Reroll

We head down the stairwell… the same forty two flights of metal stairs and right angles with the presence activated crystal lights, down to the shattered door by the double-thumb palm scanner.  We walk through, Ed taking the lead to check for traps, Betty and myself just behind Ed, the disposable meatshields… err, our loyal animal friends… by our sides.

The air is thick and stinks of decay, but it's breathable… and it's probably a good thing none of us are carrying the game's torches: Methane is flammable, and potentially explosive. We wouldn't need them anyway: This area has the same crystal lighting as the hallways, either Ed or myself can make light magically and at will, we all have lights on our cell phones, and we're carrying a few spare magical “bulbs” (sticks, rocks, or other random objects enchanted with Everglow) like we used in the house.

The first room seems to be a sitting room: It's about fifteen by twenty, with two couches facing each other, both of which are so covered in mold that I can't make out what color they used to be. The walls have… well, had… tapestries, but they too are covered with mold to the point of uselessness. There's the door we came in, and another on the far end.

“So… think there's going to be anything useful in here?” Betty doesn't seem impressed.

I shrug, “Even if we just end up harvesting the lights, we'll have something saleable.”

“And we should clean this section up as a hardened retreat point anyway,” Ed adds, “Even if we don't find anything useful down here, we are a few hundred feet underground, so this place is essentially a hardened bunker.”

“I dunno…” I consider, “we don't know if it has any backdoors; I'd rather not be cornered, you know?”

“Fair,” Ed considers, "So a hideout if it has another exit we can use, a vault otherwise?”

Betty thinks, “I can get behind that.”

I nod, “We have a plan for what to do with the place, then. Now let's see if we can actually do it….”

We check the room out… or rather, Ed does: He has the Perception market cornered for now, “Nothing in here of use but some loose change,” he announces, “...which is all over a hundred years old.  We should probably find a coin collector after seeing if there's a way we can repair them a bit; they're rather worn.”

I raise my hand, “The Alteration sphere can fix mundane objects with the base sphere right out of the box, so I can pick that up whenever, trivially, and take care of that aspect.”

Ed nods, “That'll do. I'll check the door….”

I watch as Ed works: He walks over to the door - which is again unadorned metal in a metal frame… but this one doesn't have a lock, and simply opens when he approaches, sliding smoothly and quickly up out of his way.

Beyond? I presume the main source of the foul air: Several dead bodies, decayed and molding to the point where they're little more than dirty bones on the floor, around a high metal table with plates filled with apparently live mushrooms and tarnished silverware.  I get a ping from Knowledge(Nature): By all rights, everything should be far more decayed if it's been like this for 100 years; there shouldn't be anything left for the mold or mushrooms to feed on: Whatever happened is much more recent than that.

Of more immediate relevance is the ping from Knowledge(Religion): Those skeletons are mindless and hungry undead, not just dead bones.

Which means I'm ready, and blast them with a barrage of exploding rock when their empty eye sockets start sucking the light out of the room and their bones start pulling together. I like having skill points.

Fortunately, your basic humanoid skeleton is actually quite fragile (they’re cheap cannon fodder in the game, used in small groups in low level adventures, or in large groups as background scenery at higher levels), and the one area blast shatters them all into fragments too small and too scattered to pose a threat.

I just stand there for a moment, my hand still extended in the position where I released the blast.

Betty ‘recovers’ first, “They MOVED.”

“Yeah,” I agree.  “My skills told me it would happen, but….”

“They MOVED,” Betty repeats.

“Yeah,” I repeat, “That.”  It kind of floors me too. I mean, I've been undead, but this is the first time I've seen that hungry look in their missing eyes.

“They're still moving,” Ed adds, “It's super slow, but… they're going to be back together in an hour or so.”

“You are the sense monkey…” I shake out of my shock and kneel down, taking a very close look at one of the shattered fragments and… sure enough: It's rocking, just slightly, and ends up a tiny amount closer to the other pieces with each movement.

I get back up, “I can confirm that… spooky.”

“So… loot?” Betty suggests.

Ed checks around… and grabs the silverware, plates, some antique pocket watches buried in the mess, and a few other odds and ends… then casts Detect Magic and scans the room.

I let him finish, and Ed gives his report, “The only magic I'm finding is ours; let's move on….”

He leads (the trap-monkey pretty much needs to do so), and we move on. I quickly get the impression of an underground mansion: We came in through a sitting room, then entered the dining room.  It also has a kitchen (we take the antique plates, glasses, silverware, et cetera to clean up, repair, and sell; the faucets work, sort of: The muck that comes out is not appetizing… the cabinets are full of mixing bowls, measuring cups, and other things needed to prepare food, which we leave), a dozen bedrooms (each with their own bathroom… nothing we can reasonably recover), a gym (complete with a pool full of sludge), four offices (the wooden desks are rotten), and what looks to be a ‘family room’ (with a rather rotted out concert grand piano - I have NO idea how they got it down the stairs - and several moldy couches).  We temporarily destroy a few other skeletons that get up when we approach as we explore.

Betty voices what's bugging me when we're done, “Where's the support structure?”

That brings Ed up short, “The what?”

I get that one, “The mechanical room with a water tank, air pumps, sewage treatment, and the other things that would be needed this far underground.”

Ed considers, “Well… I didn't find any secret doors…” he looks at one of the air vents, which is just six inches tall and a foot wide, “…but it has to exist, clearly.”

Hmm.  Well… “I'll go look, then…” I pull an air vent off, switch to sparrow form, and fly in.

The vent is rectangular, and a little short on headroom even for this form, but the duct behind it is circular, and easy enough to move around in…when you're six inches tall.  The air in the pipes is pretty rancid… but it is moving, and breathable.

I wander through the ductwork, using The Secret of the Maze, chosing to follow the right at every turn, to avoid getting lost, looking out through the vent grills to see if I recognize the room on the other side before moving on.  It takes a while (this exceptionally small form is not very fleet on foot; it’s designed to fly)... but that's okay - I don't have any appointments. I don't find any fans, just little crystals in the side of the duct periodically where the air moves faster the closer it gets to the crystals: Convenient for me.

Eventually the ducts get larger, and I find the mechanical room… or what I suppose is the mechanical room: There's a giant crystal on the other side of the vent grill, and everything here seems to run on crystals.

So I push on the grill to try and pop it out.

And push.

And push.

Oh, right: Strength is a dump stat for this build, and in sparrow form… well, I'm probably about as strong as a newborn baby like this. But I can't turn back while inside the ductwork.  Umm.

Oh, I have magic.

I switch out for the Warp sphere, and just teleport into the room.

Okay: This is a lot more like what I expected to find.  The area we were in was basically an underground house with some dead folks.  This? There's a half dozen metal chairs with crystals mounted in the armrests, all facing a central crystal that's floor to ceiling large (so about ten feet tall), and everything is quietly glowing in different colors.  There's also several small crystal alcove and various others hung on the walls between the couple of doors heading out of the room.  The resulting rainbow reflections from the active lights are actually quite pretty… it's a pity about the skeleton in one of them… a central chair… and yes, it's the undead kind too.