A day in the life...

Thu, May 8th 4 AW (after war) morning

Lawrence is sky-diving. He and his sky-diving partner are having a blast, when suddenly, Lawrence vanishes leaving a bewildered sky-diving partner.

Fam is lizard hunting with a few of his close friends in a swamp. He gets a trump contact, and before he can more than blink, is mentally hit over the head, and dragged off. His friends see a hand pull him into thin air.

Corliss is reading in his study, relaxing when he gets a trump contact, and before he can more than blink and realize that the caller is female, he is also clobbered mentally and vanishes.

Leon is swimming at a backyard pool with some friends. He goes up for a triple gainer with a half-twist, and vanishes in mid-air.

Taggart is walking through shadow. Up ahead he sees an odd shape carrying what appears to be a person slung over his shoulder. Asks Serephis which finds it unusual, and suggests following it. Taggart does, right into the middle of a camp of demons, where without warning, he's hit from behind, and... good-night Gracie!

Everyone awakens (separately) to much the same sight. A room, a bed, a picture, a closet, a bathroom, a dresser, and a table. Clothes in the closet are the right sizes, colors, patterns, for the occupant of the room. Everyone gets dressed.

Corliss searches the desk, but doesn't find much; a quill pen, paper with no water-mark, blotter, ink. He then searches the closet and the dresser, but doesn't find anything interesting. Tapping the walls however, yields a door shaped area. Having found nothing to open the door, he draws Wile and proceed to cut the door shaped panel into a real door. Unfortunately, the door has this annoying tendency to grow back together as he cuts it away. Undaunted, he cuts and moves some of himself through the door, cuts more, and finally gets far enough through that he can see.... an open door across from him with someone who greets him in Thari, and two other people down the hall. With the help of the person across the hall, he gets through quicker.

Leon spends some time examining the picture, thinking it might be a trump. It isn't. He next searches the closet, where he finds a large cloth-covered lump. Moving it one way yields nothing. Moving it the other, he hears a click, and finds an open door now in his bedroom leading to a hall. Emerges to find Taggart staring at a hand and dagger carving itself out of the wall.

Taggart asks Serephis what happened, and is told that the sword had expected this, but hadn't really expected the rather precipitous way he was clobbered and brought here. He searches the walls, and finds something that feels a bit softer than the rest of the stones walls. He pushes on it, and apparently not being used to technology, is rather surprised. Serephis informs him that it's a door. He lifts the picture down from it's hanger and finds a hook that he thinks might be too large. After pushing and turning the hook, he finally pulls on it, causing the door to open. He exits into a blank hall, and finds that the far end of the hall sounds rather metallic. He then turns around and stops, floored by the sight of a hand and dagger punching through the wall.

Lawrence searches the closet and doesn't find much, other than that it was arranged by an anal retentive. He next searches the bathroom where he finds stuff in the medicine cabinet like tylenol, PeptoBismol, and nicely enough, rat food, which he feeds to his talking rat Mikey. Further exploration finds a light switch in the medicine chest which he flips, turning the light on, and causing a click. Mikey notices a new door in the bedroom. Lawrence goes to the door and is confronted by a man coming through the wall across from him. He says hello in Thari, and is greeted in response, and then helps Corliss emerge the rest of the way from the wall, whereupon the rest of the people are introduced. We notice what looks like bumps appearing and dissapearing in the wall off to one side.

Fam meanwhile napped for a few minutes, and then got up to search the rooms. He found nothing interesting in the closet or bathroom, but searching the walls (and hurting his hand), he found a softer part of the wall. He punches it for a while, but doesn't come up with much. He then begins tearing apart the bedroom (literally). Eventually, he pulls one of the drawers from the dresser and the door opens, revealing the hallway where the rest of the group is congregated.

After standing around talking for a while, Corliss decides to see if they are close to Amber or not, and so begins shifting shadow in an attempt to make the walls blue. Succeeding at this, albeit after a fair amount of time, he shifts more until there is a door where a door should be and proceeds to re-enter his room. As the door shuts behind him, it changes back into the squishy substance, and the walls fade back to their normal stone gray.

While Corliss was pacing, everyone else has been poking and prodding at the walls, and Lawrence discovers that there is a possible sixth door. He borrows Wile from Corliss, and cuts far enough through the door to poke his head inside and see that it is unoccupied. Taggart returns to investigating the metal wall that he found last week, and begins poking, prodding, and tapping on it. Fam, being himself, returns to his room, and unsuccessfully attempts to re-arrange his bathroom. Leon just stands there. Lawrence returns the dagger to Corliss, who then disappears into his room. Lawrence then discovers a new switch on the inside of his door, which when pressed causes a new switch to appear on the outside of his door allowing it to be opened and closed normally. He then goes through and unlocks/opens everyones doors except for Corliss' and the empty one.

Corliss, in his room, begins to search the bathroom, and immediately tries flushing the toilet. This engenders a click, and the door to the hall opens again. Learning of the double-switches, Corliss toggles the switches on his door as well so that his room is now enterable.

Taggart by now, and after some prompting from his sword, finds and indent next to the metal wall. Pushing it leads to the door opening on a smallish room with six buttons on the wall. The button labeled 5 is lit. All of us enter the room, and then Corliss presses '5' causing the doors to close, but not much else to occur. Quickly realizing this is very much like an elevator, he presses 1, and the elevator drops downward to the first floor.

Emerging from the elevator they are confronted with a hallway lined with evenly spaced columns that lead to a swimming pool along the far wall. On the left through the columns are a kitchen and an exercise area. On the right are a dinning room, and a wet bar. Corliss pours himself a scotch and soda, while Fam makes himself a Dagwood style sandwich from the well stocked refrigerator in the kitchen. We explore around here a bit more, but don't find much else. Lawrence, in his irritation looks at the fine china, and then lets it drop to the floor with a very insincere 'oops'.

Heading back to the elevator, they discuss for a bit which floor to go to next. Corliss suggests 2, but everyone else wants to try 6, so, 6 it is. We end up on 6, and are faced with a large greenhouse that takes up the entire floor. There is a koi pond in the center of it, and paths leading all through it. The ceiling is very high up (20 feet above the highest tree) and roofed over in green glass. The light in here, and in fact in every other room seems to be emanating from everywhere (completely non-directional). Lawrence sends Mikey (as a crow) up to investigate the ceiling, but he doesn't find out much. Corliss then cuts a rock out of wall of the koi pond and throws it full strength up to the ceiling where it goes 'tink' and falls back down. He catches the rock, and replaces it in the pond. The koi during all of this give him a vaguely disgusted expression. Given that the ceiling seems to be out, they walk around through the paths a little bit, and find a very authentic Japanese tea house with settings for 5 people set out, and the tea very nicely warm. Fam decides to take out his frustration by doing a bit of landscaping. The garden plants move out of his way. Leon and Corliss both have some of the tea with Leon observing all of the formalities of a classic Japanese tea ceremony.

Everyone decides to keep exploring. Leon and Taggart decide to stay on floor 6 to try and pry open the elevator doors after they all go down to 4 so that they can see if there might be a way out through the elevator shaft. The rest head down to floor 4. Leon and Taggart are able to pry open the door to the elevator and see the roof of the elevator two floors below, a roof pretty much immediately above them, and two rails running down the sides of the shaft.

On the fourth floor, Corliss, Lawrence, and Fam step out of the elevator and into a sitting area with one set of double doors, and two other doors. Leon and Taggart call the elevator back up, and rejoin everyone a few moments later. During that time, Fam has opened the double doors, which leads to a library, and Corliss and Lawrence each opened one of the single doors apiece. These doors lead to fairly plain writing rooms with a desk, and some pens, but no papers or other items. Fam meanwhile attempts to redecorate the library, with the apparent notion that books don't really belong on shelves, but on the floor. As Lawrence and Corliss finish, they turn around and watch the books fly over Fam's shoulder, stop, and settle gently into neat piles on the floor. Leon and Taggart arrive and see this same phenomenon.

Everyone now jaunts down to the third floor. Directly across from the elevator we find a locked door. Corliss pulls out a set of lock picks (where DID he get those?) but given that there is no keyhole in the door, they aren't much help. Lawrence concentrates for a few moments, and then keels over in pain, moaning something about 'oh my aching head'. Corliss paces around the small foyer, in hopes that the door will mysteriously unlock itself, but it doesn't. Taggart tries to hack at the door with Serephis, but the sword turns into a snake, and refuses to do that. Corliss asks the sword a few things, and finds out that Taggart doesn't know much about anything related to Amber, and that the door has some of the pattern imbued into it. Lawrence in the meantime has returned to his room to get some excedrin for that headache of his.

When he returns, everyone all head down to floor 2. Here there is another ante-chamber with double doors partly open leading to a large movie theater/auditorium. As everyone enters, a screen rolls down in front, and a face appears on the screen. The face is that of a fairly monstrous looking demon. He says that it's about time the group got there, at which point Corliss remarks that he at least had wanted to go to floor two first. The demon goes on to say that it is sorry for the inconvenience of the abductions, but that there is a threat to everyone there. It further says that the group will be allowed out, and that they are to consider this place a safe haven. The threat, it says, is that some faction or factions in either Amber or Chaos or both has been killing off the younger generation of both Amber and Chaos offspring. They are told that they will find more information upstairs on the third floor in the room they couldn't enter previously. It also says that on the third floor they will find transportation, and trumps that will get them back into the building. The screen then goes blank leaving everyone a bit shaken, confused, and concerned. During the discussion it comes out that Taggart really does know very little about either Amber or Chaos. Corliss belittles Taggarts' sword for not giving him a better education.

Everyone except for Taggart goes up to the third floor. Taggart stays on the second floor and gets a small lesson from Serephis on some of the things that will be useful to him, like what the pattern is, etc. On the third floor the locked door is now open, but they wait for Taggart before proceeding, content to just discuss life among ourselves. We discover that at least two of us, Corliss and Leon, are from Amber, and the other two, Fam and Lawrence, are from Chaos. No one is sure where Taggart is from.

After Taggart rejoins them, they enter the door, and find a large room with four doors, one leading back to the ante-room, one across, and one each to the left and the right. Also around the room are three maps, two obviously those of Amber and Chaos and their surrounding circles of shadows. The third, recognized only by Corliss is a map of the new Pattern drawn by Corwin and the shadows that surround it.

The door to the left opens onto a weapons room filled with a variety of high and low tech weapons from PPG's to swords, including at least one bomb, a variety of ammunition (none of which is based on jewelers rouge) and some hand-grenades. The door on the right leads to a records room where there are folders for each of the people there sitting out, racks of other folders, and a computer. Everyone takes their own folder, and Corliss and Leon both search the racks of other folders. The folders come in three colors. Everyone who is there has a blue folder, as do most of the living Amberites (and Chaosites). Any of the Amberites and Chaosites who are known to be dead have red folders. Folks like Brand and Caine, whom are not known to be alive or dead have purple folders. Corliss finds Dworkin's folder, and snags it for later reading. The computer looks very interesting, but asks for a password. Corliss tries three passwords suggested by the others, and then the computer dies and erases all the information on it. There are a pile of disks by the computer however, but they decide to deal with them and the computer after looking around a bit more.

Through the last door is a garage with a mini-van. We all get into the van and look around it. The van has a very simplistic dashboard, with only a few buttons, one of which starts it, and one of which stops it, and one which appears to make the trump image on the dashboard work. In the glove-box we find 5 trumps back to the downstairs living room, and each takes one. We leave the van, and go back into the house. A ghostly butler appears, and announces that dinner is served downstairs, and then vanishes through a wall. We go downstairs to eat.

After dinner Corliss, Leon, and Lawrence head back up to the third floor to see if the computer has fixed itself yet, since everything else around here seems to. Fam goes off to the theater to hunt down a copy of Rambo to watch. Taggart also goes to three to read his dossier.

The computer had indeed reset, and greets them with the word 'oops', and then instructs them to start feeding it disks. The computer seems somewhat able to respond to verbal commands, but usually only talks back. After the computer is rebooted, Corliss discovers that it is an old 386 running a very old and hacked version of BSD Unix 4.1. Exploring a bit more, he finds that the machine is called 'ghost.wheel.net' and that there is a game on it called AmberMUSH. Figuring this must be the information they were promised he logs into it, and finds that it really is just a game, and one populated either by very clueless people or very bad AI routines. Turning the computer over to Leon, who's more used to these older tech computers, they discover that they have some email asking if they need help, to which they reply 'yes'. Leon also discovers a directory called INFO, with some informational files in them. Both of the files are printed out on a very old, loud and clunky daisy-wheel printer.

While Leon and Corliss have been playing with the computer, Lawrence has wandered back out to the garage, and out through the garage door. He finds that they are in a cubic building surrounded by a moat, and then farther out by ShadowStuff. The moat is crossed by only one bridge. He then returns inside.

Fam comes back down after watching Rambo and Rambo II, and gets shut in the weapons room by Taggart. Everyone decides to head to bed for the night.

Everyone gets up, showers, and gets dressed. Everyone heads down to breakfast. Taggart appears in normal clothes. Fam is more subdued than usual, and looks depressed. After eating, Lawrence experiments with the trumps of the downstairs to make sure that they work as advertised.