Beneath - An Uru Explorers Journey Through D'ni and its Ages

Over the last few weeks we have been looking to release Lehns, despite the fact the Mahri have apparently moved on, we felt the Age was an interesting (albeit cold) one which people would enjoy.

As a result I have been searching the streets around the area the Lehns Book was discovered in the hopes that we could find the owners home and find more documentation regarding the Age.

After the second day of searching I finally discovered the house some 5 minutes walk away from where the Book was located.

Doing a quick check over to see if it was safe I ducked in and had a quick look around, it wasn’t until I got to the second floor that I realized this was the place we were looking for. Upstairs sat the Book room which apparently doubled up as a study for Fehnir, a Guildsman in the Guild of Archivists (not sure of his position). Unfortunately it seems Fehnir didn’t make it out, as his body lies next to his desk.

But he was surrounded by artifacts I recognize from previous visits to Lehns. It seems he has a second Age in his possession, which from what I could quickly glean, is called Ahry’ahn. Unfortunately the Book contains the tell-tale signs of what we dubbed “Plague Seeding”, the Book is covered in that mucky brown residue and a palm print clearly shows activity after the plague had hit, most likely A’gaeris and Veovis.

I returned to the location a while later with some of the guys to start overseeing Phase 1, bringing a Maintainers Suit with my I decided to venture into the Age to see what was up. I had been there only 5 minutes when I suspicions were confirmed with the discovery of a shallow grave near the house within the Age, and another body inside the house.

Once the samples come back as green I shall have to return for an extended exploration trip.

However upon returning to Fehnir’s house I discovered a chaotic scene. The teams had set out to check the structural security of the surrounding buildings, as the district had taken on a lot of damage during the Fall. Unfortunately during their poking around one of the buildings gave way, the team managed to Link out quickly using their Relto Books, so thankfully no-one was hurt. But the collapse caused large amounts of damage to Fehnir’s house, blocking off large portions of it. As a result the area has been closed off for 24 hours to let everything settle before the teams return to check out how safe it is.

In the meanwhile I have the collection of journals taken from the study to translate with Steven.

Headed into Ae’gura on Monday, I have been doing some simple studies on D’ni architecture for future Age restoration & development projects. As we were routing through the museum we discovered a portrait of King Ri’neref.
We couldn’t locate any documentation on who it was painted by, it had some minor damage to the frame and canvas, and some of the paint hadn’t Aged as well as later paintings we have found (perhaps paint mixtures improved as time went on).
I had it moved over to the room above the D’ni Jazz Club Pub that I have been using as a makeshift office for now so that I could work on improving the quality of it somewhat.

Finished up the work late lastnight, took a while for it to dry out (some area’s still need drying), but for the most part it’s almost ready to hang, not sure whether to put it up in the museum to replace the broken painting there or store it for hanging elsewhere.

It’s a shame the DRC didn’t release more information about D’ni art.

I took the initial visit to what we’ve temporarily labeled 0004. The Book does indeed Link to a circular courtyard area, the area is flanked with columns and at the center is a large pool of water. A quick exploration of the area, whilst collecting the needed samples, revealed that the courtyard is enclosed, there appears to be no exits.

The Age is in remarkable condition from what little I could see, it doesn’t look like that it will require much restoration work before we can release it to the public.

However, more documentation on the Age would be nice, what little Keira could find indicated that it was a place for people to meet and discuss cavern life and politics. Unfortunately that seems to be it as far as we can tell, we haven’t even found a name for this place yet.

The tests all came back green so we can progress with the Age in the future, for now however I am going to assign a small group to find more documentation on the Age so we can find out more about it, aside from that the Age will be placed with the rest of the pending Ages whilst we focus on tidying up other Ages to release to the public, seeming it shouldn’t require much work.

In the mean time I have added it to the projects page of Beneath.

Today Keira and I headed out into the upper levels of Ae’gura to see if we could locate some more blank books and bottles of ink.

We spent the morning searching half a dozen locations but without any luck, with more explorers searching the city for resources for Age writing I fear the supply will soon run out, for all of us.

We need to take stock of what we have left over the next few days…

However our search was not in vain, I happened to stumble upon a Book which was hidden under the mess that littered what appeared to be a study. Keira decided to stay at the house a while longer to see if any documentation regarding the Age could be found whilst I headed back to Tehren to get the Book checked over.

Tomorrow I shall arrange for the initial visit to the Age to take place, from looking at the Linking Panel it seems to Link to a small courtyard of sorts, aside from that we’ve been unable to tell what the rest of the Age may look like.

Picked up the piece that I am going to be restoring, there is a fair amount of damage, some mold caused by damp from an undetermined source. The frame was damaged too so I had to make up a new one, the text on the frame was fading, the piece was called The Prophetess. Artists name is to faded to make out, and there seems to be no allusion to which Prophetess it actually is.

A quick study indicated that this piece was of a certain art movement, alas records doesn’t confirm what the movement was which is a pain.

I repaired and re-stretched the canvas over the new frame, cleaned up the paint work and the mold. We haven’t discovered any information on the construct of D’ni paint and how it was mixed so I ended up using surface equivalents and matching the colours up, matched them up nicely I think in the end.

I have a hi res scan of the piece here: The Prophetess.
For those of you who are interested, you can see the worst of the mold in the top left, haven’t managed to remove it all safely yet.

One thing about being in the Cavern so long restoring stuff, we have the processes down pretty well which means we can get things sorted out quickly, at least with smaller items anyway, bigger restoration projects always take longer not surprisingly.

Still got some work to do before I send it off to the SR guys.