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Cardonal's Desert Laboratory

Cardonal's Desert Laboratory memorial hall
Illustrative location art based on campaign notes.

Illustrative location art showing the laboratory’s memorial to Hephaestoos’s defeat.

Summary

Cardonal’s desert laboratory is an ancient automation and sentient-item site built around the work of Valenth Cardonal, Brutor Ruby Eye, Ennui, and the other Barrier architects. It contains Cardonal’s memorial to the defeat of Hephaestoos, instructions for creating sentient jewellery, automation research, and teleport codes linking the nearby Desert Prison to the wider Elemental Prisons network. The laboratory also preserves the history of Silver, the sentient ring that controlled the automaton body Cardonal later occupied.

Known Details

  • The sentient ring Silver controlled an unnamed female automaton body that had been there 601 years and 907 years without the mistress.
  • The laboratory was oddly clean despite a hole blown inward through the roof, a burnt rope end on a rug, and signs that a security breach and later damage had been tidied away.
  • The mistress died in a spell accident; the automaton body, controlled by Silver, cleaned her up, and the laboratory remained unnervingly maintained after centuries without her.
  • Ruby Eye had visited 47 times, last around 908 years earlier, and requested a book copy after viewing it at Aquaria.
  • Ruby Eye’s connection to the laboratory includes Valenth Cardonal as his best friend, the mage who wanted to craft herself into an object and continue in that form.
  • The site contained flower beds of well-pruned white roses with insects in the dirt, maintained and disposed of by fire at a controlled temperature.
  • One room held a huge silver memorial of a dragon, a sphinx, and the heroic figures gathered around the fallen, very large four-armed vulture-man body of Hephaestoos, commemorating his defeat. Figures included the human Browning, elf Cardonal, dwarf Ruby Eye, tiefling Ennui, Evalina Hartwall in dragon form, and pre-corruption silver-haired sphinx Garadule, with the note Victorious but too late it was still the Dunewand.
  • The elven art gallery was a marble room dominated by statues of very muscular elves and portraits of pale skin, including Aranthium shown before Grandtower.
  • The domestic wing included a kitchen that lit when entered, a dining room with old portraits of Ennui, Joy, Browning, Ruby Eye, Human Hartwall / Lady Evalina Hartwall, and a sphinx, plus a music room with instruments, a harp, and a hat stand resembling one from Ennui’s lab.
  • Charred kitchen-to-dining-room marks and an explosive device aimed into the kitchen suggest the death or breach was localised and violent rather than general decay.
  • Behind Garadule’s picture was a golden band with a smashed ruby resembling Eno’s ring, possibly sentient or hurt.
  • The library contained Everard Browning automation manuals and Cardonal’s Celestial Instructions for creating sentient jewellery; sentient items required a soul.
  • The laboratory held practice enchanted items and a copper astrolabe with a red gem through which Cardonal spoke after 907 years.
  • Cardonal provided or could provide teleport-circle codes for prisons, labs, and Grand Towers levels, including factory, control room, and meeting level.
  • Valenth Lab on Browning’s pre-Dome map is this same Cardonal laboratory.
  • Day 24 places Garadule in the adjacent Desert Prison.
  • Later Cardonal and Ruby Eye returned to Cardonal’s lab to study and gather supplies.

Open Questions

  • Who sent the message I'm coming to get you, and whose handwriting was it?
  • What book did Ruby Eye receive from Aquaria, and why did it return two days before the mistress died?
  • What was the unnamed automaton body originally made for, and what further purpose did Cardonal give it after Silver’s destruction?

Images

Cardonal's Desert Laboratory memorial hall