In Search of the Source of the Creeping Darkness Main Story

@Koko Riddle

The pale-haired Slytherin nodded. "Yeah, we could try that way." It made her a little uneasy, what with being a mysterious locked door that no one had really approached, but she was willing to try it. She nodded to herself, humming slightly.

She tightened the grip on her wand a bit, nodding at Koko's planning. "I- well, we could do that." She looked towards the door in question, blue eyes brightening imperceptibly. She may have been nervous, but she couldn't deny a good challenge. "Do you think Alohomora would work on the door? It seems like someone wanted people to stay out, so they may not have left it easily accessible. That is to say, in a magic school many people likely know the unlocking charm," she said. It was a small analyzation, with no guarantees for being right, but there was a possibility.

Unless, of course, the person who did it was too far gone to think of doing that.

Not that she meant to make any assumptions about the person, but it did have some credible evidence.

She took a few steps towards the door, looking at it closely. She hadn't gotten this far in life by skimming through it like a particularly uninteresting book. She read closely, sometimes even between the lines.

agreeing with the path || examining the door to room 10(?)
interacting with Koko

Interacting: N/A
Mentioning: @Selim Faust
Open to Interaction?

Piper peered above the entrance to the doorway the boy had slipped through. It was the door labeled "HOME." A chill ran down Piper's spine, and she walked inside, straining her senses to the best of her ability. Home to what? Or did this simply indicate that whoever - whatever - lived here was home? Swallowing hard, the Slytherin walked further in, clinging to her wand. A foreign, disgusting, repulsive scent overwhelmed her, but there was no time to consider it (along with the gruesome scraping sounds toward the center of the room).

The boy's swift shadow wasn't much further ahead; Piper ran eagerly to catch up. Jeez, wait up. He's in a hurry. Does he know something? They had circled most of the room by the time a growl from the pale boy ahead startled her. He did not want her company.

With an unexpected thud, the door closed partway behind her. Another thud. And another. The door had shut, and Piper was trapped. Curiosity killed the cat was in full swing.

All means of caution thrown to the winds, Piper uncovered her wand to see what was happening. A gear turned...not one created with human hands, but a primitive one. A gear fashioned with bite marks. Creaking in the corners. An involuntary shudder overtook Piper as a sick feeling churned in her stomach and she put more effort into her Wand-Lighting Charm. The boy was just in front of her, still fleeing, staying out of the light. Was he running from her?

Something was terribly, horribly wrong.

Piper barely had time to react before in the darkness, rats cascaded on top of her head. Huge rats, with needle-sharp teeth and bloodthirsty eyes, which Piper received a close-up view of a lá Lumos. It was by far the worst experience she had ever, ever endured. Red lights and adrenaline flooded her mind, and her body squirmed, doing anything in its power to get. Them. Off. It was the most out of control Piper had ever felt.

A first scream from the poor first year echoed through the room. Muffled cries followed from Piper as the rats hit her, biting and scratching at her flesh and sweater. The flurry of furry black bodies, the snarling of vicious rats, were the only things she could see. She kept her eyes tightly shut to avoid the flailing claws, feeling them leave thin slices on her face. At last the horrifying hailstorm of rats was over, but two bold creatures still remained about her legs. Puncture wounds and bites had permeated Piper's ankles through her jeans, leaving streaks of blood which only seemed to exhilarate the monstrous rats. The boy had evaporated, and evidently had no intention of helping. Somehow he had managed to evade every one of the rats and certainly didn't care to assist.

Wincing, Piper shakily held her wand to her shredded ankles and attempted to both blind the rats and process what was happening. She knew rats could easily carry rabies and who knew what other diseases. Piper kicked out, powerfully (albeit shakily) attempting to repel the disgusting vermin. She kept herself quiet, to prevent attracting other unwanted creatures, but the mounting shock inside of her made her want to scream. She was trapped in a dungeon with rats trying to eat her, with something home. Most certainly not ideal. Despite this fact, Piper raised her wand to light as much of the room as possible as she desperately whacked the rats away with her feet (that being her single most important thought). The rats' teeth still tore into her flesh, making the Slytherin gasp in pain, but the aforementioned scraping noise had begun to ring in her ears.

If there were other predators in the room, Piper wanted to be ready for them.

ACTION: Kick out at the rats and try to blind them with Lumos, raise wand hand to light as much of room as possible.
LOCATION: Room 4
STATS: || Stamina: 6 | Evasion: 5 | Strength: 4 | Wisdom: 8 | ArcPower: 6 | Accuracy: 6 ||
ABILITY: Perfectionist
POST TRACKER: X | X | X

Reducio

Outfit because I forgot:
Top:

Jeans:

Hair:

Interacting with: None [thought open to interactions]
Mentioning: @Kaegen Deathmote

Kaegen Deathmote

Well, that was a name that Violet had heard. Thought she hadn't interacted with him in person, she had heard rumors about this particular lurker that used to "haunt" the castle. Of course, when she had heard that he came back after a disappearance, her interest had piqued and she listened closer to these rumors: he was somewhere deep, dark, and couldn't be found easily. For once in her life, she closed her book and came down from the common room to the dungeons, which was the place she thought he was in.

It was not a place that Vi would normally go to...she thought that the place wasn't elegant enough for a person like herself, crowded with rats and bugs...absolutely not like the Carrington Manor, that is to say. But finding a inpopular person in there would be interesting. Like an adventure. Yes, another adventure, one of the many Hogwarts offered.

When she arrived at the dungeons, which wasn't so far from the slytherin common room, she saw chairs...and chalk. She frowned, and took a better look....

CONFIRMATION

Violet pursed her lips and followed the chalk line, completely forgetting about spells and her wand...no spells in trunk :'( .

Action: Trying to follow the chalk line with no Lumos
Statistics:Stamina: 6 Evasion: 8 Strength: 1 Wisdom: 10 Arcane: 2 Accuracy: 8
Abilities: None

Mentions: @Flash Holmwood@Sarah Lightwood

It seemed that the decision to go for the path less travelled was already paying dividends. Especially as Holmwood was quite intelligent and cast a spell that quickly revealed some very interesting symbols.

Alexander entered the hallway, looking around for enemies, but for now going to the strange set of symbols that had appeared. He crouched and began to observe the symbols. For a moment they confounded Alex, then his memories were shot back to the past. To a different time.

He remembered himself sitting behind his desk, listening to professor Yornivych. Explaining the magical alphabet with his thick accent. Making it hard to understand, but always being helpful. Then he remembered the people in the classroom, amongst them his friend. Ailea Frost, the girl with the nice smile. In the room were other students as well, Kyden Goodlow, Dmitri Jones, Adohiro Morai. All yearmates.

Alex shook his head, he had to focus on the here and now. Not to think about the nebulous past. But at least the past had given some insights. Because he recognised these symbols, these were the symbols of the magical alphabet. Alexander squinted as he tried recalling the different symbols. He sat there for a half a minute. Talking aloud to himself, and indirectly Holmwood and the green-haired girl. He did not think he had interacted with them before.

"These are the symbols of the magical alphabet. I remember it from Transfiguration."

He then slowly spoke.
"Okay, first word is MEET, second word, M-E-A-T, third word H-O-G-S, fourth word, MEADE......."

There was silent for a moment. As Alex contemplated hard. "Wait....... Meet, Meat...... Hogsmeade. It is as if this is a request to meet." Then a lightbulb went of in Alex's head. "Ah, then the numbers here, 6621, must be the date....."
There was another moment of silence, as Alexander realized that he had revealed his thought process out loud. Giving valuable intel to people he did not really know/trust. Though the talking out loud might have helped him come to this realization.

"Oh crud."

Alex shook his head, he then looked closer to the light weirdly reflecting from some of the bottles. He wondered what the contents of them might be. There were three options that came to him. One might be that for some weird obscure reason the bottle was filled with blood, but that was unlikely. Especially with the quantity of the bottles. The second was that it was a poisonous gas of some kind. But that was unlikely, and as the son of a chemist he was well aware how to mitigate the risk of such a poison. Especially as most were heavier than air and thus weren't too dangerous. Third was that it it was a kind of oil.

Then a fourth option shot to Alex's mind, that it might be some of the darkness that had attacked the Slytherin dungeons. Just contained in a bottle.

It might thus be better to leave the bottle sealed. Though he would look at the bottles in the light to see if anything noticeable could be made out visually.

Then he let out a sigh and looked out over the hallway filled with bottles. Then began to slowly move the bottles from the hallway to the big room behind them. He couldn't simply trudge through them and risk alerting anything that might be listening that glass was breaking.

Actions: Begin moving the glass bottles out of the hallway so that people can move through the hallway without any significant risk of knocking over any bottles.
Location: Room 2 --> Room 10
Abilities: Evasive Maneuvers and Non-human Enthusiast Monster Hunter (In my heart it will always remain monster hunter, xD)
Stats:
Stamina: 7
Evasion: 9
Strength: 3
Wisdom: 8
Arc Power: 6
Accuracy: 8
Total: 41

Interacting with @Cassandra Ironwoods
Open to other interactions (if also in room #3)
Post Tracker: X | X | X

When she inspected the white powder, it had a coarse texture to it, almost like little crystals. She rummaged through her head as to what it could be but kept drawing a blank. She had originally thought it to be some sort of slime, but this texture just didn't make sense for that. So much for her detective-work... Well, it had to have gotten there somehow! Onward, to discover where it goes! Or to perhaps what it leads to...

Starlee nodded at Cash as they explained their claustrophobia to her. She wondered if this would be the best place for someone suffering from that condition, but in her eagerness to continue and to do something fun, she pushed those thoughts aside. Of course, Starlee wouldn't feel nearly as confident if she didn't have Cash by her side. She was also a bit surprised when Cash asked her to take the lead in their little adventure. She grinned widely at this and said "Oh we will be fineeeeeee! Come on then, let's go!" And so, the two students were the only ones to enter the next room.

They entered, taking in the surroundings. There was what looked like a well in the center of the room, but with no bucket... or way to lift water... or even any water in the well itself. It was completely dry. Not only that but the trail of white powder they had decided to investigate ended right at the base of the well. Curiouser and curiouser.

She tried to examine the rest of the room, but what really kept drew her attention was this well and the strange glowing light that was emanating from it. She walked over to it, peering over the edge to see the dry bottom, with charcoal-like stones. A light seemed to protrude from around the stones.

Now this was just ripe for exploration.

She turned to look at Cash and said, "Hey, watch my back okay? I'm gonna check out this light down here!" Before the purple-hair could respond, Starlee hopped onto the ledge and began to scale her way down the well. Surely the light meant something, right? She paid no mind to the questionable stability; she was ready to figure out what this white stuff was.

Action: Climbing down into the well to investigate the strange glowing light/the source of the powder.
Current Location: #3
Abilities: Healing Sage
Stats: Stamina: 4 - Evasion: 5 - Strength: 6 - Wisdom: 8 - Arcane: 6 - Accuracy: 5

Interacting| -
Mentioning| @Kaegen Deathmote | @Starlee Kennedy
Closed to interactions

Follow the interesting white dust. How else was she going to find Kae? Someone she actually considered a friend, or at least an almost friend. She wanted to be his friend, but the boy was fragile, and it took a lot of work to make him your friend. She had thought she was making a breakthrough with him last year, but then he disappeared. She knew it was not uncommon for the boy to just vanish into thin air, but that wouldn’t have stopped her worrying nonetheless. She cared about him more than she cared about anyone else here with flights of fancy to find the monster of Hogwarts hidden in the depths of the underground.

The mere fact that most of them were here was interesting enough, but also rather stupid. Most of them didn’t have a connection with the boy besides sheer fascination. Follow the dust to the well that others were also looking at. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter. She didn’t matter to them, so they didn’t matter to her. Repetitive? Sure, but sometimes thoughts were just that. Just as a first-year blonde started to climb down the well, so did Santario, still trying to maintain the Lumos on her wand.

She would pop down, letting her hands grasp the ledge of the well before simply letting go so that she could drop to the bottom. It didn’t seem too far down.

Finding her friend… Friend? Almost friend. Close enough. That was all that mattered to her.

Action| Follow the salt, follow the salt, follow the salt down the well. Weee!
Stats
Stamina | 6 | Evasion | 7 | Strength | 3 | Wisdom | 8 | Arc Power | 9 | Accuracy | 8 |
Abilities
Healing Sage: +25% healing done with potions and spells.
Prodigal Charms Learner

Henry was really glad K’s spell was still working, it was nice to have enough light to clearly see the stones that were loose. They looked like they could be heavy, so he was glad to offer help to her. However, as he leaned forward to help move the bricks, something odd caught his eye and he flinched back, not sure what he’d seen, but sure it wasn’t good. “Wait, don’t-“ he was too late, as she pulled the stone back, all on her own, to reveal an opening. There was nothing there, though, which left Henry confused about what he might have seen. Or thought he’d seen. As they looked into the opening, the weird musty smell coming from inside, K started whispering into his ear more.

Unaware that the whispering made the girl feel left out, he was distracted by what K was saying. Blood? And a weird smell? Henry wasn’t sure how K could smell so well, but whatever the reason, he was picking up a whole lot more than Henry was. ”I don’t smell it,” Henry responded, not sure what it could be. There were plenty of smells in the space they were currently in, but Henry really wasn’t all that good at identifying what smell was what. That seemed to be K’s specialty.

Standing up rather abruptly, he turned toward where he was sure one of the other rooms was. On one hand, the idea of blood frightened him. On the other hand, if someone was injured, shouldn’t they go help? He was a little wary of what might be beyond their current location, but the little opening in the stones didn’t seem very interesting anymore.

The two of them turned and left the girl, Henry feeling just a bit bad about that, and started toward another room. As they walked, Henry continued to look around, mostly out of fear than curiosity, in case there was anything else that might be important. He didn’t want them to end up hurt if they were checking to see if someone was injured.

Interacting with @Henry Knight
Action: Moving to room 2
Abilities: Keen Eye
Stats: Sta.: 7 ll Eva.: 7 ll Str.: 3 ll Wis.: 4 ll ArcPow: 8 ll Acc: 6
color code = #5A8697

"It's alright, Miss Sarah. Thank you for the light." Flash nodded genially at her. It was indeed quite fortuitous that someone with a light had joined them, there was not a great deal of light available without her.

As the door opened at Varellion's command, there was nothing immediately flying towards them afterwards. Instead, the room was revealed to be a hallway, the end completely imperceptible by Miss Sarah's light. Scrunching his face in scrutiny, the presence of a myriad of bottles made the space incredibly suspicious, despite the lack of an immediate threat. If there was something invisible or hidden, there was one way to make it known-- "Revelio."

With a spiral motion, the wand he had held aloft would alight blue briefly, before illuminating glyphs, of all things. Flash's face scrunched further, with even scrutinier scrutiny. What an odd thing, was it some kind of description of a trap, or a note from the elusive inhabitant? It was no challenge to recognize the alphabet being used-- Transfiguration was currently the class that held his most devoted attention, but it made little sense. What was 'HNGS'? Regardless, he pulled out his journal and wrote the note down as it was. As he did so, Varellion started to speak, as if to himself. MEET - MEAT - HOGS - MEADE-- he wrote that too. Strange though, it looked like an 'N'. Certainly 'Hogsmeade' made sense-- perhaps it was the writer's simple mistake. Flash quickly wrote another note-- SHOG? If the line was reversed to make an 'O', that's what it would say. Perhaps it was nothing.

"A date would make sense. It fits. What does meeting meat mean? Who would write this?" Discerning what the letters meant didn't illuminate much, really. Still, it could be important. "Is the person someone's meeting at Hogsmeade the 'meat'?"

Flash would have his concentration momentarily drawn by Evelynn catching up to him. He was glad, sighing a bit as he showed her the notes he just took. She lit a candle that stayed floating in space to remove the need for constantly keeping their wands alight-- a good idea, though invariably also a breadcrumb for Madame Jensen to follow. Even though he had his suspicions that she was connected to the disappearances of the children in Hogwarts, he still thought it might be a good thing that she could be on her way. He didn't know what to expect, but at least Jensen needed to keep up the illusion that she cared about her wards.

"Take a look at this, it was hidden. What do you think of it?" He'd be most curious about her thoughts, her mind was one of the only ones he trusted to match his own, though he might have to add Varellion to the list if he continued to be so keen. Looking over to the blonde briefly, he saw him moving bottles out the the room laboriously. Perhaps not, after all. "You can stand on those milk crates, you know. They'll hold your weight."

It would take forever for him to forge a bottle-less path. It might have been put there as an alarm system, but they didn't have time to go so slowly. At least, that was Flash's appraisal. Perhaps Varellion had the right idea, though Flash wouldn't have long to nitpick with him. There would be the unmistakable sounds of screaming, from multiple sources. Shaken by one too many traumatic encounters, Flash's fight-or-flight would trigger, sweeping around to detect the danger with a fresh shot of adrenaline. A shame it would improve his physical prowess and not his skills of perception, though it was not hard to find the source. Both Opeila and Bridget were beset with birds of all things. Birds? Why? From where?

Wracked with confusion, it seemed the two were not suffering anything beyond the amount of irritation any bird might cause. It didn't seem like an... evil bird. For lack of a better word. What Bridget said was alarming, however-- the shadows were wrong? He looked up briefly, but in his panic he had no idea what to do with such vague information. Beyond them however, Dan stood before a shut door-- one that had previously been open, for certain. There was a scream from there as well. Closed doors were bad.

Hoping his friends would free themselves from the birds without his help, Flash went over to Dan, handing his journal off to Evelynn if she wasn't finished looking at it. The obvious first move was to try the handle-- had someone on the other side closed it? It didn't look like Dan had, at the very least.

"What happened?" Flash asked Dan, if he wasn't too shell-shocked to answer.

| Outfit |

Percival looked up at the cobwebbed-infested ceiling with a frown on his face. He didn't know why, but he felt kinda stupid. Standing there staring at nothing while everyone around him gets closer to the truth. The boy awkwardly glanced down glad to relieve the pressure of having his neck craned awkwardly. Percival huffed taking a cursory look about the room. It seemed that some of their small forming group had disappeared. Though, in truth, they weren't really a group to begin with.

The boy noted that a familiar scrawny boy had made their way into the first room. Michael Miller looked how he usually looked, like an overeager puppy who hadn't realized they were in over their head. He wondered if the boy had even thought to bring supplies with him. 'Did he even bring his wand?' The boy wore an amused smirk on his face before he turned away from the boy. There was no time waste if he were to figure out what was going on he would need to go deeper. "Come on let's go Jack." he huffed out at the annoying boy near him. The boy would nod towards Ileen, inviting her to join them wordlessly. He hoped she would come with him. A part of him really didn't want to leave her alone down here. Blindly the boy would trail his hand across the stone wall as he made his way towards the second room.

Open to Interactions

Location: Room 1
Action: Moving to Room 2

Interacting with: @Jack Burnett, @Ileen Knight
Mentioning: @Michael Miller

Reducio

|Sta 6 | Eva 6 | | Str 8 | Wis 5 | | Arc 8 | Acc 7 |

Inventory: ⋅ Metal Lighter ⋅ Scrap of Parchament / Fountain Pen

Foulplay ⋅ Lovely Creature

A grin flitted across Koko's face, gone once again and likely difficult to see even in the light emanating from Sapphire's wand. "Okay," Koko murmured, narrowing her eyes at the door. A plan had begun to form in her mind - the most of a plan someone like her, who had only come down here because she didn't want Sapphire to get hurt, could have. It really wasn't much, more like an idea.

She chuckled drily at Sapphire's suggestion of Alohomora - of course. It was a laugh that was not caused by any sort of humour, but rather, a sense of nervousness that was finally making Koko have second thoughts. While the Slytherin was usually not the most courageous, she had been running on adrenaline until now - and maybe that little buzz of it in her veins would come back if something absolutely terrifying appeared.

Goodness, she hoped not.

"Yeah, alohomora seems like a good idea. I can cast it, and you can keep your lumos going." Despite her sentence being a statement, Koko felt it had come out as more of a question. She was good at that, she had learned, making her statements seem like queries. Sometimes there were questions hidden in normal sentences. It was weird. Speech was weird. "I wonder what's even in there to make people think that it should be cut off. I mean... Eh. It's probably nothing. I think it's a better way to go, though. I don't know why. Just... thinking, you know?"

She stared at her wand, a sigh rattling from her chest. Twenty-one centimetres, aspen wood, and dragon heartstring - she hoped it wouldn't fail her. It didn't usually fail her, but then again, Koko used her broom far more than she used her wand. She also used her hands far mroe often than she took to her wand. She wouldn't blame the stick if it decided to be petty and get its revenge.

With a small flourish of her hand, she mumbled, "Alohomora."

Action - if door to room 10 is open, enter room 10. if door to room 10 is locked, cast Alohomora/Unlocking Charm and enter.

@Sapphire Riddle

Reducio

Stats:
Stamina: 15
Strength: 3
Accuracy: 6
Evasion: 6
Wisdom: 6
ArcPower: 5

Abilities:
Part-veela alluring: 10% opponent friendly fire
Evasive Manoeuvres: 10% auto-dodge
Part-veela scream: Disorients (-1 accuracy and -1 evasion) or deafens up to 5 people.