After Mez checks the stuck door, the group decides to swing around and enter through the last remaining portal left unchecked. The door opens into what Mez recognises as the room he was clairvoyantly seeing just earlier.
The chamber contains several tall wooden bookshelves reaching to the ceiling, almost bursting with the weight of books and scrolls filling the shelves. The shelves and their contents are encrusted with thick growths of brightly-coloured fungus and a profusion of glistening mould in all colours of the rainbow. Many tomes have fallen from the shelves, their open pages forming a base for even more fungi and large mushrooms which carpet the floor; there's barely a single exposed surface not overrun by the colonies of alien fungi. The only thing the varied species seem to have in common is that they are unlike anything you've seen before... yellow pear-shaped bulbs from which tentacle-like leaves emerge, bizarre clumps of coconut-sized growths with random holes in them, gigantic mushroom-like plants that glow with faint light, shifting pastel-coloured tendrils that immediately move towards your light sources, and plenty more. The naturalists at the Society would have a field day here...
The air here is damp and close, and several of the fungal growths pulse with an eerie purple light that dimly lights the room - the light sources that Mez saw from the other side. Two large iron candelabra, full of unlit candles, hang from the vaulted ceiling. Lit by the purple lights, you can clearly see the massive bed of thick fungal growths blocking the other entry into this room. No wonder you couldn't make it down that way.
Something shifting in the shadowy illumination catches your attention, and the group is on guard for whatever it may be. The bizarre creature that emerges from behind a bookshelf is like something you've never seen. A veiny, swollen bulb that bears a disturbing resemblance to an oversized brain squats atop five ropy legs. haphazardly encrusted with fungal shelves and bearing folds that resemble gills. A wide orifice with chitinous, teeth-like ridges gapes at the top of the creature, fringed with waving filaments and two long tendrils that lash at the air. Its form seems overlaid with a confusing welter of rapidly-changing, flickering images, making it difficult to see clearly.
A voice calls out--no, that's not right, it's not quite that; the voice seems to be only in your mind--and you feel the gentle touch of something coming into contact with your thoughts.
Do fingernails sing? The telepathic voice asks, and the creature flickers back and forth, almost seeming to appear in two different places at once. How do elves sporulate? Can the circumference of the moon dream of rain and fish?
The... thing... seems quite pleased, first when Norine answers its questions and then when Todric posits some more back at it. It waves its tentacles around in the air and bucks from side to side, making gurgling noises from deep within its brain-core.
Todric feels his mind probed once more, and occasional flashes of alien images cross his eyes... things that make no sense, like the rippling reflection of himself being consumed by a perpetually warping mass of blue, followed by a spinning kaleidoscope of blue and silver. He wonders if those are the alien creature's answers to his questions...
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"Be careful, though, Tod - we may have a new friend here," Norine advises.
Norine will continue to answer questions as best as she is able. "I wonder if it is digesting the information in these books ... literally. Literally literally, in fact. Perhaps it just needs a 'primer', such as schooled children are said to read..."
Norine tries just thinking again, but then realizes that she also is thinking when speaking normally - well, most of the time, anyways - and so she begins to speak to the brain-fungus-creature out loud.
"What do you want? What do you need?", asks Norine, thinking in particular of food (her trail rations) and water. "Where are you from? How did you get here?" she continues, after waiting for an answer and answering any questions of theirs, thinking of the stars, constellations, and planets ('wanderers') that she knows of as a priest of Desna and a sailor - and also of the unknown spaces in between.
Todric and the others begin to search the room, followed rather dutifully by the strange cerebral creature. It appears to quite enjoy Todric and Norine's questions, especially the more arcane and ridiculous ones. It answers Norine's mundane questions with answers that do not make much sense.
I want to seek and to find. I need to touch and to feel and to consume and to know. It gently touches its prehensile filaments along Norine's temples. The land is my home is my dark is my light. Changing, changing, moving, moving, shifting and twisting and turning and changing all of the time, like the sparkling exoskeleton of a skin-child's eyeballs!
Is a breath from beneath the earth shaped like the sun? Might a platypus not find its bellybutton inside a saucer of milk?
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Back in the more sane portion of the room, a couple of things occur.
Firstly, Todric locates a backpack near the door you just entered, half overgrown with mould. It holds a collection of canopic jars, jewelled death masks, gilded ushabti, and other valuable-looking Osiriani relics. A scrap of paper shoved inside a front pocket reads "The Eye is always vigilant".
Secondly, as you move about the room, you realise that the chamber is much colder than it should be. The closer you move towards the centre of the room, the colder it gets, until eventually you spy a strange colony of brown, spiral-shaped mould growing on a small patch of floor.
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Norine tries to think, but the words that float to her mind are: "Cannot predict now ... ask again later."
To the second question she replies, seemingly from nowhere: "The platypuses are of the mammalian order Monotremata, a 'primitive' order of mammals that, most notably, lay eggs rather than producing live births - yet they do lactate, producing milk from modified areas of skin called 'milk patches', so yes it may ... Ouch!" Wherever that came from, it kinda hurt! Norine thinks, as she wavers a bit on her feet.
"There are mushrooms that I have heard about which may help our conversation make more sense, perhaps to both of us."
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Ebon just looks on in confusion...
A think/talking mushroom. What? These questions make no sense... It eats books? Gah. help me Gorum. This situation is starting to damage my calm.
" Uhhh.... I think I'll keep watch out here...."
He states to no one in particular as he exits the room and stands guard, with his bow, outside the door.
Mez and Tod approach, warily; the mould does not seem to be sentient, but the closer you approach, the colder it gets. Norine attempts to purify the mould, but it seems to have no effect. Todric tries throwing a flask of alchemist's fire at the mould, and a small explosion of heat and flames covers the mysterious fungi...
Instantly, the patch of mould starts swelling. The small flames immediately shrivel and fade as it consumes the heat, growing and growing until it doubles in size. The uttercold that surrounds the patch of mould washes over Tod and Mez, causing them to shiver and shake from the chill.
Wisely, the duo backs off. It seems that being right next to it is the cause of the frostbite.
The acid doesn't seem to do much at all - at least it doesn't grow any further. Perhaps another element?
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Norine ponders the problem, scratching her head. "Well, if fire made it grow, ice might make it shrink. But, I don't have anything that will do that - not even a cold drink. If no one has anything we may just have to leave it and come back, perhaps with some liquid ice or someone with a frost ray, see if that does anything."
"Let's get everyone healed up and proceed."
The arrow sinks into the mould...and does very little otherwise.
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"Actually Norine, Acid is the distillation of earth and Cold is generally associated with water. It is much the same relationship with air and lightning. Some priests of Torag just couldn't hold their liquor and started showing off this acid ray that Torag blessed them with, claiming it was from the earth. Now, about this cold mold." He then pauses to see if any eyes roll over his rhyme.
Mez, the more you think about it, the more you think Norine's idea of dumping cold on it makes sense. If it expands with heat, then it's got to contract with cold... right?
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Frustrated at seeing his arrow disappear up to the fletching with no apparent effect, Ebon growls and rubs his bald pate.
" I don't have anything cold sorry. Now what?"He asks smirking somewhat at the rhyme.
" Heh. Cold Mold."
" Back in my village, I know a few Elders who might be cold enough it damage it."
Todric, this is Absalom - it may be more commonly known as the City at the Centre of the World, but it's also known as the City That Never Sleeps. You're fairly sure you know a place near the Grand Lodge that should still be open (after all, they know Drandle Dreng's typical mission hours...)
Nigel seems confused at your reappearance upstairs, but after hearing the story nods and promises to keep a watch on the entrance for anything emerging from the basement. A short time passes, and eventually you return back to the fungus-crowded room (whereupon your new 'friend' greets you with a fresh question and gurgled clacking noises: How long is the earwig of a silver fox?).
Someone brave approaches the brown mould and dumps the liquid ice onto it. Almost instantly the mould cringes away from the cold, shrivelling up until it's nothing more than a few blackened, dead husks on the ground.
With the danger gone, Todric continues to search the room... only to move barely fifteen feet before something starts shrieking. Everyone is forced to clamp their hands over their ears; the noise is unbearably loud, blocking all other sounds. Being the closest to the source, Todric can see that the source is... some strange fungus that seems to have a mouth. With teeth. What. Tod wisely strikes out with his rapier and cuts down the fungus, ending the shrieking a short while later.
All that remains is the thick bed of fungus crowding the latter twenty feet of this room. Todric attempts to start searching through it, but he can't find anything much of interest...
With Tod and Ebon working together, the duo are able to (eventually) tear apart enough fungus to locate a trap door. Alas, like the other door leading into this area, the amount of strange alien plant-life growing all around it has caused the trap door to become stuck.
With some huffing and puffing and heaving and struggling, eventually Ebon and the others are able to dislodge the shrooms and pull open the hidden trap door. A circular, 10-foot-diameter shaft drops down into darkness; Todric thinks he can just make out a stone floor at the very edge of the light spell's range. A narrow flight of stone steps spirals down along the shaft's circumference, coated with slippery slime and mould.
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-Posted with Wayfinder
Norine looks around for something tie a rope to, hoping to fall less far if she (or someone else) does so, then says a prayer before descending. She offers to go last to help others so get down safely.
Mez finds the trip down the slippery stairs shockingly easily; Norine thanks her lucky stars that she has Desna's guidance, for she very nearly falls over more than a couple of times on her way down. Eventually, the shaft deposits them in an alcove at the far end of an antechamber, free of the riotous growths of fungi and mould that choke the shaft and archives above.
The simple, clean lines of the basement's basalt walls give way here to a disturbing, organic style of architecture that makes it seem like you're walking through the gullet of some monstrous behemoth. The passage expands as it extends away from the shaft's exit, its ceilings and width practically doubling in dimensions as it goes. At the far end of the hall, a large, ornate arch that looks disconertingly like the beast's toothed maw stands in the wall, covered by a heavy black curtain with sickly green light from the chamber beyond shining around the edges.
A plain iron box sits on the floor in the middle of the room.
Norine cannot detect any magical auras coming from the chest.