Yasmeena listens in rapt attention to Aithaloessa's account of their plight, smirking ruefully at the details she omits. "After we escape from here, or at least the next time find somewhere safe to rest, I'll play you the song I've been working on that relates our adventures with a great deal more verbosity. If you are interested."
The corridor leads a short way left to a door and a longer way to the right the corridor opens up and leads to another door.
Taking her cue from the layout of the passage, Aith turns left first and listens at the door. If she doesn’t hear anything, she’ll continue to try her “sneak a peek before throwing the door wide open” strategy of navigation.
There is no noise. Inside this oddly shaped chamber is dominated at its center by a large stone statue of a crouching lion with dragon-like wings and a jackal’s head. A bloodstained stone cup nestles between its front paws. The face has been partially broken off, leaving a network of jagged cracks throughout the head and neck.
Yasmeena is nearly as paranoid as Aithaloessa, doing her best to check for traps and hazards as they blunder forward.
Since the ladies are checking well for traps Bylo follows them into the room to examine the status. "Odd thing. But why did they break the face off?"
The magic aura is only a lingering one that suggests the statue was once a powerful magic artifact that is now broken. With nothing else to see this seems to be a cubby for this broken gizmo. And a dead end for travelling in that direction.
“Hmm,” Aith muses, her curiosity piqued, as she steps into the room. “If it was magical once, I wonder what it was for? Another construct? After all, I think those fire dwarves we saw are the closest thing to ordinary mortals that we’ve met in this place so far. Given how unfriendly it is to get around, unageing guardians would be most convenient.”
She gives the sculpture another look from closer up, trying to identify if represents a real creature or just some fantasy, and, though she’s no healer, peers into the bloody cup on the off-chance that she can determine what sort of creature the blood might have come from.
With a shrug, she turns around and sets her attention back through the open door down the hall to the next room.
Aithaloessa finds that the statue looks much like a sphinx.
Walking back past the stairs and towards the next door, you find, that besides the room the corridor opens into in left direction, there is also another corridor forking to the right.
Haleen takes the lead and signs the others to be silent and stay back. She takes a peek around the corner.
Turnign back to her companions, she points with her thumb in the direction the corner turns and then holds up four fingers.
Not sure what the sign means, Bylo waits for Aith and Yasmeena to react and follows their lead.
Yasmeena nods at Haleen to signal her understanding, and she draws a wand and taps herself with it before returning it to her pouch.
With Yasmeena ready, Haleen feels heroic and decides to charge the enemies.
A wall composed of crudely shaped lumps of rough, black stone blocks the corridor ahead to the height of twenty feet. Beyond the wall looms an immese siege engine that looks like a ballista made of brass.
Using the magic of Bylo Haleen charges up an imaginary ramp to meet the lizard behind the ballista.
The lizard isn't as sturdy as the animated object and goes down immediately after two stabs.
With Neela still clinging to the carpet for dear life, Yasmeena flies around the corner and then up to a position where she can fire down on her foes. Once in place, she begins to sway like a charmed snake as she starts her battle dance.
Trying to master her fear, Neelah sings an inspiring ballad, quick-paced and jaunty, that stirs the blood and grants the speed of fire.
She then casts a spell, calling out a series of scorching epithets in Ignan with intent to demoralize all of the lizards who can hear her.
With the ladies charging forward Bylo moves ahead and activates his wand of divine favor.
The abstracted elven mage, predictably, manages to miss the significance of her friends' signals, and so is left blinking in the dust as the others surge ahead into the next room. Oh. So, "Four inmates," not, "Wait a minute?"
As she gets up to speed and tries to decide what she can do, Aith narrowly avoids getting distracted by the huge brazen ballista, the ballistic engineer in her far too eager to give the thing a try, if she can.
Yasmeena shoots one of the lizards, but only wounds it. Two of the lizards attack Haleen, as operating the ballista with her in the way is no option.
Bylo moves into the battle by Haleen. He isn't sure if they have a language but decides to try draconic.... "Hey! That's no way to treat a lady. Or do you just not recognize a lady without scales?" He activates Aura of Heroism and attacks.
Aith lets Neelah's tune carry her forward, and whisks on as far as she can get, the wall towering up before her. It's a bit of an awkward angle, but she decides to take a pot shot at the one Yasmeena wounded anyway, while weighing whether she needs to commit to a spell as Haleen and Bylo charge the ones on the ground.
It turns out trying to point a firearm while running full-tilt at magically-enhanced speed is terrible for your aim.
Another lizard steps up to Haleen and attacks, before Bylo can swoop in to save the 'damsel in distress'.
Haleen take a stab at each lizard.
It's an overkill on the first two, but the last one keeps standing for Yasmeena to give him the treatment.
A bit embarrassed, Yasmeena nonetheless focuses her fire on the remaining lizard.
With a strong sense of self-satisfaction, Neelah ceases singing her fiery song, briefly forgetting her dislike of perching several feet up on a thin piece of cloth.
Yasmeena shows, that she can do an overkill too. With the lizards out of the way, the brass ballista is free for inspection.
The lizards have each a potion of cure moderate wounds, a potion of
shield of faith +3, a masterwork chain shirt, a masterwork heavy mace and a masterwork iron longbow (+2 Str)
Bylo looks at the dead creatures in disgust. "So weak. Why did they attack?" He sheaths his weapon and looks around. "Is anyone hurt? We shouldn't move on to the next enemy hurt."
"I totally agree." Haleed replies to the latter. To the former, she whistles lapaloma.
Seeing the wounds on Haleen Bylo pulls out his healing wand. "Better than using spells that may be needed later...."
"Thank you."
Bylo looks at the dead creatures in disgust. "So weak. Why did they attack?"
“I don’t imagine they get a lot of visitors here. We met some troglodytes once, back home, and fortunately they weren’t reckless or powerful enough to be gallivanting about the planes, so I guess if these fellows had even heard about people like us…” Aith frowns, brows scrunching together as she considers, “It must be locked down very tight if the inmates are still loyal to Jhavhul, anyway, since he was trapped for so long, not counting the constructs and such. Either that, or I wonder who’s in charge now, and if they even know everything about the place, like the levels we came from.”
With that, she turns her attention to the siege engine, already estimating range and torsion strength, a glimmer in her eye that suggests it would probably be a very good idea to stay clear of the pointy end, just in case she can’t resist the opportunity to test the thing out and see it at work for herself, rather than contenting herself with mental calculations.
“He is an ambitious warlord. Is this the sort of thing he would want to outfit his army with?”
She reaches out with her sense for magic to see if there’s anything special about the ballista that she can’t see or estimate from her usual vision, inwardly fretting about whether her spells are up to the task.
While this cunning ballista requires two Medium creatures to aim the device and operate the windlass, the process of reloading is mostly automatic, similar to the technology of a repeating crossbow. It can fire at a rate of once per round, up to 12 times before its magazine is exhausted and must be reloaded by hand.
Bylo watches as Aith looks over the siege engine. The only thing he knows about the thing is that in front of it is not safe.... so he moves.
"Nah, I'm sure this is only placed as a distraction for curious elves. Imagine a genie that can grant wishes and their general gets to wish for something to make their army win a war. I'm sure they won't wish for that."
Looking at the corpses she adds "And if those guys are his army, I have to say, it is pathetic."
"Why would someone create such a barrier with a ballista on top in the middle of their basement corridors?"
“I’ve never studied wishcraft, or genie summoning. They do a lot of that in Jalmeray, don’t they? Maybe there are some sorts of rules – binding ones, I mean – about who they can offer wishes to and how often,” Aith muses, Haleen’s sarcasm going right over her head.
“You don’t think they were worried about that worm thing crawling its way up or something?” she adds, alarmed. “I would have thought that construct would have been guardian enough for anything less determined than we are, but then I’m not defending my home.”
She gives the device a last once-over, estimating how much space it takes up.
With the ballista shrunk to toy size and packed away, the question arises, where to go. There is a door left unexplored back at teh corner and there are three new ways to go from here on. A long corridor to the left, which's end is hidden around a corner. A long corridor leading straight on, which forks further there and another one leading right in a short distance which is mostly hidden from the platform.
Back to the door it is. The door is neither locked nor trapped. The large, dark chamber behind possesses multiple deep alcoves, each nondescript with the bits of only a few rough furnishings and rude bedding strewn about. Also the room has a flight of stairs that lead further up.
Before entering the room Bylo holds the wayfinder hanging from his neck and commands it to display any evil presence. "It can sense evil within sixty feet. Could someone scan for magic too? With the dangers we've been encountering maybe going a little bit slower would be advised?"
"Do we want to go up? Or continue scouting this level?"
Aith falls in to keep pace with Bylo, using her cantrips to scan for magic while he keeps an eye out for lingering traces of ill intent upon the air. As they check the alcoves in turn, she tries to guess when they were last disturbed. Is this where the azers hang around when they're not patrolling deeper?
"I don't mind going back and forth a bit to make sure we don't miss anything, especially in case we stumble on something that would want to chase us that would be able to funnel us towards some other unpleasant thing if we don't deal with it first. Although whatever's keeping us here probably should be quite an impressive bit of magic, I think, so I would hope that we would know it when we see it. So there's that, at least."
Yasmeena is content to follow the others, though she does step forward and check doors and corridors for traps before they proceed. "If these are barracks, there may be other chambers above, or perhaps prison cells?" She shrugs. "Maybe just a quick peek to be sure this isn't the exit?"
"That's fine too, of course!" Aith nods. She is never going to be a stickler for method, barring cases where being more relaxed about it is definitely going to lead to disaster, as in alchemy, or grinding gunpowder.
At the top of the stairs is a dark chamber is of cavernous proportions, its vaulted ceiling held aloft by huge supporting columns. The stench of beasts remains strong, though whatever was once stabled here is long gone. The gutted remains of a few battered war chariots are pushed against the walls. Campfires of burning coals can be seen toward the rear of the chamber.
There are some giants walking about, some hounds that look like they are straight from hell, and other creatures that look like walking hot stone.
Aith darts behind the nearest pillar, hoping she and the others haven’t been spotted.
“Ideas?” she whispers back to the others, a bit worried about the likely resistance ahead. “I don’t have anything prepared right now that would let us sneak past, and after that brass lion thing… Poke around a bit more downstairs first? Or just enough to see what would give us the best chance of slipping by discreetly? Or throw caution to the wind, and start hurling spells?”
Fortunately, if the columns are made of the same unearthly brass that the rest of the palace seems to be, there’s no odds for the demolitionist mage to whip out a wand and start doing terrible things to the architecture.