a familiar sight: a column of pale light shines down an eight-sided shaft. Beneath the kitty, there appears to be a sloped area with tiers of stone benches; it opens to be as wide as the shaft itself. Apparently, this is the large alcove the avatar saw from below, earlier.

The avatar conjures itself a healing snack, gets all better, and transforms itself into a kitty. Casually.

Its smaller form makes getting through the broken door an effortless task, but its feline eyes don't help the situation much. There is a hallway just as wide as the door beyond, leading into an utter void of blackness beyond. The light source on the left seems to be coming from what's left of another door; it appears to have long since collapsed into rubble.

The avatar is no longer injured.
CONJURE FOOD (Dan's ability) becomes available at 6:13 AM tomorrow.

Having retrieved the staff and javelin from their resting place, the avatar sighs and has another go at the other set of doors, further into the Sanctum. Crack! One of the stone doors breaks in several large pieces upon impact, and these go scattering to the floor. Though the other door is still more or less intact, there is plenty of room for the avatar to maneuver through the remaining metal frame of the broken door. Whether the avatar is physically capable of the maneuver is another question, since the fatigue of repeated bursts of superhuman speed has been compounded by bashing recklessly into solid stone objects.

Nevertheless, at first the avatar can see naught but darkness in the space ahead. There does, however, seem to be a very vague source of pale illumination that comes from an opening about fifteen feet away.

The avatar is now injured.

Poof! Clang! Thud! The avatar shifts into cat form, and both the staff and javelin plop to the ground in an area near the entrance to the Sanctum. Its feline eyes reveal more details about the state of the room: the narrow windows are completely covered with rock growth, as is the fountain and its tiny drainage canal. There are, however, two doors on the north side of the room, both in a similar state to the western door before it was bashed down. And so...

The avatar shifts out of cat form, takes aim at the lefter of the golden door frames, and bursts into speed. Upon colliding, both of the doors' lower hinges are knocked completely off. This leaves the double door hanging from its top hinges, swinging like a doggie door. Since this isn't much of an obstacle, the avatar ducks through and peers towards the next area...

Its humanoid eyes are adequate here, since a beam of cold, grey light shines straight down into the room ahead. Just past the broken door, a steep set of stone stairs leads north, down into the octagonal room. The eight walls seem to continue down finto infinite darkness: this appears to be a shaft of some sort. There's no easy way down, however, since--though the stairs continue to wind around the left side of the room a ways--they do not continue past the opposite side. Above, the avatar sees the source of light where the walls climb far up to an octagonal skylight.

Not far from the skylight, a wide alcove spans the righthand (eastern) wall. From this angle, it is impossible to ascertain what it contains, or how far back it goes.

The only other apparent feature of this room is a rusty, metal plaque that's built into the northern wall. Something is inscribed there, but either it's not English, or the layers of grime have made it unintelligible.

CAT FORM (Kass' ability) becomes available at 10:57 AM tomorrow.

The avatar travels with its javelin and the staff to the door to the Sanctum. It activates the staff in order to pass, and after a blur of light and a sharp drop in temperature, the door shifts to its bashed-down state. The avatar passes through to find...

The Sanctum, and not a cavern, though by the looks of it, it could become one given a few hundred more years. The air is dryer, though still frigid, and there is still very little light to see by. The limestone walls are caked with a few layers of slick-looking rock, but the shape of the room and its features are still relatively intact. And lo, to the left, on the north side of the room, the avatar notices two separate beams of golden metal ever so faintly glinting back at the broken door whence we look.

The water cups are actually suspended between a compound belt that straddles a pair of large but narrow wheels: one right in front of the balcony, and one far below which is nearly obscured by the mists. The closer wheel is supported by a beam of stone that partially blocks access to the alcove behind (where all the gears are). Luckily for the avatar, the angles are just right: a javelin placed between the balcony and the supporting beam will cross paths with the spokes of the wheel coming down.

The avatar does so, and there is a great crunching sound. The belt carrying the cups of water comes to a halt. Then a crack! and the main water wheel and its gears continue to move for a moment, then crack! again. This must be the sound of a gear or mechanism slipping periodically, since it is meeting resistance that mounts as the water behind the main wheel builds up. The javelin, however, seems to be holding.

And speaking of javelins, the avatar takes a step back to grab a second javelin to replace the one now keeping the water cups from delivering their cargo.

When the avatar first returned to the Sanctum, it faced a well-made door of stone, turquoise, and gold framing. The stone seems much darker than the rest of the walls (and the square fountain), so it's probably different than the limestone. In any case, to pass the door, we required use of the staff. When the world shifted into a different era, the javelin in the avatar's off-hand seemed to spontaneously burst to dust. When the shift completed, the avatar might have noticed the javelin's simple metal head laying on the dusty, dirty floor, caked with rust and grime.

Having done its business in the Sanctum, the avatar returns to the hallway on its way to investigate the corpse. When it uses the staff to return to the corpse-inhabited past era, we notice that the javelin is whole again, laying on the floor in front of the intact door to the Sanctum. The avatar leaves it there, and moves to take a very close second look at the dead body...

At first, no new information can be gleaned from the gruesomely torn corpse when the avatar uses its intellect boost (after all, nothing has changed). But then the avatar notices the corpse's outstretched arms... they were reaching for something. And the place just above the stairs, just out of reach of the dead hands, was the location of the golden staff before the avatar picked it up.

ARCANE BRILLIANCE (Vikki's ability) becomes available at 8:21 PM tomorrow.

The avatar takes a closer look at the square fountain, trickling happily next to the western door....

For some reason, in seeing the water pouring over the sides of the stone structure, our avatar has a mineralogical epiphany. The fountain, and indeed all the creamy-colored walls of the building itself, are made of limestone. Perhaps there's something about water and limestone together that provided this realization...

ARCANE BRILLIANCE (Vikki's ability) becomes available at noon tomorrow.

The avatar takes a spot near the first stone slab, and glances over the three doors, all identical, all hopelessly and utterly sealed shut. Then the avatar narrows its binocular sensory organs and concentrates....

Again, a visual flash from a later era imposes itself on the environment. In the future, the western door to the Sanctum was both preserved and decayed: preserved enough to be accessible, and decayed enough to be broken down with relative ease. But the two northern doors were not even apparent at all in the future era...

But of course! The golden seal! When the avatar was in cat form, searching the northern wall of the cave, it found a rusty spot of metal in the spot where the right northern door is now. So the doors probably do exist in the future, just not nearly as well-preserved as the western door that was oh-so-bash-down-able. If only there were a way to change that...

ARCANE BRILLIANCE (Vikki's ability) becomes available at 9:31 PM tomorrow.

The avatar takes a close look at the water wheel and the alcove in which it sits...

For a very brief moment, a vision overlaps the sight before the avatar: the dark, broken mechanical mass that was half-encased in ice. Both the present and the future status of the water wheel lie in contrast, suggesting the history--that is, future history--of how the wheel came to such a state of disrepair. It appears that the infinite plane of ice encroached slowly since some parts of the wheel were enveloped, some where displaced, but all seem to be accounted for. It follows, then, that the mechanisms here will be delivering water up into the reservoir above the alcove for a long, long time, until its cold and creeping demise.

The insight subsides, and we once again view the water wheel turning happily as it drives the cups of water up and down in the bright, warm sun.

ARCANE BRILLIANCE (Vikki's ability) becomes available at 9:04 PM tomorrow.

The avatar grasps a long javelin in one hand, keeping the golden staff in the other, and ungainly ambles back down the hallway. It stops, looking up the stairs towards the starting room, at the silhouette of the mangled corpse.

The avatar trotts gleefully away from the corpse, heading west and down the stairs. It comes to a long tunnel which leads straight onto a somewhat familiar balcony. However, much is different...

The largest change is the absence of an infinite plane of ice standing just outside. Instead, the view is clear: beyond the balcony, to the west, is a sea of unbroken clouds. A distant peak of white and green juts up like a verdant iceberg in a roiling ocean of white foam. Looking up and to the north, the avatar notices something fantastical: a building is floating motionless in the air, far above the clouds. It is creamy white, like the stone of the rest of the area.

Just to the north of the balcony, the alcove is host no longer to a mechanical mess, but to a working waterwheel. The glistening of the running water that drives its motion is just barely visible beneath the bright mists. The gears lead to a second array of wheels that brings a belt of cups down into the waters. The cups return to a place at the top of the alcove where they tilt and pour the water out to somewhere out of sight; presumably a reservoir or canal.

To the left of the tunnel which leads back to the starting area there stands a trio of long wooden javelins. There are no other obvious routes to take.

The corpse is lying face-down on the stairway, its intact arms splayed in an awkward reach for the room above. The obvious cause of death is a series of slashes that start at the chest and rake through the neck to a point where the jaw and skull have been crushed in. The messy nature of each slash suggests the weapon was jagged; perhaps a serrated edge or animal claw. There also appear to be blackened areas at the edges of the wounds, charred as though someone took a blowtorch to the body.

The near-black blood smears on the floor have dried completely, but though the blood from the corpse is no longer issuing freely, it has not dried, remaining purple-red and lukewarm.

The skin of this former person is near-white, and the long, wavy hair is a similarly bright blonde. The body is rather lithe and fit, by human standards, but there is no guarantee this is a human. Though the face has been smashed in, the figure seems female ... unless the avatar takes a shameless peek beneath the now-tattered white robe (which is the only clothing nearby). There lies the mystery: there are no obvious breasts or genitalia to identify a gender. Compared to a human, this creature appears asexual.

To reiterate the surrounding environment: from the corpse, the stairs lead east and up to what we can call the "beginning room", and they otherwise lead west and down to a hallway, the end of which appears saturated in daylight.

The avatar passes through the doorway, and with another click of the staff, the world blurs and brightens back to its pristine state.

Or not so pristine. The hallway is built with the same material as the sanctuary, but there is a rust-red smear on the ground that leads up the stairwell. Following this, the avatar finds the same circular room in which it first appeared, but infinitely brighter and wholer. The smear, however, leads to outstretched arms that are reaching up from the opposite stairwell. These arms, upon inspection, belong to a gruesomely torn corpse that's lying at the top of the stairs. Beyond it, the long hallway continues west.

For the openings in the room: the windows are about two inches wide, too narrow for your standard housecat (and yet so much light is streaming through, it's like there's a spotlight on the other side of the wall). And in the northwest corner, the hole is just big enough to let the small trickling stream through; again, too small for a cat, perhaps not for a guinea pig or rat.

There are elegant carvings that mark the four faces of stone that are in the center of the room (two sides of each slab). The artistry is mostly found in the embellishments: there are an abundance curves and circles that follow the contour of otherwise very simply drawings. The first shows two discs, one cut into a crescent, hovering over a broad horizon. The second isolates the crescent figure, tailed by lines suggesting movement, which shows the figure falling towards the horizon. The third figures the full disc prominently, with much embellishment, while the crescent shape is far smaller and sitting directly upon a distant horizon. The last carving puts the disc very near the top center, heavily embellished, over what seems to be a sort of building sticking up amidst the curving decorations.

With a flick of the wrist, the avatar produces a tasty morsel of cherry muffin pie thing from out of thin air. The snack is invigorating! Thereafter, we go to investigate the staff and the doors, but no part of the staff--head, handle, foot--seems to fit the metal seals in any way. In any case, nothing happens when the attempt is made.

The avatar is no longer injured.
CONJURE FOOD (Dan's ability) becomes available at 3:35 AM tomorrow.

Upon a small taste test, the avatar finds that the fountain water seems perfectly clean. It's not too cold, and would probably make a pleasant bath if the ambient temperature gets any higher.

After sating its thirst or what-have-you, the avatar turns to the large stone slabs. It backs up to make as much room as possible for a direct rush at the first slab, and then takes off. Contact, and a loud crack! The sound, unfortunately came from the avatar's shoulder, not the stone. The slab stands unblemished and unmoved. It didn't give at all, in fact, opening up the possibility that the slabs are integrated into the floor.

The avatar is now injured.

The avatar makes its way back towards the staff and, "poof," it is once again humanoid. Bringing the golden handle into its other hand, it takes an upward movement to unlock it, then a bit of force to bring it around to the other side, where it slides into its other position. There is a satisfying click, and the mechanisms in the glass head of the staff begin to whirl at an insane pace...

The world begins to blur. An ambient glow fills the air, and allows a glimpse of the cavern walls contracting into smooth surfaces of white and turquoise. The temperature shifts from its hollow chill to a comfortable warmth. The dusty smell is replaced with a sweet fragrance. All this occurs in about two seconds; the room in which the avatar is now standing is roughly the same size and shape as the cavern, but it looks quite different.

The avatar is standing near one of three doors. All of them are made of some type of marbled stone, inlaid with turquoise and gold, these embellishments culminating at a circular crest at the center of the door. The other two doors are on the longer, northern wall. Just north of the nearest (western) door sits a fountain that fills the room with a happy babbling. Its concentric squares lead to a square pool, this in turn feeds down a small trough that runs to a hole in the northern wall.

Except for the few inch-thin openings in the south and eastern walls that let bright sunshine in, the only other feature in the room is a pair of large stone slabs that stand upright, parallel to each other, in the middle of the room. Their bases are also inlaid with turquoise, and there are fine carvings that have been made on both faces of each.

CAT FORM (Kass' ability) becomes available at 8:17 PM tomorrow.

In a poof of grey special effects, our avatar sinks to become a cat. The staff has been left over near the entrance. Once the cat-avatar has its fill of kitty-type happy fun play time, it turns its attention to the room and lets its new eyes adjust...

The enclosure actually appears to be rather small. It is roughly twice as far across as it is wide. There are your obligatory cavern features: stalactites, stalacmites, and two very wide, narrow pillars of rock that stand near the center of the area. A glint of golden metal catches our cat's eye over on the wall; it is heavily rusted and seems to be much like the center of the door that has just been bashed open, except that it is surrounded by an uneven rock wall. Upon further strolling around, patches of dirty stone can be found here and there on the floor, lying beneath the layers of smooth calcified rock.

Bashing the gaps in the door with the blunt end of the staff does seem to loosen some of the material, but it would take some time to create a hole large enough for the avatar to fit through. Instead, the avatar heads back to the landing (not so far away), activates sprint, and rushes the door. Upon impact, there is a great crumbling sound as one of the doors is flung right off of its decaying hinges. Both stone doors, still barely connected by the rusty metal, crash to the side, opening the way to the next area.

Unfortunately, there isn't much light to see by here. The air tastes very old, yet rather humid. What can be seen is an uneven floor, layered with slick rock which builds up higher to the nearby walls. Dark forms of pillars and stalactites are discernable nearby, but it's impossible to tell how far the dark cavern extends beyond.

For investigations about the balcony: The ruined mechanisms lie in a large pile just north of the balcony, collapsed in a large recess of stone and ice. There are two large circular objects covered with rust and sporting regular jagged edges, suggesting that they may have once serviced as gears. A rusty pole sits broken, half of it sticking out of one of the gears. There are also what appear to be rectangular boxes, also apparently metal and heavily rusted. Broken stone pieces of varying size are littered throughout this pile.

It seems impossible to tell how high up the balcony--or the rest of the stone ruin behind it--actually is. A look straight down is met only with the dark grey mists that roil below. The only "floor" to speak of is the one supporting the mechanical mess in the alcove.

The ice is quite impressive, though sadly is not within an arm's (or tongue's) reach from the balcony. It looks like an uneven plane of white, stretching into infinity in all directions.

Now, moving back: back through the tunnel, up the steps, through the circular room, to its eastern stairs. These steeply lead to yet another tunnel that goes only a short distance before the avatar is presented with a double door of some kind. It appears to be made out of the same stone as the rest of the ruin, but is so badly weathered that there are even small gaps that have worn completely through the stone. The doors are connected at the center by some faint glint of metal, which is nearly covered in rust.

Our avatar has been inexplicably whisked away from its happy existence to a place where nothing seems alive. The room in which it finds itself is roughly circular, with a domed roof, tall narrow windows encircling the space, and a few benches facing each other--all made of stone. The surfaces are rustic, heavily weathered and pockmarked, as if even a light touch would crumble the structure to dust. Between the benches, two openings face each other, each leading to stairwells that climb steeply down.

The main feature here, it seems, is a staff that lays on the ground in a pile of dust. It does not seem ancient like the building, but rather, its gold and silver metals glisten--even in the dim light--radiantly. About three-quarters the way up the shaft, a golden handle protrudes which seems to sit within a track that leads half way around, laterally, to the other side of the staff. On the head of the staff sits a clear glass ball with many fine etchings barely visible on its surface. Inside the ball, a great host of tiny bronze mechanisms are at work, including four or five pins that are all rotating at different rates, following the lines of the etchings.

Outside of this ruin, the sky is grey and cold. A shrill wind whistles past the tower, carrying an occasional clap of thunder. Out of the windows, to the west, a great body of white ice seems to stick up out of the dark mists, which otherwise cloud any view of whatever might lie beyond. To the north and east, a moldy stone roof disappears quickly into the fog. And to the south are only the infinite black clouds.

Obvious exits are east and west.