The Bronze Bird
It is nine feet from beak to tail and its wings are folded the way a real bird folds them, which is the detail that stops you talking.
Bronze feathers, each one hammered separately, each one loose on its pin so the whole wing sighs when you touch it. A cradle underneath for three people to lie in, prone, head to toe. A crank. A rail running out of the workshop door and down the length of the long gallery toward the shaft.
Thirty years of dust on all of it, and one wingtip resting on the floor because something in the shoulder is broken.
The Way Out
The wings of X17 were Daedalus's field expedient — wax, feathers, and desperation. This is what he built when he had a workshop and time. A bronze ornithopter on a launch rail, cradle for three, wound by a crank against a spring-tendon of twisted sinew and bronze wire, aimed down a gallery at a shaft that opens on the sky.
It has been sitting in the dark for thirty years with three things wrong with it, all three of them repairable by a party who has been paying attention to this maze's machines. Fix it, wind it, launch it, and it will carry three people out of the Labyrinth and about a mile down the coast.
Three people. Not six. That is the Resolution.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The bird | A sealed workshop off R006 Gallery of Unfinished Wings — the racks of half-built wings are its rejected drafts. R047 The Wax Cellar is its stores. Getting in is a bricked door (Athletics DC 14) or the delivery hatch behind R045 The Bellows Gallery |
| The spring-tendon | Perished. Needs twisted sinew and bronze wire: R038 Loom of Ten Thousand Legs has the wire on its warp, R012 and R053 have sinew, and R023 Forge of the One-Eyed will simply make one — the cyclops smith is bored and this is the most interesting request he has had in a decade |
| The pinion gear | Missing, and it was not lost: the Cult took it. R074 Stalls of the Bronze Herd and R079 Hive of the Bronze Bees both carry the same gear at the same pitch, and prying one out is Athletics DC 15 and loud. R056 Atelier of Living Bronze has a spare and will argue about it first |
| Oil, or ichor | The joints are seized. Any lamp oil does badly; the automaton ichor from R003, R056, or R067 Anvil of the Lame God does properly. Bad oil means the bird flies with a −2 on its flight check |
| The rail, and somebody on it | The rail runs 200 ft down the long gallery to the shaft, and it is chocked, corroded, and blocked in two places. Clearing it is twenty minutes. Releasing it must be done by hand, at the workshop end, after the bird is moving |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | A single bronze feather on the floor of a corridor, hammered thin as a leaf, with a pin-hole through the quill end. |
| Trace | A rail. Two lines of bronze set into the floor, four feet apart, going somewhere with great purpose and vanishing under a fall of masonry. |
| Sign | A hoarding across a doorway with a workshop's mark burned into it and, beneath, in a different hand and a great hurry: do not open. he is not finished. |
| Proof | A drawing pinned to a workshop wall — a bird in plan, elevation, and section, with a cradle for three drawn in and the weights written beside it in a neat column. |
| Path | The rail, cleared, running the length of the long gallery to a shaft with a grey circle of daylight at the top of it. |
| Door | The bird on the rail with its wings out, nine feet of it, the spring wound so tight the whole frame is singing. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the decision is who is on it.
Phase one — the repair (10 minutes). Three jobs, and any character can attempt any of them. Each is one check at DC 14, with advantage for anybody carrying the right part from the right room.
| Job | Check | On a failure |
|---|---|---|
| Fit the tendon | Athletics or tool proficiency | It seats, but two turns of the crank short: the flight is one round shorter |
| Set the pinion | Investigation, Arcana, or tool proficiency | The gear is a half-pitch off and the wing beats unevenly: −2 on the flight check |
| Oil and free the joints | Any tool, Nature, or Medicine | The shoulder is stiff, and the bird will only bank one way |
Failures do not stop the launch. They stack up as a bird that flies badly, which is the correct kind of consequence: everyone gets to be nervous rather than blocked.
Phase two — the arithmetic (5 minutes). The cradle takes three, and Daedalus wrote the weights down. Six people, three places.
- Two trips are possible — the bird lands, and somebody has to walk back into the maze and rewind it, which is forty minutes and one encounter. Legitimate, and slow.
- The rail must be released by hand from the workshop end. Whoever does it is not on the bird when it goes. There is a chock, a lever, and an eight-foot run to a cradle that will already be moving. Athletics DC 17 to catch it — a real, dangerous, allowed option, and if they miss they land hard and stay behind.
- The chock can be rigged with rope, a spear, and Investigation DC 15, and then nobody has to stay. This is the intended answer and it is the party's job to find it.
Phase three — the launch. Wind the crank — twelve turns, two rounds, and the frame makes a noise like a held note. Release. The bird accelerates down 200 feet of rail, picks the cradle off the floor at about the halfway mark, and goes up the shaft.
One flight check, DC 13, made by whoever is at the crank, with all the modifiers the repair earned. Success is a mile of coastline and a landing in a barley field. Failure is the shaft's lip, a wing folded, and a party sitting in a field of thistles half a mile short, entirely alive and extremely famous.
Fallback
The bird will not fly — no tendon, no gear, or the party will not risk it.
- Glide it. Unwound, with the wings pinned open, on the rail, downhill: the long gallery slopes and the seaward wall at its end is one course of brick and a hundred years of salt. Aim at it.
- What happens: the bird goes through the cliff face wall, drops forty feet, and strikes water. Everybody aboard takes 4d6 bludgeoning, everybody makes a Constitution save DC 13 for a level of exhaustion, and the bird is destroyed — nine feet of Daedalan bronze, gone, in the sea.
- It takes all six. In a heap, badly, holding each other. That is the trade: the glide costs the bird and everybody's dignity, and it does not leave anyone behind.
- The party still gets out. In the water below the cliff, in daylight, with the wreck sinking beside them.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- A bronze feather, taken from the wing before launch or salvaged from the wreck. Hammered thin as a leaf, pinned through the quill. Every smith in the Aegean will know what it is and none of them will be able to make another.
- Daedalus's plate — the pinned drawing, bird in plan, elevation, and section, with the weights written in. It is a set of working plans for a flying machine. What the party does with that is the campaign.
- The bird itself, if the party landed it whole and can get a cart to a barley field before anybody else does. A one-shot vehicle: three passengers, one flight, needs a rail and twenty minutes of winding.
- The smith's respect, if the cyclops of R023 made the tendon. He would very much like to be told whether it worked.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two repairs instead of three — the joints are already oiled. DCs −2, the chock is already rigged, and the flight check is DC 11 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Four repairs: the cradle's harness has rotted too. DCs +2, and the Cult arrives during the launch — two rounds of pressure on whoever is at the rail |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the shaft is contested: something is roosting at the top of it and the flight check is opposed. The rig-the-chock trick is DC 19 because the Cult took the lever |
- The bird is not a puzzle, it is a project, and the difference matters. Nobody should be stuck. Every repair failure makes the flight worse rather than making it impossible, so the scene always ends with a launch and the only question is how ugly.
- "Three seats, six people" is the whole Resolution. Do not solve it for them. Let them find the rigged chock, or take two trips, or have somebody make the eight-foot run and catch the cradle. Any of those is a good ending; the run is the one they will talk about.
- Never make staying behind fatal. Whoever stays walks out by another Resolution or gets picked up on the second trip. State that clearly the moment a player volunteers, or the table will treat it as a suicide and refuse the best scene in the room.
- The loose feathers are the detail to spend words on. Each one hammered separately, each one on its own pin, and the whole wing sighing when a hand passes over it. Thirty years in the dark and it still does that.
- This Resolution pairs with X17. Same workshop, same clues, same man's obsession — the wax wings are what he built when he was frightened and the bird is what he built when he had time. If the party finds both, let them choose, and note which they chose, because it says something about them.
- If the party is out of time, hand them a bird with one repair needed, rig the chock for them, and launch. Eight minutes, and keep the held note of the wound spring.