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You're stumped for a bit.
He's deffo not in there somewhere waiting to ambush you; the woodsmoke smell that was on him from dinner is gone.
You creep, keeping to the walls, full alert for sound, smell, movement.
Since the building's just up and not operating there's nearly nothing here. Biggy boxes mostly; several heavy travel trunks, with iron corners and barrel bands. All of them have a simple Whitey seal front and top; all locked with two keys.
Expensive, bulky stuffs. Toily books and things like that, you guess; if they wuz weapons they'd be kept personally or in the armory, and if they wuz magics they'd be protected by magics. Mebbe theys supposed to be put in the top levels of Ͳ some time.
There's nothing glowy or zappy you can see around; no taste of tin or ozone smell in the air; no volcanic sulphur wiv blood coppa; no greeny, weedy stink, like ripped grass or summat. Just stale air...
...eh.
Behind the big stack of biggy boxes there's ...somefin.
Not exactly glowy, like a primed spell, but a fadey glowy, like after a spell is fired.
You peek: gotcha!
It's a, a thingydealy! Ner, ner, a, a, a <span class="mu-b"><span class="mu-i">Telly Pop-up</span></span>! Dats what the faggit just used!
It shouldna been the sordyguy wots drorwn it; this kindy stuffs usually made by Wizzies. But bugger that: <span class="mu-i">this</span> is why you couldn't find anyfin rapping on the outside of Ͳ block! There are no structural weaknesses because it's a fully enclosed cubby, using Telly Pop-ups for ins and outs!
You'd usually try to muck about wiv something like this if you found it, on the general principle that there's always lewts behind fancy doors, but the sordyguy's just on the ovva side in an enclosed space. You're not completely sure you can take him if you go in blind. Also, knowing Wizzies, most of this Telly Pop-up stuff will have hidden features against people like YOU.
Say, zapper turrets or splosiv traps or guard summonz if you don't have a passphrase or a key trinket.
Right now Sordfaggit's probs in the cubby between level 2 n 3, and he'll be in dere fer a good bit.
You make the most of it: you get out a grubby whitish half-a-towel, press it on the Telly Pop-up runes, and scrubb it with marking chalk. That got most of the pattern that's carved in; you use little bits of the chalk on another rag, about the same size, to kind of drore out the fading glowy bits. Mebbe Seafood can twigg out something if you show him your kludge frottage.
You're about to hide among the boxes and wait for sordyfagg again when you get a better idea.
The walls of the cubby are thick, so's you carnt tap out nuffin from outside Ͳ building.
But, the inna parts of Ͳ, the floorz and ceilenz, there's woody parts and hollows, and plastry to cover those up, because seeing uggo things like dat hurts Humies' eyes or sumfin.
You take a gamble: the actual ceiling should be higher on level 2, but visually lowered by a false plastry ceiling.
If yez remove some plastry board and get in the crawlspace.....
