Stefani grits her teeth in pain as her muscles clinch and spasm from the the current running through her body. She shifts her aim to the device and fires.
Shabad advances into the room, keeping her distance from the young doctor construction, so she can try to disrupt the shadow stuff supporting the floating medical machine. She projects her mind into the realm of shadow and tries to disable to threat.
Seeing Shabad move in to deal with the floating machine, Recorva will continue to focus her attention on the doctor herself. She fires two rapid shots in her direction.
Feeling his systems beginning to seize up due to the influence of the magical energy the doctor just put on him, Rain will still attempt to engage her in combat. Engaging his combat routines, he attempts to swing at her twice with his hammer.
Shabad successfully shuts down the surging device. Stefani manages to land two hits on the doctor.
The doctor turns her baleful gaze on Stefani and casts a spell, attempting to rewire the soldier's flesh!
Taking a cue from Stefani, Shabad begins to fabricate a more powerful version of her weapon, a decimator disintegrator rifle.
A strangled cry from the soldier indicates that the spell is taking hold of her and twisting her insides.
In spite of the pain she continues to fire her weapon.
Despite her pain, Stefani shoots the doctor three more times, disintegrating her into a pile of shadowstuff. With her defeat, time seems to return to normal in the room. The low rumble resolves itself to be a massive explosion and all the floating debris crashes to the ground. It then becomes eerily quiet here.
Though the room is in shambles, you can find a few working pieces of equipment with a thorough search. Tucked away in a partially burned cabinet are a flash shield generator and a pair of synaptic link headbands.
Shabad looks at the generator and headbands. "I'd suggest these headbands go to Stefani, Damonkayo, and Recorva to divy as you choose. It is supposed to help you coordinate your actions. I could handle the generator if I see a need to give someone cover, or perhaps Recorva could use it to give Rain a shield."
"Does anyone need a rest or healing? I have figured out how to cast a mystic cure spell and I've got the medkit as usual. Then let's keep moving."
"Give me just a moment," Stefani says with a grimace as the spell upon her continues to change her insides.
The room looks like an operating theater, though some kind of biological life has infected the walls and floor, causing strange growths of flesh, skin, and organs. The room is brightly lit with overhead lights that flood the place with sterile, white illumination, though the room smells of rot and disease. A table on the north side of the room appears to be caked with layers of blood. A door exits to the north.
A strange, misshapen robot lies on the table. It resembles a sphere with three arms ending in surgical scalpels and lasers. It is slathred with dried blood and bits of flesh, and misshapen teeth have been installed in its ports, giving it the semblance of an unnerving grin. It appears to be inactive.
Shabad keeps her distance from the machine, studying it with her aura goggles. She activates the special ability of the goggles, allowing her to use them to grant her arcane sight for 8 minutes.
She also tries to see if she can spot anything distinctive about the construct.
"I'm inclined to just blast the thing from a distance. Nothing in this place seems to deserve mercy."
The robot doesn't seem to have any spellcasting abilities. It appears to be a highly modified surgical drone. Shabad guesses that it likely has the ability to deliver anesthesia, which can sicken, fatigue, or even render living creatures unconscious.
With her arcane sight, she can see two magical auras in a plastic crate under one of the surgical tables. They appear to be mk III serums of healing.
Shabad shares her intel with the team and burns a 3rd level spell slot to fabricate an Elite Plasma Bolter, a massive longarm that looks even larger in the petite doctor's arms.
"Stefani, I know you're going to hate this, but on my mark, fan out and blast the hell out of this machine. Keep your distance, as it has some kind of anesthetic it will try to use on us."
As suspected, the surgical robot is not quite as inactive as it appears to be. As you level your weapons at it, its engine flares to life and it lifts off the trable, brandishing its surgical tools!
The soldier chuckles darkly. "I thought you'd never ask," she says as she moves to the side and steadies her weapon to fire.
Shabad aims her big gun and fires. A white hot ball of charge belches from the gun and flies at the deranged machine. Then Shabad steps to the side so it will have to advanced to target her with its weapons.
(range: 60 ft.)
While the magic that allows her to fabricate such weapons primes her mind with how to use the weapon, aimed high, expecting a slow moving bolt instead of the fast straight discharge.
Shabad's shot comes up short, but Stefani lands a good hit. Since the soldier was kind enough to move closer to the drone, it sprays her with a blast of anesthetic liquid!
Shabad moves back to where she has a clear shot at the medical monstrosity. Because it is such a perversion of the whole medical profession to which she has dedicated her life, she feels a particularly intense revulsion at a machine designed to heal attempting to kill. She levels her new toy and this time aims true. Her bolt of plasma damages the construct and causes it to start leaking hydraulic fluid.
(range: 60 ft.)
Critical: Wound
, gains the bleeding condition
"This whole place just keeps getting worse and worse." Recorva will level her rifle at it. As she lets some excess power build up in the shot, she says "I'll see about trying to limit its ability to act once Rain is next to it. For now though..."
Shifting into a combat stance, Rain will scuttle forwards on his four legs in order to get into melee range with this large, warped piece of medical technology. Hammer activating as he moves, he will bring it around in a powerful side-swipe at the other machine.
Stefani gags as the chemical hits her, but continues to unload on the bot.
Tapping into some innate fury, Shabad and Recorva both land critical hits on the drone while Rain bashes it with his hammer. Stefani blasts it twice more, and it falls to the ground, melting away into slag. The fleshy material covering the room deteriorates rapidly, the biological matter sloughing off into disgusting piles of slimy goo.
Searching the room, you find a cache of nanite hypopens (three white and two green) and two mk III serums of healing in a plastic crate under one of the surgical tables.
Shabad goes up to the defunct machine and sends another bolt of plasma into it, just for the satisfaction of it. Once the shards of technology cooled enough, she salvaged enough to serve as her next weapon fabrication.
"How are you doing Stefani? Need a moment?"
When the crate under the table reveals the hypopens and serums of healing, she smiles and shows the items to the others in the room.
"White hypopens can remove disease, parasitic infestations, poisons, and even magical curses. Green is even more powerful and can restore strength and other damage to your system. These serums, very potent. I hope we won't need them, but ..." She crosses her fingers and places the medical supplies into her medkit.
While her medkit is open, she comes across the serums of enhancement discovered some time back. Sensing the final confrontation with Dr. Gragant is nigh, she downs both, one to help her with tasks involving computers, engineering, and science, the other with mysticism and life science.
She packs away her kit and waits by the next door for everyone to join her in moving on.
Stefani leans against the table with both hands as she lets the effects of the drug slowly pass. "I'll ... I'll be ok in a moment," she says, taking deep breaths. Once her stomach finally settles she takes firm grip on her disintegrator and power-cycles it. Once it whines up she gives the doctor a nod.
"Let's do this," she says in a firm voice.
A massive, slow-spinning fan occupies most of the floor in this stark chamber. It creates a gentle draft here on which float the smell of fresh blood, a few wisps of gray smoke, and the faint, distant screams of unknown creatures. The fan is surrounded by four bulbous devices made of glass, metal, and plastic. The machines glow strangely from within, shifting from one end of the color spectrum to the other.
The laboratory complex seemingly dead-ends here in at the top of a dark ventilation shaft. At a glance, the shaft seems bottomless. The fan blades move slowly and are easy to dodge, though they make lowering a rope down the shaft impossible.
There is a 10-foot-diameter hatch in the northeast corner of the room. This hatch opens onto a smooth, dark tube that leads down into the darkness...
Shabad enters the room with her semi-auto pistol drawn. She pokes at the glass portion of one of the devices around the fan. She strikes a fragile point with the butt of her pistol and it shatters to reveal ..., not much at all.
"These don't do anything. They're just for show," she says.
Shabad retrieves a spell gem and uses it to cast See Invisibility on herself.
She shines her miniature sun lamp down each shaft to see if it can illuminate the bottom or reveal anything within the top 60 feet.
"I can fly for a few minutes. Damon has a force pack and Recorva has her wings. I'll cast a second flight spell on Stefani. Recorva, can you carry Rain? If not, I can fabricate a force pack for him. We can fly down the main shaft first and return if it leads nowhere useful."
"No need for a spell on me," Stefani says, gesturing to ports on the back of her armor. She readies her weapon and approaches the edge of the shaft. Once the others are ready, she steps off the edge.
"Recorva, how do you propose to get Rain down with us? Can he climb down or maybe we could all support him with some ropes. I could fabricate something like an armor jet pack if it could be attached to him. Or I could disassemble this fan so we could rig up a rappeler."
When the necessary work is done to allow Rain to fly or descend, Shabad coordinates everyone heading down the main shaft in unison.
Fortunately, Rain is designed with climbing in mind, and so the drone clabmers down the side of the shaft as the rest of you fly down to the bottom.
Beneath the ventilation shaft, you find yourselves in a bunch of twisting tunnels in the stone of the asteroid. These tunnels are similar to the ones you explored beneath New Elysium, but close inspection reveals tiny striations in the rock that resemble lengths of chain. Though the passageways are illuminated by dim light, you constantly see menacing shadows just around the next corner that disappear as you approach.
You traverse the tunnels for several minutes until finally, you emerge into a large area. This large, square space has twenty-foot-high ceilings, and the walls are tiled with five-foot-wide square steel panels. Several glass cylinders line the walls in regular intervals, each filled with a dark fluid in which floats unmoving forms that defy classification, only parts of the contents visible at a time as they bob gently within.
The center of the room holds a thirty-foot-wide pool of thick, opaque liquid. A totemic obelisk rises from a small square island in the center of the pool, a disquieting structure of living flesh and machine parts wired together. Skinned faces are stretched over monitors, their lips moving without making a sound. Limbs reach out from tangles of cables, and whole dismembered torsos hang twitching from transmitters.
Dr. Gragant, wearing a white lab coat with dark leather armor underneath, stands on the eastern side of the pool. She idly holds a dagger in her left hand while examining the readings on her computer screens.
The doctor looks up. "At last, you’re here," she calls out. Her voice conveys a cold but human callousness with hint of a machinelike tone underneath it. "You’ve made a mess of my research project, but then again, the signal tends to incite violence at first. If you live with it long enough and accept the changes, that’s when your new body can show you what it’s capable of. I can help you make that leap—to become immune to pain like I am. You’ve suffered so much already. Let me free you, and together we can transmit the signal across the galaxy. What can be more philanthropic than to free all worlds from the tyranny of pain itself?"
Shabad shakes her head. "As there will be no convincing that you are wrong, that you are attempting a tragic insane solution to a problem that doesn't need to be solved, I'll quote a poem you keep bringing me back to. Then let the battle begin.
"pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing, itself hiding one)
life’s only and true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin"
Shabad rises in flight as she says this, attaining a vantage point from which she could make ranged attacks without objects in between. She is ready to cast a spell if Dr. Gregant makes any attacks.
Dr. Gragant sighs. "So be it. I will show you pain beyond imagining!"
As she shouts, the water churns as three strange creatures emerge. The scaly beasts have no heads, but a fifth, clawed limb emerges where a tail might be, and their backs have lengths of chain running down them!
"No time to be waxing poetic, Doc," Stefani says as she opens fire on Dr. Gregant.
"I'm going dark. Fly above these turkeys and focus on the doctor, so-called." With that Shabad vanishes and flies to a different location.
"This shouldn't take too long." That said, Recorva will take comparatively careful aim at Doctor Gragant. Before she fires though, she forces excess power to build up in the weapon before firing.
Rain will scuttle forwards towards one of the three creatures that have emerged from the strange fluid filling the center of the room. Maneuvering to keep out of the fluid himself, he gets to a position where he is able to attack one of them. As his hammer arcs with electricity, he brings it swinging down onto it.
Damon steps up to keep the strange beasts occupied, though he misses with his chains. Shabad disappears from sight and flies across the room. Stefani and Recorva shoot Dr. Gragant, the latter scoring a critical hit despite the doctor's partial insubstantiality. Gragant screams in a mixture of pain and ecstasy. Rain lands a heavy blow on one of the monsters.
Dr. Gragant casts a powerful spell, trying to overwhelm Damon's mind and transform him into an unwilling guardian.
The vesk's expression goes slack as the doctor suppresses his will!
The hound Rain struck claws back at him while the other two bound past Damon. One claws at Stefani, while hte other lashes out with the length of chain that makes up its spine, trying to entangle Recorva!
Stefani struggles futilely within the chains, but continues to fire at the ecstatic doctor.
Recorva manages to just avoid getting tangled up in the chains that the nearest hound tries to entangle her with. Not wanting to get into a drawn-out melee brawl, she quickly activates her personal energy shield around herself. Once it is fully active, she launches herself straight up into the air in order to hopefully get out of reach of both the claws and chains of the hound-like creatures below.
His armor plating protecting him from some damage from the claws of the creature that he is engaged in combat with, Rain will engage his improved reactor in order to have a short burst of excess power available. Using this, he takes two quick swings at the hound that he attacked before, hoping that one of them will connect.
Shabad remains where she is and concentrates on fabricating a special grenade to try to contain Damon without hurting him (much).
Stefani scores another hit on the doctor, while Rain batters the hound attacking him. Damon moves unwillingly towards Dr. Gragant, interposing himself to provide cover to the doctor. Recorva activates her shield while Shabad fabricates a containment grenade.
The hounds claw at Rain and Stefani. Rain takes two brutal hits, the creature's claws tearing through his armor plating, while Stefani is hit once.
Seemingly taking a page out of Shabad's book, Dr. Gragant casts a spell, attempting to trap Stefani in a sphere of force!
Stefani triggers her armor's jets to avoid the entrapping spell, rising up into the air and continuing to fire at the doctor.
Remaining flying up in the air above the battle below, Recorva will aim another shot at the doctor. Similarly to before, she forces excess energy to build up in the shot before firing.
As the claws of the hound-creatures tear into his body, Rain shifts his combat strategy. He shifts to a more defensive stance, wanting to keep the various hounds down on the floor occupied for as long as possible in order to allow the others to target the main threat.
After the special grenade forms in Shabad's hand, she flies until she is within 20 feet of Damon and lobs it at him.
Damon is trapped within the containment grenade's force bubble, preventing him from protecting Dr. Gragant. Stefani jets up into the air while firing at the bad doctor, striking her once. Recorva hits her as well, and she is now quite badly wounded. Rain misses with his swing.
Rain's opponent claws at him, the second attack striking him and leaving him too badly damaged to continue operating! Meanwhile, the other two hounds try to entangle Recorva and Stefani with their chains.
Dr. Gragant attempts to wound Stefani with a mind thrust!