As the metal critter reels from Arien's attack, Huc winds up as smashes it again. Fynn also continues his attack, latching onto the thing's metallic leg and trying to bring it down.
<— crit?
Chanting in more of her orcish tongue, she lightly puts her hand on Temperance's shoulder for.... another casting of Guidance.
With one more chop of his axe, Huc dispatches the clockwork construct!
It was guarding a heavy iron door, still sound after many years. The door, of course, is locked, but the key from the iron maiden can open it.
The revealed room is good-sized, and contains an area set off by a cage of thick iron bars that extend from floor to ceiling. Within the enclosure sit seven black iron chests. To the north, the stone wall has collapsed, revealing a rough-hewn tunnel.
Still bleeding from defender’s attack, Huc vents his building frustration of this whole bleeding place on the strange defender.
He staggers back, leaning against the wall to catch his breath as Fynn sniffs curiously at the unmoving thing's body.
"Gods, I hate this place." the woodsman mutters as he pulls out one of the scrolls they purchased, whispering it to life to help close his bleeding gash.
Before moving forward, Huc gives this first room and its guardian a full, patient investigation. Then, standing at the heavy doorway looking into the new room, he looks for traps, threats, or clues.
There's nothing in the first room besides the remains of the clockwork servant and the floating key. (The floating key, incidentally, doesn't look like it fits a door--Arien thinks it would fit in a slot on the back of the clockwork construct, though.)
Pausing at the vault door, Fynn whimpers.
"Perhaps we can carry that key and command, or switch off, other statues. Huc, does your dog sense something?"
"That's not a bad idea," replies Huc, eyeing the floating key suspiciously. Standing back, he tries to knock the key out of place with his greataxe.
the woodsman does so ... reluctantly.
he slips it into his pack and heads towards the door, where Fynn whimpers.
"Looks like he does," Huc kneels next to Fynn, resting a hand on the mutt's scruff. "What is it, boy?"
There's some resistance, but Huc is able to knock the key onto the floor. After a moment, it floats back to where it was.
To Huc's trained eye, Fynn seems to be pointing at the tunnel opening. As a result, no one is surprised when a humanoid figure comes shambling out at the party.
Round 1:
Initiative order
Arien
Oranna
Huc & Foe
Master Temperance
There's a magical aura in the area of the key, but the key itself doesn't appear to be magical. There are two spells present, one moderate and one faint. Oranna is unable to identify the school of either of them, though.
Round 1 (ongoing):
Initiative order
Arien-moved & held
Oranna
Huc & Foe
Master Temperance
Arien moves into position and awaits the creature's onslaught.
Huc is a second behind Arien, sliding to a stop and readying his own blade as he whistles out a few sharp blasts for Fynn. The mutt is right behind, sliding to a stop next to Arien to defend her.
"Bi kharankhui, aimshigtai khüchin tögöldör bus urialj ustgakh bolno," she chants as her eyes go black and an eerie chill of the void assaults the ghoul.
The creature charges towards Fynn. Oranna's void-drawn power damages the ghoul, but doesn't put it out of the fight. It collides with the hound in a flurry of fangs; it scores a significant hit on the dog, but when the dust settles Fynn has torn its throat out, and it lies unmoving on the stone floor.
In addition to the obvious death wound, it looks like the ghoul has been stabbed shallowly a couple of times.
"It is a ghoul. Sadly I don't know the cure to its terrible disease. We'll have to get him checked by the alchemist in town," she gives another look at the ghoul, "Someone stabbed it up before us."
A bit of searching reveals nothing out of the ordinary in the room outside the heavy iron bars but a pair of slots in the floor, one just east of the cage and one just west. Arien peers in the slots and can dimly spy some sort of lock mechanism, but it's far beyond her current skill to figure out.
There's some resistance, but Arien is able to take the key away. Until she gets into the other room, though, there are intermittent tugs at it, as though something was trying to take it back.
”Attaboy!” Huc yells as Fynn tears the thing to pieces. After giving the creature his own chop , the woodsman kneels down once more next to Fynn, checking on the mutt’s injury.
He hastily pulls his out his waterskin, prying the dog’s jaw open and rinsing its mouth out. ”Oh, calm down, Fynn. I don’t know what that thing is, but I can’t imagine it tasted good. And I don’t want you getting some kinda crazy disease from it.” Once Fynn’s mouth is rinsed, he rinses the wound, then tends to it.
"It is a ghoul. Sadly I don't know the cure to its terrible disease. We'll have to get him checked by the alchemist in town," she gives another look at the ghoul, "Someone stabbed it up before us."
Happy with his handiwork, Huc frowns down at the destroyed thing. ”Ya know, I think you’re right, Oranna. Good catch.” He stoops to look at the stab-marks, ”So something weak? Or something small? Maybe that thing we killed in that other room back there? Or maybe kobolds have been here, too?”
He stands up, looking at the room again, most specifically the destroyed wall, then the bars with the boxes behind them. ”If the owner of this place fancied himself a rich guy, I’ll bet the stuff in there is either important or expensive … or both.”
He tests the bars a few times, seeing if he can loosen one.
The bars are stubbornly immobile.
Huc shrugs, "Those aint movin'." He looks back at the group, "Any bright ideas? Or should we just move on?"
It fits. The mechanism it would mate to inside the construct is largely destroyed. Arien suspects that this key would have been used to wind its mainspring, though.
As Arien experiments with the key, Huc sets Fynn to guard the rubble-door as he thoroughly inspects the room with the iron bars.
Most of them are fixed firmly in place. One section looks as though it could be lifted, but there's apparently some sort of locking mechanism in place that prevents it from moving.
Arien, as you study the setup and remember other treasure vault designs, what comes to mind is that this innermost setup would be designed to avoid a single-point failure. The outer walls, the secret doors, the sludge trench, the trapped entry, the clockwork guard--all of these are barriers to prevent an outsider from getting in and stealing the treasure. But that wouldn't necessarily help against a single traitor. So designers would make a system that prevents one person from opening the last door by themselves, because a pair of traitors is much easier to spot.
That suggests to you that the slots on the floor are keyholes of some sort. You would guess that the two keys will have to be inserted and engaged simultaneously to access the treasure. However, the slots don't look like conventional keyholes, so you're pretty sure that you're not looking for conventional keys. Eyeballing the mechanism in the slots, you figure that the functional part of the "keys" will have to be at least a foot long by about an inch and a half by less than a half an inch, not counting any sort of handle, or it wouldn't fit in the slot.
Huc scratches his head at Arien's revelation. "Well, I'll be damned. You're right. I guess now we just need to look for a pair of those things."
He turns towards the rubble-hole, where Fynn stands on dutiful watch. "So, deeper down the rabbit hole?"
The passage meanders north, but is blocked at its end with a pair of low barricades made from timbers and rocks. Beyond it, those of you with darkvision can see that the passage opens into a larger cave beyond. The walls are densely packed dirt.
"Do ghouls heal? If not, something with a knife is relatively nearby. We may have an ally, or just another player in this puzzle."
Temperance peers into the cave, raising his hooded lantern to shine on the walls.
"Why only dirt here...?"
Master Temperance, there's something at the top of the barricade that catches your eye. It looks like a piece of rope, stretched taut. You follow it to the wall, then up to where a piece of old timber hangs from another rope. Once you point it out to Arien, she immediately realizes that if the rope is touched the timber will swing down from the ceiling, and the gleam of metal in the lantern's light would indicate that there are some sharp pointy things on the timber.
Arien is able to get a good handle on how the trap works, but when she tries to disarm it she learns too late that it's on a hair trigger. She's unable to leap clear and gets stuck by a couple of the spear points in the timber . The trap requires a manual reset, though, so now the party can cross the barricade in safety.
Huc winces. "Sheesh. That looks like it hurts." He looks over at Oranna, "Let's get her patched up and move forward."
Then Huc and Fynn stalk forward with Arien, looking for whatever other traps this place contains.
The chamber, despite being expansive in area, is also somewhat cramped by the low ceiling, seldom exceeding five feet in height. It's all packed dirt, shored up in some spots by crude but effective timbers. Several tons of debris fill the western part of the chamber. Near the north end of the cave, what appears to be the body of a man lies half-buried in rubble.
The investigator notes the presence of more timbers in the debris and the freshness of the excavation and concludes that this is where the collapse of the tower was engineered--someone undercut the foundations, kept it shored up through the digging, then pulled the props out at the right time and dropped the tower.
There are two more dead kobolds near the body of the human, spades still held in their lifeless hands. The dead human is white-haired and balding, wearing fine robes now much the worse for having been through a lethal accident. In one hand he clutches a key ring with two keys on it.
Master Temperance nods. "Here is the reason for the dirt and the low ceiling. Kobolds did this work. Did this human kill them?"
"And what was their motivation for bringing down the tower, I wonder..."
The kobolds also appear to have been caught in the collapse.
"My guess is the kobolds just didn't get out in time when they caved this place in." He moves over to the human, searching for any telling details as Fynn takes guard duty.
"Motivation? I have no idea. Maybe they were working with this guy? Maybe he was in the tower?"
"Watch that body. If there is one undead there is always more."
Fortunately for Oranna's equanimity, the body remains stubbornly unmoving.
From the north edge of the rubble pile, Arien and Oranna can see that the excavated area extends further north and branches to the west in two places.
"Yep. I think we may be returning with more questions than answers." He looks down at the man, taking the key ring. "This could be useful. Also, are we supposed to carry this guy out?"
At the fork, Huc pauses, squinting into the darkness before them.
The north branch leads to a small chamber with a hole in the floor. It doesn't take a skilled tracker to spot the imprints of many clawed feet leading to and from the hole; Arien speculates that this is where they took the dirt out. Huc hears nothing, and Fynn is no more skittish than usual.