Gideon directly targets the spokesman for the group with Dispel Magic. "Snap out of it! You're workin' for the bad guys!"
Terana continues to concentrate, her glaive flying back and forth on auto-pilot.
Crack! Crack! Two more bolts sink into the ugoloth closest to Terana.
The Hound Archon presses the attack from the rear of the soldiers, with Cathyriel attacking from the front.
Terana can detect four aberrations among the eight foes, including the one that has already fallen, but further concentration is needed to pinpoint which ones are ugothols.
The spokesman blinks as Gideon dispels the domination effect on him. "Ah! Please, don't kill me! I'm not a faceless one!" he shouts, raising his hands in surrender.
Gideon and Cathyriel combine their efforts to take down a foe, while the summoned archon drops the one it was attacking.
The four remaining foes attack, slicing Cathyriel and the archon.
Terana finishes concentrating and determines the two soldiers who just fell were not aberrations! Three of the four foes still standing are ugothols in disguise!
"Not that one!" Terana yells, levelling her glaive at the remaining human. "All the others are stalkers!"
"Damn." Cathyriel curses as she realises she's just felled innocent men. "I just thought they were all -" she breaks off. No sense in wallowing in guilt now.
With a nod, she directs the summoned Hound Archon while she attacks the others.
Trusting the others to be able to handle things, Gideon turns his attention to the fallen humans, moving to the closest one with the worst injuries still standing, on whom he casts a low powered healing spell.
Tobar switches back to covering Cathyriel after she's slashed by one of the ugoloths.
Tobar and Cathyriel take down one of the disguised faceless stalkers while the hound archon wounds another one. With their ruse uncovered, the two remaining aberrations snap back to their natural forms, attacking with renewed fervor. The last dominated human slices at Gideon. Fortunately, none of them hit!
Seeing Gideon doing the first aid, Terana returns to what she does best - smiting aberrations!
Handily dodging the dominated soldier's sword stroke, Gideon takes a quick step backward and casts the dispelling magic on his enemy. "C'mon, guy! Wake up! There's healin' to do!"
Cathyriel keeps fighting the good fight, taking down the freshly-revealed faceless ones.
Tobar, likewise, keeps picking targets based on Cathyriel's choice of sword-strikes.
The other human blinks in confusion as Gideon dispels the domination. The rest of you focus your attacks on the ugothols, quickly putting them both down for the count!
Terana stashes her glaive and kneels to examine the remaining unconscious humans. If any are actively bleeding she will lay on hands to stabilise them, unless there's two or more in which case she channels energy.
Tobar shoulders his crossbow, stands, and jogs to join the rest of the team.
With all the faceless stalkers revealed and dead, Gideon releases a sigh, using a cloth tied to his belt to wipe the blood from his rapier before sheathing it, then holding both hands up, palms flat and facing outward, toward the Andorans. "Dunno how a buncha Andorans got to this island, but I'm gonna hazard a guess it wasn't of your own free will, if your group had taken up with a buncha faceless stalkers. Breathe the free air again, my friends. Take a minute to let the fog of the domination wear off."
"Thank you for freeing us from that horrid compulsion," says the first soldier Gideon liberated. "We came to the island of Ancorato aboard the Liberty's Herald to ensure security at the new colony we were establishing. But the colony was infiltrated by those faceless shapechangers, and they captured us and brought us here. The southern half of this cathedral is completely flooded, and there's a strange laboratory somewhere far below where the other colonists are being held inside cells behind glowing sheets of green energy. They force-fed us some slime to let us breathe water to get to and from the cells, and their tentacled fish-thing master used its magic to dominate our minds.
"We're not much use in a direct fight against those things, but we'll be happy to hold these upper halls or guard you while you rest in here. You need to save the others!"
Gideon gives a firm nod. "I think we're definitely gonna need a staging area if we're gonna have a serious chance against Onthooth. Is there anything else up here, above water, that might be useful in this fight? We'll probably look around up here and make sure there's not something up here that would be helpful to us before we head below."
"How are you all going to breathe?" Terana asks. "I won't have a problem, but you'll need magic of some sort. We should definitely clear the above water section first though - Aboleth's hate being above water."
The soldier shrugs. "I don't know the layout of this place. It was dark when we came through here. The faceless ones guided us."
The hall stretches ahead, many doors and passages offering opportunities to explore...
"I'm a good swimmer but yeah, I'm gonna need a way to breathe underwater," says Tobar. "And we'll probably need more of those spells to free people from its mental influence."
"I have the ability to do that if I can get close enough to touch them." Terana offers. "The most effective method though will be simply slaying the aboleth. When we go up against it you should all stay close to me. I've trained for this sort of thing for years, hopefully if I'm in front it will concentrate on me rather than the rest of you."
"So...get behind you. Same plan as always." Gideon answers with a slight grin. "I do agree that we should clear all the rooms here above the water before we head further down, though. No need to let somethin' sneak up on us." he answers, moving to the door to his immediate right to check it over and give it a listen.
Gideon doesn't find any traps or hear any noises.
Gears, hammers, shears, springs, tongs, and plentiful other tools and components lie scattered on shelves and on the floor of this room. The room’s main features are a large hearth with a darkened metal hood and exhaust duct above it, and an anvil placed in front of it. A single steel gear is lying on the anvil, and right next to the anvil is a stack of metal tablets with cogwheel-shaped indentations of different sizes on them.
Lying around in the clockwork forge are gears, mainsprings, pendulums, and other components of Azlanti origin. The parts are worth 1,000 gp in total. Atop the hearth are a pair of blue work gloves and a strange tool.
"Huh. Nice workshop," says Tobar. "Wonder if this place used to be dedicated to Brigh?"
"Do we care right now?" Terana asks, "There's more important things to do right now, although this might be a good place to retreat to if needed."
"It's some kind of forge for automatons," says Tobar. "Maybe for making more of those constructs like the ones we saw earlier."
"I can prepare magic to allow us to breathe the water. But I would need to rest first."
The soldiers drag their unconscious companions into the workshop. "We'll hole up here until you need us. Best to leave the others unconscious for now. They're still under Onthooth's control."
"There are some nice tools in here, at least...and I think that this lever would reactivate the forge, which I don't think is a bad idea. It might be able to produce something useful to us for the fight we've got coming."
Cathyriel raises an eyebrow, remembering how Gideon's previous attempts to resurrect bits of machinery have resulted in all sorts of trouble. "You sure that's a good idea?"
Terana is less subtle and gives Gideon a (gentle) cuff around the ear. "Focus Gideon! Clear the temple now, tinker with ancient machinery later! Don't make me drag you like that time in the library." She says it all with a smile, but Gideon and Tobar know from past experience that she means it!
Gideon frowns, clearly disappointed. "Can we at least compromise? After we clear the upper level here, but before we go underwater, come back here and see if there's anything worth finding out about this forge? It's not just for intellectual curiosity that I ask; the fight against Onthooth that we are surely headed towards won't be an easy one and I don't favor rushing headlong into it without as much preparation as possible. There really might be something that can help us in that fight here, as advanced as Azlant was."
"I don't think Onthooth would have left something up here that we could use." Terana replies, "They're a race of brilliant thinkers - insane, but brilliant. I'm fine with that though - we probably want to go in fully prepared anyway."
"Brilliant for sure, but they're also incredibly arrogant. We might find a use for something that they didn't anticipate. Either way, thank you for that! The concession is appreciated. Let's head on to double-doors on other side of the hallway."
The walls of this gear-shaped room have seven alcoves, each five feet deep and fitted with a horizontal metal shaft. Each of the hollow, cylindrical shafts has six notches cut around the outer edge. In three of the alcoves stands a trio of intricately sculpted metal statues, one in each alcove. One appears similar to the clockwork servants you encountered in Spindlelock Tower. The second is an armored warrior that grips a halberd, while the third has four arms and a crystal in its chest.
The central pillar has a metal pin panel and a lever. The panel is unresponsive and displays the words "No power" in Azlanti.
As they enter the room, Gideon casts his spell of Heightened Awareness on himself, knowing there's probably still a lot more that is going to need to be puzzled out; he also removes the ioun gauntlet and puts on the Engineer's Workgloves to see if they can help him figure out what's going on with the statues and pillar around the room.
"Well...it's possible to get these clockworks functioning again, but their power doesn't come from this room; there's somewhere else that we could turn the power back on. I wonder if it's possible to see what kind of program is in them without turning them back on...to see if they're programmed to attack strangers or something. Seems doubtful...but these machines might still be helpful to us if we could get them up and running. I'm gonna see if there's a way to make sure they're disconnected from the main machine just to be safe, though..." Gideon says to the others, then sets about doing just that, trying to find some way to disconnect the automatons from the recharging station so that they can't immediately draw power, should it be restored.
Cathyriel watches, one hand on the hilt of her sword, in case something goes wrong.
Gideon is able to disconnect the clockwork servant and the four-armed automaton without incident. When he reaches for the armored soldier, though, it suddenly springs to life, gears turning as it brings its halberd to bear!
Cathyriel wordlessly gives Gideon a bewildered, disbelieving look before calling on the help of her Goddess once more.
An ethereal, glowing angel-figure appears in front of the bard . With a longsword of pure, shimmering force, it strikes at the automaton.
Drawing her own longsword, she moves into melee.
The spiritual ally strikes the clockwork twice, scoring its metallic body. The construct retaliates with its first strike, but realizing its weapon passes through the figure harmlessly, it shifts its aim to Cathyriel. The half-elf just barely manages to block its strike with her shield!
"This is why you don't touch things!" Terana yells in exasperation as she closes to batter the creature down.
"Hey, I made known what I was doin', nobody stopped me!" Gideon answers as he fires an arrow past the others.
"Would you prefer that I shoot you next time?" says Tobar as he unloads on the latest automaton.
"Let me know what 'stopping you' requires - does it take divine intervention? Because I can arrange that too." Cathyriel would say more, but the threat of combat makes her terse.
Her strikes go wild because she wasn't concentrating, but the angelic force assisting her does better. She sets her guard once more, doing her best to push her annoyance out of her mind.
Most of your attacks strike true, badly damaging the clockwork. It retaliates against Cathyriel, scoring two powerful slashes!