The Wayfinders - The Wreck of the Archon

You set out once again, retracing your steps through the bowels of the vast city-ship. Doral leads the way with Kraken close behind followed by Henrick, still clutching his broken wand, and finally Midian and Whisper bring up the rear. The halls are quiet for the most part. Every now and then you hear a hiss or pop of a steam pipe but so far no tell-tale groans of the abominations that stalk the halls.
Up ahead, Doral raises his arm and signals you to a halt. You are close to where you encountered Henrick's trapped friend. You crowd in close and Doral whispers back that the body has been removed. Creeping forward cautiously you find the scene disturbed from how you last left it. Both halves of the body have been pulled free of the rubble. There are bloody drag marks on the ground leading away down the hall in the direction you are traveling. Nothing has been left behind, even the little red worms have been gathered up. The walls nearby have been marked with drawings and words. You can see eyes, mouths, and tentacles all writhed together. The script moves down the hallway in the same direction as the drag marks.

Linguistics DC15
[SBLOCK]
The bizarre script is made up of words from every language you have heard of. From Dwarven, Gnomish, Elvin, and common to the otherworldly languages like Celestial and Infernal, all of it contributes to the long running script. Every time the words change languages the handwriting itself changes as well. It is as if the writer was drawing on the memories and fine muscle skills of numerous beings.
You are able to translate the following:
"What lies in the depths is dormant no more. Its eyes awaken and turn upwards. Eyes, eyes everywhere follow and watch and move and coming for you. Follow down, down down and join us in the glorious merging of life. Freedom from loneliness evermore. Join us us all of us. We can be be be together. Turn aside, reject the gift of our blessed unity and be in danger of forever being set aside separate from our glory."
[/SBLOCK]

Linguistics for everyone, No DC
[SBLOCK]
You are able to pick out a word here and there. "Eyes", "Follow", "Merging", "Danger" are some you are able to recognize. The drawings follow a similar vein with sketches of eyeballs, claws, tentacles, bodies intertwined, and more unrecognizable forms.
[/SBLOCK]

Kraken kneels down near the blood marks and can see huge footprints, three toed and tipped with claws, mixed in with the gore. Setting his own foot next to it he can see that it is at least twice the size of his own. Shining a light down the hallway you can see where the bloody trail turns into a side hall. An office at the end is the only exit. The door is open and you can see where a large section of the floor has been torn away. The main hallway continues past and looks clear to the next intersection.

Midian Rightson, human druid

Midian keeps the crystal hoisted on his back, taking advantage of his magically-enhanced strength to carry the burden until they've found a place to stow it. Water from the crystal seems to flow directly into his own watery form, and its unclear if the source of the small puddles that form in Midian's footsteps are the elemental housed within the crystal or the one carrying it.

Luckily, the druid's masking magics are still at play, and the watery trail evaporates almost as soon as he makes it.

Midian's watery features darken as he sees the scrawlings and drawings. He can't make heads or tails of them, but having encountered enough since arriving, he's even more concerned that something has decided to write its thoughts down.

"The body was forfeit when the poor man died," Midian offers, trying to soften the tone of his voice to express his sympathy. "If we don't want ours to be, as well, I suggest we move quickly."

[sblock=mini-stats]Full Sheet

Used: Scroll of Water Breathing[/sblock]

"Some big bastard's been this way," says Kraken. "Don't reckon it's those tentacles neither, unless they've taken over an ogre or something, eh? Dunno what made these tracks, but it loks like it's gone down there," he points down the side hallway with his falchion.

"Don't reckon we want to leave it behind us, eh?" he says and begins to carefully walk down towards the torn floor and door.

Doral answers, "I do agree with you in regards to the risks of putting the creature behind us, and yet I am unsure a direct confrontation is wise seeing as its mere size may make the felling of its smaller appendages nearly meaningless. However, if you wish to take up the hunt I will back your effort."

Midian Rightson, human druid

"If it's close, we should probably try to either deal with it or block its way behind us," Midian says. "If the signs point to it having gone deep into that side tunnel, though, I think we're better off moving quickly and leaving it to feed. My magics will keep it from tracking us, so as long as it doesn't see or hear us, it won't have any idea we even moved by while it was busy."

[sblock=ooc]Just the reminder Midian's masking the party with Negate Aroma and Pass Without Trace, so: as above. If it's not nearby, it doesn't have a way to follow us since it will have no idea we were there or which way we went (save, of course, whatever hivemind information happens to come its way)[/sblock]

[sblock=mini-stats]Full Sheet

Used: Scroll of Water Breathing[/sblock]

Kraken stops in his tracks. He shoulders his falchion and looks, with some regret, down the corridor before returning to the original course.

"Fair play," he says.

"Something that big probably won't be stealthy," Whisper thinks aloud. "But it might be fast to respond to a summons when we encounter other creatures." She grimaces. "But any fight could hurt us a great deal, in ways we can't necessarily recover from easily."

Finally the sorceress shakes her head. "I doubt we can bar it's path...lets rely on avoiding it for now. But stay alert...if it starts to follow us, we're better off trying to overwhelm it quickly than letting it stalk us."

OOC: I've got a big update coming, almost finished with it but work keeps eating up my free time. Hang in there!

OOC: Hanging on.

The metal halls are quiet as you back track through the ship to the room Henrick was using as a hiding place. There are no signs of the mutated crewmen or the animals that have taken over the ship. The only sounds you hear are the tread of your boots on steel floors. Even the hiss and banging of steam pipes are slowly fading as the pressure in the lines drop now that the shard has been removed. The shard itself hums occasionally, each time marked by a flare of light as some of the runes glow in thick animated bands around its surface, before going dormant again. The sight reminds you of chains binding the crystal. Henrick mutters about the creature being restless and testing its bonds. The shard continues to drip water but seems stable enough. The “flare ups” don’t seem to have a pattern to them and aren’t accelerating as far as you can tell.

Before long you have reached the Cooler once again. Midian lowers the crystal gently to the ground in the back corner. It seems safe enough here for now and you take the time to break for a meal. Henrick eats a little before moving off a bit to fiddle with his broken wand. A few moments later you hear an exclamation of surprise. Henrick holds up his broken wand incredulously. It is no longer spitting sparks but instead drips water from the damaged section. The red tip now shows an icy blue. He then points at your feet and indicates the small puddles near where you were sitting. A quick check of your equipment reveals that your magical weapons have all begun to drip water. Drawing them sends a splatter of water droplets and they appear wet as if freshly drawn from a pool of water. The strange water is icy cold to the touch. Whisper studies the effect, drawing on her extensive mystical training, and after some experimentation determines that some of your equipment has become imbued with elemental energy. She theorizes it might be due to your exposure to the intense magical field of the shard. Though she is unsure whether or not the effects are permanent; it does not show any signs of ebbing.

OOC:
[SBLOCK]
You can choose how you would like the effect to manifest, once you decide the choice is permanent. A +1 weapon in your possession gains the Icy property (1d6 cold), a +1 armor gains Energy Resistance 5/Cold, or a wand/staff/scroll changes its energy type to cold damage. Midian and Whisper can choose to have the effect manifest when they shapeshift into a water elemental instead of the weapon effect. Your slam attacks would gain the extra cold damage.
[/SBLOCK]

After your short rest you turn to Henrick to lead you to the surface. You seal the Cooler door behind you as you leave and scatter trash behind you to hide your tracks. Henrick takes the lead, moving slowly and hesitantly. He stops numerous times along the route to ponder branching passageways. He seems to avoid the open passages and instead looks for ones partially blocked by debris. Some passages are marked by signs of violence. Blood, scorch marks, and destroyed equipment are seen most often at these sites. You never see any bodies though, the creatures must be quite efficient at recycling the dead. The strange effects of the Mourning keep the blood from decaying making it hard to tell how recent any of it is. At one intersection you stop to study unusual markings. The walls, floors, and ceilings are covered in thousands of bloody eye drawings. The effect is unnerving and calls to mind the words written in the stairwell when you first descended into the belly of the ship. For a moment you think you hear… whispers. They slowly rise in your mind like a tide, growing louder and louder. The sibilant words come from a great multitude and it is impossible to sort out individual refrains. Being seasoned adventurers you are able to shake off the effects and they slowly fade away into the background again. Henrick suffers a bit of a nervous breakdown at this point. He shakes and grabs his head, turning to look down various hallways as if seeking an escape route. Each hall has the red eyes though and you can see the panic rising. Kraken strides forward to him and gives him a few good slaps to bring him around. Shakily, the man leads you farther down a tunnel until you reach a maintenance tube.

The confines are narrow but the shaft contains a ladder leading upwards. You shift and shimmy your way upwards at least two levels before reaching a blockage where the tube was partially crushed by a girder. Exiting you find yourself in a hallway blocked except for a door at the far end. Doral sets about checking it for signs of life on the far side and for any traps that may be lying untriggered. Finding nothing amiss he motions you forward again. The door opens onto a steel platform high above a darkened space. You quickly extinguish your lights so as to not give away your position. After a few minutes your eyes adjust. A faint phosphorescence comes from shapes far below you. It looks like some kind of mold growing on stacks of crates. The platform you are on is part of a catwalk spanning the ceiling here. On the wall near you however is something unusual. It looks like several tumor growths joined by a thin webbing of slowly pulsing veins. You see more on the walls and ceiling all joined together be a webwork of circulatory systems. Henrick shakes his head when you look at him to indicate he doesn’t know what they are. Each one is not large, about the size of your head and don’t seem to have anything with which to grab, bite, or claw at you. You keep a wary eye on them as you slowly make your way out onto the catwalk.
Halfway across you hear a noise far below. Some shapes are moving slowly around the warehouse floor. You can hear slow dragging footsteps, wet sounding “schlup” noises, and the muttering multi-tonal voices of the infested crewmen.

Lowlight or Darkvision
[SBLOCK]
You can see humanoid figures dragging body parts across the warehouse floor towards something below the far end of the catwalk. It looks to be a thick protrubrance, like a vast toothless maw, that has burst up through the floor of the ship. The crewmen are throwing the body parts into the maw as if feeding it.
[/SBLOCK]

The creatures don’t seem to notice you in the darkness that high above them. The catwalk continues through the darkness towards an outer wall. Henrick’s face has gone pale and he is starting to breathe rapidly.