The subterranean vault hummed with the stale, heavy air of neglect—and then he arrived. The plague doctor cut a figure that straddled the line between dignified vigil and theatrical farce: upright as a marble statue, draped in a heavy greatcoat that seemed woven from lead, gauntlets of considerable heft clasped at his sides, and boots of almost preposterous proportions that swallowed his feet whole.

To any observer with a shred of candor, he was a walking absurdity—though one would be wise to keep such thoughts to themselves. The ensemble was suffocatingly sweltering, each fold of fabric a cocoon of heat, and executing anything resembling celerity was an exercise in futility; he moved as if wading through honey, or through the weight of the very sickness he was meant to combat.

The crow-masked facade, with its beak sharp enough to skewer a rumor, bore eye pieces of nearly opaque black disk—crafted, so it seemed, to pierce the very fabric of one’s soul, as though the heat that threatened to melt the wearer’s bones mattered not a whit.

As he stepped further into the dimness, voice echoing in the hall—soft, but clear enough to cut through the vault’s silence. "I confess, I was unaware i were to receive an assistant." he said.

The plague doctor simply eyed you, his own voice emerged as a metallic, warped drone—filtered through the mask’s beak as if through rust and regret. "Visitors are a rarity in these subterranean depths—most prefer to keep their distance from places where the air tastes of ash and inevitability."