A small warehouse originally used for securing limited quantities of valuable cargo. The windows and main doorway are boarded shut, with a locked side entrance concealed behind artfully arranged debris that makes it difficult to locate.
If the side entrance is found and its locks are picked, it leads into a sealed side room where Paul cultivates a variety of psychogenic mushrooms, including a puffball variant that emits spores when disturbed - as they will be when the door their trellis hangs on opens. Contact with exposed mucus membranes and/or inhalation will produce powerful and unpleasant hallucinations within minutes that will last for several hours. Someone determined or prepared may pass through the room to attempt the barricaded inner door, which much more simply is rigged to ignite the firetrap failsafe built into the workshop if tampered with.
The actual entrance to the workshop is through a smuggler's tunnel whose trapdoor entrance is found in an adjacent abandoned building. This entrance is trapped on both ends with propellant tranquilizer darts that can be disabled using a key Paul will provide to anyone he gives permission to enter.
Paul has made the office the trapdoor entrance opens into a modestly comfortable space complete with a camp stove for heating water and a selection of dried snacks and teas in a wooden chest.
Further inside, the workshop is tidy, well-organized, and illuminated by lunar orb lamps. Along one wall is a workbench scattered with twists of silver wire and semi-precious stones in various pendants, rings, and bracelets. The wall opposite is covered in a black curtain labelled "Do Not Touch" by a pinned note. If pulled back, the looping circular shapes of Paleblood painted runes are prone to making eyeballs itch, but are otherwise harmless. Those who know how to interpret them will recognize them as dream-runes, intended for use in the landscape of the sleeping mind, and largely powerless in the Waking World.
A few feet away from the black curtain, surrounded by a mosaic ring of polished sea glass, is a pane of clear glass set in a white painted wooden nonagon frame. It rests on the bare floor with nothing interesting underneath it, and it is covered in dried salt residue suggesting ripples. If the sea glass ring is crossed to touch the window, or it is examined through magical means, it radiates vast and icy fury and may trigger the sensation of being plunged into freezing water.
The journals stored in the workbench drawers document Paul's experimentation with draining corruption into inanimate objects, developing precognitive and telepathic abilities, and attempts to catalog and classify various types of blood magic.
In one of the deepest and least used parts of the Pale Sanctuary is the chamber Paul has claimed for his work as a Disciple. The entrance is flanked by two statues of humanoid figures in robes whose faces have been worn away by the touch of hands over the years, with white blindfolds tied over where their eyes would have once been. Between them hangs a black curtain over the doorway.
Inside the chamber is enough space for several people to share comfortably, as long as they don't mind sitting on the cushions and mats stored in niches along the wall. This is where Paul makes his bloodstones and incense, aided by the aperture mechanism built into the ceiling that allows him to let in moonlight when he wants it. The tools for blood letting and casting are kept clean and tucked away in an unlocked chest when not in use. Here is also where Paul keeps a variety of small oddities and ritual supplies: bottled waters from the Salt Lake, the dried petals of lumenflowers, antlers, preserved samples of flora and fauna in jars, incense, and a collection of allegedly protective charms.
There are no traps in the chamber. Paul relies on the overall sanctity of the location to deter sacrilegious intruders and the watchful eyes of fellow Disciples to let him know if his privacy is invaded.
The one unusual aspect of the cell can only be perceived by those able to perceive the ultraviolet spectrum or to otherwise detect the fungal-based paint that Paul has used to cover every stone surface with eyes devoid of pupils. Looking at these eyes for any length of time risks contamination with the Pillar of Salt and Sorrow, a reality corrupting intrusion from an unrealized universe.
There is a sea cave whose mouth is only visible at the lowest of tides, opening into a shallow scoop of unremarkable grey stone with a lip of flat rock above the surface of the flooding ses. Along a rim of cave wall are set a number of silver wrought bands studded with gleaming Paleblood gems, secured in place with anchors sunk into the walls.
This is not the place Paul does his work. The stones are empty of anything but pale light, pure and unblemished.
To reach the cave behind this one, you have to plunge deep into the dark water, deep enough that it takes a practiced deep diver or someone otherwise able to do without breath for long time - long enough to make your way up through a slanting tunnel that branches into lightless, airless ends along all routes but one.
If the explorer finds their way back to the stale air of a cavern, they will find themselves in perfect darkness. When lit, there is another rising slope yet, and fixed to the wall on one side is a simple sheet of etched metal that will warn them, above a pictograph of a skull, a crossed out path, and a body laid flat and still:
THERE IS NOTHING OF VALUE HERE
DEATH IS PAST THIS POINT
RETURN THE WAY YOU CAME
If they yet persist, the rest of the way is easy. The tunnel opens comfortably into one wide and tall enough for human passage. No paths curve away before the intruder will find an ancient, rotting door secured with a padlock and a trap set to launch at its disturbance, a puff of a dart laced with traces of the egg residue that returns a Sleeper to their dream form of tentacles and oblivion.
The room past it is mundane. There are stacks of small chests, some of which have been arranged as a makeshift desk for a person who might sit on the woven mat on the floor. A lunar orb shines brightly in a setting upon the bare black stone floor, filling it with light. Notebooks are the only obvious clutter, weathered and filled with notes in a cipher that resists but does not defeat breaking. They list, factually, a series of experiments, all plausible and well-documented in words and sketch, upon the Beasts of this world. In dry, formal language, they recount tests of endurance in the face of great torments, some of which claim their lives.
It does not matter what they say. None of them ever happened, and Paul has alibis for all the worst of his fictions. He would never trust anything as important as his work to paper in a room that has no guards, cobbled together of only what he can scrape out of this barbaric world.
The things that are true throb like bloody hearts in those closed, unlocked chests, a miasma of corruption that paints the air in the sweet, unholy taint of Beastblood, each marked only by his memory for their providence.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Inventory
Locations
Docks Warehouse Workshop
If the side entrance is found and its locks are picked, it leads into a sealed side room where Paul cultivates a variety of psychogenic mushrooms, including a puffball variant that emits spores when disturbed - as they will be when the door their trellis hangs on opens. Contact with exposed mucus membranes and/or inhalation will produce powerful and unpleasant hallucinations within minutes that will last for several hours. Someone determined or prepared may pass through the room to attempt the barricaded inner door, which much more simply is rigged to ignite the firetrap failsafe built into the workshop if tampered with.
The actual entrance to the workshop is through a smuggler's tunnel whose trapdoor entrance is found in an adjacent abandoned building. This entrance is trapped on both ends with propellant tranquilizer darts that can be disabled using a key Paul will provide to anyone he gives permission to enter.
Paul has made the office the trapdoor entrance opens into a modestly comfortable space complete with a camp stove for heating water and a selection of dried snacks and teas in a wooden chest.
Further inside, the workshop is tidy, well-organized, and illuminated by lunar orb lamps. Along one wall is a workbench scattered with twists of silver wire and semi-precious stones in various pendants, rings, and bracelets. The wall opposite is covered in a black curtain labelled "Do Not Touch" by a pinned note. If pulled back, the looping circular shapes of Paleblood painted runes are prone to making eyeballs itch, but are otherwise harmless. Those who know how to interpret them will recognize them as dream-runes, intended for use in the landscape of the sleeping mind, and largely powerless in the Waking World.
A few feet away from the black curtain, surrounded by a mosaic ring of polished sea glass, is a pane of clear glass set in a white painted wooden nonagon frame. It rests on the bare floor with nothing interesting underneath it, and it is covered in dried salt residue suggesting ripples. If the sea glass ring is crossed to touch the window, or it is examined through magical means, it radiates vast and icy fury and may trigger the sensation of being plunged into freezing water.
The journals stored in the workbench drawers document Paul's experimentation with draining corruption into inanimate objects, developing precognitive and telepathic abilities, and attempts to catalog and classify various types of blood magic.
Pale Sanctuary Cell
Inside the chamber is enough space for several people to share comfortably, as long as they don't mind sitting on the cushions and mats stored in niches along the wall. This is where Paul makes his bloodstones and incense, aided by the aperture mechanism built into the ceiling that allows him to let in moonlight when he wants it. The tools for blood letting and casting are kept clean and tucked away in an unlocked chest when not in use. Here is also where Paul keeps a variety of small oddities and ritual supplies: bottled waters from the Salt Lake, the dried petals of lumenflowers, antlers, preserved samples of flora and fauna in jars, incense, and a collection of allegedly protective charms.
There are no traps in the chamber. Paul relies on the overall sanctity of the location to deter sacrilegious intruders and the watchful eyes of fellow Disciples to let him know if his privacy is invaded.
The one unusual aspect of the cell can only be perceived by those able to perceive the ultraviolet spectrum or to otherwise detect the fungal-based paint that Paul has used to cover every stone surface with
eyesdevoid of pupils. Looking at theseeyesfor any length of time risks contamination with the Pillar of Salt and Sorrow, a reality corrupting intrusion from an unrealized universe.no subject
⁍ Shield generator
⁍ House Atreides signet ring
⁍ Paleblood Corruption sealing jewellery
⁍ Bull and matador statue
⁍ O.C. Bible
⁍ Squid goo
⁍ Chocolates
⁍
Three Moon Dropsone Moon DropThe Sea Cave
This is not the place Paul does his work. The stones are empty of anything but pale light, pure and unblemished.
To reach the cave behind this one, you have to plunge deep into the dark water, deep enough that it takes a practiced deep diver or someone otherwise able to do without breath for long time - long enough to make your way up through a slanting tunnel that branches into lightless, airless ends along all routes but one.
If the explorer finds their way back to the stale air of a cavern, they will find themselves in perfect darkness. When lit, there is another rising slope yet, and fixed to the wall on one side is a simple sheet of etched metal that will warn them, above a pictograph of a skull, a crossed out path, and a body laid flat and still:
THERE IS NOTHING OF VALUE HERE
DEATH IS PAST THIS POINT
RETURN THE WAY YOU CAME
If they yet persist, the rest of the way is easy. The tunnel opens comfortably into one wide and tall enough for human passage. No paths curve away before the intruder will find an ancient, rotting door secured with a padlock and a trap set to launch at its disturbance, a puff of a dart laced with traces of the egg residue that returns a Sleeper to their dream form of tentacles and oblivion.
The room past it is mundane. There are stacks of small chests, some of which have been arranged as a makeshift desk for a person who might sit on the woven mat on the floor. A lunar orb shines brightly in a setting upon the bare black stone floor, filling it with light. Notebooks are the only obvious clutter, weathered and filled with notes in a cipher that resists but does not defeat breaking. They list, factually, a series of experiments, all plausible and well-documented in words and sketch, upon the Beasts of this world. In dry, formal language, they recount tests of endurance in the face of great torments, some of which claim their lives.
It does not matter what they say. None of them ever happened, and Paul has alibis for all the worst of his fictions. He would never trust anything as important as his work to paper in a room that has no guards, cobbled together of only what he can scrape out of this barbaric world.
The things that are true throb like bloody hearts in those closed, unlocked chests, a miasma of corruption that paints the air in the sweet, unholy taint of Beastblood, each marked only by his memory for their providence.