Catalogue of Items Retrieved from the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed
-1 iron sword, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing.
-2 30-cm-diameter rings. Putting anything through one ring makes it come out the other; putting anything through the other ring dissolves it into pure water vapour. The second ring described has been marked clearly with tape and an indelible marker.
-1 iron knife, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing.
-1 pit trap, capacity of ~300 m3. Composition is exquisite; the weight-activation mechanism remains perfectly functional despite its age; the trapdoor hinges are functionally invisible even when cleared of dust; and the internal stone is well-smoothed with almost no visible cracks or joins and provides no handholds beside the giant clawmarks adorning the bottom half of the pit.
-1 large (~5L capacity) dish of silver, decorated with golden bone sigils. Once every 24 hours this becomes filled with a rich and nourishing meaty stew.
-1 skeleton (complete) of a monstrous magical hybrid of a zazz’zjarran fen troll and a cposk-serpent. Individual has somewhere between 0 and 7 limbs and died in late maturity, probably in the 7th century of its life when its body outgrew the capacity of the feeding dish it had been locked with inside a pit trap.
-4 hollow glass globular chandeliers, each containing ~200? engorged cannibalistic fireflies living in accelerated reproductive cycles of mass death and birth. Thermodynamics appears to have been violated.
-1 glass jar (weight: 100 grams) containing some water and an adult (female?) blue whale (weight: ~110 tons). Whale appears to be content, in good health, and sings quietly when kept company. Song appears to be of normal volume for an adult blue whale.
-1 guidebook to the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Writing style is exhaustingly dense and unnecessarily multisyllabic, which without further analysis lends credence to its authenticity as a work of Malgrokklus. Guidebook is coated with contact poison brewed from frogs that will paralyze the afflicted slowly, starting from the fingers and proceeding towards the heart while turning the skin bright blue.
-1 iron spoon, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing. Chronologically may be the earliest known spork.
-1 iron-bound ironwood chest measuring 123 cm x 123 cm x 170cm externally. Internal volume is currently unknown until the spelunking team reports back, assuming the wildlife didn’t get them.
-1 tiny (26 cm tall) robotic man crafted from brass. No apparent power source, no apparent animating force, no apparent personality beyond ‘butler.’ Refuses to do anything but offer staff members drinks he does not possess.
-1 tiny oak chest inlaid with gold containing 3 small (living weight estimated at <10g) eyeless, tailless mice and a knife. Implications are unsettling.
-1 map, drawn in badly-weathered ink on what appears to be a used napkin (food stains include traces of wine, cheese, and some sort of preserve). Map appears to be either a prototype of the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed or a close facsimiles thereof.
-1 unattended brick, seemingly mundane. Brick contains a secret compartment holding a key which does not fit any lock within or without the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. The key does have a secret compartment in its handle. In the compartment is a tiny version of the unattended brick. Inside a secret compartment of the tiny unattended brick is a tiny key. Investigation of the tiny key for secret compartments will begin as soon as sufficiently small set of tweezers can be manufactured.
-1 ceremonial oar-sceptre of coral and pearl crafted by the master-eddyists of Current Court. Historical records sourced using the maker’s-mark on the hilt proclaim this to have been granted for services rendered in creating some sort of magizoological reef fixative.
-1 signet ring, carved from solid onyx and emblazoned with the spirals-in-spirals symbol of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Experimental use has confirmed that sealing any envelope with it will cause the contents to melt upon opening without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.
-1 grand wing’d dream-chariot, harnessed to a team of 4 horse skeletons each enchanted into nightmaredom and sealed within a private chamer. Appears to be designed to convey the passenger into their unconscious mind while waking, but this remains difficult to confirm at present since the nightmares devour anyone approaching them without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.
-2 private journals of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed, self-identified as such upon their covers. One of them is false and one of them is real, and each invites the reader to ask it a single question (by writing in the frontispiece) that can be used to tell them apart. Writing anything in either book causes the reader’s fingers to come off without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.
-1 scrap of incredibly aged parchment, crudely and casually erased, found hastily crammed in a midden just outside the tomb’s entrance. Trivial analysis of the palimpsest shows a list of pass-phrases for every magical trap and device in the tomb.
-1 large sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Sarcophagus is crafted from pure lead to deter all forms of removal and intrusion, physical, metaphysical, or quasireal. Inscriptions on the outer lid admonish trespassers; inscriptions on the inner lid deliver final warnings; inscriptions on the INSIDE of the inner lid spontaneously transform all oxygen within ~100 m3 into angry monomolecular devils when the lid is removed. See attached files: site incident reports 2-38.
-1 mortal remains of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Peculiarities and noteworthy anomalies include 32 false teeth crafted from enchanted rubies containing 1 trapped lost soul each; 2 ritual trepanations designed to create ‘inward eyes’ in the brain-pan; runic etchings in the long bones of the limbs to ward away ill fortune; and an enchanted pubis. The nature of the enchantment on the pubis is unknown and unspeakable.
Xeek I swear to Frog the next time you drag me out here you can tabulate these tables on your own; have you ever tried to get a consistent count on a globe of rapidly dying and birthing bugs that never stop flying? My eyes hurt.
And after that pubis, my brain hurts. Goddamned wizards.