DM: Did anything happen when Titaani took the gem? Any shift in the environment?

Pud tip toes ahead and creeps towards the staircase leading up the next tower. He cups behind his ears and listens for anything up ahead.

Perception: 6

Nothing seemed to happen when Titaani picked up the jewel. (Is she pocketing it?)

Pud hears nothing but silence up the marble stairs.

Ben:

”Ready to continue?” asks Ben, as he has one foot already on the next flight of stairs up.

Titaani gives one last grin to Matilda as she pockets the gem. "We can decide later!" 

Then, the little gnome follows Ben up the stairs. 

Ben, Titaani, and Pud lead the way upstairs. It appears to be a dead end. The second windowless round turret is completely empty, and has no other visible exits.

Ben:

Searching the wall where the tower is adjacent to the main structure (eastern wall), Ben says, “I wonder if there is a hidden passage here, or perhaps all the gems need to be collected from the surrounding towers to enter the central spire.”

Perception on the eastern wall:  22

"Oooh, like a scavenger hunt?" Titaani claps her hands excitedly. "That's so fun! Let's see how fast we can do it!" She proceeds to race down the stairs to get to the round turret on her right. 

Catching up in time to hear Titaani's comment, Horatio replies, "Scavengers? Like the poor folk who loot the fields after a terrible battle? I've heard of doing such things, but never seen it. I once met a man who said he was a tinker, but I'd caught him stealing rubbish from behind a shop I worked at one winter. He said he was scavenging for parts. Not sure what he thought he'd find, but he smelled awful. I felt bad for the man. Not sure I'd want to hunt scavengers for any reason... Do you think we'll run into some here? Or that if we do, they'll work for the Hags?"

Ben examines the wall closely, but can see nothing but smooth, solid marble.

Titaani races down the stairs but hesitates before she gets to the bottom when she realizes she's not quite sure how to get to the next turret over. (Or do you mean the exterior tower on the far right of this map with the double doors?)

Pausing with Horatio on the open stairway in the courtyard, with the twilit sky above and the floor-less vortex maelstrom below, listening to Horatio's ruminations, Titaani can see the next turret to the right is not connected by stairway to the surrounding palace, nor to any other turrets. It seems to be attached solely to the palace’s central tower. All of the turrets seem to be divided into two vertical sections - a bottom floor ringed with stained-glass windows bearing the images of various knights in armor, and an upper, windowless floor, like the two they have just visited.

Ben:

"Let's move together--that League of Malevolence group could be around here anywhere," says Ben.  He heads down the two flights of stairs to the outer tower.  With no access to the northwest, he suggests, "Let's head east and go to the southeast tower."

"That's what I was thinking!" Titaani replies cheerfully to Ben. Turning to Horatio, she begins to chatter excitedly. "Well, I've never heard of those kind of scavengers, but in the forest village where I live the older gnomes used to set up this game for us that they called a scavenger hunt. Basically, we had to run around and find certain objects, and if we found them all, we'd win a prize! I was never very good at it, though. I'd always get distracted halfway through..."

Pud has the same suspicion as Ben to investigate the wall. He takes a stab at investigating it himself. 

Perception check: 12

Alas, Pud doesn't spot any hidden passages either. He turns and runs after Ben and Titaani.

The party retraces their steps down the stairs, through the Hall of Stars and past the front door. Opening the eastern set of doors, they find an identical circular room to its counterpart on the other side, right down to the demon-themed sculpted reliefs. A spiral staircase with a golden handrail is in the middle of the room leading upward. To the northwest, an elevated staircase extends over part of the Court of Storms and leads to another one of the turrets of the central tower. The room is otherwise empty, clean, and still. 

Ben:

”Let’s try the straight northwest staircase first, to see if the rest of this lower floor is a mirror image.  If it is a dead end again, we will need to try the spiral staircase,” says Ben, heading for the northwest staircase.

It is indeed a dead-end. The circular chamber in the turret contains no other exits.

But it does have something within it: an enameled white coffer rests on a black basalt pedestal in the middle of the room.

"Yay! Another gem! I wonder what colour this one will be!" Titaani chirps, moving to open the coffer. "Red? Or blue, maybe? Oh, I hope it's purple!"

" Why are there different coloured crystals scattered into different rooms?  Is this a normal magic thing?", Matilda said with confusion.

The coffer contains a plum-sized jewel made of translucent white crystal.

"I guess so!" Titaani laughs, picking up the white gem. "Hmm, this one could be turned into a pair of goggles for Pud." She holds the jewel to her eye and looks through it playfully. 

Horatio shifts a little uncomfortably. "Just had a thought. Wasn't there some list of rules folks aren't supposed to break here? Like, at all? We took stuff from the Hags, sure, but they started it and are criminals anyways. But this place... are we taking from the queen, or whoever? Breaking some kind of rule?"