Aiming at the one in the back, Trem hopes to get another lucky shot. He presses the trigger of the crossbow and send another quarrel flying.
Trem's arrow misses the ooze he was aiming for and the bolt sticks into floor.
The ooze in the back slides up to attack Harrash.
It manages to take in part of the half elf again, resuming the burning assault on his body.
The ooze in front of Arrenopos again tries to take the android into its body.
He dances away from the blob as it lunges toward him.
Everyone go
Instead of attacking this time, Trem uses some of his magic to heal Arrenopos. He invokes the energy and touches the fighter, closing some of his wounds.
Harrash cuts away at the blob again with his sword.
Harrash makes a long gash along the membrane of the ooze wrapped around his lower half.
Skivven reloads again and shoots, aiming between Harrash and Arrenopos.
"Take that, you puddle of pus," says Skivven earnestly.
Arrenopos tries to finish off the ooze by him.
Skivven hits his target with a second bolt. The amoeba pops like an old boil, and it's juices splatter across the melee combatants. Arrenopos manages to cleave through his attacker and spill its contents across the all ready sticky floor. The party takes a few seconds to look around to notice that all of the amoebas are gone. Searching for valuables is pointless as oozes are not known to collect trinkets or valuables.
There are two paths you can take to proceed: the doorway farther into the technological dungeon, or back to the unexplored desert. Keep in mind that Khonnir is still missing and the footprints led to this part of the caves.
Harrash brushes the goo off of his clothes. "That was unexpected. Even the puddles here are dangerous. It seems to have been a sort of trap to block people from entering."
The rubble cannot be moved and like the other doors in these underground passages, there are no windows or gaps.
"Why don't we circle around and see how far this passage leads to the south?" Skivven suggests.
"I want to see if we can determine what direction the footsteps point to. This dungeon seems to have been undisturbed for centuries, and surely it can wait a while longer if Khonnir isn't here."
The foot prints lead to the door.
With the group unsure of where to go next, Trem just shifts his weight from one leg to the other, staying out of the decision making.
Let's leave this place alone for now. We can always come later. I'm sure Khonnir will thank us for it if we can find him," Harrash says.
As the group opens the door to the next room, the temperature drops considerably. Inside, the chamber is filled with a layer of frost and ice. The far wall is lined with a row of casket like containers with small windows in the front of each. They are all hooked up to large metal tubes and trailing wires, most of which is has been ripped and frayed. While most of the cold graves contain only corpse long decayed, there is one container that houses a perfectly preserved specimen. Through the glass in the front, you see a four armed humanoid, like the creature you just fought. However instead of a sickly grey color, this one has a healthy rust tone to its flesh. As you approach, a green light flickers on inside the capsule. The doorway begins to open up, hissing vapor from its interior
Enrathe, your last memories are of being strapped down to a table as two handed creatures poked and prodded you body with tools you could've never imagined. You remember being opened up and closed again, over and over. You remember being downloaded with things like "language" and "security training." You ever remember the purpose. The men who took who, "humans", wanted to study the limit of your body's biological limits, physically and mentally. You remember something going wrong and being locked up and "preserved." You don't know how long they kept you asleep. You just know that through the whole long night, you were trapped in recurring nightmares and being forced to relive the experiments. Suddenly, you body began to wake. Standing over you are the "humans" like the people who took you captive, but they do not dress like the ones who took you. These people dress more like they were from your home. They even carry familiar weapons. Of particular note is the small, furry creature that looks like a giant, wingless, petromin in clothes.
Enrathe stirs in his metal coffin, breath hissing from his lips for the first time in untold years. Ten fingers grope about the sides of his enclosure, while the other ten tentatively find his own face and cradle his head. There felt to be as much fog in his skull as there was in the air. When his eyes finally peered through the mists at at the other figures standing, mouths agape, there was a few moments of nonplussed silence while his thoughts finally began to catch back up with his body. Then, he suddenly raised an arm.
Mouth now safely hidden behind his upper left elbow from these strangers, he tried to speak, but only a jumbled melange of his native language and whatever language those humans pumped into his skull came out. He was not used to knowing two languages. Holding up his upper right hand as though asking for them to wait as he sorted out his thoughts, he gathered himself for a few moments before attempting a second try.
"Qa'ata," he said, hailing them in his native language. He was met only with muted confusion, so he tried again. "Greetings?"
Arrenopos takes a defensive stance as the creature emerges from the coffin. Unlike the previous encounters, this one does not appear to be undead. When he speaks, Arrenopos is slightly less defensive, but maintains his guard.
Harrash holds his longsword up to the creature who looked just like the creatures who had tried to kill the group yesterday.
"Who are you?" he bluntly interrogates the creature.
"Who? Yes, who," Enrathe spoke, keeping his mouth behind his arm as he sat up, not too keen on getting out of the metal coffin lest he provoke the one with the sword. "Enrathe. That is me. Yes..." The language was still raw in his brain; the right words came to him, but in the wrong order. Hopefully that would right itself in time. His eyes looked from side to side, scanning for clothing or a scarf. He felt naked without a scarf, although he could no longer remember the reason why. "Why am I here? Do you know?"
Harrash relaxes the sword and turns back to the group. "He seems to be too clueless to be a danger."
"Well... do you have any family here? Who put you inside that case? How long have you been here?"
Harrash looks around at the other party members for help in the questioning.
"Are you one of Khonnir Baine's people? Did someone take you prisoner?" Asks Skivven earnestly.
"We are the rescue mission sent to find Khonnir. Do you know if he is alive?"
"What? Who?" Enrathe furrowed his brow, finding only fog where memories should have been. "...No?" The alien answered tentatively as he clambered out of his former tomb and scavenged for whatever he could find to dress and equip himself.
"He does not know. I know not? Do not know..." He answered Harrash, experimenting with different ways of speaking this new language.
Looking around, you see two doors in the room. The first door sits to the back of the chamber. The second door sits off to the left, and there is a large pool of dried blood sitting where it meets the wall. There is also a large crate off in the corner.
Enrathe investigates the crate, hoping to find something more suitable to social interactions than the meager strips of cloth he was interred with.
As Enrathe tries to open the crate, the lid holds itself shut. He realizes the container is locked, but there is nothing outside to hold it together.
His fingers search the edges for some kind of lock or latch, but finding nothing he stares at it, confused. Even if there was some hypothetical way of generating a random chance of him having the requisite knowledge with a statistical advantage or disadvantage based on individual skills, having no innate understanding of whatever he was looking at would mean that even though he may indeed have experience in what he would need he would not be able to attempt such a random chance for knowledge. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
"Um... what are you trying to do there?" Harrash asks the clueless kasatha while staring at his arms.
"Open..." He half answered, half commanded the inanimate object in front of him. "Open!" He insisted again, bonking his hand against the top of it.
The rest of the party takes a look at the crates and discover that they seem to have the same kind of card lock as the doors in this strange place.
Skivven goes through the various cards they have found and attempts to open the crates using them.
"Maybe one of these will work..." he says.
Skivven goes through the tried and true brown cards first, but none of them work. When he finally tries the black card, the lid pops slightly ajar. Enrathe is able to lift it up the rest of the way. Inside, you all find Enrathe's gear.
The alien immediately grabs the scarf from the crate and bundles up to hide his nakedness, then holds one of the axes aloft. He hefted it’s familiar weight and balance, then began putting on the robes and wrappings he finds beneath them. He had no memory of any of it, yet he knew it was his. He takes the time to equip himself with everything he finds.
After Enrathe robes and equips himself, the party is still faced with the task of where to go next. There are three doorways out of this cold chamber. First up, there is the obvious door closed over a large stain of dried blood. The other two doors contain next to no obvious markers.
All doors are closed with card locks.
"Do we follow the blood? It is probably recent."
"That blood looks dried, but we might as well try out our cards and see if any of them work on the door."
The blood is at least a week old, but certainly not much longer than that, and it is definitely not old like these ruins are. You guess that it came from a humanoid, but you can't tell more than that.
"That looks like humanoid blood, and it's about a week old. I have a feeling that whatever that blood came from, it has to do with Khonnir, since that's about when he disappeared," Harrash posits.
"Let's follow the trail then. Either it leads to Khonnir, or to one of his enemies who is hurt. If the former then he may need our help, while if the latter, we may have a chance to finish off a wounded enemy."
"If it is someone other than Khonnir, let's try and get information from him first."
"Who is this 'Khonnir'?" Enrathe inquired, pushing himself into their conversation. Truth be told, he was not keen on journeying out by himself until he was more familiar with this place; if he could find some common ground with these humans (and the petromin) he may be able to scout the area safely.
Bloodstains mar the floor and walls of this hallway, while scorch marks and smears of ash on the walls suggest some sort of altercation having taken place in this area relatively recently. Four tangled mounds of metal and other materials lie further up the hall, surrounded by strangely colored stains.
The hallway curves around to the right and ends a set of doors going straight and a set of doors going to the right.
"Who is this 'Khonnir'?"
"Khonnir was a fellow who went to explore this place, and he never came out again. So we are the rescue mission," answers Skivven.
"If you weren't with Khonnir, how did you get down here then? And how did you get into that box?"
”I do not know where ‘down here’ is,” the alien states simply as he moves more towards the front of the group. Many were injured, it would make far more sense to have someone in top condition moving toward the potential danger. ”I was forced into the box, by creatures calling themselves humans.”