Weyve steps back to the doors. He looks at the skum facing Tobar, and his eyes and skin turn dark. Black mist seems to come from his eyes and nostrils, and with a shout, a gout of blackness shoots forth from his mouth and engulfs the frog-like creature.
Calvin chops at the skum with his sword, slicing deeply through flesh and bone. The creature bellows in pain.
Weyve tries to snare the other skum with a shadow trap, but it resists his spell!
Unsurprisingly, once Tobar is no longer caught off-guard, he brings up his crossbow, steps back 5', and takes a shot at the skum that stabbed at him.
Tobar backs up and shoots the skum right in the neck! The creature gurgles as blood pours from the deep wound, but it manages to remain standing!
It steps forward to try to exact revenge while the other one tries to stab Calvin. They come close to scoring hits, but both warriors' armor protects from harm!
Calvin is thankful that he was uninjured yet and retaliates with a stab.
"Hold on Tobar!" he shouts, turning to the other foe and stepping in to flank it if his target was felled by the attack.
Calvin stabs his foe through the heart, killing the monstrous creature. As it falls, he moves in behind the second skum.
Tobar pivots and reloads his crossbow while changing aim, in a deft maneuver that surely has been perfected with all of his recent practice.
Tobar's bolt drives deep into the skum's gut. It topples over, blood spilling from the fatal wound.
"Well, if these things are here, we know we're in the right place."
Weyve approaches the 'wall' the Skum came out of and puts his hand through. Once satisfied that it is an illusion, he pokes his head through to look on the other side.
The wall becomes hazy and transparent to Weyve's eyes, verifying its illusory nature. Peering past the image, he can see a room that has a simple stone floor and undecorated gray stone walls. The stark nature of the room is interrupted only by a large circle of silvery metal set into the floor in the corner.
The illusory wall on the other side of the entrance chamber conceals an identical room.
Weyve examines the tridents. He then moves on and examines the circles.
"What do you think, Gideon? Circles for Summoning? Or teleportation perhaps?"
"Interesting," says Tobar.
"Given how these creatures are aquatic, we may well be doing more fighting underwater... and a trident is a pretty good tool for that."
He checks his crossbow, scratches his chin stubble, then says, "I wonder if these magic circles are used by constructs like the ones that were trying to teach us about that old Azlanti goddess."
Curious about the magical circles, Gideon examines them, trying to discern what their purpose may have been.
"A handy device for the Azlanti, I'm sure...though I don't think it's going to be of much use for us. We might find a helpful construct somewhere along the way to bring back to the circle, though. Seem as likely as anything. I suppose I could regenerate one of the warden jacks, but that seems a poor use when it might be useful to us later today."
"I'd want to be able to control whatever we put in there. I'm not sure the warden jacks will follow our orders."
"Let's press on."
Weyve goes to listen to and examine the doors to the north.
Tobar acquiesces silently and makes some adjustments to secure a trident to his combat harness.
Calvin will be ready to take point, his sword and shield ready.
Weyve doesn't hear any sounds coming from beyond the doors. They appear to be neither trapped nor locked.
"Shall we have a look?"
Weyve opens the door.
A curving ramp along the northern wall of this chamber ascends to the floor above. The east and west walls each have a single door, and a double door stands in the southern wall. Murals cover the east and west walls in this space, depicting kind-looking human adult figures smiling benevolently at children. The children, for their part, are smiling and appear healthy and happy. The figures, both adults and children, have tiny jewels orbiting around their heads in shining rings that resemble halos. Bold words are painted above the door.
Weyve translates the inscription for the others.
"I wonder if this is meant to be some kind of school?"
"Let's check these side rooms first."
Before Weyve steps into the room, he spots concealed panels above each door. He's pretty sure they are part of a trap that guards the room, though no trigger is obvious. On the north wall, he spots another panel that contains some sort of clockwork mechanism. Accessing it might allow one to disable the trap.
"Looks like it might be...look at these halo-like rings around the heads of these figures. Do you think they represent ioun stones?" Gideon asks, tracing his fingers along the mural.
When Weyve points out the panel on the north wall, Gideon walks over to him. "What'd you find?" he asks. When he gets a chance to, he tries to figure out how the mechanism might be accessed.
As Gideon starts across the room to the panel, the panels above the doors slide open, revealing crossbows mounted on clockwork mechanisms! They track the bard's movements and fire--one bolt breaks on the floor, but the other grazes his arm painfully! He hustles to the panel as the devices load more bolts and starts turning some gears and removing key components. Fortunately, he is able to disable the trap quickly before the crossbows can fire again. It should be safe to traverse the room now.
Grimacing, Gideon rubs at the bleeding gash on his arm, clamping his hand hard over it to facilitate the blood clotting. "Great...well, at least it's disabled now." he remarks. "Must've been some kind of motion trigger on the floor."
"Whoever built this place seems to have known a lot about machines. Here, let me look at that arm."
Weyve presses his hand on Gideon's arm.
"Shall we press on?"
The door on the left opens onto a chamber that appears to be a workshop, as evidenced by a table along the western wall laden with tools and mechanical parts. Two humanoid clockwork constructs are in here, tinkering with some tools. When they see you, though, one of them speaks in Azlanti.
They move towards you menacingly.
"Clockwork servants; they can fix each other." He puts his hand to his machete, but doesn't draw it from its sheathe yet.
The clockworks stand down and return to their tasks.
Calvin stares at Gideon. "That... was that magic?" he asks
Gideon turns to the others, grinning broadly. "I can't believe that actually worked! Not magic at all. Apparently we are not 'authorized' to be here. I told them that we had orders to come and inspect the facility and evaluate the state of it. I didn't really know if you could bluff a construct, but...apparently you can!"
Tobar looks impressed. "Great idea. Let's see how far we can take it. We have a whole facility to evaluate, after all."
"Anything with a mind can be fooled..." Weyve observes.
"Let's check out the next chamber."
The faint coppery tang of blood wafts out of this room when the door is opened. A gleaming metal table covered in blood stands in the northeastern corner of the room. Just south of the table is a smaller table covered in surgical tools—some of them obviously used. A metal sheet attached to the eastern wall of this room is etched with anatomical diagrams and brief instructions of incision length and depth for various parts of the human body.
A human corpse lies in a butchered pile in the center of the room. The body has been stripped of most of its meat, but the carcass is otherwise intact. A set of bloody and torn men's clothes sits in a pile near the smaller table.
"Gods... I hope this is not the fate of all the colonists..."
After a moment, he approaches the pile warily. He looks it over, though without touching it, looking for something that might be of use identifying the body.
The only thing Weyve discovers in the pile of clothes are two bars of coarse gray soap with tiny pieces of coal embedded in them. When studied with detect magic, they glow faintly.
Gideon shivers a bit at the sight of the corpse, veritably clean of flesh.
"Gods indeed..." he agrees, looking both at the body and the diagrams on the wall. "I very sincerely hope that this person wasn't vivisected..." he says, his tone one of voicing an internal thought, and shivers again.
"Soul soap? Seems an odd thing to find here...unless they had their victim strapped down and were using it to to make sure they could keep using whatever magic they were using until it took."
"Or maybe he had it in his pocket when he was killed."
"It may not look like much, but it is actually quite valuable, and may be useful."
Weyve gingerly takes the bars of soap out of the bloody clothing and shakes them.
"I shudder to think about why they needed to cut this man up like this. Or was it a woman? Hard to tell. Let's get out of here."
"Leave no door unopened...we don't need anything sneaking up on us." Gideon says, moving to the eastern door and pressing his ear to it.
Gideon doesn't hear any noises through the door.