<br/><br/>Aria nodded, "Let's hope they keep laughing, to guide us, and cover our own sounds...as unsettling as it is."<br/><br/>She found a vague amusement in the way Rose, despite her assumed size, managed to pick her way through deftly through the room. As they followed the sound, the shifter would have to duck through archways, but, thankfully, luxurious quarters had a tendency to be spacious as well, as these were no exception. The hallway from whence the sound had echoed led past several rooms to another, larger chamber at the far end.<br/><br/>This one was cylindrical in shape, with a hemispherical stained-glass ceiling. A spiral staircase wound up to open balconies and second-floor hallways. Growing within the spiral of the marble stair was a great true, hale and healthy despite being indoors. Its branches were adorned with light hanging sculptures which, Aria realized, were meant to symbolize the 'Great Tree' cosmology - upper planes like their present Brightwater and many others all strung along the great World Tree.<br/><br/>The stained glass dome was, also, stylized with such a theme: an abstraction of the Great Wheel, another way of looking at the shape and linking of the Planes, yet the glass-artists had merged this with the semblance of the female-faced coin which was the symbol of Tymora.<br/><br/>The staircase spilled onto a second floor balcony circling the upper half of the multi-story chamber. Here Rose once again could echolocate the sounds, now rustling and muttering and scrabbling and occasionally dark-voiced giggles, from one of the second floor hallways.<br/><br/>Down this curving hallway, they came to a T, which, it seemed, was one of the second-floor enclosed catwalks leading to one of the four outlying buildings.<br/><br/>Most of the length of this hundred-foot hall was the floor-to-ceiling stained glass 'walls' they'd seen from outside, through which they could see the gardens now a story below. The glass cast the hallway in a prismatic riot of colors, dancing on the white marble floor.<br/><br/>At the other end of the hall, through open double doors, a straight narrow sliver of the chamber beyond could be seen: open to its rear, where stood a religious alter with a Tymoran emblem like on the other ceiling; a residential chapel, it seemed.<br/><br/>However, an armored figure in the doorway between the catwalk and chapel obscured much of the view of the latter. In silhouette he or it (surely not a she) was like in stature and the particular style of Garland - the horned helm, in particular. A bow and quiver of black-feathered arrows rose over the right shoulder-plate, a lance handle over the left. The armor looked exactly like Garland's might after another few wars or decades of scratching and dents. Over it hung a tattered tabard of royal purple, with the purple-dragon-on-a-golden-shield insignia of Cormyr, also the standard of its elite order of Purple Dragon Knights.<br/><br/>The armored figure stood with uncanny stillness, but an almost mockingly gentle tip of the face-shrouding helm acknowledged Rose and Aria as soon as they came into its view down the hall.<br/><br/>"Oh my;<em>guests</em>!" the voice was alternately deep or shrieking, and raspy, but still quite full of ambition and vigor. The accent resembled Garland's in many ways, but the tone was less serious, even irreverent. "Do forgive our last of hospitality..."<br/><br/>The figure flipped up the face of its helm. The face underneath good quite clearly be said to have a pronounced jawbone like Garland's, for it was semi-skeletal. Ashen flesh was stretched and pinched over a rictus grin, and sockets absent of eyeballs, holding only a faroff and baleful red gleam.<br/><br/>"...things are pretty dead around here!"<br/><br/>Then it erupted in peals of horrible laughter, pointing out an open gauntlet and drawing the first closed swiftly, in a long-out-of-style gesture of knightly challenge.<br/><br/><br/>Catwalk hallway is 15' wide and 100' long,<br/>It's also about 15' to the ceiling (enough for about 20' of long jump of Large Rose, for example, sine long jump height is 1/4 distance, so she can leap attack without hitting her head, for example)<br/><br/>(ongoing<br/>hall)<br/>- - A  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br/>- R R - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - K<br/>- R R  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br/>(hall from<br/>stairway)<br/><br/><br/><br/>Aria initiative 27 (again)<br/>Knight initiative 8