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

Admittedly there isn’t a whole lot of work to be done in Ahry’ahn. The Age is in fairly decent condition.

We had taken a bit of a hiatus from the location after working on Fehnir’s house due to the amount of documentation discovered there. We’ve managed to make enough progress on the translations that the rest can be handled by Steven and his team. As a result I have returned to the Age to continue with a more thorough exploration.

My previous trip had been a quick one, collecting samples and seeing what the immediate location was like. I Linked through to the enclosed area, which I now noticed is actually tunnel that appears to lead up through the rock to the forest above. The way was blocked off however by a large bolder, I was about to turn away when I noticed a book on the floor, on closer inspection it appeared to be a journal.
I placed it in my bag to take back to my office on Sul to translate and headed out to the well again.

Descending the stone path I followed it around the rock wall towards the house, heading in I took the time to look around more. The first room appears to be a kitchen, a small stove and work bench is to the left and to the right a small table with four seats.

Past this room was a single bedroom where I had discovered the corpse on the previous trip. In this room was a largish bed and a desk which contained a Book back to Fehnir’s house and a Book to Lehns, oddly it contained little else, perhaps his usual equipment was back in D’ni?

Back outside I walked over to the well, an actual well this time that the family likely drew drinking water from, and looked up at the rock face. It would appear that there was once a waterfall that dispersed water into the basin, a section of the rock face is worn away that would indicate such, however no water currently flows, perhaps it has been blocked, either by Fehnir and his family or naturally.

I do not (hopefully) foresee this Age taking a long time to release, there is not a great deal that needs fixing. For now, however, I plan to return to Sul and being work on this translation.

What a busy morning, however Fehnir House has now been released to the greater public.

Linking Books to Fehnir’s house can now be obtained from our Order Page. Some may be asking “why a Linking Book for a D’ni location?” well for two reasons.

1. It is a long trek up to the house which can be tiresome to make constantly.
2. Due to structural instabilities the entrance to the house is now blocked.

I dislike chaotic weeks, and the last three have been long.

I returned to the surface last week to have some stitches removed from my head, and whilst up there I discovered we had a family gathering to go to in Kansas for July 4th. So after much running around like a headless chicken and 6 hours across several states we finally got there.

As a result of all this, releasing Fehnir’s house got delayed slightly, but we should be allowing access tomorrow with any luck.

Not a huge amount of work has taken place since Whil and Blake Heatly dropped in, the place is still a bit of a mess, but we can tidy it up later. Personally I’m inclined to leave it as is, the location is a snap shot in time, albeit one you can walk around, but it shows the emotion and destruction Veovis and A’gaeris’ actions that fateful day.

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.

To a degree I like uniformity, makes things easier to find if you know what you’re looking for, especially when dealing with books in D’ni.

The various Books of Commentary in the Ages are currently in their draft books, so I have been looking to design a finished book cover product that we can implement. Yesterday I received the proofs back yesterday for the designs, so I figured I would put one up on Beneath for people to check out.

The design inspiration came from the Penguin Classics book sets, whilst mulling ideas over I happened to look down at my copy of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and thought a design based on that would be interesting. It is tempting to work within the aesthetics of D’ni, the big old leatherbound books, but we’re not D’ni and hints of our culture will slowly seep into the cavern, indeed it already has, so I thought something more contemporary would be an interesting direction to go, yes even with something as simple as a book cover.