Seeing the shadow menace Des, Broom brought to mind thoughts of the place of dreams and conjured up a set of softly glowing spheres of light that she set around Des in an attempt to ward off the shadow.
"Are you ok?" she asked, worry in her voice.
"Do we have to break the wall? If the body is on the other side, isn't it already buried? Maybe we just need to say the appropriate prayers over the wall to set the ghost at peace?"
Desdemona had come back in, her usual tense and smiling self, but when the other women expressed their support, her smile became a touch more genuine. That smile broadened to one of relief as Broom brought light into being around her.
Touching Broom's arm in thanks and reassurance that she was fine - though admittedly, she always said that - she stepped (carefully only in the direct pools of light Broom had conjured) closer to the corner to see what they had achieved in her absence.
"I think a proper burial is called for, rather than an impromptu one - likely by whomever murdered the spirit's body. As there doesn't appear to be a body hiding in plain sight, I'm afraid we'll have to break down the wall. Gentlemen?"
In an aside to Broom as the others (presumably) worked, Des offered a few words of comfort of her own. "Don't think of it as creating a mess, Broom. Think of it as tidying up on a whole new plane - this is just the first step. We can set it right once we have the body."
Still, as they waited, Desdemona's attention remained more on the shadow (now obediently mirroring her motions, though in four weak copies thanks to Broom's lights) than their surroundings, as usual. However, she was aware she was doing so.
"Do you suppose there are any other surprises in wait for us here at the fort?" she queried of Reine, though she didn't meet her eyes. "We never did find what had happened to the woman who walked into the mirror, for instance."
"I wouldn't doubt it," Reine said. "I don't know if we'll find her again in here - but something isn't right."
Lachen readies his big hammer, and starts working on the wall, with a big grin on his face
Thanks Desdemona, for bringing back the sweet memories of the last time a woman called me a gentleman. It was... never. Probably hadn't done anything to be worthy of the title. My bad.
John doesn't find any traps- it's just a wall, and a hastily erected one at that. Lachen quickly smashes it down, finding that it had just been a single, inexpertly built brick wall covered over with plaster. Behind that, they found a short corridor stuffed floor to ceiling with moldering bales of hay. It took more time to clear the hay out of the corridor than it did to pull down the wall but soon enough they were looking through a grate in the solid wooden door of a dungeon cell.
Inside the cell was a desiccated corpse dressed only in a ragged loincloth who had undergone a process of natural mummification. The most recognizable features of the corpse were several large tattoos on the torso and thighs, mostly depicting abstract, swirling monstrosities with too many eyes and too many mouths.
The group found that the keyring that had provided access to every other room in the fort didn't have a key to fit this lock. No key, muffled by several feet of hay, walled in- whoever this man was had never been meant to be found.
Desdemona's world tilted and swooped on seeing the tattoos on the corpse's body.
eyesmouthshungereyesmouthshungerEYESMOUTHSHUNGER-
The sharp memory of the thing whose mind she had touched on the pier made her gasp for breath - not panicky, so much as nauseated.
Even in this vertiginous stupor, her fear was reserved for the dark.
She eased back out of the hallway and leaned against one of the whole walls, breathing deeply, eyes slitted as she focused on one spot and attempted to rein in the madness that threatened to come rushing back like a tsunami.
In the middle of it all, she had to wonder: what did this man and that thing have in common?
Only then did she realize: her shadow was gone again.
The only thing the shadow found in the room other than a corpse was a wooden bedframe bolted to the floor. No mattress, no sheet or pillow, no bedpan, not even an empty plate. Whoever he was, he had been sealed in and left to starve to death in the dark.
The shadow knew death, had dealt it, seen it, felt it before. This was a new experience for it, though, as it oozed over the accidentally mummified man. Skin like leather, muscles like rope, bones like the wooden beams of a ship. Except... there was something hard in the mummy's stomach, poking unnaturally up out of the skin from the inside.
It flowed up like water, into the dead man's mouth and down its throat into darkness so complete it had never seen light. There, deep in the man's guts, it found the thing it had been looking for and brought it back out.
Slinking back out of the still-locked cell, the shadow deposited the thing at Desdemona's feet- a small crystalline sphere, pink and green colors swirling inside and the outside polished to perfect smoothness. Luckily the corpse's insides were long dried out, so nothing untoward clung to it or marred the shine of its sparkling interior.
"Well," Reine said, "that's disgusting. What was he, and what in the hells just rolled out of his stomach?"
She tactfully (she thought) didn't point out how the little sphere had rolled out of the dead man's stomach.
Broom took a cloth from her pack and carefully picked up the little orb. Even though it looked mostly clean she rolled the sphere around in the cloth to shine it up and make sure there was no residue left on it before handing it to Des.
"What do you suppose it is?" she asked inquisitively.
Desdemona looked at the orb as though... well, as though it had come out of a dead man's stomach, though her concern was probably its manner of procurement rather than its origin. But her disgust transformed to curiosity right before their eyes. It was like seeing someone else surface deep in her eyes, and swim to the forefront of her mind.
"I rather imagine he was some kind of priest or prophet of..." Her mind flashed back to the sigil she'd found in the bathtub of the bookshop they'd searched earlier, and the book she'd been reading: The Pnakotic Manuscripts. Her mind threatened to remember something Unpleasant, and she deliberately turned her mind's eye away, sweating and smiling, whistling past the graveyard. "...something that we aren't familiar with. I have no idea why he would have swallowed this, but it seems... familiar... similar to one of those small glowing stones that circle your head so you can read with your hands free in the night... an ioun torch. But this one's purpose... It's at the tip of my tongue, really."
LOL
Desdemona looked at Broom, but not in the eyes - rather, searching her clothes and checking her shoulders. "Might Us know, Broom?"
John opens the door and enters the cell.
He'll lay out a blanket and roll the old corpse onto it, then roll it up.
"We can find a better place to bury this and make sure that ghost doesn't come back."
The very sight of Us appeared to spark a memory in Desdemona's brain. "It's a stone that increases one's aura of... charm, or gravitas." She held it with an expression of mixed interest and disgust.
It was similar to the look she gave the corpse John was rolling into his own blanket.
Us oozed out of Broom's neck and reformed herself before skittering down Broom's arm and to the little stone held in her hand. Us' slender claws picked up the stone and her many eyes studied it intently before staring off in random directions and shuddering a bit.
Focusing once more on the here, Us gave a quiet little screechy sound.
"Us can't see or study its aura, so she doesn't know for sure what it is. But, if it is an ioun stone like you think, then Us agrees."
Us gave a few more little screechy sounds and Broom replied quietly "Are you sure they want to know that? Well, if you think so"
Broom's brow furrowed and she once again took on a serious flat tone as she recited Us' lecture.
"Ioun stones are an old type of magic. The function of each type of stone can typically be determined by its shape and colour."
Satisfied, Us hopped off Broom's hand onto the floor and skittered over to where the corpse was being moved to get a closer look at the patterns on its mummified skin.
I've heard of these magical stones, but it's the first time I see one. So you say this one enhance our ... I'll say swagger, for lack of a better term. I won't pretend I got academical training.
Mixed into the tattoos of tentacled and too-many-eyed creatures, Us recognized several hidden references to one particular entity. Unlike the eye-like sigil of Dagon Desdemona's shadow had recognized at the bookseller's apartment, here Us saw repeated motifs- faces with no features, circles of wings, inverted ankhs, bats- that implied the man venerated the creature known as Nyarlathotep.
Can you make sense of that thing? I'm just hoping the man who created that was totally drunk, at least.
"What do we want to investigate next?" John asks.
"Nobody in town or the fort seems to have any answers, maybe we should try Count Lowl's house to see if there are any clues to where he went."
"The Count's place seems as good as anywhere else. Might give us some more clues as to what we were doing for him, too."
And why he didn't take us with him, wherever he went, Reine did not say out loud.
"I agree. To the Count's estate, then." Desdemona was watching Us, with great interest and none of the disgust she'd shown the dead man or the stone the shadow had dropped in her hand.
After all, magic was one thing. The dark was quite another.
But when John mentioned the Count, an expression crossed her face that would have looked more at home on Reine's. She left off her study of the homonculus, intending to do one last check that they hadn't missed any rooms before departing.
Us squeaked and screeched away as she pointed at the drawings on the man's body, waving excitedly at the swirls and patterns as she nattered on and on about their meaning. She had obviously found a whole trove of thoughts on the subject and was eager to share!
Broom listened attentively for a few minutes before saying anything. "Us says all this stuff is dedicated to Nyarlathotep. There are a lot of thoughts about Nyarlathotep. Us is happy to let us know whatever we want on the topic, but We need to find some way that everyone can understand Us so that We don't have to keep repeating everything."
Broom was pensive for a moment "Maybe We can get a little paper and ink and Us can write this all down. Oh! Maybe Us can use her tail like a quill!" Us' tail undulated happily as she expressed her interest in trying that out.
"As for where to next, there is also the strange lights in the cave that everyone thought was linked to the missing people. While we know where the people actually went, it is still something strange. But the Count's place sounds good too."
"What about that door?" Reine asked, as the group was heading back towards the stairs. "We wouldn't want to leave anyone else stuck down here, would we?"
Broom nodded in agreement. "We agree, we should make sure that nobody else is here." She paused for a moment "Did we find out how the fish people got in? Or why they attacked the garrison? Or who the mirror lady is. Were they just kidnapping people to eat? Oh, and what about what those people were talking about how they were pulled through a wall and ended up here? Did the fish people do that?" Broom looked perplexed.
Good point about the mirror lady. I still don't understand why she attacked me, I thought we were friends."
The door south from the wood storage also looked like a storage area. The many wooden shelves in this room were stacked with wooden crates, paper-wrapped packets, and small clay jars sealed with wax. Smoked trout and other dried fish hung from metal hooks fixed to the ceiling. A number of boxes and containers had been emptied and smashed, now laying in pieces on the floor along with discarded fish bones and other refuse.
The room looked like it had been half-heartedly ransacked, with only some of the food gone. Smoked fish, hard cheese, dried fruit, corn, oil, wine, vinegar, and other bottled or canned foodstuffs filled the untouched containers.
A small passageway led to the west into what looked like a musty cellar containing a dozen wooden kegs, several demijohns, and dozens of empty bottles standing on shelves along the wall.
Desdemona was about to step into the room when she was pulled back. Turning to see who had done so, she was horrified to find no one close enough to have done so. Which meant...
Swallowing hard, she stilled her mind, and sure enough, the darkness there spoke.
"I do believe that puddle there appears to be alive," she smiled, a bit too bright and cheerful.
"So it does," Reine said, and her eyes narrowed. "That might explain all of the food being left behind." She did not give voice to her thoughts about how helpful that food would have been on the island...
"What do you want to do about it?"
Broom looked about the mess disapprovingly, only partially aware of what the others were saying. "Sorry, what was that? The puddle? We don't have a mop but We could sop it up with some towels if you like."
"What puddle?"
"There's a puddle?"
"I don't believe this puddle would put up with being cleared away, Broom," Desdemona cautioned. She pointed, making it amply clear where the thing was.
"Do... do you or Us, perhaps, know anything of what it might be?" Horrible ideas of melted people came to mind, fools who had ventured in to gain knowledge they had no business knowing and been reduced to nothing but a puddle of eyes and teeth and mouths and eyes and-
Damn it. Damn it. Why couldn't she forget that terrible thing?
This wasn't one of those. Not an eye or a mouth in sight. See? It couldn't be.
Desdemona kept a healthy distance from it, and a wary eye on it, all the same.
Probably not a stone pudding, because those look like a large blob of slow-moving stone rather than a patch of wetness through which you can see stone.
Probably not a giant amoeba, since you can't spot the nucleus and other normally-visible pieces of those creatures' internal structure.
It could be a slithering tracker, but from what you remember those are much more aggressive than whatever this thing is. A slithering tracker probably would have already attacked you by now.
No, this is most likely a gray ooze, a nonsentient but still dangerous creature of acidic, mobile goo. More information well be provided based on the check result.
Broom stared at the puddle intently. She didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but she trusted her friends so she took them at their word about what they saw.
If it was a creature, what could it be? "Oh! We know!" she suddenly blurted out excitedly. Broom actually knew this one, she didn't have to send her mind out or even ask Us. Inside Broom recognized a distant kinship and something resembling ancestral memories surfaced.
Also, you have no reason at the moment to think it is an Id Ooze, but there's no real way to know the difference until it uses its special powers, and you know all about them, too.
"It isn't very fast, it usually just sits there until someone who doesn't see it walks onto it. But you need to be careful, it dissolves all kinds of stuff except stone. If you hit it with your weapon it will eat your weapon and if it gets onto you it will eat your armour and clothes off.
It just oozes around and cleans up anything that isn't stone. If that didn't include people it might not be a bad thing to have around in the right place
We could either leave it alone, or we could shoot it from far away if we had to. It should be easy to stay out of its reach if we are careful." Broom thought for a moment longer "Oh, and you can't freeze or burn it." she added as an afterthought.
Good. Let's give it space, so. We don't need to kill it, and we surely don't need it eating us.
Reine shook her head.
"There's a door in there. Could be people trapped on the other side. Any way to lure the thing out without it trying to eat us? Or go over it?"
"You are right Reine, We don't think it should be here anyway. The guards probably didn't keep it here so it must have been brought by the fishmen?" she asked quizzically.
"But that is strange too. Maybe they kept it in a jar? But then why let it loose, We don't think you can tame them and they aren't picky about what they ooze over. We should probably do something about it before someone gets hurt by it."
"Could we leave a trail of things it would like to eat from here to the room in which we found the body?" Reine looked at Broom. "Would that work? If we started the trail in there, obviously, and worked it back to here. As long as we stayed out of reach - on the stairs, for example - maybe it would follow the food into a place where it would at least be out of the way."
That's not a bad idea at all. It's worth trying anyway. So, do we use some of our rations to leave that path of crumbs, or would it prefer some fine rotten corpses bits?
"We still have to bury the corpse. I'm betting the spirit haunting it won't be any happier about being eaten by a puddle of slime than it was about being buried behind a wall. Broom? Do you know what it eats?"
"The grey ooze? Well, just about anything really, like wood or meat. While it does dissolve metal We aren't sure if it eats the metal or if that is just something that it does. We also aren't sure if it prefers alive stuff over dead stuff though."
Broom shrugged
"If we just want it to move somewhere else we could just start tossing food to it and see what happens. We could get Our helper hand to dangle stuff in front of it if we want to try that too."
"Let's keep our exposure to a minimum. There was wood and other organic stuff, and we have a bunch of bodies upstairs. Let's lay out a path of organic 'food' from the hole in the wall back to here. We can use your helper hand to drop the last few bits into place - we don't know how far away it can smell food or whatever - and then see if it'll follow the trail."
Broom nodded and began pulling out rations from her pack. She divided them up and placed them in little piles along the corridor, up the stairs and over to where the corpses of the fish people were.
Satisfied, she conjured up images of a dreamlike landscape in her mind and called upon her invisible helper friend. Sensing his arrival, she instructed the place where she guessed he was standing.
After the directions, she held out a small amount of food which was dutifully picked up by unseen hands and floated down to where the ooze resided. Once in position, the invisible helper held out the food and dangled it a few feet away from the protoplasmic puddle trying to entice it from one pile of food to the next with movement to try and attract the ooze's attention.
[ooc]
Place piles of food roughly 10-15' apart in a path to the other building. Then sending down an unseen servant to dangle the piles of food in the air to see if that gets the ooze moving.
Desdemona watched Broom work with fascination and approval. Now this was an interesting experiment!