From Room 11, a foam-filled tunnel led to Room 12, a cave in which a tiny but fat shell-man makes hand gestures and grunts. His body is glittering, and he was immobile until Rathy plucked him up and placed him on his shoulder.
Rathy and shell-man used a rope to descend a chute filled with slippery foam. They found Room 8 on a lower level which contains some soft white chairs and a number of doors. Shell-man seemed happy to sit and swivel in the chairs, so Rathy left him there and climbed the rope back up to level one.
While Rathy was down the chute, a metal crate on slug-like feet came crawling through Room 12 where the party was waiting. Walter messed with it and this slug crate unleashed a blast of light. A metal door with some red coral around it led to Room 20, which didn’t contain much except the far wall which was meaty, red, and too tough to cut through.
When the doorway to Room 10 was opened, a blast of dessicating hot air blasted Turlough on the head, causing him some damage so he rested in Room 12. Amaris peered into Room 10, seeing large empty metal cages. Walter entered and was almost to the other side of the room when he saw a pulsing sac on the floor. He sliced it up and as it died it emitted a psychic scream that caused Walter to feel dazed and sweat blood. He also retreated to Room 12 to rest and heal up. Amaris applied one use from her healing pouch.
Rathy returned up the chute (without shell-man), and the regrouped party moved through Room 10 to Room 9. There, they found in the floor a dark and cold shaft, seemingly bottomless. Amaris and Rathy could sense/see that there was some sort of rust-colored humanoid figure clinging to the shaft down in the dark, lightly breathing or pulsing but otherwise not moving. Bruusa intuited a divine sign that indicated they should go through the metal door to the north.
Room 8 (level 1) was a misshapen room, its lumpy metallic walls were beaten and smeared with blood. Meaty chunks of grey cold flesh on the floor tasted rotten to Rathy. The faint glow of symbols on the wall opened a door to the north.
The door opened onto Room 5, which contained a few boxes of thin metal and a big ceramic box in the center of the room. The small boxes contained some jerky, which everyone ate or took except Rathy. The big box contained some jars of green beads. When a bead was picked up, it slipped off the fingers and bounced off the floor and continued bouncing off the walls of the room. Walter and Turlough took a jar of beads each.
A treasure hunter named Thalian entered the room via the crawlway from Room 1. He looked and acted a bit like a typical Steve Buscemi role. After bantering with the party and trying to stash some loot, he moved through Room 8 and peered down the dark shaft in Room 9. Amaris convinced him not to go down there. Then Thalian removed some of the soft red coral on the south wall, revealing a door to Room 19. While the party watched, Thalian greedily entered the room and began digging into the next red wall. A meaty, disgusting “jaw beast” like a large Venus flytrap emerged from the wall and devoured the screaming treasure hunter. Bruusa shouted, “Justice!” The glass jar that Thalian took smashed on the floor, so the room became filled with green beads dangerously bouncing and pinging around the room.
The jaw beast belched out some remains: Walter and Rathy each took a slimy musket, Bruusa took a crude armor chestplate, and Rathy found an emerald-studded skull-pendant. When Rathy licked the skull, he felt sort of a high-caffeine electrical jolt throughout his body – not unpleasant, just mildly stimulating.
Our adventurers head back (via crawlway to Room 1, then exit) to Dyresanje Berm as dusk falls. Amaris heads to her private spa. They plan to sleep overnight in town.
