(Round 1- Banny)
"Big-- an' ugly," Banny says, blinking ahead, having expected more humanoid foes to the extent she expected anything. "I only see three of 'em, but the tunnel has a branch off to th' right-- might be more of the buggers back there!"
She blinks again when Alicia's dagger punches right through the shell. "What in all hells..."
No time to wonder, though-- she glares at the strange beetle, and for one split second, she envisions punching it hard enough to destroy the carapace as well. The chunks of barricade fall from her hands as she focuses.
Taking a step forward, Banny tries to make a reality of what she'd just envisioned.
"Ain't exactly much room to back up like you said, priest-- sorry about that!" she says as she strikes.
Banny steps forward and punches through the beetle's upper shell, her fist clearly having more impact than Ali's thrown dagger.
The intact beetle behind it scuttles forward, leaving no doubt what was making the dry rustling sound Vhailor heard. It attempts to take a nip out of Banny's living flesh but is foiled by the dwarf's armor
Carbonel hunches down defensively on Vhailor's shoulders.
The lead beetle snaps at Banny, but its mandibles close only on empty air.
Crunch!
Banny's fist punches an even larger hole in the carapace of the second beetle, but it nips at her nonetheless.
Happily isolated from the danger at the rear of the group Vhailor focuses on keeping the aloft torch steady and flickering to provide best opportunity for his companions to act to a swift conclusion.
The third beetle unfolds its brittle wings and takes off, climbing clumsily up toward the stone ceiling as it circles toward the action. Hovering above its fellow, it snaps at Banny's head, its mandibles scraping over her face.
Marikel frowns and steps forward behind Banny.
"I don't think those things are alive. Iomedae preserve us."
In response to his prayer, a pulse of positive energy bursts forth from Marikel and sweeps over the creatures.
Banny grunts as the mandibles tear into her flesh, but she doesn't seem in any very grave pain... yet.
Marikel presents his holy symbol, and a wave of divine power breaks over the beetles. Their exoskeletons crackle as they are weakened by the positive energy assault, and the carapace of the beetle between Marikel and Banny simply bursts into a cloud of dust. The flying beetle is knocked out of the air by the pulse and lands, scrabbling, atop the beetle below.
Banny inhales at the wrong second as Marikel's holy energy destroys a beetle. She sputters, hacking and coughing, on the dry, gritty, chitinous dust.
"Not many things can wander about with nothing inside," Marikel remarks with grim satisfaction as he waves the dust away.
Alicia, both Banny and Marikel blocking her way to the remaining beetles, waits for a clearer shot.
Still hacking and spitting out dust, Banny drives her knee up into the under-carapace of one of the beetles, reflexively.
Banny's knee strikes the underside of the beetle and just keeps going as the exoskeleton explodes into another cloud of dust.
Banny spits out the last of the grit, feeling better.
Apart from a small squeak of excitement as Banny powder puffs another of the empty beetles, Vhailor keeps to the task of watching and presenting the torch to the best of his ability.
Unfazed by the fact that it's surrounded by a cloud of its fellow, the last remaining beetle tries for another taste of dwarf but finds Banny's torso better armored than her face.
"Banny, I can't reach it."
Marikel looks for a chance to step forward and strike.
Ali dives past her comrades and the beetle, coming up out of her roll to stab it from behind ().
Ali makes a dash to get past the exoskeleton, but its necromantically-animated mandibles are too fast for her, snagging her arm and coming away bloody. Squeezed uncomfortably between Banny, the beetle, and the wall of the tunnel, she nevertheless stabs at the cracking carapace. Just as it seems her rapier will slide harmlessly off the beetle's shell, its tip catches on a crack formed by Marikel's positive energy pulse. The shell cracks further, craters, then bursts into another cloud of dust as the exoskeleton is destroyed.
For Marikel, determination turns to surprise turns to worry as Alicia dives past and destroys their final foe.
"Miss Alicia! Are you alright? Here, let me."
Marikel lowers his head and a pulse of warmth covers Banny and Alicia, soothing their wounds.
When Marikel raises his head, his look of concern is gone, replaced by anger.
"What was that!?! I told you to stay back. Banny and I had everything under control. What if there had been more things in here? What if that thing had more powerful necromancy on it? I'm meant to be looking after you. I should have made you stay with Ruby!"
Banny's brows also shoot up to near her hairline at Alicia's attempt to not just join the fight, but get to the far side of it-- "Hey, watch out--"
Further words are lost to another round of coughing; by the time Banny can speak again, Marikel's doin' a fine job with the scolding, she supposes. Banny frowns a little to herself, torn between two thoughts on the matter: the way she reckons it based on that bit in the inn, Alicia does seem to have a streak of reckless to her that could get her hurt... on the other hand, she's got her knife, and she's not brand-new to it the way Ruby is, neither. Iomedans can't go motherin' folk forever...
Unable to decide whether she wants to join in on the ragging or argue against it, Banny stays silent, instead crouching to look at the ground. She sifts through the gritty dust that is the remains of their fight, frowning.
Banny grunts as Marikel's healing washes over her, and gives the priest a little nod of thanks. Well, Iomedae's good for somethin' anyhow.
"After our fightin', can't imagine there's any point in tryin' to sneak quiet," she says. "Tunnel ends in rocks ahead, but there's that branch off I mentioned. Suggest we go see what's behind it... these creatures sure weren't natural."
Alicia squints into the darkness ahead of them, letting Marikel's words wash over her in the same manner as his healing power does. She grunts in response to one of them, though it's unclear which. "Mmn."
Marikel seems about to say something else, but his glare slides off Alicia to the dusty remains of the beetles.
"There's dark magic at play here. I don't know what Kerst stumbled on, but it cost him his life. We must all tread carefully."
Marikel makes his way in to the beetle area and looks around carefully.
All that is left of the beetles is a silica-like dust which glitters on the stone of the tunnel as Vhailor brings the torch forward so the humans can see more distinctly.
Directly ahead, where the tunnel once bored deeper into Bloodmarch Hill, it is collapsed in a pile of rubble. A separate tunnel turns sharply to the right and meanders back toward the outside for about fifteen or twenty feet before coming to an abrupt end, as if the miners had simply stopped, carried away their tools, and never come back.
Banny does not gather any fragments of carapace, for there is nothing to gather...
She brushes off the dust and trudges ahead, eyes piercing the gloom. When she gets to the dead end, she stops in her tracks, confused.
"Now why the hell would you go to all this trouble then just..."
She starts looking around, thick fingers probing at the earth-and-rock-wall for anything she's missing. She checks for any areas that seem hollow, and eyes the ceiling in particular, in case of obscured trap-doors.
...You can take the dwarf out of the caves, but you can't take the cave out of the dwarf? Something?
Banny searches the truncated passage, looking for anything unnatural in the stone, but finds nothing unusual. The work in this tunnel simply stopped. Perhaps due to the collapse in the larger cavern? But who put up the barricade, and why?
"There's dark magic at play here."
You don't know much about magic, but perhaps whatever animates undead beetles might also spawn ghost rats?
"There's got to be another way out of here!" Marikel's voice is slightly higher than usual.
"What about the other areas?" he demands.
Banny's hands drop back to her side, a little defeat in the gesture. "...there's no secret way outta this section, I'd swear to it," she says.
"That tub of water accounts for why those steps were wet... though I don't grasp how someone gets a gods-damned tub up or down the cliff face and into this cave without nearly killin yourself," she says, rubbing at her forehead. "I mean, the way we came up was narrow enough-- imagine tryin' that with a big ol' tub on your back! Or even worse, down from the ledges above... no. There's got to be some... hidden door, or somethin'. Not that it explains why you'd go to so much trouble for a tub anyway. Most miners I've met don't care about baths when they're underground."
Banny scowls to herself, rubs at her face, and starts trudging back through the tunnel, heading for the tub room. "And water," she mutters to herself. "You gonna haul all that water in, just to fill a tub...?"
Ali mutters darkly, "I wonder where the ghost rats are...?"
"Exactly." Marikel seizes on Banny's musings.
"I don't know if that was a bath with that... thing in it. But there must be an easier way to get that tub and that water in here."
Marikel heads to the deepest part of the cave and starts scrabbling at the rock.
Vhailor and his feline companion follow on in the wake of the others. Still out of their depth in matters of earth and haulage, they restrict their input to the occasional nod and mused hum.
Beckoning to Vhailor to accompany him with the torch, Marikel returns to the room with the fresh remains of the campfire. Stepping over the blood stain on the rock once more, he heads to the back of the cave, past the bedroll and backpack Alicia pawed through, and looks for any hidden doors or tunnels. What he finds instead are signs of recent mining activity: not any single tunnel but several places where a pick-axe has been applied, spaced out fairly evenly along the base of the southeastern wall.
Banny, meanwhile, not needing the torch to see, paces out the distance along the once-barricaded tunnel. By her reckoning, the cave-in is nearly as deep as the back of the campfire room, though somewhat lower. When Marikel points out the marks along the wall, it occurs to her that someone may be trying to find a way in around the cave-in to the other side of the collapsed portion of the mine, testing the penetrability of the hill in various places. Due to the sharp bend in the side tunnel behind the barricade, there's likely no more than a dozen feet of earth and rock separating the campfire room from the collapsed tunnel.
Another possibility, if the prospector isn't a patient miner, is that he intended to fill the niches he scraped out with blasting powder and try to take the whole wall down that way.
Banny still scratches her head over this mystery as she walks, unhappy. Yeah, you could haul a tub up, she supposes. Seems like it'd be real visible, though, on the cliff face, the sorta thing that folk would talk about, laugh over, some miner hauling his tub up into a rock pit... she mulls this over to herself.
Marikel calls before she's looked thoroughly around the tub room. She hurries to see the marks, rubbing at her jaw. "Could be someone' hunting tunnels already there-- tryin' to find a way further in. See, if that collapsed bit keeps going, it would prolly be back of this side so you could go through from here... if you got through, say, a dozen feet of rock..."
The dwarf chews on one ragged thumbnail. "Or he might plan to load up all these niches with powder, blow it wide. Kinda risky if you ax me, with one cave-in already hereabouts."
Banny uses her axe to poke at the stinking, rotting marmot haunch, then at the little pile of small bones now sitting in the mud.
She looks at the tub, and looks at it, then runs her fingers over the gouged marks on the edges. When she speaks, it's loud enough to call to the others, if they haven't joined her in the room already.
"I think..." she hesitates, then continues, "I think somethin' stays in here that needs wet. Some sorta... creature. With claws. Look at edge of the tub. Something that they had to keep it wet, and there ain't much water up here on the hill short of the spring itself... somethin' unnatural, that likes its meat raw an' maybe goes.. hunting at nights, or... or something. Maybe something that ain't natural the way those beetles weren't."
She shivers a little, then looks around the tub room, her booted feet nearly slipping in the foul mud that coats the floor at this point. She checks the walls, taps them with her fingers and the butt of her axe, as she had the other room.
Banny can tell that the bones she finds, both in the tub and buried in the mud on the floor, are those of small mammals: marmots, badgers, maybe a young coyote. It seems that last night's marmot haunch wasn't the first meal consumed in the cave. Somewhat to her relief, there's nothing larger or more sentient represented in the collection of bones.
Her other investigations are less satisfactory, however; as closely as she examines the cavern walls, she can't find anything that suggests that this is anything other than an unsuccessful search for ore, abandoned when nothing of value was discovered or when another exploratory tunnel proved more promising.
Banny's skin still crawls a little at all the small bones. Something that likes its meat fresh-caught, that's for sure.
Shaking her head, she turns to the others. "It's worryin' as hell, but I dunno there's nothin' new here beyond what we already saw. Mayhap we better get topside and tell the Defender all about these tunnels... and about Kerst's knife, and the blood, and all the rest of it."
Alicia's torch has burned itself out by the time Banny completes her inspection of the tub room, but the dwarf has no need for firelight anyway. When she is done, the party retraces their steps back out into the sunlight and stand blinking for a moment to let their eyes adjust to the brightness. The sun has moved across the sky and now illuminates the first few feet of the tunnel that they found in darkness; any remnant of the wet footprints near the entrance has now evaporated.
Marikel realizes, with a sinking feeling, that they're going to have to go back down the same narrow, winding path that they came up.
Banny digs out a stub of chalk from her cluttered pack, and as they begin to make their way back, she chalks little arrows onto the rock as they go, down just a few inches off ground level-- in the hopes that, if the people using that cave come back in the meantime, they won't notice the little marks and scuff them away.
Alicia follows along back out of the tunnel, then takes a position slightly ahead of everyone else to stealthily scout ahead, in case they were followed.
Alicia takes the lead, retracing her steps down the cliffside; Banny follows, marking each intersection so they can find their way back to the correct cave, now that Kerst's hopeknife is no longer distinguishing the entrance; and Vhailor and Marikel follow at a slower pace, one due to his short legs, the other to his extreme caution.
Their return to ground-level is quicker than their ascent, as there are fewer wrong turnings and dead ends: the surface of Golarion comprises a larger target than a short blade gleaming in the sun. Still, by the time they arrive at the foot of the cliff, both the position of the sun and the acuity of their hunger tell them that the hour is something past noon, and they have still to re-circle the hill to the town gate.
Knuckles white, Marikel breathes a loud sigh at the news they've reached the ground. It almost looked for a while like he wouldn't step off the path, his face buried in the rock, eyes squeezed shut, refusing to turn from the cliff to which he had clung.
He briskly walks away from the cliff, and tries to avoid turning back towards it. He doesn't look up.
"The water," Marikel says eventually, between deep breaths. "If that came from the Hopespring, maybe Silvermane knows something. And we might check out the burned church on the way back. Maybe this has something to do those rumours of lights."
Banny looks quizzical at Marikel's suggestion that Silvermane might know who exactly drew water out from the spring, but she shrugs. It's not like she has a better idea as to how to track down their... 'bather.'
"Suits me. Anybody doin' damned deeds might hide out in the church anyhow. Dunno why we let that hulk stand, it just gives cover for orcs when they come callin'..."
Banny scratches at the scar tissue on her knuckles as she goes, pleased to be out in the sunlight and open air again, with room to breathe on either side of her.
Ali grunts and makes for the ruined church, lips pressed into a thin line as she recalls a previous trip there. "It's haunted," she says matter-of-factly, though she doesn't alter her course.
Marikel snorts at Alicia's statement.
"It wasn't a haunt that killed Kerst. Prospectors probably stop by there every now and then. And maybe Kerst's killer."
Marikel sets course for the ruins.
"That barricaded tunnel back there was more haunted than the burned church," he declares grimly.
The party circles beneath the promontory behind the Longhouse, and the ruins of the church come into view. Huddled in the lee of a huge boulder just to its east, the building looks ridiculously small; at one point, there was presumably a steeple, but it collapsed in one of the fires along with most of the roof on the western side. The entire northwestern corner of the church has crumbled and stands open as you approach; just past the gaping hole in the outer walls, the double doors that are the official entrance sit incongruously closed some three feet off the ground, the stairs and porch that once led to them long collapsed.
Alicia glares over her shoulder at Marikel as she walks. "I've seen the ghosts in the old ruins. There were no ghosts in those tunnels; but I know the Plague House is." She leads the way through the porch and to the first set of doors inside, then gestures for Marikel to lead the way with a flourish.