LAST TIME IN MISTVERGE:
- En route to the entrance to the catacombs, Rusty asks why they don't Send to Thessalie to see if she is still alive, and Theophania immediately pulls out her stick, "Auntie! I invented a Sending Device, and we stopped a necromancer causing a zombie invasion, but now people are poisoned and there's magic river fog!"
BACK TO THE PRESENT
- Tiff's eyes light up a little bit (unusual) and she feels a calming energy that comes over her and there's a warm tingly sensation, but no words.
- Tiff is a bit infuriated once the calming effect wears off.
- Osiris says she'll give it a go later. (She and Theophania discuss the possibility that Thessalie has ascended to a higher level of being)
- Osiris continues leading the way down to the catacombs, and then she takes what she believes is the tunnel that goes the deepest into the earth, though she's never been to the end, so it must be pretty deep
- Tiff is still very distracted percolating on what the Sending response could mean, but Rusty and Lyrielle hear a scratching noise. Rats?
- They pinpoint the noise coming from a particular niche, and then investigate further and get taps in response to taps and there's a warm spot one side of the back wall.
- Tiff casts (R) Detect Magic, but she can't see anything. It's probably because there's more than 12" of stone between her and the magic
- Tiff then uses the Alter Self spell to give herself some kind of fantasy badger hands that can dig through stone and she starts going at the warm spot.
- She digs and digs and digs until she has a hole just wide enough for her little self through about 36" of stone and through a hole just big enough for her face she's sees a mechanical spider-like creature that jumps back and regards her suspiciously
- She wiggles backwards enough to turn her head to talk to her friends and report that there's a metal digging critter that can't understand her.
- Raiàn casts Tongues on Tiff's foot, and she talks to it again, and it's just continuing to repeat "Danger, danger, must report."
- Tiff makes her little hole large enough to pop her head through to see how many of these there are, but there's only the one.
- Tiff backs out of the hole, and then the creature follows her, scans the group, then approaches Rusty and beep chirps at him and he instinctively turns his ankle and a port opens up on his ankle that the critter integrates with and begins the upload of information. During this process Rusty is sort of catatonic
- Tiff goes back to widening her part of the hole for her friends to maybe squeeze through before Alter Self wears off because the critter's tunnel leads south towards the river.
- The critter communicates to Rusty through images:
- There's a store room that the surveillance drone was watching
- The wall in the store room collapse and a foul ooze and black tendrils start creeping into the room they're not quite vines, but more like a slime mold sort of netting in appearance. There's something growing out of the nodes of the "net" or "webbing" that looks shiny. They resemble the tendrils that were on the alter that the group destroyed that created the portal to the nether-realm.
- The final image that it communicates to Rusty looks like the head of a large black dragon.
- Tiff has the hole she made more or less matched up to the tunnel the surveillance drone made, and Osiris shoots a flaming arrow down the tunnel and it goes about 500' then curves to the left away from the river. She calculates that the end of the tunnels would be around the edge of the temple grounds.
- Rusty gives a recap of what he just learned, and the drone powers down folding its little legs underneath it.
- After much freaking out about the tendrils (familiar) and the dragon (also familiar, but bigger), Tiff examines the dormant drone, and finds the activation switch, which she pushes with Rusty's permission
- It beeps at Rusty in a "Input Command" sort of way, so he asks it if it can lead them over a different, larger route where they'll fit, but it just cocks his head curiously having not enough intelligence to answer the hypothetical question, so Rusty just commands it to follow
- Tiff pats it and tells it's much less scary than a dog, and it seems to like the attention.
- Tiff casts (R) Alarm on the opening to the tunnel.
- They take it back up to the temple and report in to Rowan and Birel about the robot dog (Rusty took it to Osiris's room to scare as few people as possible)
- Tiff also very excitedly reports to them about her Sending to Thessalie as well.
- The unnamed (at this time) mechanical critter and Rusty have an Q&A
- Can you count? Can you give numerical answers? (Affirmative)
- How long did it take you to make the tunnel? (Another connection through the ankle, and it probably took like months (at least two months) to dig it's little tunnel after it had been trapped for probably a few weeks.)
- Can you take us to the main entrance to that place? (Another picture of an underground place with an overlaying sort of feeling of being lost.)
- Were you specifically searching for me? (Negative)
- Were you looking for a Steel Guard? (Affirmative)
- How the ass did you detect me through all the stone? (Confusion)
- Are there other Steel Guard within your detection range? (Negative)
- Are you capable of following your tunnel, but on the surface? (Confusion)
- No more digging unless I specifically tell you. (Affirmative)
- Are you able to power down but still respond to my voice. (Affirmative)
- Power down mode.
LONG REST
- 3,000 XP ea. for 79,000 XP total ea.
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