Emmaline tests a theory

Skye looked from one part of the wall to another, inspecting the lurid depictions carefully. Each one seemed to depict a different sort of depraved act, and when she moved closer to investigate, she found that any of them could be pried free and all fit the same size and shape of those three stone holes. "It's some sort of picture lock," she muttered. Skye then turned to the hand prints, raising her arm, but keeping it just out of range from touching them. "And this would be how we open it."

"Well, it's not like we're gonna figure it out just by staring at it," Emmaline said. Skye's mouth closed in a pressed lipped frown, but she did nothing to protest as Emmaline picked up a brick, turning it in her hands. She rotated it until the face that depicted a rather buxom woman pleasuring herself with a stone phallus was pointed outward, then slid it into place. "It seems pretty straight forward, at least. We are all women, after all."

The piece had fit perfectly, and now with the the image facing toward them, Emmaline pressed her hand against the crimson print once again. The tendrils rustled, seeming to shift away from their knotted center, as a handful pulled back to slink down the wall. It wasn't nearly enough to clear the passage, however, and she soon saw them nestling back into inertness.

"Good try, I guess," Liv said. She turned back to the wall, leaning in closer to examine it in detail. The nuances and detail of the paintings really were rather striking, and as she examined them closer, she found herself noticing subtle complexities where she hadn't seen them before. Here on a depiction of a woman behind impaled from behind by a horned creature she could make out faint lines indicating the bulge of his cock pressing against her stomach from the inside. As if in a hypnotic trance, Liv reached out, her finger tracing along the image only to find that the stone itself bulged outward at that very spot.

"I guess I could just try another block?" Emmaline wondered aloud, though her mind was readily drifting from the puzzle to the locking mechanism itself. Even stationary, the web of tendrils seemed very much alive. The deep purple things seemed to faintly pulse, like veins with a heartbeat, surging with some sort of liquid.

Before she knew it, Emmaline was standing close in front of the barrier, peering intently at the entangled mess while her flame flickered nearby. Up close it seemed even more chaotic, and more alive, tiny flecks on the surface of the tendrils shifted and moved relentlessly and seemingly randomly, twitching and rotating in place.

"There are so many combinations," Skye mused. "How do I know which is the right one?"