Tower of sin

Ah, the rain. You know, now that he stopped to enjoy it, the rain actually felt kinda nice. What, between exhausting himself with that healing stuff before, and combining that with his general inept abilities to deal with the current situation, suddenly Aji found himself quite happy there in the mud. His mother might scold him later for getting his clothes dirty. Ah well. She was busy right now, right? Actually it was technically her fault too, but Aji would never say that to her.

His gaze fell to the side... and to Kaycee, her own self beginning to be buried in the mud. Where as Aji was simply quite tired, she looked to be asleep. Out here? What a place to fall asleep... and come to think of it, dangerous too.

Decision made within a second, Aji slowly pushed himself to his feet and stumbled over to where Kaycee was. Trying his absolute best to ignore his overwhelming exhaustion, he picked her up in his arms and headed off back towards the tower.

Inside, after probably falling on his face a couple times (actually using himself as a cushion for her though), he slowly made his way to his room and put her in his bed. Considering how muddy she was, mother might scold him for getting those sheets dirty too, but again he didn't care all that much. What was he gonna do, leave her out in the rain? Satisfied though that she would wake up at least in a little bit more comfortable conditions, Aji decided to rest himself.

He was out even before he hit the floor.

Rujin felt a relief with Aji going to pick up Kaycee...But she was feeling a little stuck to be able to do anything for it, considering how tired her son looked.
However, seeing the orb dropped, she focuses on manipulating the water in the mud, and through it, 'slides' the orb back to her direction. With a slight smile for the progress, she happily fetches it up.

The golem reeled back at the impact of the arrow, stumbling, but made one stomp to signal its recovery, and rose its arms, giving an angry motion. The golem shed some of its frontside, but wasn't very effectively harmed. The golem rushed towards Tamerie! ...Rushing...relatively. This was a pretty slow monster when it came to making distance.

Tamerie jumped back a few steps while readying another explosive head arrow and shot the golem. The explosion centered on the same spot of the goelm that appeared damaged. Tamerie landed, sliding back from the momentum of her leap. Her foot caught onto some slick mud and she stumbled back, landing on her rear, mud splashing up from under her. "Gah...freaking rain." She struggled to get her wet hair and mud out of her eyes, unable to see anything.

The golem was struck pretty dead-on, in a mindless charging. The blow was more effective with the focused effort. The right shoulder seemed to look a little vulnerable from its support thorugh the torso, but the rest of the golem was holding on well.
The golem itself started to partly-fall, dropping lower overall as it struggled to ensure it kept moving so that it wouldn't trip and fall, and lost plenty of momentum through that, but in the end it started to close distance. The golem thrusted its left arm down-forward at the ground, halting itself with the punch. The section of ground broke up and split away from the blow, not making any sort of danger towards Tamerie, or very much for even the golem, but it was the beginning part of a spell-natured power. The ground in front of Tamerie started to break up and feel uneven, then suddenly it sharply thrusted outward random parts of separated, broken up earth, jutting as random beams into the air at inconsistant angles.

Rujin frowned, concerned at how this was going, and held tightly to the orb. She flicked her arm up and outward to the side, a trail of silver sparkles lingering, and then straight downward, continueing the trail. Suddenly the trail merged up together, and then spread in a straight line across a length that was an equivalent of the trail's length. These sparkles then materlized into sapphire, and created a solid staff which Rujin then chose to wield properly...A staff with that chaotic orb at the end of itself.
The fox-like humanoid decided that she would intervene if it looked like Tamerie entered serious danger, but for now the golem was trying to be indirect enough to be harmful but not fatal.

Tamerie managed to wipe the mud and wet hair out of her eyes just in time to see the golem nearly upon her. She tried to move out of the way, but uneven earth hindered her and she couldn't regain her balance. She closed her eyes when she realized the golem's spell was upon her.

The spell, however, was over already, producing the beams alone. After that, the golem practically threw itself into standing, and started at her once again.---Only to be blasted from the side with the strike of a different spell.
A burst of water struck sideways harshly against the golem, but it didn't make a very effective impact. The water, though, suddenly grew out from against the side of the golem, and seemed to form a monster of spider-like legs, made up purely of water. It had about 7 of such legs, all connected to a tiny point which was its 'body'. Suddenly, a blade bursts out from the body point, immediately stabbing into the golem, made of water that almost looked crystaline. It didn't stab particularly deep, so suddenly it retracted, then thrusted out, with a burst of several repeats.

It was with this that the golem suddenly stumbled off-balance to the side, Rujin keeping up magic effort visibly, with her motion of both hands held out forward, the staff gripped from near the end by her left hand. The orb at the staff's end was held out in a forward-right angle, and Rujin's other hand was palm-forward, cupped, near the left hand with about twice as much lateral distance from it as the orb of the staff.
What likely wasn't known, though, was that in addition to stabbing the golem, Rujin was modifying the internal structure to have an organic entity infest the inside of the golem and connect to its crystal. The idea was that it took over the golem, so that it would be 'revealed' that the golem grew fleshy insides when it was finished being created, which would be a real vulnrable point.

With the illusion in place, the water monster retracted its blade so quickly that it actually jolted outward from the golem when the blade completely retreated into the elemental. A little bit of blood trickled out from the wound of the organic inside, and the golem retaliates with a swat of its good side's arm.
The water being quickly collapses into itself, to a bulky blob of water, and suddenly throws itself into the golem again, knocking the injured construct off balance. This time, it retained part of its blob-like form and recycled merely most of it to generate new legs. A variety of smaller blades suddenly stabbed into the golem from the front-left, where the water spider clung. The golem brings its bade side's arm back, and then punches forward, single-handedly annihalating the water spider, making it splash randomly near Tamerie.

When the spider was punched off, though, a decent chunk of the golem was ripped off, exposing the organic inside in some spots, which was injured with relatively light stabbings from the second attack.
"Are you still able to fight? That flesh is maintaining the control over stone! Finish it off!"

Tamerie opened one eye and glanced at the golem. "I got it?" She wasn't sure what had all happened...but seeing the weak spot on the construct was all she needed to know. Tamerie scrambled to a kneeling position, her bow and bulb head arrow at the ready. She pulled back on the draw string and zeroed in on the newly revealed sinew within the golem. She let loose the arrow, striking her mark dead on as the arrow erupted in a small ball of fire on impact, turning the flesh of the golem into charred remains.

The golem suddenly stiffened up at the immediate result of the impact, then suddenly stumbled backwards, reaching inward at its torso. In the sharp movement, the damaged right arm, which was hurt more by the last explosion, finally gave away, breaking off and falling to the ground, breaking up and scattering some once it hit the earth.
The rest of the golem made a single additional light step in the last of its life, before swinging upwards its good arm, and then striking out at Tamerie, falling forward as it attempted to attack---and fell short, since it was initially at a distance to start with.
The rest of the body more or less shattered as if it was made of glass upon hitting the ground, revealing an alien monstrosity of flesh that filled only the torso section, which held protectively the untouched golem core. Though a considerable portion of the flesh was untouched, the thing was clearly dead for the fact of what received the explosion.

Rujin meanwhile relaxed her stance, and unsummoned the staff, looking back towards the house and thinking of the children. "I'm going to go check on the kids. Go ahead and have the crystal...Need a heal before I go?"

Tamerie stood up, picking some of the muck out of her hair. "Oh maaaaaan...I need to find a river or something now." She walked over to the golem's remains and grasped onto the crystal core, wrenching it out until the gem broke free. She gazed at the crystal for a few moments, watching the light of the sun bouncing off of its crystalline surface. "Say..." she pocketed the gem in her side pouch. "Where did those kids go? I'd feel bad if I hurt them so...mind if I come with you?" She did want to see if the kids were fine, since she didn't want to give the impression she liked to hurt children or anything, but she also wanted to see if this tower she heard about had any treasure. Wouldn't hurt to look, right?

The makirak started walking towards the tower/house as she listened the woman talking to herself, pretending to not really be paying any attention. However, hearing that she was being talked too, she looked over her shoulder towards Tamerie. "The kids went to the tower. If you want to, you can come with me." She followed this with "There's a shower upstairs, too..." with a tone that clearly conveyed how much it bothered her that the elf was muddy.

With that, Rujin came to the door of the tower, and...! Anti-climatically simply opened it, nothing abnormal of it compared to any other building by the aspect. The front room was in fact just as similarly boring as it was small on the first floor: Its only purpose was that on the left side, stairs ran along the wall of the building itself from the left side, and on the right side, there was at best able to be explained as some form of elevator shaft that was incomplete. The fact that there was an incomplete elevator itself exposed probably was the best suggestion.

The stairs were wide stairs, slightly curved from the shape of the building itself to keep from going through the end of it to outside. Along this outer wall, there was a simple, but nice pattern. There would be a rectangular long floor-to-ceiling window every short interval of gaps equally as wide as the windows themselves, and on the gaps of opaque wall, a torch was fixed to it with a decorative torch holder, and on the ceiling section directly above, its smoke was allowed to vent out to who-knows-where.

Only by the time that they reached the second floor elevation was there any change, though. The floor plateaued briefly, and a single window spanned the whole flat segment. This window was a stained window, like in churches, which potrayed a calm forest setting with a lake. The inward wall on the other hand had a strange door. The door was thick, and had a square shaped gap slot embedded into where a doorknob should've gone. This slot had a circular bulk attached to it, as part of the door's wood, though it looked strangely twisted in its texture as if it was grown out in a strange fashion, by magic.

Rujin grabs it and opens the door, revealing that it actually slid sideward up to where the doorknob went. (on a side-note, by the sound and how easy it looked, it probably was on a wheel track.)
This revealed the 'intermission' room. It was a brief small room that had on the back wall a coat rack (left side) and shoe rack. (right side) There were also two decorative statues mounted on pedistals, one seemed to depict a monsterous humanoid healing a wounded person with magic, the wounded laying in bed as his injuries were healing. Holy symbols on the healer seemed to try to convey more that a sort of divine magic was being used positively. The other statue was of the same species of monsterous humanoid with a fireball in right hand, and sword in left, standing over a kill.
The species had bone wings, and clawed scaley hands with triangles of scales protruding backwards from where the fingers bent away from. It wasn't that much different from humans otherwise, though.

After the intermission room, which had a door on the back wall that opened the same way, the two would be exposed to the front room. It was a long large room, with a table in the center mimicing its shape with width and length. It was a rectangular table, with a single decoration seemingly risen up from its dark wooden material itself: a sculpture of an icy hand, seemingly human but with fingernail-like claws, and a bulk of scales built up in the center of the hand's back. It held a simple item: a sphere that contained a strange translucent yellow smoke. The smoke calmly twisted and moved within the invisible container's s confines endlessly as time passed on. Past the table to the left was an entertainment center along a wall. The center had a large TV, the left side had a couple of movie players and some movies to go along with it, but they weren't very plentiful and had decorations to try to not look bare. The right side had a larger variety of games and game systems, though, the variety trying to adept to the technology inconsistency of the surroundings. To the right of the table was a comfortable couch.

The right wall had two doorways. The further one was open but the room couldn't be viewed from the current angle, and the closer one had a closed door that didn't have a visible form of opening. Between the doorways were plants.
The far wall had a long/shallow closet that can be opened from several points on the left half, and the right half was a walk-in pantry that had a doorless doorway from the shallow-side. Past the edges of the closet/pantry combination were seperate entrances into the kitchen.
The left wall only held the entertainment center.

The two corners of the wall the two came through had staircases, one to each corner. They went along the near-wall up/down, went flat-elevation sideward deeper into the room, then continued up/down. backwards 'along' the wall. The one on the left was upstairs, but the one on the right was downstairs, and had a low gate along it with a simple hook-in-loop lock at the door in the entrance of it: a sort of subtle message for privacy to not go into the basement.

Rujin motioned Tamerie with her to upstairs. From the entrance of the second floor, there was a hallway to the left, with a bathroom door just across the stairs. Rujin pointed it out and commented that's where the bathroom was, and then went down the hall as she commented for her to go ahead and clean herself up. A short length along the hall, there was a laundry room to the right that doubled as a towel closet. The hall then turned to the right, though. Immediately in front, at the corner was the door to Aji's room, where Rujin went to check if Aji went there. Along the hallway further, Rujin's room would be on the left side, and the right side eventually had a double-door to what was essentially the attic.

Knocking on the door, Rujin came in anyway, asking "Hello? You in there?" Her presence literally introduced with it a soft cool breeze, and she blinked a bit at noticing that Aji and Kaycee were both asleep. "...Oh." She immediately closed the door, hoping that they didn't wake up from her intrusion.

Tamerie couldn't help but giggle as she entered the bathroom and closed the door. Wow...I can't believe she let me in. Now I can see what this place has to offer. She sneered at the thought of dashing away from the tower with a large bag of gold as her payload. First, however, she needed a shower. She needed a shower really bad. So, she drew the curtain around herself and did just that.

Twenty minutes later, Tamerie emerged from the bathroom fully dressed and cleaned, her hair still damp from water. She shook her head, droplets of water flying free of her golden locks, and then smoothed her hair back with her hand. "Much better..." She glanced around. "Hmm, where did water girl run off to? Oh well, time to go exploring!" She headed off into the tower.

Rujin thinks about how totake care of the situation, and goes back in, focusing on her magic. She at first casts a pretty straightforward spell to manipulate the muddy mess through its water, and draw it out, off from Aji, Kaycee, and the available sheets. She continues the work to make it 'roll' backwards along the trail, to get the whole line from entrance to room removed. The mud blob then 'falls' into a spread all over in front of the front door of the tower itself.
That done, she puts her hand lightly onto the door as she closes it in a second leave of the room, and spreads an enchantment into the whole room. A 'taint' of mana seeps throughout the said area, and starts to manipulate the recoveries of everything within, obviously the two children being the intended recepients of it. The sort of recoveries, though, were of their stamina, mental health, spiritual health, and so on and so on.
Such a spell, in the nature of its design should be fine to help them completely recover---but a particular feature was cruical to be known...What recovery it caused would not actually be effectively present untli the spell completed its strength: in other words, this spell was going to recover them in about 20 minutes, but...Throughout that gap of time between the finish and start of the spell...none of that recovery would actually be there until that very end.

---

Rujin on the other hand went about onto her own business, going downstairs immediately. She came to the gate at the front of the room, and reached over the low gate to open the lock, and open the door outwards towards herself. She went ahead and went on downstairs, closing the gate behind herself, entering the 'basement'.

The floor started off with a metal hallway, which came to a central room. Centered in the room, there was a strange...monster. It seemed roughly like a very wide pillar, a vague fleshy infestation that had several bones protruding from random high points, only to run down along most of its exterior, only to sink inside, in narrow round forms.
In addition, in random points of the spaces between bones, eyes poked out in blank wide stares, and several mouths in fact were similiarly placed. It seemed as though limbs were embedded into the flesh pillar, but they began and ended invisibly within the mass.

((Edit: added the following portion))

From there, a half-circular spread of six more halls with the same monsterous things centered in them were present, although they did not lead to additional halls themselves. The half-circle spanned with its flat side facing the entrance of the floor.
Rujin would be down here for the whole duration of time.

---

The tower...would be more-less the way it's been described already. If Tamerie was leaving the house and going further up the tower, she would be able to reach the third floor, with its own plateau. The stained glass of this floor potrayed a city. The stairs would start to go up further, before suddenly cutting off as if the stairs further up were broken off. There was no visible other end of this break, and the tower went up further for some duration before hitting a ceiling, probably less than 10 floors in this current state. (Including the floors she went up, so 7 more floors.)

A door similiar to the second floor door was in here. Beyond it would be a short stone hall, which lead into a massive stone room with no ceiling....no ceiling to a clear, sunny mid-day. What was stranger then this weather and sun position mismatch, was that the room also extended backwards through what was supposed to be past the stairwell to outside...No such room space existed from outside of the room. (And never mind that the second tower floor had a upstairs floor that somehow was not overlapping with this room!)
This room was blank, but because it was so big, it was easily capable of being open despite that it held a narrow, short tower that was black and omnimous looking.

If Tamerie didn't go in the third floor of the tower, there wasn't really anything else that the tower had except for the 'house' in the tower second floor.

Tamerie explored the majority of what she could of the tower, searching the places for treasures and the like. When she found nothing, she sighed in frustration. "This tower is stupid!" she let out in irritation, flailing her arms up as she turned around to head back. Disappointed in her lack of findings, she went back to the house on the second floor, grumbling all the way. At least she got that golem's core, right? No. She thought the tower would have something just as nice. She folded her arms behind her head as she descended into the second floor. "What's the point of this place being a wizard's tower if it has no secret treasures?" She wondered if those stairs that ended abruptly actually lead into another secret room. She'd check it out later. Right now, she was hungry!

Kaycee awoke and slowly looked around in the room. She had no idea where she was and the only thing she could remember was being in the forest holding an orb of some kind. "where am I" she said to herself as she sat up and got off the bed. She walked slowly to the door and opened it and began walking around not knowing where she was going but hoping to find something familiar so she could find her way home.

Well if walking around meant almost colliding with Aji, yeah, that was probably what happened. Seeing as he carried that tray of food though, Aji was about to probably make a mess of the situation with her (literally), but instead, when surprised by her swift appearance in front of him when she opened the door to his room, Aji stumbled backward and sent the tray into the air, which, of course, came down all on himself, covering himself in what food he had been bringing her. Needless to say, he was a tiny bit stunned, and he let out a small whimper of sadness at having gone through all that effort for nothing (Aji was normally too short to cook after all, so he had to improvise by using tools like chairs and stuff to stand).

Nonetheless, he grabbed the towel he had brought with him and started to clean himself off while standing up, "Sorry about that... you were still asleep when I left. I thought I might've had time to bring you some food, but..." he trailed off at that, "You're okay now though, right?"

"This is yours? It's not bad," Tamerie spoke up from above them, still chewing a bite of one of the sandwiches Aji had flung into the air when he stumbled. Hanging upside down from her knees on the rafters just above Aji and Kaycee, the elf looked down at them with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand. "Sooo...." she swayed back and forth; her long hair flowing gently like countless golden streamers, "You two okay, or what? I'd have to say sorry for the nasty prank I pulled on both of ya." She took another bite of the sandwich and hummed with satisfaction.

Kaycee had no idea what to say or do, so she grabbed Aji and brought him into the room with her then shut the door behind them leaving Tamerie out of the room. "what is she doing here?"

Well he HAD been cleaning himself off at least... of coruse being grabbed by Kaycee, that stopped rather abruptly. So after being dragged in the room and having the door shut behind them, Aji finally had the realization of the situation hit him as well. All he could offer her in response was a shrug, "No idea... I mean I woke up in here only a little bit ago, and went to make the food, then came right back. I hope she's not here to try and steal anything from mother..."

Tamerie blinked with wonder. "Hey! That's really rude, ya know!" She let go of the sandwich and swiftly dropped from the wooden support, revolved once in the air, and landed on her feet. She held her hand up to catch the sandwich, but it landed on the floor. "...bah!" She went over to the door and knocked on it. "Hello...? Hey! Open up!" Frustrated, Tamerie put her hands to her sides.

Kaycee looked at the door "go away you mean lady!" Kaycee then looked at Aji "we need to find a way to get her away from us"

Aji just blinked curiously, "Wait, mean? How is she? She actually didn't seem all that mean to me... well sorta. She did steal stuff..." He called out from behind the door too, "Hey! Why are you tryin to steal stuff from mother? You shouldn't do that."

Tamerie tried to slowly open the door. "Hey, I did it for the fun of it. And what do you mean 'mean?'" She poked her head through the opening and looked at the two children.

"you stole stuff from us, so that makes you mean" Kaycee said folding her arms in front of her trying to be tough. "so you better leave before something bad happens to you."

"Yeah! What she said!" Aji said, trying to agree with what she said before really knowing what she said. Slowly, it began to sink in though, and he turned back to her, "Erm... something bad? Why? There's not really reason to hurt her if she tries to be nice about stuff."

Tamerie folded her arms behind her head. "I got to get chased around by crazy little lady here, tossed around in the mud because of some stupid golem, got soaked, and got a few bruises. What else could happen today?"