Snippet #1564888

Gwen resisted the urge to sigh theatrically and lapsed into silence once more. Nope; apparently not even horrible jokes could coerce anyone into speaking to her. Well, fine then. If nobody wished to leave the solitude of their thoughts, she wasn't going to press the point. Rather than let it get to her, she devoted her attention to seeking out as many interesting tidbits about her surroundings as she could. An inverted ziggaurat, was it? If there was this much interesting stuff up here, she wondered might be in the small area at the bottom. Then again, that was what they were here to discover, was it not?

When they entered what appeared to be a honeycombed passageway, she took one look at the stone floor in front of them, or more accurately how pristine it was compared to the ground in front of the depression in the walls that might have been merchants' stalls at some point, and shook her head. There was something not right about that, and she was opening her mouth to say as much when Hellion simply stepped onto it, which killed the illusion of stonework and left him standing on what appeared to be nothing.

Why bother making a solid vanishing floor? It was not as though anyone would be paying for their unwariness with anything more than a moment's fright, after all. Perhaps it was one of those things that people did simply because they wanted everyone else to know they could, like when aristocrats built homes far too large for them to live in the whole thing. She tested the surface by hopping up and down a few times (if it couldn't take her doing that, it wasn't going to hold up under half of the others, anyway) and was surprised to find that it felt just as solid as stone, if smoother, like glass. Crouching, she rapped on it with a few knuckles. Hm... definitely more like glass than ordinary granite.

She considered testing that theory with her glass-cutting thieves' implements, but the wisdom of doing this while walking on the surface was questionable, and it didn't look like she'd have enough time besides. Shaking her head, she flitted over to one of the carved-out hollows that must have been a shop. She didn't touch anything; none of it interested her for its material value, anyway, merely for its use. There were several devices she had never seen before, though from the lines inscribed at regular intervals, she would suppose them to be some variety of merchant's measures. What, exactly, would be measured with what looked like a bladed compass was unknown to her, but all the same...

"Hm... if they wanted to scare us to death, you think they would have tried that before the stone things," she said with a shrug, stepping back out onto the glass floor. As she did so, Gwen was overcome with the uncanny feeling that she was being watched, and the hair on the back of her neck pricked. Her posture shifted slightly; she placed more weight on the balls of her feet rather than her heels, and held her arms steadily at her side. It was a subtle change, but not an imperceptible one. Still, she did not comment on the feeling, and continued to walk with the group as though she had felt nothing at all.