"You know," Morin mused as he watched his servant work.  "When we were coming in, there was a decontamination room.  The room with the nozzles, not the one that was shooting lightning everywhere, the other one.  Looked like it was working, too!  Maybe we could toss all this stuff in there on the way out?"

"For all we know that might well make things worse."  Zorden commented with a bit of a shrug.

"Wonder if there's a bag or box we can put this stuff in."  He looked around in the room they were in to see if there was anything not covered in mold that might suit.

The party gets to the exciting work of sending in an Unseen Servant to do all the potentially risky work for them. The servant retrieves from the corpse a silver holy symbol of Brigh, a ring which Cain identifies as a ring of protection, pouches containing three fungus-encrusted potions of Cure Moderate Wounds, and twenty gold pieces. It then proceeds to pat down the mass of fungus and gore ... but it's impossible to tell if that accomplished anything besides disturbing the remains.

The party then proceeds to investigate behind the other closed doors and finds similar grotesque displays. Locking each door open(so as not to end the Unseen Servant spell when they close) and sending the servant in to retrieve the plainly visible gear and pouches, the party collects another 54 gold, three more silver holy symbols of Brigh, three masterwork light hammers, and even a suit of masterwork chainmail armor which remarkably was not ruined by the emerging vegepygmies or invasive vines.

(Khonnir's Scroll of Unseen Servant 1 > 0)
This message was last edited by the GM at 04:23, Wed 15 May.

"Well, at least we got something out of this mess. We should return their symbols to Joram, along with the news of their fate."

OOC: Not really interested in anything here. I assume we also picked up that magical hammer?

"A magic ring is always handy, though it'd probably fit better on one of you two." At this, he gestured to Cain and Kel, the two frontline fighters.  "I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to touch it before a thorough cleaning."

While Morin normally made a point of recovering the bodies they found, and bringing them back to town for burial (or more accurately, badgering someone stronger into doing so,) he figured he'd make an exception for the disintegrating masses of fungus in front of him.  Instead, he simply dipped his head in respect to the fallen heroes he had just looted, doffed his hat, and solemnly intoned: "Whoever you may have been, you died as heroes in the pursuit of knowledge and justice.  We commend your souls to the Whisper in Bronze, and inter your remains here in this heart of technological mystery."

Closing the doors to the makeshift tombs and sealing them with his keycard, Morin turned back to the others with his usual grin.  "Right then.  Onward and upward!  There's still a few rooms we haven't had a chance to look at.  Hopefully there's something more relevant in them, or I'm at a loss about our next move."

OOC: I guess we head north from the plant room.  There's a room or two we haven't checked there.

"Hopefully there's something."  Zorden echoed Morin's sentiment in agreement and prepared to move into the areas they hadn't explored yet.

Kelaria said nothing, she already thought this cave was amazing.  The Metal she saw here had been astonishing, and the other sights were a bonus.  She just grunted as she got the last scraps of vegetable mess off of her.

Ionaya requests one of the potions of Cure Moderate Wounds and one of the silver holy symbols of Brigh. She made certain that both items were clean and clear of any vegetable or fungal matter before fully accepting them.

"We need to make certain that we are all healthy and clean of this vile wetness. Likely there are worse things ahead of us but, we will prepare and persevere!"

Feeling secure in having vanquished the vegepygmies and explored most of these ruins, the party begins exploring again with a bit less directed intent. Led by Morin's unseen servant and Cain, the party heads through the northern door of the vegepygmy home and find what seems to be an oddly shaped hallway. The spatially inclined who are familiar with the ruins reason that the door to the southeast leads to the room where they found Khonnir, though the door's panel glows white--a keycard the party has yet to find.

"Seems odd this one door is a different color, when you could use the other color and take a bit longer to get to the other side."  Zorden remarked as they figured out where they were based on where they had been earlier.

"Maybe take a look over in there next?"  He suggested motioning to the door on the right side of the corridor just down the hall from the pygmy's garden room.


OOC: The door Zorden is referring to is the one just NW of where Kelaria is located on the map.

"Might as well." Cain replied as he approached the doors suggested by Zorin.

"Everyone ready?" He asked before trying to open the doors, sword in hand.

OOC: Somebody should pick up that ring, makes sense to use it if we have it. Kelaria? Morin? Someone else?

For Cain, I'm just going to take that scroll of Shield we got earlier. I only had one casting of this spell, so a scroll might come in handy.

Ionaya waits until she is certain that no one else is looking to take the magic ring, she then takes it for herself. "I'll accept this ring as a link to the courage and faith of those before us." She adds solemnly.

"Also, she adds, let's make sure that everyone is clean. Hold still, please!" With a fae-like smile and a light step, she casts Prestidigitation on each member of the party who is willing, cleaning them completely, while dancing to a song only she hears.

When everyone who has been willing to be cleaned has been, her happy smile changes to a determined grin and she says calmly, "Ready!"

Morin nodded in agreement with Zorden's comment. "I dunno if it was even on purpose. Someone with a white card probably just locked it last, so now you can only open it with a white card.  Weird system, if you ask me." 

Accepting Ionaya's cleaning magic gratefully, Morin also took up a position and waited for Cain to open the door.

Kelaria was a strange creature, inclined to yell for hours somedays, utterly silent others.  But she truly had nothing to say when everything useful had already been said.  She took position to clobber or bash whatever came in.

After piling into the narrow hallway and gathering at the door in preparation, the party presses the nearby panel to reveal the unexplored room. The room reeks of stagnant water and decaying vegetation. A long trough of water runs along the walls of this room; a layer of brown scum and algae grows on the water’s surface and on the walls. A single workstation sits in the middle of the room connected to a large machine made of tubes and bubbling tanks of water.

Cain relaxes a bit when nothing immediately jumps out on them from inside. But remembering how things went with the vegepygmies, he does not relax too much. "Doesn't look like there is much of interest here. Unless something is hiding in the water."

"That thing offer there probably does something,"  Zorden commented with a gesture towards the workstation.  "but I don't know that it's what we are looking for as far as getting the torch going again.  So probably better to keep looking and come back if we run out of other options."

Ionaya adds, "While only a fool is not careful about the unknown, I'm not fearful of this too wet room."
Pausing for a moment, she looks around at everyone else, while a zephyr breeze swirls around the party. After the breeze fades, she starts to move back towards the more open hallway from which they came. "While I owe you all my life and I enjoy your company, I'm concerned about us being caught by ill intended beings in too close an area."

Morin hid a smirk as Ionaya declared she had no fear of the wet room they had just opened up, then proceeded to retreat from the open door without going in.  The others didn't seem too interested in checking out the room either, but Morin couldn't help but want to take a look.  After all, they were running out of rooms to search, and it wouldn't do to miss an opportunity because they didn't bother to look for it.

"Just one moment."  He called, sending in his unseen servant to poke around the scummy troughs with an unlit torch. If the magical disturbance didn't spook any beasties out of hiding, he moved in himself to give the place a quick once over.

"Do these vegetables not give the poor death we have seen?" Kelaria asked.  She had a healthy respect for the weird plants down here by now.

She tried to maintain a position out of the way but able to leap in and rescue.  Somehow.  How well she'd split the difference remained to be seen.

With no obvious threat present, the party spreads out into the oddly shaped hallway while Morin sends in the servant to root around. When nothing jumps out at the figment, the gnome follows it in and also finds nothing particularly useful. The machine here, like many in these ruins, seems to be used to study water ... or plants? ... in some way, but there's no telling how to work it or interpret it. The only thing he can tell from examining the overgrowing algae and scum is that the scum covering the seat of the workstation seems to have been pressed down for some time by a small, muscular rump.

"No dice."  Morin shook his head, as searching the room yielded no results.  He was a bit surprised to see the cheek marks on the seat by the workstation, though. That vegepygmy hadn't seemed like the computer-using type.  Hopefully they didn't just brain their best source of useful information.

"Looks like we've got one more room we haven't searched."  The gnome opined, looking over the map.  "Hopefully, that's our ticket." If there wasn't anything of note there, he was pretty much at a loss about where the party should go next.  Maybe figuring out Garmen's doohickey would be the real secret to fixing the torch?

"There was also a room I'd looked into earlier then locked."  Zorden reminded everyone.  "Couple of creatures in it, but no Khonnir Baine, so we didn't really see what it was for."

"Perhaps we just break something."  Kelaria suggested.  Because of course she did.  But if not breaking things wasn't working, maybe she was on to something with such a suggestion.

All these technological marvels just look like junk to Cain. Possibly valuable junk, but junk still.

"Alright, let's check out that room as well, and then we can decide where to next. It would help if we even knew what we were looking for. We do know there was somebody else down here about the time the torch went out. And I don't think we've found any of them yet, alive or dead, did we? Maybe finding them - or finding out what happened to them - would point us in the right direction."