Velden will put the dagger in his pack for now, as he doesn't know of anyone who can ID it in the current group. "Thank you Selena." Once everyone is done getting healed, Velden will continue. "Ok, I think we've covered all the rooms on the first floor, except the one in the middle that was sealed, yes? And the door we couldn't open in the fountain room. So, we either double back, or we go down the stairs, either here or back by everyone else, the fallen stones were a fake door, and we have the key."
Avizzi cocks his head to the side slightly at Velden's 'Knife Boy' comment, but soon finds himself unable to resist winking at Jellena. "Don't need it, but sure wouldn't mind," he snickers.
Back to the situation at hand, Avizzi shrugs. "You guys' call. I'm just a hired merc on this one, here to do the dirty work and make some gold. Seems like we could give those sealed doors another crack, though. What kept you from getting through?"
Velden shrugs. "The goddess said we should go through it, given how much of a b~@@@ she is, we decided we shouldn't go through it." He responds, and then snaps his finger. "Oh, and it was locked and trapped and nobody was a burglar or thief so we didn't really have a way to open it, that might have contributed a small amount to it, but mostly it was the Goddess being a pain."
Leans over to whisper to Avizzi.
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Since no one else asks for healing she shrugs and goes behind Avizzi. Giving him a back rub while the group decides what to do. "Uh, should he be talking about or to his goddess that way? It is not healthy for him or others."
She chuckles at Karn's comment, especially knowing that Velden can likely hear it.
Avizzi shrugs and is about to talk when, surprisingly, Jellena begins massaging him. Totally unused to this, the tiefling tenses and remains very still for a moment, then relaxes, letting out a thin breath. "Ah... Uh... Well, you have me now, so locks and traps are nothing to fear. Mm..." He opens one eye a tad as Karn whispers to him and grins. "We all do, coffin boy. Me more than most, I'll admit. I'll tell you about it, and these scars and burns, some time. Yeah..."
"Might as well get to trying the fake door then. "
Velden nods. "Yep, we can do that. Let me lead everyone through the traps again." Velden leads everyone through the traps again, to avoid them, and then back into the water room. "Ok, here we go Avizzi, this is the cursed door of doom. I'll be waiting in the back corner, assuming you survive the explosion, the poison, the blades, and the acid, I'll follow you into the next area." Velden smiles and takes up a position in the corner where he can fire past Avizzi and through the door.
Velden then snaps his fingers. "Oh, you might as well try these keys..." He holds out the burnt key and the golem key. "One of them might work."
"I'm amazed they didn't give you a PR billet in the service Velden. You have such a way with people. "
but he will also scamper around a corner in case a trap goes off to avoid any blast
"Oh, they offered me one, but I turned it down. You have to be too much of a smarmy ass to be a PR flak." Velden responds, chuckling as he watches Bishnu hide around the corner.
Karn waits around the corner also.
"Let me know if you need healing after the door explodes"
Velden grins at the newcomer. "There you go, Mummy Lord, you're catching on!"
Avizzi rolls his eyes. "Haha. So funny." He squats down in front of the door and begins going over it, first with his eyes, then with light touches of his fingers, looking for the lock and the trap(s).
"Right. Here we go." He pulls out a dagger and begins tapping and raking the device, trying to disable it.
Velden looks down at the two keys he offered, shrugs, and puts them back in his pocket.
Avizzi you realize that there are no obvious traps on this side of the door. Working your blade in the lock you find yourself snapping the blade off in the lock. You should be able to pull out the blade with a disable device DC 15, though the lock looks to be great craft either a DC 30 or even 40.
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Jellena smiles at the group as they get to the door. "I will take Selena back to the room, don't run off to far without me. After all I can tell you all like my touches." she says suggestively, blowing a kiss at Bishnu and batting her long eyelashes as the two girls walk off her hips swaying as she goes, the walk of a dancer.
"Mm," Avizzi hums in response to Jellena, then, "Oh shi--gods f*cking dammit!" He pulls out his dagger, the blade of which has snapped off near the hilt. "I paid good gold for this piece of skag sh*t, and look what happens. I ever find that merchant he's gonna be a few fingers lighter." He curses some more under his breath in a language none of the others understand and pulls out another dagger, trying to get the blade out of the lock.
"Are you f*cking kidding me right now?" he hisses, obviously angry.
Moves toward the sound of gun fire, "The women may be in trouble!"
Breaks in to a run in that direction.
"Huh? Whuh? Did I miss something?" and he will take off after Karn.
Karn luckily does not go towards the traps, but to the front of the crypt coming to see a massive statue made of wood and another one made of metal. Both just standing there. The wood one has shields in its hands. The metal one has a mean looking sword that has a cable attached to the weapon to its suit of armor.
"Sounds like something is attacking our marines outside." He hands Bishnu two keys. "If Knifey McKniferson ever pays enough attention to anyone to actually try them, let him try them. Otherwise, keep watching him break his tools off in the door. I'm gonna follow Mummy Master out to see what's going on. Oh, and announce yourself before you go check on the greenhorns, someone's fracking Jellena."
He exits the room, walking past the stopped Karn. "Huc, don't kill 'im, he got teleported in here by some stuck up goddess." Ducking under the wooden statue, Velden will crack the door a half-inch and see what is going on with the marines.
Karn looks outside. "What plane of existence did I wake up on?"
Velden chuckles. "My own thought is Hell, but the brochure's say Pandora. I think they are wrong of course."
"Maybe they said Pandemonium..."
Velden shakes his head, and pulls a brochure out of his pack as he watches the marines. "Nope, see, Pandora." He hands the 20 year old brochure that's still got stiff shiny high gloss paper to Karn. The space station has hundreds of thousands of them in storage. Velden had picked up a few mostly for emergency toilet paper.
Avizzi breathes deeply and cracks his neck and his knuckles. "Alright, let's do this again."
The tiefling grunts as his manages to pry out the dagger blade, which he kicks over into a corner of the room, tossing the hilt after it. "Piece of sh*t..." He glances back. "How bad we want through this door? Lock's one nice piece of work."
Karn reads the pamphlet.
"Interesting paper."
As he reads, he mutters, "Definitely not home..."
As he finishes, he looks at Velden. "You mean to tell me that everyone has a flying ship? Magic must be in abundance is your realm."
"Maybe you might try one of these keys? I understand they are an archaic way of opening doors from before numpads, retinal scans and all that jazz. "
Avizzi gives Bishnu the evil eye, which is a rather nasty sight, especially from a burnt, scarred tiefling who's pretty pissed off. "You had a f*cking key and you didn't--just give it here." He grimaces, muttering in Abyssal again, and inserts the key. Now, how do we want to go about not triggering the probable trap?
"No, Velden had a key and waved it at you but you didn't notice. He just ran off to check on a noise. Now let me get behind cover again before you get a new set of scars. I have to keep my pretty face intact. "
Karn sees Velden's jaw clench, and then the half-elf yells at the top of his lungs, pointing his head toward the doorway to the room they just left. "YOU MORON! I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE FRACKING KEYS TWICE, YOU WERE TOO BESOTTED BY THE LOCK TO LISTEN KNIFE MONKEY!"
Bazizz laughs, falls off Bishnu and rolls on the ground clenching his belly as he continues to laugh!
Karn is in for a world of change with the tech of Pandora and everything of his new fellow companions. Perhaps he will be a light in this horrible world.
Velden winces. "Ok, that's not good. The marines equipment is turning on them. When it's done with them, it's likely to come for us. We need to get going." He turns to Huc. "Huc, watch for their equipment heading over here when it's done killing the marines. Yell when it starts, and then turn the golem on and get out of here. We'll be down there."
Velden drags Karn back into the other room. "Ok, the Marines are being turned into catfood, and we've got about five catfoods worth of marine equipment on override or just plain viral breakdown heading for us when it finishes with it's current catfood mission. We ain't got time to explore no more. We need to try the two downstairs areas for an exit PDQ. If one of those keys don't open that door, we start going down."
Catfood is a measurement of how big the enemy is. It derives from how many enemy it takes to turn a squad of marines into catfood. So five catfood's worth is enough enemies to turn 5 squads into catfood.
"So you don't think we can turn the tide and win the battle out there?"
Velden snorts. "First, we don't exactly have friendly relations with the marines, they set up to trap us in here and kill us when we came out. Second, we've got non-combatants in here, and I'm not going to leave them to die so I can go charge to a glorious death saving people who were pointing laser scopes at me a few hours ago. Third, my job is the people in this crypt, nothing else, and I'm not putting my butt on the line to save strangers, again, especially strangers who were pointing guns at me earlier."
"That makes sense. I'm not as worried about them then."
Avizzi looks back and also clenches his jaw, then hacks and spits a wad of phlegm on the ground. "Moron, sure. If you had a key, why didn't you use it before, huh?" This to himself, more than anyone else, and whispered in his raspy tones.
When Velden and Karn return, he shakes his head. "Five catfoods, huh? Damn. I dunno what you lot or I did to piss off those boys, but we pissed 'em off good. As for heading out, I'm gonna side with Point-Ears McGee here and say f*ck that. Now, let's get downstairs. Everybody stay back." Avizzi stands to the side of the door that has hinges--if any are visible--and twists the key and opens the door, pulling or pushing, before rolling quickly to the side.
"Didn't say the Marines were coming, just their equipment. Right now, the equipment is busy turning the marines into catfood. Then we're next on the grist mill I'm sure." Velden comments first, then grins. "As to the keys, we didn't have the burnt one before. We tried the non-burnt one, but it didn't work. Figured as screwy as this place is, it might be worth trying it again now that we've been everywhere else."
"Makes sense. I meant we must've pissed off the marines right good for them to have brought five catfoods of mech."
"Yeah, but they mighta wanted to debug it first right? Those AIs can be a b+$~! if something goes wrong. As they are learning the hard way. There's a reason they still keep grunts like me around. "
Karn is pacing, swinging his scythe.
Elo simply sits back and observes the masterful team dynamics. There seems to be nothing to shoot or sneak by, so she waits.
With Avizzi's work with the key, the door opens up into the room.
Once in the room, there is a small stone bench sits in the center of this dusty chamber. On the far wall is a faded mural depicting the hero Kassen defeating the mercenaries at the entrance to this crypt, with his blade piercing the chest of the mercenary leader. These figures stand alone in the center of a scene of carnage, with dead villagers and mercenaries all around them.
"Knife man, you might want to look up, the sword of Damacles swings over your head. Maybe wedge it so it doesn't come down on us before we proceed?" He nods toward the top of the door, where a blade waits to fall on the first over the threshold.
"Those kids really woulda been dogfood without us here. This place is kinda sick. "
"Sick? I'm thinking I'll retire here. Seems defensible, got plenty of tinker toys for me to play with, and the only woman who's touched me willingly in twenty-odd years, I met here!" He grins and chuckles his eerie, raspy laugh as he looks upward. "Now, let's see about fixing this trap."