Ordyt confirms Bel's earlier assertion that the tablet is made of horacalcum and possesses space-time warping properties. He doesn't get any further insights regarding the mummy and its accouterments. When he goes to investigate the eastern door out of the room, he comes to much the same conclusion as Mari did earlier - there doesn't appear to be a way to open it.
Ordyt swallows audibly. "Well...I guess I rig a harness to carry it on my back...if you really think it'll help..." He clearly doesn't think so and hopes no one else does. "We should decide now though, I don't like leaving Atra and her people alone for this long."
”With the destroyed robots here and unknown items likely already taken from the mummy’s four destroyed appendages, I expect that our enemies have already been here and acquired what they wished. My counsel is that we take detailed video and deep scans of the mummy, then leave it seated here. I am torn on whether we should physically disturb the mummy by taking its items, but its guardians are destroyed and it has already been damaged, and the items could prove of great use for research at the DCI,” says Flint.
Turning to Ordyt, he adds, ”Whether we take the mummy’s items or not, we should salvage the useful material out of the destroyed robots and return the way we came. As long as there is an open path before us, I want to try and avoid damaging this facility in case this “Core” needs to decide which of the invaders to trust when we finally reach it.”
"Taking items we need for our mission is one thing," Mari says, her tone reproachful. "Stealing a corpse from its resting place is another. If we find that we need it after all, we can come back."
"Okay, let us leave the mummy where it is and scavenge what we can from the destroyed robots. Shall we take the polyfluid rod and the tablet for further study?" Flint asks, looking at Mari and Belmarniss for reactions.
"Belmarniss, Mari, any last thoughts before we move on?" Flint asks.
Assuming not, Flint gathers the cast models of the robots in the shiny metal, then carefully removes the items of interest from the hands of the mummy for later study--the metallic flower, the polyfluid rod, and the strange tablet.
Assuming nothing strange happens in reaction, he moves back towards the strange liquidlike wall, looking towards Ordyt for a reaction to his earlier suggestion.
"Not sure why we need them now, captain. That tablet in particular creeps me out. I say leave it until we've explored a bit more." Ordyt squares his shoulders and sighs before pushes back through the squishy wall.
When Flint asks for any other objections, Mari shakes her head and follows through the wall back to the other chamber.
Leaving only the tablet behind, Flint picks up the rest of the small robot models, the rod, and the flower, and heads back toward the soft wall segment. One by one, you head on through, pushing through the slightly warm, slightly spongy matter. Mari, in the rear, suddenly gets the sensation that she's being watched the moment she's the only one remaining in the room. She turns...
... but everything seems normal behind her. She follows after the rest of the team.
----
Once back through the wall, you continue into the the chamber to the east. Here, four rectangular slabs of metal line the northern wall, each slightly angled and with a smooth, vaguely humanoid-shaped indentation big enough to hold a giant. A complex network of shallow channels runs along the inside of each cavity. Tiny, thin metallic filaments run through the channels and connect to the base of the metal slabs.
From this chamber, two flat inset planes of metal indicate where doors lead to the south. Both doors don't have an obvious method of opening them.
”If Noma’s idea of augmentation is what happened to that unfortunate ifrit, I think I’ll pass,” says Flint.
Looking around, Flint says, ”If we can’t find a way to open these doors, Ordyt, we will need to start breaching the doors the hard way. Do you have an idea which way you want to go first?”
"I'm not the one with the cool breaching gun," Ordyt answers his captain, which just a tiny hint of envy. His attention is immediately pulled by Bel's decision to try out the device.
"Um...well, you're literally the tech wizard, not me, so I won't gainsay you but I really hope we don't end up with a shiny robot version of you." Ordyt shrugs off several of his weapons and sets them down, ready to bodily drag the drow to safety if need be. "Does it activate automatically?"
When Mari looked over her shoulder as she was leaving, she did notice something off. The mummy seems to have shifted just slightly, its arms extended just a little toward the corrupted wall and the party currently making their way through it. As she watches, the slight straining ceases and the mummy falls back into its previous serene position.
It does not stir again.
----
When Bel rests upon the metal slab, the traces along its shallow channels begin to glow a dim blue.
As you lie there and enjoy the experience, you receive brief flashes of images and accompanying tactile sensations.
A group of six ifrits and a larger salamander, looking well armed and definitely not robotic, stand in this very chamber. One leans forward and seems about to rest upon one of the slabs.
Ifrits with their arms full of strange technological objects, while other ifrits gun down Noma's robots.
A small group of speaker robots, greeting ifrits disembarking from a ship.
You also realize, knowing the fact somehow despite having never heard it, that Noma's robotic lifeforms are known as Protocites.
---
You get the sense that if you stay upon the slab, it'll not only have a further restorative effect, but will impart more of these memory fragments.
Despite Bel falling asleep in rather short order, the slab doesn't seem to be up to anything untoward. As you watch, her remaining minor wounds disappear and she takes on a healthy glow (or whatever a healthy glow would be like for a drow :>). She does, however, remaining sleeping for quite a long time, almost half an hour, while the slab works its techno-magical effects.
---
Second, your dreams are filled with more images, more sensations. They seem more like memories rising to the surface than anything else. As if you were in these places and saw these things first-hand. There are no further ifrits, but there are other memories that show themselves.
A sensation of industrious contentment. Large and complex patterns form themselves and resolve, one after another. The data grows ever more complex, ever more enlightening, despite failures in the source code. Directive 1 continues.
A cylindrical chamber. You feel it nearby. Within the chamber, hundreds of thousands of points of light arrayed in geometric precision. The source code. A moment of confusion, of wrongness. One point of light dies.
An eight armed visitor floats within the Core, its yellow robes rippling despite the lack of wind. It clutches three objects, the tablet in its lowest arms. The words it speaks are inscrutable cacophonies. It arrives at the source code and raises its arms. A sensation - change washing over the source code. A new directive.
The bubble opens. Beyond lies . You cannot observe . reaches out and deposits a being. A visitor in yellow robes. The bubble closes behind the first visitor to Noma.
As Bel wakes, the slab she was on grows dark.
"How are you feeling?" Ordyt asks carefully, having barely glanced away during the past hour for fear of nanites or oozes or any number of other horrors.
During the downtime while Belmarniss tests out the device, Flint looks on with concern, wondering aloud, "Mari, do you think that our mechanized ifrit could be revived by such a device? Can you tell what it is doing to Belmarniss?"
After the examination of the doors, he works on his datapad and looks at the map he has so far of the facility and the unopened doors. "Curious, would you say Sammad, that there are no more blown open doors. Do you think our adversaries turned back at this point, or perhaps found a less forceful way to open the doors from here forward?" asks Flint.
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Belmarniss stretches as she rises from the slab.
"I'm feeling...good. Better than good, in fact. Better than I've felt in a very, VERY long time!"
She looks at the others.
"I saw things...memories...Ordyt? I think your instincts about that mummy back there were right. When the person who became it arrived in Noma...they were the first visitor the city had ever had and its presence...changed Noma...changed something in the very code of the protocites. Protocites...now it's CLEAR they're related to the anacites!"
She looks at the other slabs.
"I think it healed my injuries too...if you did the same, you could see what I saw."
While Bel is relaying her experiences, she happens to wander close to the first door to the south. The door cycles smoothly open at her approach, then closes immediately as she gets further away. You get a brief glimpse into a room dimly lit with orange light before the door closes.
Mari shakes her head at the suggestion of submitting herself to the strange chair. "No thanks. I'm all for augmenting myself, clearly, but only when I'm in charge. If that thing can give you memories, it can take them, too."
She starts in surprise when the door opens, her breaching gun halfway to a ready position before she stops. She lowers it down after a few seconds. "Any votes for spooky door number three?"
”By all means, let us continue without breaking down the Core’s doors. I wonder why the others didn’t open at our approach like this one does,” suggests Flint, preparing to move into the next room once all are ready.
”Perhaps it is your recent attunement to the rejuvenation table that causes the door to recognize you,” he guesses, ”Do you want to test the doors we bypassed to see, Belmarniss?”
"Seems plausible that Bel has been, I don't know, attuned to this place." Ordyt forces a grin. "I still have a lot of questions and far too few answers, but for now I guess there's nothing to do except press on."
Flint will perform his own experiment, walking up towards the door to see if it opens for him like it did for Belmarniss.
Atra stands up from where she and the other two Brass Dragons had been resting in the ooze room. She looks Bel up and down a little skeptically "About time you got up. And no, I can't say I'm interested in getting filled with whatever energy it was pumping into you."
Flint and Bel briefly test the doors and find that as Flint suggested, the doors seem to respond to Bel. There's no response from any of them when any of the rest of you approach. When Bel gets near them, you see that the rest of the doors all appear to lead down long, unadorned 10-ft wide hallways.
You advance on into the first room that Bel opened. Atra and crew follow behind you, but don't join you in the room. This room is dominated by an enormous scale model of Noma. Atop a physical grid are numerous holographic representations of the various structures and experiments. Above the city is a holographic projection of its protective bubble, which is slowly pulsing a deep orange color. It's the light off the bubble that illuminates the room.
Mari spends some time examining the model, walking several circuits around it so she can see it from every angle. Something catches her eye, though, and she points it out to the others. "This is a real-time model, or close enough. It's got the Breath of Embers on there."
”Nice catch, Mari. Can you set it up to feed to your rig so we can keep tabs on the whole place? Or maybe leave a small camera behind to just give us a video feed?” asks Flint.
"I'll do my best," Mari says, setting aside the breaching gun in favor of her engineering kit.
"Influence it how? Like a command and control nodule?" Ordyt looks intrigued by this, inspecting the details of the holographic city. "Are the missing piece--or pieces--from the projector or within the hologram image itself? Since the Core can presumably access this device, could we use it to communicate with Noma's central AI?"
Sammad listens to his comrades, then glances at Atra and her crewmates, waving them over. "You lot are tech-savvy, right? Any insights as to how feasible these ideas are? Any advantage against Jalusann's killer is worth pursuing, in my opinion."
Mari finds a way to get into the electronic guts of the hologram model, where she notices that the internals are incredibly complex, well beyond her capabilities. There's no one clear data connection for her to tap and get Noma's real-time model data. The technology at play is just incredibly complex.
She does however feel confident that she could set up a short range feed between a camera and a datapad. .
Bel is able to confirm to Ordyt that the missing piece sat on the front face of the projector, though she doesn't know exactly what it was or what it looked like.
You open the door again to the slab room for Sammad to ask his question of Atra and the other Brass Dragons. They are in close conversation when you do, a conversation they drop immediately upon the door opening. Atra shrugs "Your people have just as much tech savvy as us. And, to be honest, we're starting to think this is all going down the wrong tube. Lot of dangerous alien weird things - not a whole lot of people that look like they were responsible for all the trouble back in the Burning Archipelago."
Hearing this, Ordyt moves to join Sammad in the doorway. "Yeah, this is all very weird and creepy, and I'm not sure how it connects to the Brass Dragons we're looking for. But we got the coordinates to this from them, and they sent a team here. The people who caused all that trouble want something from here--whatever it is, if we keep them from getting it that's a way to hurt them. Just...bear with us a little longer, please?"
Mari gives Atra an annoyed look. "But they were clearly here, looking for something. They may still be here, just deeper in than we've managed yet."
”Someone has been here before us, left behind an ifrit who was turned into a machine. destroyed some robots, blew a hole in a door, and partially dismantled this sensor grid. We are all just following the clues here, Atra. As Ordyt says, the only people we know of who were coming here are Commander Jalusann and her forces. Is there something else you have noticed that might lead you to believe they are not behind this intrusion?” asks Flint, backing up Ordyt.
"Right, the coordinates..." Atra and her two allies look somewhat encouraged by Ordyt and Flint's reassurances, but still cast nervous glances at the hallways and alien technology around the place. Suddenly Atra adds "Could have been this was a trap. A way to dispose of us? Like they did the Commander? Damn, that'd make a hell of a lot of sense."
Ordyt's impression of Atra is that she's out of her depth and getting worn down mentally. She might choose to flee if things get rough, but she doesn't seem to be considering it right now.
"Anything could be a trap, Atra, and you are right--this is all new territory for us. That is why we must stick together and stay alert, with our weapons close at hand. Let us explore the rest of this core carefully, looking for evidence of Jalusann's presence. Given her past actions, the information we find here might be vital to understanding the threat to the Archipelago's security. Of course, if we find her, then you are welcome to directly take your revenge--but I warn you, she is a difficult opponent," responds Flint.
Looking at his Datapad as they have mapped the core internals, Flint points to the "south" and says, "Belmarniss, if you wouldn't mind, let us check this room next."
Mari stacks up to the door indicated by Flint, ready to go.