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"Nay, they just scurried away like wild hares!" Saul replies, perturbed.

"What was your plan for coming up here?", Thelma asks with a smile on her face.

"Well honestly I didn't have a plan exactly, but down there we are sitting ducks." She turns to look at the assembled group, one hand in her hair. "But that inner door won't budge from the outside... that means someone locked it..." She grins and looks into the courtyard. "So we go in.."

"Which room are we going into?", Thelma asks and looks down the hole. "We should let the others know our plan," she reminds Eloise.

"The first one we can get to.." she grins, "But I like the the idea of that one." she motions to building 7 below her.

Nodding, Thelma moves over to the hole and gesture to get the attention of the others. Point towards building 7, she says in a low voice, "We're going to try and get us inside."

The men can see Thelma and Eloise appearing between the battlements as they run along the rampart of the inner courtyard. They are about 15 feet above the ground of the inner courtyard, and more than 30 feet higher than the men. Building #7, to the left of the gate tower in the men's view, is directly at the wall separating the two courts, and ist roof is as high as the battlements. It has a few windows designed as loopholes directed at the upper courtyard. The door leading onto the rampart is not locked, so the girls can go in without trouble. This is perhaps all the better, because they are in full view of anyone in the inner courtyard (have they looked down into it at all?).

The door of the building leads into a corridor that is quite wide. Directly ahead, hugging the wall, is a set of stairs that goes down one story and back up again. The corridor leads along the stairs to the other side of the building with another door. A scond corridor branches off to the left approximately three quarters of the way through the building. The side of the corridor is a wooden wall, the floor is of wood.

(OOC: Maybe the players of the male characters should read these descriptions again. There is a hint in there that allows you to reach the ladies without having to climb walls)

... he remembers that the rampart between the outer gate tower and the outside of the inner wall was made of stone, not wood, it might be worth looking if maybe there is an access there. It would make sense, from a defender's point of view, to have direct access to the outer gate tower from the inner court, after all, especially since none of the buildings in the outer courtyard seem to have served as barracks in the castle's heyday.

The wings of the gate to the courtyard are leaning against the walls of the tower. Above them on each side, two small rectangular windows are visible, as if they were allowing light to shine into a spiral staircase, and one window is over the center of the arch, at the height of the ramparts.

At the moment, of course, inner gate of the outer gate tower is still open. Christopher thought of closing them, but never said he did.

Dale looks for any obvious open doors or stairs that are overlooked.

Saul returns to the main entrance (Where the gates were already open) and looks behind the doors that are ajar, thinking that perhaps there is another entrance hidden behind the gates.

When Saul pulls back the heavy gate from its resting place against the wall (as if closing it), he soon sees a small, man-sized door with an iron ring to pull it open once the gate is closed.

"What do you see?" Dale asks Saul in a low level voice.

Matthias groans loudly as the door is revealed, devolving into self-reproaching mutters as he takes a few steps toward it. "Obvious and expected! Of course the guard ~tower~ must have a stair, and of course this stair must connect between towers. I spend too many days in my woodland fastness!"

"Shall we try the stairs? We planned to get down and open gate for the others?" Eloise asks as she walks softly on her tip toes to the top of the stairs and looks down.

Move Silently: 1d100=98 Fail

"Lets not spilt up." She adds shaking again. "I'm not scared when I'm moving."

Standing at the top of the stairs, Eloise gets a whiff of smell she can't quite place, but that reminds her of the pub she had been working in before setting out to Valckenburg.

"Hmmm... Beer." Eloise raises her nose and sniffs, "I smell beer and sweat, you know that smell."