Still absorbed in his muttering over the smokes rising from the censer, which had shifted from pale grey to a white unnaturally veined with blue streaks, Ulor managed to hear his name being called from behind him, even though the words previously spoken by the bard had slipped by his ears without leaving any trace. Without ceasing his incantation, he turned towards the table and approached it with short, careful steps, swinging the censer from its chain as he carried it as, he remembered, the adjuncts did during worship functions. And to say it seemed so easy when he saw them doing it... Before reaching the table, he had already struck himself over the knee no less than five times, and, he was certain, narrowly avoided setting himself on fire once more. Now, more than ever, he regretted never having been chosen for service at the altar. Fortunately, however, he reached his goal without excessive damage to his own person, something he found he already had had enough of.

While the stream of unintelligible words from his mouth flowed on without interruptions, he nodded in acquiescence at the feline, and, placing the censer on the table at what should have been a safe distance from the papery findings, bent over the latter. Curiosity lit his eyes as he leafed through what seemed to be ledgers - and ledgers in a cathedral were bound to contain something interesting - only to be replaced by disappointment as he found himself unable to decipher the writing on their pages. Nor was he any more successful with the other documents. The script closely resembled Dwarven runes, but the symbols' arrangement was entirely unfamiliar.

Ulor was about to sweep them aside and proceed to the inspection of a handful of black stones, but instead found himself peering at the strange text so closely that his eyes crossed. Further distracted by a melody he vaguely heard from somewhere in the nave, he stopped muttering and began to absently bite his whisker, as his right hand slid off somewhere along the table to toy with the first thing it encountered. Something metallic, breathing warmly, which had a opening just large enough for... With a sharp and rather breathless curse he drew back his hand, blowing on what had, until a few moments ago, been one of the few spots on his body that had remained relatively safe from scorching and knocking the smoking censer down onto the table. Smouldering ashes fell from the overturned thurible onto the central pages of a still open volume, rapidly eating through the parchment and obliterating what might have been crucial information.

Hissing a rapid spell, Ulor extinguished the cinders and shook them out of the book before hastily shutting it. Then, rapidly resuming his mumbling as though to regain the lost time, he returned the censer to its proper standing position, waved his hands over it almost as though to reassure it (or something else) that the summoning was still happening, and placed the pile of cryptic manuscripts into his backpack. The stones did not yield much else - they seemed fairly valuable, if anything, but that aspect of the matter did not interest him in the least. Slipping them into a pouch, he returned to his ritual in a slightly worse disposition than before.

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Ulor's [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/4061]nat 1[/url] in examining the document costs the party some precious pages out of a ledger.

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