[Indigo]

They called it an ancient temple, but then, they were students. She could hardly expect someone both young and new to the field to appreciate the weight of time, and nobody lived close enough to the place for more accurate information to be on hand. She still rolled her eyes, but she waited until they'd left her office.

The office: a recent development, so recent Millicent could smell the previous occupant everywhere, though the place had been cleaned enough to satisfy a human nose and she couldn't entirely blame the staff for not knowing better. Many people who hadn't met her didn't believe she was a werewolf. A real werewolf, born and raised in the deep forest, could not possibly compose such exquisitely passive-aggressive memoranda.

[Indigo]

She looked over the students' notes, and considered.

The temple had been abandoned for 200 years or so, and nobody seemed to know how long ago it had been built. The students had come across it by accident and anything they knew, which wasn't much, came from asking around in the village 40 miles away where they'd been staying. They hadn't tried to go inside—smart. Actually they hadn't tried much of anything, because it was spring break, and they were alchemy majors anyway and only taking her class to fill the anthro requirement, but they'd seen a mysterious religious thing and thought of her and so put together a loose report. She was strangely touched. While she wasn't one of those researchers who resented teaching, she was under no illusion that her manner endeared her to many students.

[Indigo]

If pressed, she'd admit that she did resent, at this moment, that she couldn't jet off to investigate this right away; but even without the obligations of classes she'd have to apply for funding, and that might take the rest of the term anyway. Still. This was an exciting new avenue of exploration. She should remember to thank the students for it later. For now, she filed the notes away and got started on the paperwork.

In the months between submission and approval, which surprised her by being slightly longer than even she had guessed, she tried to gather more information on the temple.

[Indigo]

Tried being the operative word. Despite its mere two centuries of neglect, well within the lifetime of certain respected scholars, nobody seemed to have looked into it or thought about it or even seen it except in passing, and nobody remembered what it had been used for or why it closed. It appeared abruptly in the literature a few years after its supposed abandonment, in a paper on a local village's inhabitants which was so shortsighted and frankly racist that Millicent couldn't trust any of its assertions; the only mention of the temple called it a site of worship for the villagers that they no longer used due to nonspecific "superstition," information that was worse than useless.

[Indigo]

None of her research turned up anything better. At some point a legend appeared about a nonspecific "explorer" entering the temple and never returning, but no details were given and even if it were true it meant very little. Untrained adventurers died in ruins with distressing frequency.

When the time came she did her best to prepare, but what this meant, in the end, was that she approached the temple with what she considered her "standard" supplies and not much else. An overly specific tool for the wrong situation could be worse than nothing at all, she had always believed.

[Indigo]

At least she had no trouble getting directions, though nobody could imagine why she was interested; a woman over six feet tall, yellow-eyed and steel-gloved, largely obscured by a many-pocketed green traveling cloak, screamed "adventurer" to strangers, and the temple was not famous or exciting enough to naturally draw such a person. By the same token nobody tried to dissuade her, assuming she was up to facing the meager or more likely nonexistent danger, so for once she didn't bother to correct the assumption. Even though it made her grind her teeth. She was no monster-slaying wanderer, damn it, she was a scholar, a professional. But that fight was rarely worth having.

[Indigo]

The temple, when she reached it, was unremarkable in appearance, with no indication of what god or gods it had been dedicated to. Not in the natural way of a ruin, symbols and statues worn away to stubs that showed something had been there but no sign of what—no, there was something generic about it. Unfinished, except that nothing about it gave that impression. It even lacked any architectural style she could pin to a particular religious movement, and there was no writing on it, decipherable or otherwise. It was just...a temple.

From a purely practical perspective she didn't like that at all; it felt like a trap, the world's largest mimic.

[Indigo]

It was also fascinating. She'd be careful, of course—she was no fool—but she wasn't about to leave something as strange as this unexplored. There was nothing that made her so twitchy as unsatisfied curiosity.

The entrance was sealed. She slipped her thumb between the pages of her journal and pressed the palm of her other hand against the middle of the door, and watched cracks spread out from it. Not as flashy as some potential solutions, but it got the job done. She pushed the fragments out of the frame—she'd come back and fix it later, she wasn't a barbarian—and took about three strides into the temple before she stopped, frowning.

[Indigo]

Two steps back and lean out the door to confirm that it was still a temple on the outside, because inside...

Well, it was still a ruin, so points for consistency. But while she'd expected stone to match the exterior or maybe a mellow-wallpapered vestibule, to all appearances she'd just entered a house. A mansion, actually, given its apparent size, though she couldn't say exactly how she knew how big the place was, since there was no reason to believe anything about it matched up with the temple. Except the front door. Hmm.

She was in some sort of parlor, maybe?

[Indigo]

The anatomy of large houses was not her strong suit. The walls were papered in dark green with a faded floral pattern, torn and peeling in too many places to count; she couldn't tell what color the carpet had originally been, as it appeared to have been variously rained and bled on for the last several decades. Every light bulb in the room had been reduced to splinters of glass, and there was no furniture. Also no windows. There must be some light, because she could see, but hell if she knew where it was coming from. The whole place smelled of mushrooms.

[Indigo]

The room extended into impenetrably dark hallways on either side. In front of her was a staircase that looked like it would probably hold her weight, and this felt enough like a known quantity that she chose it over the other options. The steps creaked and squealed ominously, but held, and shortly delivered her to another darkened hallway. This one contained a rotting fainting couch. She tested a cushion with her hand, and the whole piece of furniture promptly split in half. Fortunately she did not plan to faint.

Doors lined the hallway. All were closed. None showed a glimmer of light beneath.

Okay. Think.

[Indigo]

Millicent leaned against the wall above the remains of the couch and was only a little surprised it didn't crumble into dust under her elbow.

This was...what was this? Not a temple, that was for sure. Not anything that fell within her field of study, unless it was some god or other's weird little side project, but they usually tried to keep those things from being stumbled upon the way the students had. That left what? An elaborate magical trap of some kind? But to what purpose? There was nothing here, except maybe mold, which was rarely prone to nefarious schemes.

[Indigo]

Whatever was going on here, it certainly had nothing to do with her. But there was this problem: she wanted to know. Millicent always wanted to know. It was one of her most insufferable qualities.

Something else occurred to her, and, frowning at nothing, she turned and made her way back to the stairs. They were gone, replaced by a small indoor balcony, and while she could have jumped down to the entryway and been just fine, she couldn't help but notice that the front door had resealed itself. Decaying tendrils of wallpaper were creeping over its edges, slow but sure.

[Indigo]

Well. Now she had no choice but to investigate further, since she was not especially eager to die here.

All the doors were identical as far as she could tell, and with werewolf senses she could tell a lot. She tried several of them, all of which turned out to be locked. After about six of those she started cursing under her breath.

Somewhere in the depths of the house, she heard something heavy fall.

Now, a dilemma: the noise was probably just another layer of trap, and it would be unwise to follow it. On the other hand, most people couldn't follow a sound any distance from a single occurrence like that, not with any kind of precision.

[Indigo]

She had no reason to believe this place was molding itself to her in a personal way—the exit had sealed up behind her, but that didn't require any specificity or even her continued presence in the building.

She waited several minutes. The sound did not recur. Which didn't mean it wasn't a trap, but it was an encouraging sign, and as long as she was careful pursuing it she'd probably be all right. Probably. She had her notes, she could defend herself.

Finding the source of the sound proved to be harder than she'd expected, as she turned down several unpleasantly winding hallways and lost her bearings more times than she'd ever admit.

[Wild Pet Found]