The moment the duplicate stepped through the doorway, he immediately felt like he was being jerked sideways by an unseen force. He'd expected something along those lines happening the moment he stepped in, and yet, somehow, he still managed to get caught by surprise.

It felt like what direction was down twisted mid-stride. The closest thing he could compare it to was vertigo, but then again vertigo left you disoriented. This didn't. Instead, it just took the floor out from under you and left you with only a split second to get your feet beneath you.

He was damn lucky he'd had plenty of opportunities to learn about acrobatics the hard way in his time exploring Hallow London.

No time to rotate midair this time, unfortunately, so he tweaked his end goal somewhat. Most of the technique to falling to the ground was in keeping your neck from bouncing against the floor on impact, as well as slapping your arm against the ground to properly break the fall as it happens. At the end of the day, all he needed to do was not pull something.

He continued his free-fall sideways, bracing himself for impact in a way he'd practiced countless times already. Crazy what sort of information people just left lying around in their houses. He'd found this particular tidbit in some judo nut's basement, because he was bored and waiting for a pack of werewolves to stop snooping around. Since then, he'd had ample opportunities to apply it.

Regrettably.

He managed an almost textbook fall into his new direction of gravity. At first, he worried that he might crash straight through once he landed. A cloud of plaster did plume up in response, but the stinging pain all along his side kindly informed him of the solid brickwork underneath. The clone sat upright wincing slightly from the impact but otherwise unscathed.

One of the mages closest to the door seemed a little concerned. "You alright, mate?", he asked, peering over Henry's shoulder in the process.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just bruised my ego a bit, is all…"

With only a little apprehension, the rest entered the first room one by one. The approach each one of them took was, tactfully, more of a measured response than his blind face-check had been. With people were taking a bit more time to look before they leapt, progress wasn't exactly fast to start, but there weren't any incidents bigger than his that came from crossing over the threshold into the curse region.

Pretty soon, the foyer was completely filled to the brim. Even with people lining the floor, walls and ceiling, there was really only so much space a room designed for a maximum capacity of about three people could manage. People were anxious to disperse further into the building, but the original Henry took the time to hold everyone up and instill some important lessons.

"Right, class time, everyone," he began. "Since this is everyone's first attempt at something like this, and everyone wants to come back out of this alive, I'm going to give you lot some very important knowledge that might save your hides as we keep checking these places out. I'll keep it brief for now, since we're on a bit of a time crunch, but when dealing with curse regions, there's two big things you should keep in mind."

"First," he held up his index finger as he spoke, "And most important, is that every curse has rules that it follows. They're not always obvious from the start, and there might be more that you don't know right away, but there's always something. If you can figure it out, and quickly, your odds of being trapped or killed by a curse go down dramatically. So, pay attention to your surroundings, and puzzle things out as quick as you can while still being accurate."

"Don't we already know the rules of this curse, though?", one of the more inquisitive mages asked. "That's what all those scouts spent time figuring out, I thought."

"Trust, but verify," Henry responded. "And, more importantly, those are just the broad strokes of how the rules are applied in this instance. We need to figure out specifics, otherwise we risk someone getting hurt. And if you hurt yourself here, there's no way in hell you even have a chance in anything remotely more dangerous than this."

The clone decided to cut in here. "So, first order of business for all of you is going to be testing against the low hanging fruit, first. Start tossing random junk around, see how it interacts with the region. Summon stuff if you can, or otherwise get a friend who can do so and work out some ideas with them. Take time to observe and get some working theories together before we jump headfirst into this."

After only a token amount of grumbling about working elbow to elbow, they all began doing just that. Various multicolored glows lit up the tiny foyer like a Christmas tree, mostly resulting in summoned objects like the original had suggested. It worked out, because Earth and Water were far and away some of the most common Domains to be found amongst them, though they did have to talk one of them down from using Fire magic in the confined space. Nothing life threatening. Just got a little carried away, was all.

In a manner of minutes, the results began trickling in one by one.

The first big breakthrough was from one of the Earth mages. Due to him having a good angle on one of the door frames leading deeper inside, he started materializing small pebbles one after another and tossing them as hard as he could.

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It gave a nice visual of how the change in gravity took place. The direction it changed in was all over the place, but the timing was consistent between each of them. Gravity only ever changed when the stones passed through the open door frame. With just a little bit of testing, they had stumbled across the primary trigger.

After that, it didn't take long to confirm that the movement between rooms was indeed a necessary component for a gravity shift. A water mage summoned droplets inside the adjoining room, and every last one of them only fell straight down. For them, gravity was normal, apparently.

They probably didn't have all the information, but for now it was enough. Mindful of the triggers they'd uncovered, it was finally time to split up and search for artifacts.

"Before you go," Henry hurriedly added. "Second rule of curse regions: There's always at least one artifact causing it. Sometimes there's more, but until that point tear this place apart for anything that feels even remotely ominous. I'm only expecting to find one genuine artifact in this place to begin with, but trust your instincts and point out anything that feels even the slightest bit off to you. I'll swing around to verify when I get the chance. Don't touch anything yourself."

A mumbled chorus of ayes bounced back towards the two clones. Now, all that was left was to do was give them the space they needed to apply the new information themselves. Each of them picked a direction, kicked off and prepared for landing on the other sides of the twin thresholds.

It's a bit strange, not having to do everything by myself, Henry realized. Not bad, but… certainly strange.

< -|- -|- >

"Hey, I think I found something!"

"You sure? It's not even been five minutes!"

"If this isn't it, I'll eat my own hat. Come over here, and you'll see what I mean."

One of the mages, who'd spent most of his time working to pop the Domain seal off the door to the basement, had apparently hit paydirt. A few of his friends nearby were a bit skeptical about his reported findings at first, but as Henry and the rest made their way downstairs to see what the commotion was, there was no denying that they'd found what they'd come looking for.

In the dim glow of an orb of off-white light, courtesy of the team's Day mage, the artifact lay plain as day. Or rather, floated. Over a wide open toolbox, various measuring instruments literally hovered in midair, as if they were suspended from the ceiling by invisible wires.

Yep, that was magic, alright. A bit tame by the standards of some of the more extravagant displays he'd seen, but you certainly would never mistake a fake illusion for the real thing. Real illusions you could be paying full attention to from every angle at once, and still fall for it.

"Alright, alright. Everyone take a step back."

Henry strode forward, climbing up the side of the doorframe leading into the basement only to rotate 90 degrees to hang upside down, feet on the ceiling. Lucky break, this time. He simply walked his way down the sloped roof of the stairwell, while the rest gathered around to watch him work.

He walked straight up to the toolbox, both it and its contents hovering directly overhead from his perspective. He spent a moment or two considering how to go about bringing this particular artifact outside, before mentally shrugging to himself and trying the simplest solution first.

Reaching high to grab the toolbox off the bench, he used it to scoop up one of the free-floating devices and shut the lid tightly. The moment he did, he noticed an immediate shift in how heavy he felt. Not enough to fall back to Earth, apparently, but there was a certain floatiness that hadn't been there before.

He opened the box back up. The weight returned. Shut it again, and the weight redistributed back closer to the norm.

Guess this thing has a 'deployed' and 'undeployed' state then, for lack of a better term…

"Everyone get ready," he called back up the stairs. "I'm going to be putting these away one by one, and as I do it looks like gravity's going to be going back to normal. Make sure everyone else knows; I don't want to come up there only to find someone's cracked their head open."

Someone up top snorted. "Don't need to tell us twice."

There were sounds of movement as they all went to pass along the message, and Henry waited until the count of ten to give them a chance to move around without being surprised. His clone went with them, supervising while he took care of the packing up.

In no particular order, he started stuffing the tools back into the case one by one. The drawers inside were no good – everything seemed to just free float no matter what he did – so he decided to toss them away and just stuff everything in haphazardly. With much more hollow space free within the metal container, it was a much better fit overall.

One by one, the tools went in, and with each addition his center of gravity normalized more and more. About halfway through, where the differences were in near perfect balance, he was pretty sure he could do some sort of moon jump if he was so inclined. He elected to try it out some other time. Right now the ceiling was the floor, and coincidentally very low-hanging and made of solid concrete.

Eventually, only one was left. One of those level-measuring sticks with the little air bubble trapped in the middle, currently clutched in his hand as he prepared to stow away the last piece. He was already slowly drifting back towards the floor, but the gentle landing wasn't enough to snap him out of the small detail he noticed in this particular item by pure chance.

On the inside of the small glass tube, there was an unassuming, void-black crystal pearl. No wider than the head of a thumbtack, and flush with the glass lining so that it was only visible if you held it at an odd angle, but… it was there.

Strange… none of the artifacts I've gathered before had anything as obvious as this. Is it just luck? Or are all artifacts a result of these things, and I hadn't noticed?

Questions upon questions, and no good way of answering them just yet. One thing was for certain, though. He'd be keeping an eye out with the rest of the artifacts they were going to be hunting soon. With nothing to do about it currently beside speculate, he put the last measuring tool inside the box, and reality hurried to exert itself in the proper fashion once more.

Henry fell back to his feet, once again on blessed solid ground. After the rough landing, he shook himself out a bit, loosening up so that he didn't feel too beaten up tomorrow morning. Grabbing the toolbox as he stood, the contents within rattled around with an awful racket, banging against the metal interior haphazardly. The noise grated against his ears, and was noticeable even from the top of the stairs.

"You alright, Henry?"

"I'm fine," he shouted back up. "The artifact's whats making that racket. Tell Martin I'll be ready to head out in five. I need to find some sort of cushion to stuff in here with this thing."

With that, the first team expedition into a cursed region went off without a hitch. Henry desperately hoped their luck would continue to hold out. After all, that was the easy one, and they needed as many artifacts as they could get their hands on.

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