Despite narrowly escaping being burned some more, and being punctured within another inch of his life, Ulor remained all throughout, by some miracle, lost in his transfixed state. While this fortunately did not impede his ability of wilful action - though his accuracy seemed to have suffered slightly - his gaze remained lost somewhere in the vague direction of the remaining enemy, and his thoughts presumably somewhere deep under the sea. Only when finally the paladin's hammer, as implacable as its wielder, brought an end to the struggle did start shaking his head, as he tended to do when returning to a fully waking state; and when the feline, seemingly driven by some sort of atavistic hunger for fish, began to maul the already motionless corpse, a bout of irritated grumbling was heard from his side - a certain sign that everything was as normal as it could possibly be.

With little more than a last condemning glance at the frenzied monk and those of the party who followed to subdue her, the elf making even more of a scuffle in the process, he hobbled towards the altar, now guarded only by the lesser acolyte's body and its floral decorations. His gait was limping and painful, and he found himself leaning heavily on his staff as wounds old and new made themselves heard in a stinging choir; yet he found in himself the strength to admire the building around him. The solemn silence of temples and abbeys, which had never quite left him since the bygone days of his novitiate, coiled about him almost reassuringly, as a fine blanket might on a winter night; the high, vaulted ceiling, less roughly shod than those he remembered, was as a lid between an eye unaccustomed to light and the glare of the midday sun. He wondered if, had that been possible, he would have felt at home for a moment.

Whatever the function performed over the altar was, it clearly had been already well underway when the group had intruded upon it. A ritual symbol was seared into its surface, and an offering of incense was being prepared about it, presumably to be immolated. Ulor frowned as he gazed over the mark. The ends of threads of familiarity writhed somewhere far off in the darkness, yet there was nothing concrete he could grasp. Strange, indeed. A cursory inspection of the surrounding space did not shed any further light onto his findings at the scene. All he could see was what could be ordinarily expected to be in such a place. Censers, instruments of worship... Instruments, indeed. If they could tell him nothing thus, they could not deny him another service. He swept up a victim's worth of incense, and, seizing hold of one of the censers, dragged himself back towards the main door.

In the chamber to the left hand, discussion over the priestess's corpse was still ongoing, but that was not what Ulor had come to see. Lifting himself up from his stooping posture with some difficulty, he glanced about over the group's heads. There did not seem to be much to be there, either. A relatively small collection of books, none of which he would think of as suspicious. What did people know when they spoke about not judging a book by its cover? One could have thought they actually had some experience with it, but no. Not one of them had actually ever seen a truly dangerous book, as far as he knew. But he was straying from the point.

Satisfied with his lack of discoveries, save ones of a strictly practical sort, Ulor hobbled into a nearby corner and began to arrange the censer and incense for the incantation, whispering unclear, yet obscurely sinister words. Soon, the two would be as one again - and this dreadful headache would be gone at last.


[hider=Sherlock Holmes back in action]

Ulor investigates the altar (Religion roll of [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/3747]10[/url]), the nearby space (Investigation at [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/3748]7[/url]) and the lateral room (Investigation at [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/3749]5[/url]). As could be expected, he finds nothing useful except for a censer and some incense. Now he can summon back Octopus with [i]Find Familiar[/i] at someone else's expense.

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