Mya sighs, recomposing herself and enters the courtyard garden. She remains attentive considering the recent attack by ghost birds and the strange rat-like creatures.
You hear strange noises: the flapping of wings, low growls, and rustling steps. It is raining, and a sudden peal of thunder sounds almost exactly like godlike laughter. The next thundercrack sounds like a screamed name. "Tassa!"
Mya steps back and draws her dagger, ready to cast if need be. After the ghost birds, this situation does not seem entirely out of the ordinary, but the specific calling out for Tassa leads her to believe it is someone playing with them.
Who would know us? Is it that Zandalus we have heard about?
"Who is there?" Mya says out loud to the room as she steps back to the door.
Tassa feels a jolt along her spine.
She manages to regain human form again for a moment, the tentacles retreating. "Alright, I don't know if they're toying with us or what, but someone out there knows who we are. Maybe that means we can get some answers?"
What happened with the plan of exploring the inside first? Trident in one hand and net in the other, Baldrek follows Mya like a looming shadow. Good that she toughened up. "Answerrs arre goode. Failing zat, I settle forr killinge ze f+!~err."
Arberie quietly acquiesces to everyone else's desire to go out. She slinks along in the back, doing her best to go unnoticed. She's heard flapping and has already been snatched up and dropped once. At least the first time there was a ceiling to how far up she could be carried. Out where they're going there's no ceiling at all, literally.
As you exit the building, a faceless batlike creature with a long tail swoops out of the mist and flies toward Mya!
Mya's eyes widen at the creature swooping at her. She sees she cannot simply step back and away from the creature, backed to a corner, so she tries to calm herself and focuses on hastening Baldrek, the only one she can see now.
Arberie isn't startled by the swooping horror. It's pretty much how she expected things to go. But some people just have to learn the hard way she tells herself. While she's doing the private mental 'I told you so' in her head, Arberie pops the kunai in her spring loaded sheath into her hand, flips it around to grasp it by the blade, and throws it at the winged attacker.
Baldrek quickly steps around the monster, throws his net at it and then follows with with a stab from the trident, thanks to Mya's help.
Tassa surrenders to the hunger inside her, letting the tentacled thing reemerge from her, but manages this time–with considerable effort–to keep her own face and limbs.
Then she steps up and tries to catch the thing in her maw-covered tentacles.
You quickly defend yourselves as the creature swoops down. Arberie's dagger pierces its wing, slowing it enough for Baldrek to entangle it in his net. Then Tassa transforms into a horrible abomination and bites it. Despite its wounds, the creature remains eerily silent, lashing out with sharp claws and prehensile tail.
As they writhe over it, Tassa's tentacles slurp of some of the thing's blood. Thus energized, she strikes again, attempting to devour the attacker before it can devour them.
"Sssurrender, or be devoured, beassst!"
Mya manages to cast and her companions come to her rescue, but that does not stop the strange creature from hitting her with its tail.
Mya immediately feels wobbly, as if she were tip toeing in circles while the garden tilted on an axis. The nausea makes her let go of the strings of time, putting Baldrek back to normal speed. All she manages to do is step aside.
Arberie quickly circles around behind Baldrek, drawing her rapier. She looks for a promising portion of the creature's back and tries to drive her blade into it.
Flanking with Tassa, Baldrek shoves the creature with his trident to make it unbalanced, then follows up with a swipe under its legs to trip it and finally he thrusts the trident on its torso. Win is all that matters for him, no matter how dirty he needs to fight.
You continue to pummel the nightmarish creature. It continues to strike out at anyone within its reach, but it's having a very difficult time doing so.
Mya is spared from the creature's flurry this time and can take a second to gather her thoughts. She moves once again, hopefully away from the creature's reach.
She notices Baldrek has now been the victim of the bat's stinger, so he could be feeling that strange nausea. That allows her to make a decision: empowering Tassa and Arberie instead.
Hiding behind Tassa in her strange serpentine form, Mya's body starts glowing and the sound of clocks once again emanates from her. She tugs at both Tassa's and Arberie's time strands and holds them firmly.
Arberie tries stabbing the thing again.
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Baldrek ignores the tail for whatever it would do to him, but the claws do hurt. A bit. Probably more when he isn't pumped with hatred. He shoves the creature back to the ground, then kicks its stomach to sicken it before stabbing once more. "Die alrready ye f%+@e!"
Working together, Arberie and Baldrek stab the creature to death. Hopefully it'll stay that way, but who knows what strangeness the mists will bring. Best to get back inside soon.
Mya steps back into the building. Even with the fight and the mysterious aura of it all, she seems stoically calm now.
"Does anyone know what that is?" she points to the body "If nothing else, let's take a breather. I'm also ready to finish exploring this building before we step outside again, but if you want, we can try running to the end of this garden."
Mya walks to one of the yet unopened doors inside, awaiting her companions' response.
"Dead sing." He replies to Mya as she asks what the thing was. "We will have to investigate ze outside at some bointe. Now mighte be goode momente... we know one enemy is deade. Ite might be reblaced, orr rrise frrom ze deade, who knows in zis shithole."
Arberie is trembling, both from fright and frustration at the mulishness of some of the people with her.
"F!%+! What does it take? Didn't exactly what I said would happen just happen? It's a goddam open sky! Yes, there are more! I'm going back in. We've barely looked around in there. Why do you insist on f@#!ing around out here instead?"
Unwilling to debate the subject, Arberie immediately goes back inside.
Mya moves toward Arberie. While her new less feeling self was finding it hard to relate completely, she understood that splitting the group was a bad idea and, at the end of the day, it was not her that was almost carried by ghost birds.
"I'm sorry, Arberie." she says, sincerely "Everyone is nervous and making hasty decisions. I agree with you. Let's finish exploring inside for now and maybe go back for a meal. Whatever that was outside, it was the strongest.... creature we have faced ever since we woke up."
Mya opens the closest door to reveal a long, narrow hallway. The end is blocked off by rubble - it looks like from a collapsed exterior wall - but you should be able to clear a path with a few hours of work.
"Ha! Mya exclaims "turns out one of the exits we could see from the garden led here anyway. We could clear it, but I see another door down there." she points to the east as she crosses the door before the hallway.
"I'm sorry, Arberie." she says, sincerely "Everyone is nervous and making hasty decisions. I agree with you. Let's finish exploring inside for now and maybe go back for a meal. Whatever that was outside, it was the strongest.... creature we have faced ever since we woke up."
As Mya mentions going back for a meal, it seems that Tassa's rubbery tentacles have dragged the thing that tried to carry Arberie away back inside, and the sharp-toothed maws on them have started slurping up pieces of it. Tassa's human face looks at bloody mess being scooped into her abdomen with a look of horrified fascination, though she finds (despite her wishes) that consuming the thing feels good.
Pulling herself away from the half-consumed corpse, Tassa says, "I don't love the idea of squeezing through there...though it wouldn't be worse than climbing up that chute, yesterday."
"I can squeeze srrough ite, no brroblem... ozerrwise zerre is still zat doorr acrross ze librrarry."
Pale paint peels like scabs from the walls of this spacious chamber. A bent desk guards a broad hall stretching away to the north, while curtained frames shroud the room’s eastern quarter. The place smells intensely of rubbing alcohol. On a stool, a lantern burns - although the flame doesn't flicker. It instead remains strangely motionless.
On a more pressing note, as you squeeze into the room, two grotesque oozes of diseased matter slop from a pile of dirty gauze and begin crawling toward you.
You realize these things are Boilborn: disgusting oozes spawned from diseased corpses and areas of massive contagion. They're very slow, but killing them causes a burst of leprosy-causing acid.
Even more disgusting creatures...
Mya does not need to squeeze to pass, so she hangs back, these oozes wouldn't need as well. She focuses and empowers both Baldrek and Arberie.
Her logic is that Arberie needs to feel a bit more safe and Tessa is already under her strange transformations.
"Boilborrne... disease oozes." He tells the others behind as he moves towards the southern door to check if it is unlocked. "Lete me see if I can lurre zem away."
Given what Baldrek says about the two things in the room, Arberie is confident she can play keep away with them. They could probably be left behind easily enough, but Arberie isn't opposed to a little public service in this case, especially with some magic to speed her up.
She pops the kunai in her spring loaded sheath into her hand while stepping up to get her range, then throws it at the slightly closer of the two monstrosities. As soon as the first kunai has left her hand, Arberie pulls the second one from her other wrist sheath and sends it flying right after the first.