Broom considers looks at the boots and her eyes become unfocused as she casts her mind out into the void, looking for any memories she can find on the various subjects at hand.
Broom's first search quickly brings her mind in contact with a mind wholly fixated on footwear. For whatever reason whoever or whatever this individual was, they were admiring their collection, many of which still had feet or even a little bit of leg still in them. Its mind a jumbled mess, the obsession was the only clear thoughts it possessed.
Shaken by that experience, she quickly tried to change the nature of her question, but the quest for a mind with useful knowledge of the Millair family only brought her in contact with a mind consumed with a boundless hatred of the name and likewise searches for any of the other names only produced vague notions of paranoia and loathing. She couldn't make out anything of value in the memories.
She blinked a bit as she pulled her mind back to the here and now. Her face was an odd ashen colour as she took a couple of ragged breaths. Her brow furrowed as she spoke "We know We should be able to find out stuff form other minds, but ever since We woke up here the only minds We ever seem to find are terribly broken ones. We can't find anything about any of the stuff you asked about."
The colour returned to her features as she smiled brightly at Xander "But you don't have to search for the answers, you already know them all. You are the smartest person We know. Do you need those cleaned?" she asked, pointing at the filthy boots.
"The ghoul came from the north. I am betting that where's there is one, there will be more." John tells the other as he stands up from studying the tracks.
"let's clear the south before we go hunt down the undead's nest." he suggests as he starts down the corridor towards the curtain.
(+1 for traps)
Desdemona's brow wrinkled as she thought hard, but no... there were no memories of those names that she could find. Only the latest horrors she had experienced, and then... blankness.
She wandered along at the tail-end of the procession, lantern raised high.
"Well, all this information is new, or lost, to me. So--this old man from a noble family, who is part of five interlinked families, came here to this asylum, put up a good fight, and died."
Rostam shrugs. "I'm sure the significance of this will come to light eventually."
He trucks along with the rest, longspear in his hands. After a while he asks, "So are we from Ustalav?"
Miniel doesn't really know what Xander is talking about, so she doubles back to pray for the dead before following John. "I hope there are no more of those undead abominations, but if there are, we have to kill them."
Moving south, John stalks down the hallway to a spacious room with paint peeling like scabs from the walls. A desk guarded the broad hall stretching away to the north, while curtained frames shrouded the room’s eastern quarter. The place smells intensely of rubbing alcohol.
Windows set in the walls showed more of the sickly yellow fog, and a door to the south seemed to lead to the path the group had seen from the birdcage room. Another door was pushed half open by debris from the collapsed ceiling to the west.
Light shone clear and steady behind the curtain separating the eastern part of the room from the rest.
Xander thanks Broom for cleaning the boots. They ARE nice boots, after all.
As they head south, he takes a quick scan of the room to see if they missed anything. "John, what's behind the curtain there?"
Rostam tapped the desk with his spear, then searched it.
"Um...I'm not very good at this," he said, apologetically, getting a drawer stuck half-open.
John steps forward quietly and shifts the curtain slightly with his outstrectched sword to peek behind it.
(+1 for traps)
Behind the curtain is another window choked with yellow mist. Inside, just behind the curtain, is an oil lamp on a stool. After looking at it for a second, Xander noticed that the flame didn't flicker or waver at all. The light it cast was perfectly static, unwavering and unchanging. If it didn't cast light the way it did, it could almost be a sculpture or a painting of a lamp.
"Uhhh.... weird lamp." John says over his shoulder.
"Anybody got any ideas?"
"Don't touch it,", Reine suggested. "Or, wait. Maybe... touch it? I don't remember..."
Miniel had a vague memory of spells that could freeze time. This lamp looked almost like it had been caught in a moment in time and stuck there.
Broom looked at the scene with curiosity. "Do you want Us to use our magic hand to try and lift the lamp from the doorway?" she asked.
"Seems like...maybe someone paused time around it. Not sure what will happen if you touch it." Not bothering to wait around and find out, Miniel moves on to the larger room and joins Rostam at the desk.
"Hmm, I guess that's one way to conserve lamp oil." Xander examines the lamp via detect magic.
"Let's toss a fly at it, or something," says Rostam.
When filtering out the background traces of conjuration and transmutation magic that permeated the entire asylum, Xander found a faint transmutation signature around the lamp.
The first time anyone physically interacted with the lamp, whether it was tossing something at it or touching it, the flame flickered back to life for a moment before immediately snuffing out.
The desk didn't contain anything of use, not even paper or ink or bandages. It looked like someone had already rummaged through it for anything useful.
Broom looks a little disappointed when the lamp goes out. There was something appealing about the thought of a lamp forever shedding light but itself eternally unchanging.
Still, it is a nice lamp. She takes the lamp and examines it before putting it in her pack.
"Anything else worth investigating down here, or should we head north to backtrack that ghoul?"
"We should probably head back north. I don't think there's anything else here."
"Let's keep moving," says Rostam.
The assemblage cautiously moved down the hallway past the spot where John had so neatly separated the ghoul from its head. Before reaching the large open area at the end of the hall, they entered the door on the left.
More chipped white paint peeled from the battered frames of a row of identical beds. Dingy white curtains separated each bed, but offered only the illusion of privacy. A man was screaming at the north end of the room.
"...away from me, you bastard!" The group could hear thrashing from behind the last curtain at the top of the room but couldn't see what was happening.
John moves quickly across the room and tries to flip the curtain open with his outstretched longsword.
How many creatures are in this damned place?!
Xander rushes behind John hoping they might be able to help another survivor before it's too late.
"We can..." Broom's offer to pull back the curtain with her magic hand from the safety for the door was cut short as John rushed forward. "Maybe We should just do things instead of asking if it is OK. John and Xander didn't ask if they should rush forward."
Rostam trots up as well, getting ready for a phalanx maneuver.
Seeing the others dart in the door and towards the commotion, Reine stayed in the hallway, but she moved up to the intersection, where she could keep an eye on the door, just in case anyone (or anything) came out of it, as well as check the rest of the hall to be sure that nothing was going to surprise them while the group was otherwise occupied.
Moving into the room, Miniel also prepares her bow, but with not quite as much urgency as Reine. Given that there's too many people between her and the commotion anyways, she peeks into a few of the curtained segments in the south end of the room while the others move to deal with the situation.
John easily pulled the curtain back with the tip of his sword, revealing a man in a patient's gown having some sort of fit. He was strapped to the bed with thick leather straps holding around his wrists and ankles but was fighting them hard enough to rattle the bedframe. "You won't get me, you bastard! Get away!"
In spite of the yelling and flailing, he seemed to be asleep. Somehow he had managed to remain unmolested by ghouls, dopplegangers, and cultists this entire time but now seemed to be fighting something in his own mind.
John steps away from the man strapped to the bed.
"Sickness ... or madness?" he asks the others, looking about to see if anyone has an opinion.
"How has he survived all this time strapped to the bed without food or drink and with all these monsters prowling around? He isn't being very quiet after all."
Broom pondered for a moment.
"Do you think we should bring him back to the chapel? Maybe Winter knows how to help him."
Desdemona was about to suggest that they bring the strange man back to the chapel for treatment when a sinking, sliding feeling alerted her to her shadow tearing free and slipping away, into the dark hall.
Swallowing her words for fear of drawing attention to herself, she sidled a few terrifying feet closer to that hideous blackness... and Reine.
:P
Rostam moved to the man's side.
"Wake up," he intoned.
Without looking away from the thrashing sleeper, he said to the others, "perhaps he's engaging in a dream battle, the way we were."
"Night terrors, perhaps. It is curious that he seems unmolested, so we should remain cautious." Xander approaches the other side of his bed opposite Rostam. Nodding to the man's spear, he lowers a gloved hand to the man's forehead and gently touches him.
The cautious adventurers hung back as the man thrashed and yelled in the bed, held down by his restraints. As Xander reached down to touch him, the man's whole body convulsed hard enough to lift his back off the bed. He flopped back down onto the mattress a few seconds later, his thrashing stilled. A wisp of yellow mist leaked out of his gaping mouth as he breathed his last breath.
"Woah .... where did the yellow smoke come from?"
Xander backs up surprised by the convulsing. "What the hell?" The smoke is also unexpected. "If I had to guess, perhaps a manifestation of some kind? This is completely new territory." He scratches his head. "Suppose for a moment there's something here that can animate the dead? That yellow smoke could be related. OR it could be what killed him." He covers his mouth with his sleeve, just in case. "May be best if we keep moving."
Seeing nothing else of worth in the room, Miniel joins the crowd on the other end just in time to see the mist. "Looks like the same kind of mist that's outside. Maybe he tried to leave, and breathed it in, or something?"
Rostam steps back involuntarily. "The yellow mist...it may have sustained him and killed him."
"Are any of you alchemically inclined?"
"Anyone have any ideas on what killed him? Was it the mist, or starvation, or something else?"
"Do you think the yellow mist is alive? Maybe it was just inside him and wanted out?"
Broom peered at the dead man pensively for a moment before glancing at the roiling mass of yellow fog outside the window.
"Maybe we should avoid going outside if we can help it."
The dead man suddenly opened his eyes and jerked against the restraints around his wrists, trying to lunge at Xander, the closest one to the bed. Luckily for the group, the leather restraints held. Instead of a dead man there was now a ghoul strapped to the bed, desperately trying to reach Xander.
Rostam stepped back and stabbed at the ghoul in the bed with his longspear, aiming for the neck.
"We have an answer," he said succinctly.