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Save Point: The Ziggurut

"It is the temple of the new god!" says the holy madman on the corner with glee.

In order to visit this self-proclaimed whackjob and prophet of the streets, they've had to adopt simplistic disguises, just based on their proximity to the building of which he speaks. There's an air about it, a certain something, a large and nondescript building site with the all the usual fallen planks and rope and bits of scaffolding in the mud, and yet a feeling as though it is on the verge of becoming, turning into a focus of people and events and happenings.

The feeling is all too literally meant, as Cleo clips a corner too close and realizes a faint tingling sensation across her skin, as if she has glanced briefly against a diaphranous veil. Looking up and crosswards to the angle of the sun, she realizes that the entire site is enclosed by a faint sphere, probably below the limits of normal human vision if not below hers. It looks almost like someone has recorded an explosion in slow motion, then freeze-framed the spreading ripple in the air to be driven out ahead of the blast itself.

She adjusts course but not too hastily, trying to make it look as if she hasn't noticed anything.

The prophet is priest of a something, or was, or possibly still is, although no-one seems to know quite what. So in order to blend in, they've observed him from a distance and then improvised a different outfit each designed to plausibly resemble something from a sister or brother order of some kind, not close enough to share any details of doctrine they might get called on, but enough to soothe the prophet and any passers-by who may witness this convocation of the devout.

With the slight disclaimer, of course, that their respective outfits need to conceal those unusual features that they each bear. Sethkill has been forced to opt for a large and voluminous travelling robe, in a dirty shade of gray, that drapes all the way down to the tip of his muzzle, accessorized on the outside only by a suitably junky looking, ever-so-slightly gold-leafed pectoral, some cheap copper armbands and a couple of smaller necklaces of beads that coincide with the places where his body-shape is most nearly adjacent to that of a human. The upside of the robe is that it has been washed so many times it's thin and maneuverable around him, and any vermin it may have been carrying have not survived.

Terrowne has done the opposite by going bare-chested, wearing a pair of braided-leather pants that are too large for him (they're the ones Cleo traded from a roadside merchant for a song and a screwing, and scarcely accommodate her own muscle-curved hips and thighs) and reinforcing the similarity of their look with his own armbands and pectoral, obtained from entirely different shop keepers but with the same end in mind. To conceal his knives, he has bought along his forearm bracers after wrapping them in the cheapest piece of barely leather he could find, looped about with several twists of thin rope in the ironic dissimulation of a very non-dangerous person trying desperately to look tough.

The fact that he's not exactly tanned doesn't really help that one. He's a shade of slightly pale that contrasts oddly with his darkness as a dragon, perfectly consistent across his entire body like it was carefully planned, statue of an intentionally casual athlete careful not to build up too much in the way of muscle, so as not to impede his flexibility. There are no scars or markings. It's actually quite intimidating in an understated way that's strangely hard to elucidate, but works as far as it goes to sell him as a foreign member of their fictitious order, perhaps a pilgrim who has traveled far in dangerous country.

Cleo, as the only female member thus avowed, has naturally gone for a sort of opposite look to the both of them, getting in on a little of the sacred prostitution thing that's so popular in these parts and being sort of a temple girl. Because she has no way of knowing whether her illusion of normality will work in front of anyone else who's empowered themselves, she's trying to show off the bits that will attract the most audience attention and distract from the rest. It's probably not the first time she's had to do this.

Boobs out and nipples hard is of course essential, so she's obtained a little demi-corset type thing that wraps around her lower ribcage, and rouged herself up with some red ochre. Around here its actually quite tame, but no-one ever fails to look at what's on offer and it makes her relatively less noticeable. The top parts of a travelling robe similar to Sethkills reach down only to the top of her shoulders, purchased for almost nothing as the rest of the garment was full of tears and cuts and punctures, surrounded by irremovable stains where the previous owner had met with banditry of some description.

Because walking around in the streets with her twat out would be just a bit much, even though there is no nudity taboo in Uruk and that sort of thing is fine for the poorer quarters of the city or indeed any improvised shrine of worship in a back alley, she's gone for a time-honoured religious stereotype and wrapped a sort of long decorative sash twice around her waist and through itself to hang down unnecessarily longingly between her legs. There was a lengthy debate before they started as to how to hide her tail and whether it would actually be a good idea to try, but the sash breaks up her line nicely and the faint pressure of the cloth over her tailbase reminds her to keep it down between her legs.

Throw on more of the matching copper bracelets and anklets, smaller pectoral and necklaces and you have yourself a real steal at only copper for a good time. She'll be available for the worship of the faithful later tonight, is what it suggests.

"It grows, you know," the madman continues helpfully, around the mouthful of food he's scarfing down. They bought him a basket full of assorted breads and beer in a jar, local staples associated with hospitality and being properly civilized, in a manner that makes it look as though they are extending charity to their brother of a fellow order. "The gods have blessed it and are helping with the construction. Each day the builders build up the outside, and then when they knock it off and go home, the inside grows until it has matched the level of their work from the day before."

"I have a hard time believing that," declares Terrowne, playing the skeptic, the new and younger brother who has only just joined and is yet to have the worldly edges knocked off.

"It's true, you know," insists the prophet. "I may have happened to slip inside one night, very very discreetly if you catch my drift, and when I woke up I was in a me-shaped hole in the floor where the very clay had grown up around me. I was just lucky it had grown sort of outwards instead of flowing right over me, otherwise I'd surely have been swallowed up."

"Oh you pooorrrr man," purrs Cleo sympathetically. "Not the sort of thing you want to wake up with hard between your legs, am I right?"

"Exactly," declares the prophet, tearing off another piece of bread with terribly maintained teeth and getting crumbs caught in is beard. "The builders know, they aren't stupid. So now they take advantage of it and build only the outer courses, and do them with the cheapest grade of unfired sun-baked bricks, as fast as they can. Then the gods do the work for them. Only happens if there's nobody left conscious on the site, you know. They tried waiting up to see what would happen, but nothing does until every last one of them is gone. Then it grows."

"You must be disappointed you missed seeing it happen," suggests Sethkill. "It sounds as though you got nearer to them than anyone else."

"I think it might be because I'm a priest," declares the prophet. He gives off a distinctly homeless vibe of his own, but he still has a shabbily stained robe of sorts, small twists of silver in the braids that make up the preferred hairstyle for his vocation and some of the beads and bracelets they've modeled their own disguises on, which are worth decent sums in an economy where most of the transactions are still paid in timber, leather and clay, and the smallest copper coin constitutes an expensive faith-based donation for a night with a good-looking temple prostitute. If he was truly destitute he'd long since have parted with all these things, which leads them to a shared suspicion that it's really more a case of needing more beer than his position can provide. Hence the jar they tucked casually into the basket, as if in afterthought.

"They don't mind priests," he continues, although it is hard to say exactly who 'they' might be in this context. "The guys who bought all the original building on this block, the one who arranged to have it built? They're priests too. They live inside it somewhere and come out occasionally to go places, do errands, that sorta thing. Kinda remind me of you actually," he casually accuses, waving a crust floppily at Sethkill. "Well, only a bit. But they have the same sort of big robe with a large hood on top, you know, completely covering their faces. All you see is a sort of star-shaped bit at the front where the cloth folds together, exactly the same for each of them. Never seen perfectly identical robes like that before, even all the stitches are the same. That's how I know you aren't one," he enlarges gesturing expansively. "Got yourself a real-person robe, ya know?"

"What was that you said back at the start about a new god?" Terrowne asks, broadening his role as the new guy into a touch of unseemly curiosity.

"Well, it's gotta be," shrugs the prophet. "I mean we have all the usual ones already, the local ones, not yours or mine obviously, but still, the big names. And they all have their followers and priests and stuff, usually a different main one for each city. Thanks for this bread by the way, it really is quite delicious. But these new guys are clearly from somewhere else, they have serious amounts of purchasing power, and they've got themselves immediate divine intervention from the moment they laid out the scared geometry on the foundations. This has gotta be a new god looking to get in on the action. Ishtar will be bitching about it big time."

"I would've thought that the Ishtar girls would be cock-blockading the builders, if you know what I mean," purrs Cleo in a delightedly sleazy giggle. "Put the competition out of business before they can get it up, if you follow my drift?"

"Oh, they can't," explains the prophet. "Several reasons actually. The owners are funding that big contest thing that's going on, the tournament. You've probably seen all the warriors and wrestlers and spearmen and archers and stuff, right? They're backing it and lots of people are making loads of money. And if it is a new god, then it's a powerful one and good at miracles, and the Ishtar girls might get themselves in trouble with their goddess if they started a fight with one of her divine relatives. Plus, everyone is getting kind of excited about it. They want to see it finished, see what happens when it reaches the top and the tournament is over. It's like there's something in the air just waiting to happen."

He eyeballs Cleo as if he can read her mind, although in all probability he's just checking out her tits on general reflex. The long curved animal teeth on his necklace jangle as he quirks his head sideways and looks at her.

"I reckon," he concludes, "that there's gonna be some sorta ceremony when it's done, and the new god will show himself then. Of course that's just my opinion. Thank you for the beer."

~*~

"Did you get any sort of a read on it?" exclaims Cleo excitedly as soon as they're safely out of line of sight, around several corners and sure they haven't been followed.

She seems to consider Terrownes unfortunate dragonishness an intelligence asset of some sort in this context, perhaps able to see through walls or similar. She hasn't quite come to grips yet with his almost limitless power and its peculiarly intrinsic limitations.

"Yes, but Sethkill explains it a lot better in the next few seconds," he hedges.

"I can tell you exactly what it is," exclaims Sethkill. "They're using nanofacturing to build that big ziggurut of theirs and get it done in time for the closing ceremonies. That little ripple thing in the air around the perimeter, it's actually a sort of special effect to show where the boundaries are for when you're doing nanotech waste remediation. They use it where I'm from to clean up old waste spills and rubbish dumps from the industrial age. You wouldn't want to accidentally get yourself accidentally mistaken for biological waste."

"Crazy prophet guy was right?"

"Yes. He was lucky that he didn't get disassembled. Safeties must have kicked in."

"It's kind of honey-combed, of course," interrupts Terrowne. "They've taken materials from under the building and in the ground beneath it to build the rest of the structure, so it's mostly hollow space with a lot of good engineering holding it together. Something that big needs a lot of mass to hold up its own weight, unless it's mostly space to begin with."

"I can't really speak definitely, but I saw that apartment of yours with the original walls exposed back in Azatlan, so I can guess a little bit about how you guys did nanofacturing of structures. It would've been more rigid and standardized than the techniques we use, probably with the whole structure strictly modeled in advance, assembled one section at a time, level by level, with a fresh supply of raw material for each one," explains Sethkill, now warming to his subject. "Our method is more flexible and smarter, able to improvise to a limited degree around the available materials and desired output if it thinks there's enough there to work with. Especially if you are willing to shave down all of the applicable safety standards in the interests of speed."

"It's kind of fascinating from a combat point of view," Terrowne continues, still seemingly off on his own track of the conversation. It's like he's reviewing the layout of the building somewhere inside his own head. "The interior is deliberately maze-like, laid out in a branching pattern to make it difficult to take from the ground. The exterior stairway runs straight up to the top, but it's completely exposed. And if you try to deploy more than a certain amount of force in any of the internal chambers, that section will collapse around you. The collapse always propagates outward and favours the remaining parts of the structure staying intact."

"They've taken being under-resourced and made it a feature."

"Exactly."

"So now what?" asks Cleo, irked by the fact that the conversation seems to be going around her without actually involving her. "How do we get in there and kill them?"

"We'll have to think about it."

"I have a few good ideas."