Truly Evil?

"Still don't trust this." Ician took his trusty table leg and kicked it into the hallway, waiting for any traps that might be present to trigger.

The table leg stopped around halfway down the hall, nothing moved or triggered from it's sudden appearance.

"Hm..." Ician moves cautiously into the room. "... Am I being overly paranoid?" He pauses. "Nah."

He trots over to the nearest door on the left and peeks in, his sword ready.

The room Ician peeked into was cold. Very cold in fact, to the point where he could see his breath fogging just inches in front of his face. Inside, several more jars and boxes sat with a rather prominent layer of frost/ice forming on them.

"... I'll look into this room later." Ician shuts the door quickly before he got any colder, and moved over to the next door on the left, pushing it open tentatively.

The next room, apparently some kind of research study, was actually rather small. A circular room, with a couple windows at regular intervals going around and up the tower. Bookshelves lined the walls wherever there was space, all of which were packed with books, nick-nacks, various stones, and other seemingly random items. In the center sat a rectangular desk with a fresh looking stack of paper, ink and quill resting on it's surface.

"A study, huh..." Ician tossed in the table leg again.

The table leg bounded into the study, lightly hitting the desk before coming to a stop near it. Nothing else happened.

Ician shrugged. "Safe enough for me." He trotted into the room and quickly swung his sword at the space behind the opened door, seeing if there was anything there.

The sword simply swung through empty space.

"Okay, maybe I am being a bit too paranoid." He moved over to the bookshelves and started examining the nick-nacks and stones, looking for any that seemed to be infused with magic or simply suspicious.

"Hey, if it means anything, it probably only a little paranoia based on what's happened so far. I remember reading a line that goes 'You're only paranoid if you're wrong,'" Dusk said to Ician. He had given up trying to open the box, but decided to take it with him.

Dusk decided to follow Ician and go check and see if anything was written on those papers on the desk. Besides, he was reluctant to enter the other room since he wasn't a fan of the cold.

The stack of papers on the desk were indeed blank, not a single thing on the neatly stacked pile. As for the bookshelves, well it was a far easier question to ask what wasn't magical or suspicious. Most of the random objects seemed to be either awkward spell components, or rather bland looking stones while the books were widely varied in topic, title, and size, though most seemed centered around some form of magic or another.

Jon watched the other two leave the room he was in, and looked at the jar still in his hoof.  He checked that they weren't looking through the still-open door, and quietly set his backpack of convenience on the floor.  Making sure the flaps hid the opening from sight, he made the bag lead to the unseen space where he and his kin could hide things, the unseen storage space.  He placed the jar through the bag into the space, and grabbed another from the shelves.  Glancing only briefly at the label, he put the jar next to the first, and another and another quickly followed.  He paid no attention to what he threw in, only making sure nothing broke.  It was more than the backpack should be able to hold, but any who might glance over would see that they hadn't even made a dent in the bottom of the bag.

Easily enough, the jars offer no resistance to being moved to their new location.

Jon was eventually satisfied by the amount he had obtained, and smiled at his bag.  He really did love the storage space.  Sure, there were mountains of objects already there, but there was always room for more.  And whatever those things were, they might eventually come in handy.  With that thought in mind, he moved on to join the others.  After a brief glance around the room, Jon decided to head straight to one of the bookshelves.  He chose one of the blank stones, and checked it for magic.

The stone, was just a stone. A medium sized rock with several little pocketed holes in it. It was also surprisingly heavy despite the numerous air pockets that seemed to dot the surface and could be assumed to be throughout the interior.

"Hm..." Ician studied the books with a contemplative gaze. "I wonder..."

He began to peruse all the books on magic, seeing if there was any connection between the schools of magic involved. Or perhaps something on runes... Maybe that'll tell us what's going on in this place.

There were literally dozens of books, each one quite thick in it's own right, on just about every field of magic. Runes, teleportation, basic magic theory, advanced magic theory, a few crack-pot magic theories, levitation, conjuration, illusion, transformation, evocation, and that was just the tip of the iceberg of topics the books covered. There also seemed to be at least 3 books on each of those topics.

"Well... runes, then." Ician picked out the first book on runes he saw and skimmed through it, looking for a picture, or diagram perhaps, that resembled the rune that he'd seen beneath the table.

None of the runes within the book resembled the scribbled mess that was on the underside of the table.

"Huh." Ician put the book aside and picked up all the books he could find on runes at once with his telekinesis, flipping through all the pages as quickly as he could. "Surely there has to be something on that in here... Surely...?"

Still none of the runes within the various books matched the scribbled mess on the table. There might have been the occasional 'part' of a rune that seemed to matched up with a small fragment of mess, but the majority of the rune had at least three times the number of lines wrote on it.

"Hm." Ician scrutinised all the 'rune parts' he could find, trying to see if he could match all of them up into the rune he recognised. "You know what? This is hopeless. I need to at least know the basics."

He looked up at the ceiling contemplatively. "Perhaps runes are like a language. String a bunch of symbols together and you get... a killer table." He looked for the most basic book he could find, one that would teach him the basics of rune magic.

The basic book, while rudimentary, would be helpful in learning the basics of runic magic. Granted, this was a necessary start to understanding the rather highly advanced and complex stuff that had been present on the table.