Seeing everyone preparing to leave the room, Broom abandons her impossible task and follows them as they explore the other doors.
At john's motions, she peeks into the room and whispers "Why would this place have animal cages?"
"For..." Experiments had been on the tip of Desdemona's tongue, and she didn't know why. "For research," she ventured in a whisper, with no idea if it was true or not.
She eyed the crate with interest, trying to discern the nature of the creature within from the sounds it made.
John and Desdemona both thought it sounded like a scared, whimpering puppy.
Broom nodded at Desdemona's suggestion. It made sense, she had seen many different thoughts that involved cages of creatures to be used in experiments she didn't understand. For the most part they were no pleasant memories.
"Do you want Us to send It over to lift the crate, or does one of you want to do it?"
"Yeah, go ahead." John answers Broom.
"Go lift up that crate and put it by the wall" Broom whispered to the air beside her. She then waited, nervously rubbing her wrist again as she waited anxiously for whatever was under the crate to be revealed.
Reine stood next to John, her bow once again in hand. She pulled back an arrow and aimed at the crate. If something untoward jumped out, she was prepared to let fly.
John steadies the shield they just found and readies himself for whatever appears from under the crate.
Broom's friend struggled to move the heavy crate but eventually shifted it enough for the group to spy an adorable, fluffy puppy whimpering in fear. It looked like it had had a rough time- it was dirty and grimy and shivering and covered in scabbed over cuts and scraps- but while it looked terrified, its big, puppy-dog eyes were practically begging for someone to come along and save it.
"Ohhh, its a puppy!" exclaimed Broom as her face lit up. "Its hurt and all dirty, We can fix that!"
Broom moved into the room to comfort the small dog.
"Careful..." it could be carrying a disease or illness in this place.
He crouches down and gestures to the dog.
"Here pup..." he says.
The dog whimpered but John had a way with animals and he was able to coax it out of its corner. The poor creature approached hesitantly, shivering in fear and looking up at him with big dark eyes, and meekly licked his outstretched hand.
Reine immediately began looking everywhere in the room but at the dog, looking for the trap.
It was hard, though, to keep her eyes from being drawn down to the fluffy bugger every time it whined.
She did not reduce the tension on her bowstring.
"It seems to be ok."
Reine looked down at John, then at the dog. She gave the pup a measuring look.
Desdemona eyed the puppy. It seemed sweet enough, but Reine's caution was well-placed. Why hadn't the ghouls eaten it if it was making so much noise? Where was its mother?
Still, those big eyes were so appealing...
Reine didn't see anything else in the room and the puppy seemed like it wanted nothing more than to be petted and taken away.
When John didn't hurt it after it licked his hand, the puppy took a tiny step closer and even pushed its head against his hand for petting.
John gives the pup a scratch behind the ears.
"It follows along with us, maybe we can leave it with the people in the church later for safekeeping."
He looks at the others.
"Let's check the doors at the end of the hall before we try those stairs. I want to make sure nothing is left behind us."
He heads up to the north door and looks/listens for danger.
(+2 for traps)
With the puppy befriending John, Broom set about cleaning the little fella off with her spell. "We shouldn't just let him run around by himself, someone should carry him in their pack. We can make him a little nest so he is comfortable.
Oh! And he should be given a name as well since we don't know what his actual name is."
Broom was disappointed that she didn't have any food to offer the puppy. This was the second time that she wished she had kept some supplies. In the future she would make certain that her pack was stocked with food.
"It's not going in my pack," Reine said flatly, "It'd probably eat all of my jerky. And do you really want it going nuts by your head and neck in the middle of a fight? What if it bites when it's scared?"
She shook her head, then shrugged and followed John to the North door. She listened as he examined the door.
Desdemona didn't offer to carry the puppy, either. She didn't want anything so sweet and innocent near the living shadows. Just because they'd been helpful this past day didn't mean they didn't have an ulterior motive. She was still wary of a sudden attack - maybe not physically, but something. Maybe something subtle.
Something, the darkness in her mind whispered, and she shivered.
"You should name him, Broom," she smiled at the other woman. "It only seems fair." She lingered behind with Broom as they saw to taking care of the puppy.
Broom's spell revealed the puppy to be a cute l'il fluffer. Apparently having decided John was his best friend, the puppy ran after John as he made his way toward the northern doors. Now clean and brave in new company, it jumped and galloped, growling and barking happily as it followed its new friend. The little dog nipped at John's calf as he stopped to listen, making it hard to hear if anything was moving around in the room.
Reine was pretty sure she didn't hear anything, either, though the excited puppy was being kind of distracting running around loose.
"Broom, can you hold this little guy?" John asks.
When she corrals the puppy, he opens the doors.
"By the gods," Reine muttered, trying to keep her voice down, despite the puppy obviously making enough noise to make any such precautions nearly useless.
She reached back and dug into a side pocket of her pack. There, she found some waxed cloth wrapped around strips of some very odd-looking, slightly green-tinged salted and dried meat. "Here," she said with an exasperated sigh, as she knelt and held out one of the meat strips to the dog, "jerky. Made it myself. Chew on this, and keep quiet, OK?"
Broom gathered up the excited puppy and held onto it while John checked the door. She didn't dare put it in her magic pack because she didn't know what would happen to it. Things moved around in her pack when she wasn't looking, she assumed it was part of the enchantment but it could just as easily be haunted. Broom didn't know.
She strained to think of a name. She knew that at one point she might have been called Mashiki, but right now Broom was the only name she remembered and that name had been given because she had a broom. That was pretty simple.
She looked at the puppy trying to think of a trait she could name it after. "How about We call you Nipper?"
With the puppy safely contained (as safe as anything is in this place) John focused on the doors to the north.
"Ok, let's see what's in there."
He opens the doors.
The puppy wiggled happily and tried to lick Broom's face when she picked it up and gave it a name. It was hard to tell whether it approved of the name Nipper, but it seemed content to be carried.
Inside the room was a row of wicker rocking chairs facing a wall of tall windows, staring into the mist licking the outside of the glass. A heap of broken planks lay in one corner, the wreckage of a wooden stairwell that still partially clinged to the wall above. The stairway once climbed to the platform 15 feet overhead, and then on to the tower heights. The lower potion had collapsed, though, leaving only the rickety flight of stairs leading up from the platform.
John advances into the room and looks around.
(+1 for traps)
"Looks like the stairs collapsed..."
"Stand back. We don't know for certain that the platform up there is stable."
John slings the heavy shield on his back and fishes out his silk rope and grappling hook.
He swings the hook up to the platform and tries to climb up.
"Uh, John," Reine said as John started to climb, "It might make more sense - and be safer - for us all to take the stairs in the hallway. Together, rather than you climbing up alone. I thought you mentioned something about being more cautious and not rushing into things, right?"
"I don't think those stairs go to the same place."
"This is the tower, and the doctor said the smoke-spewer thing was in the north-west tower.
"I can secure the rope next to the wall here. I can probably lift you half-way up if the platform is stable."
Reine sighed. "Fine," she said. "Next to the wall then. We can brace against that."
Once John had moved the rope closer to the wall, Reine braced one foot against it, and then followed him up, pulling on the rope and walking herself upwards.
Broom bundled Nipper up in a towel and tried to secure him to the end of the rope. As John lifted him up, she stood below, arms outstretched ready to catch him if he fell.
Once Nipper was safely up, she attempted to climb the rope herself.
She scrambled and slipped as she slowly attempted to make headway up the rope. At one point her feet slipped off the wall leaving her dangling helplessly for a few moments as she slowly twisted around, trying to find purchase once more.
John pulls up the dog and sets in down on the platform.
Then he helps lift Broom up to the platform.
"You're next Desdemona"
The platform was nothing but a wide landing attached to the stairs. Once everyone was up, the group was able to proceed up to the tower heights. Broken windows looked out across a sea of churning saffron fog. Inside, dusty crates of every size crowded the room.
Oddly, the fog looked thicker near the middle of the room, but the view from the top of the stairs was obscured by stacks of crates.
"Thick fog. Maybe we're getting close to the Oneirogen thing."
Broom looked about at the dusty crates, curious about what was in them and a little bothered by their dirty state. The one thing that she was greatly concerned about was the thick yellow fog. "Do we have to go into the fog?" she whispered, not wanting to disturb anything that might be lurking within.
"Probably just like the doctor's office. We'll find it, I'll punch it, and it'll stop spitting smoke."
Broom's mind was immediately put at ease as John explained how simple this was going to be. For some reason she thought it would be a lot harder, though she still wasn't happy about entering the fog. Didn't the Ragged Man lurk within the jaundice vapours?
After consoling Broom to make her feel better, John looks past her to Reine and shrugs, indicating he has no idea what's really about to happen.
He unslings his shield and steps forward to search the fog and look behind the crates.
(+1 for traps)
Reine returned John's shrug with a near-imperceptible shrug of her own, then moved to enter the fog with him. She drifted away to one side, so as to avoid clustering together, just in case something in the smoke was watching them.
Much as she wanted to keep alert, she found herself focusing more on keeping station with John in the smoke.
The group's eyes weren't deceiving them. The fog was thicker on the other side of the boxes. In fact, it was so thick it was impossible to see all the way through.
John draws 'Red Destiny' and pushes forward to search the smoke.
(+1 for traps)
Broom cradled Nipper and stood close by John, following him just a step or two behind. She was thinking about the terrible things that the fog could conceal when she suddenly noticed an odd absence. She looked around for a moment, though she wasn't certain what she would be looking for. "Our invisible friend is gone. We think It left shortly after we climbed up the rope." she muttered to nobody in particular.
Its absence was oddly disconcerting though she didn't know why that would be.
John pushed forward into the fog and was lost to sight in a matter of seconds.
"It's here .... we've found it." John calls out over his shoulder from the fog.
Sticking close to John, but wary about the coiling mist, Broom was a little startled when he suddenly stopped and called out that he had found the mist spewer.
She peered around him to get a look at the unfortunate soul, but couldn't see much more that a hazy lump in the yellow fog.
"Do you need Us to do anything, or are you just going to hit it now?"