ze_arteests | Expired: The Tower

The Tower
    Ten visually precarious stories tall, the tower is found south of the eastern exit. On the road there, the stones randomly are missing, bits of the road having gaps off into nothingness like a poorly played game of tetris. The tower it leads to isn’t much different, appearing like the base of a jenga tower, randomly cored out in the middle, followed by a narrow story that two halves of the next floor will be balanced across. Despite it’s looks and the logic that might inform otherwise, the Tower is stable. The tower also lacks any windows, and is crowned with a giant stylized skull with three long spikes sticking out from it. Those who came from Shibusen might recognize it as being a replica of the one on their school.

    The tower also as an area of effect of nothing being able to stay dead in there: if the body is not destroyed or taken away from the area, a few hours after killing something it will come back as an undead. The zekes tend to make good work of anything left dead in their territory, but every now and then they’ll encounter undead versions of what they’d usually find infesting the tower. And hopefully no one is dumb enough to try a solo run in the upper floors... they might get an unpleasant surprise, but not one as bad as actually staying dead would be.

    The internal geography of the tower is not consistant: the halls stay the same but the contents of rooms behind closed doors does not. Where you remember the clinic being, now there might be a room containing an imp, or what was an empty room now houses the library. Things are confined to the floors they were originally from, but aside from that all bets are off. So, you can’t just memorise which rooms in the tower are the useful ones, and avoid the rest.

    Lower floor rooms tend to contain fewer of the monsters, a room may have only one imp that you can slam the door on, while up on the higher levels a room might have a party of five, that. . . well, are much more difficult to slam the door on. Take caution while exploring.
    Of note:

OUTSIDE:
    Wyverns: The gaps in the building’s construction give plenty of high places for the wyverns to roost. They’re four-legged flying dragons, vicious and territorial, and gluttons that are willing to try to eat anything and everything, even things that... you wouldn’t really usually consider edible. But they can be tamed, and the tame ones are extremely attached and obedient to their riders, though they’re hardly a “beginner’s pet”. Though, while the rest of the behavior can be domesticated, that gluttony is there to stay.
    Sword Field: Around the tower swords are stuck into the ground, blade buried in and the hilts pointing skyward. They’re impossible to be pulled from the ground, existing as sharp, immobile obstacles.
    Horses: Wild beautiful horses live in the sword fields. It’s survival of the fittest for them out there, the most agile and quick being the most likely to survive predation by the wyverns.
    Gnezdo: A swarm of these things lives at the top of the outside of tower. Scaling the sides and getting all the way up there to fight them is not recommended. . . The wyverns prey on these, and they use wyvern corpses to spawn.

BASEMENT
    Training grounds: Follow the stairs down instead of up and you hit the training grounds, a large empty space where you can practice your abilities freely. (The gallery really isn’t the best place to do that, the maze-like hallways don’t give you the most room) The walls are high and look like they’ve been imported directly from a castle, but the greek columns give it an entirely different feel.
    Two adjustable height basketball hoops have also been bolted to the walls, and the white lines of a court painted on the ground by them.
    Energy Drink Vending Machine: Directly next to the bottom landing of the stairs is a rather bizarre vending machine: it provides only highly caffeinated gaming cola with warning labels informing the potential drinker that they will keep you up for 36 hours. The only flavors are utterly terrible whacky combinations. Wasabi! Cucumber milk! Sweet soy sauce fizz! Drinking this might not kill you, but it’ll make you wish it did! Takes grist from killed imps for payment.
    Cereal Vending Machine: Located right beside the energy drink vending machine, and also takes grist from killed imps for payment. It’s filled with deliciously unhealthy sugar-coated marshmallow-filled cereal, the breakfast (and lunch and dinner) of crime fighting bachelors.
    Cleaning robot: Patrols the perimeter of the training grounds, picking up debris like empty soda cans and generally keeping the place clean. If you shake down too much rubble in here, you can count on it to clean the place up so it’s ready for use the next time you come back.
    Dungeon: Off to the side of the basement there’s a door, leading down a hall to a set of barred dungeon cells. A keyring with the keys to each cell is hung on a nail near the entrance. This place would be pretty useful for locking up any trouble-makers. . .
    Court room: Located conveniently beside the dungeon, at the end of the cell-filled hallway.

FLOOR ONE
    Bats: The ceiling of the first floor of the tower is covered in bats. You should be quiet while walking through here, lest you disturb them, and get the whole colony flapping around, shrieking and getting tangled in your hair.
    Cats: Ginger cats also inhabit the first floor, and can be found roaming the next two floors as well. Unlike the friendly grey cats in the orchard, these are more or less feral, and are likely to hiss is approached, preparing to either scratch or scamper. They are also larger than the grey cats, still housecat sized but definitely on the upper end of the size spectrum.

Boosterrific Vending Machine: A tacky shiny gold vending machine containing miscellaneous products of various types, all themed around the most commercialized superhero in 52 realities: Booster Gold! The vending machine contains: Single serving boxes of Sugar Packed Boosteros and Booster Bits cereals, D-Cell Booster Batteries, Booster Bubble chewing gum, Booster Gold Coffee in cans, Booster Blast energy drink, Boosterpaste toothpaste, Cologne de Gold (which is described to smell like "an old maid's bathroom"), and a tacky plastic Booster Gold action figure.

FLOOR TWO

Sewing room: The second floor has a room that was likely once part of a costume shop, bolts of team colored fabric + black and white are available for the taking here. Which is good, considering characters just come in with one set of clothes. There’s also buttons, needles, thread, and scissors. Six modern sewing machines are there for use, nothing industrial grade but that’s probably for the best, as the home models found here are easier to use (with a lower chance of sewing over your fingers at high speeds)

Barbed Wire Fences: What it says on the tin! While the chains generate to make escaping difficult when you have a large haul from the tower, these fences generate randomly, blocking you either from advancing, and other times from retreating! They force you to find another way around. Unless you’ve got a plan that will let you go through really nasty looking barbed wire. . .

FLOOR THREE
Bob: Imported from Thusia! It just amoebas along the third floor, occasionally blocking doorways.
Chains: Up from here animate chains start becoming a problem, blocking doorways and stairwells of anyone trying to leave with a really valuable haul, trying to keep things inside the tower. They won’t hurt you, but they will make you need to turn around and find a different stairwell. Though, if you’re being chased or cornered in the first place... then they might pose a bigger problem.

Knives: Knives in decorative sheaths have been put into the wall as decoration, but with a little work you can pry them free of their rusting binds. Due people taking them, there's none left on the first and second floors. Three are found on the third floor, and four on the fourth, three on the fifth, and then four on every floor upwards from there.

Clinic: A small, basic clinic. It was stocked with a limited supply of tools and things like bandages, but the items have since been moved to the stage and inside Sage for easier access and safe keeping.

Meal Bar Vending Machine: The clinic has yet another one of the tower’s grist operated vending machines. This one has awful cardboard-tasting nutritional bars -- just one will fill you up for an entire meal! If you…can get past the fact that they taste godawful and aren't made better by anything.

Betty Crocker Vending Machine: Filled with all sorts of batterwitch abominations. From the deceptively okay triple berry muffin mix pouches to the obviously hideously deranged dulche de leche cheerios, they’re all found in here. Whenever one thing runs out of stock, it is replaced by another crockercorp product, running out of gushers will prompt it to stock tinned rainbow chip frosting. Like all the other vending machines, it takes grist.

Freezer Room: A room that’s freezing, your breath coming out in white frosty puffs. Ice is built up against the walls, and empty cartons fill the room. In the back, a curious machine sits. If you read the instructions on it, it looks like if fed grist and numerous other ingredients, it will produce different flavors of ice cream. If fed an invalid combination, it will spit out vanilla ice cream, with the other things inserted into the machine as toppings.

Vanilla: Grist and white fruit from the orchard, or grist + an invalid combination will produce vanilla with toppings. A familiar classic.

Green Tea: Enough tea leaves to produce a kettle of strong tea.

Royalberry: 7 drops of honey and one cluster of blueberries from the orchard will produce this flavor. “A raspberry ice cream with a hint of sour hiding under all that sweet.” Though how raspberry ice cream is produced from blueberry ingredients is a mystery.

FLOOR FOUR
Puppet phantoms: Haunt the fourth floor, and make pharmacy visits none too fun. They hover in between the line of terrifying and aggressively annoying. They have an obnoxious hee hee hoo hoo laugh, that makes trying to talk to other people or listen for other baddies sneaking up difficult. And you can’t get rid of them, the puppets being phantoms and intangible. They follow around anyone who is unfortunate enough to catch their attention, until they leave their floor of the tower. Hopefully you’re not doing anything that requires a lot of focus that creepy laughing stalker puppet ghosts will distract you from. . .
The Pharmacy: An old fashioned pharmacy with drawers and drawers of herbs, to help aid sleep, to help headaches, to kill pain, ect. The useful stock here has been emptied and distributed to the stage and the sage dorms, for easier access and safe keeping.

Soap: I don’t think I need to explain what this is. If you look inside one of the drawers, there’s also a stash of this. When your dorm runs out, this is the place to come to restock.

Blue Pills: A stimulant that causes an intense mood lift and gives a feeling of increased energy, with mild psychedelia! After-effects include a mood drop into anxiety and/or depression, exhaustion, aches and impaired focus. Comes in the form of little round blue pills.

Skiving Snackboxes: Sweets that come in two, different colored pairs. Take one to cause the ailment, and the other to cure it. Currently the pharmacy has Fainting Fancies, Nosebleed Nougat, Fever Fudge, and Puking Pastille.

Canary Creams: They have the appearance and taste of ordinary custard creams, but when eaten, they transfigure the eater into a large canary. Within a minute, the person will moult his or her feathers and revert to normal appearance.

FLOOR FIVE
    Imps: Found in groups on the fifth floor and up, with single imps and occasional pairs appearing on the floors below that, in more frequency as you climb. Random encounters that are an exception to the zombie rule, when killed they instead burst and drop grist, so obviously they’re not coming back. And the grist comes in handy too, it can be used as tokens to pay for things from the alchemiter. (or maybe if you’re a masochist, the soda machine in the basement)
    The imps themselves are not very large, no bigger than a person usually is, and a solid color each. Their basic form is bipedal humanoid, but they’re chimeric, with a variety of animal parts added. Some have extra spider legs, extra eyes, while others have dragon wings and bullhorns, or a centaurs hindquarters. The random encounters of the tower.
    Library: A large room on the fifth floor is dedicated to the library, shelves and shelves of books. In the front, there’s a more general variety, but the back half is filled all with tales of adventure, fantasy, fairy tales and awful purple prose porn. In an alcove, two bookshelves have been dedicated to the sciences and economic theory.

FLOOR SIX
The Lab: An R&D Lab that looks like it may have once been in great condition, but now is kind of rundown and full of junk. There are an assortment of basic tools (manual and powered, but nothing more complicated than a wireless drill) and counters and cabinets littered with half-disassembled strange machine bits that don't seem to do much of anything, old car parts, and some broken non-lethal weapons (stun guns that just sort of make noise instead of stunning, that sort of thing). There are also a few crates of raw material for assembling your own small-scale trinkets and inventions.

The Alchemiter: A strange device in the lab. It’s difficult and complicated, but used properly will allow people to combine items, creating new items that are a mixture of the original. Though, they sometimes combine in strange and unexpected ways, creating new items that have properties that the originals were only implied to have: mixing a wizard statue with knitting needles might net you a pair of magical wand knitting needles. But, there is a catch to using it: It needs grist from the imp drops to operate, and the better the item, the more grist you need.

Lab Closet: A closet in the tower stocked with a dangerously high quantity of hydrochloric acid and gunpowder.

FLOOR SEVEN

Varren: Omnivorous pack-hunters, these creatures are very much like wolves or
wild dogs but with scales instead of fur. They can come in all sorts of colour varieties, but common wild varren are usually silver and black. Their jaws can also dislocate, very much like a snake’s... even though no one’s seen them at it, they might be capable of eating smaller prey whole like that. And even if they aren’t they’ve got an impressive set of teeth. They’re are edible if you manage to kill or get your hands on a dead one. Found mostly on the upper levels of the tower, seven and up, but the packs occasionally venture out of the tower to hunt in the orchard.

Orpheus Bracelets: Think of these as a “rare drop”. There’s a chance of you finding one of these inside the belly of a Varren once you’ve killed them. If you put it on, you’ll find they enhance thinking power tremendously, but also cause mental stress for the person wearing it, warping their personalities and twisting their emotions. They break when the person wearing it has been returned to their senses.

FLOOR EIGHT
    Zekes: Mutated worms that have grown to the size of snakes. They have powerful teeth designed to bore through flesh. They also operate in a “hivemind,” in a way similar to ants, where individual worms don’t matter as long as the group survives. They are territorial and aggressive, but they can be bribed with meat. They’ve made their territory the eighth floor of the tower, so enter cautiously.
    Husks: Zombies immune to the attention of the zekes, being synthetic. If you get too close, they’ll attempt to grab and drain vitality from you... but being zombies, they don’t have the most stamnia themselves. If you attack them at a distance and don’t go after a large group, they shouldn't pose too much of a threat.
FLOOR NINE
    Cerebro: It's a small room, with a few machines (to print out the result if necessary) and a chair with a large helmet. Its function is to amplify brainwaves, particularly those of telepaths, allowing them to pinpoint things with their minds. It may not work for everyone all the time and sometimes it can overwhelm the character, costing say ... peace of mind for a day or so. Consequences can be hearing voices, going blank for a day and being emotionally erratic.

FLOOR TEN