As we came to the end of the tracks thru the sand, we were greeted by another set of metal doors and an idea suddenly occurred to me; and so I threw my lit staff as high as I could into the air. It went up several feet and made a clang sound as it crashed into a ceiling that was much smoother than any of us were expecting. We pondered the significance of this for a moment before agreeing that we should just move on. The next room beyond the doors turned out to be violently zapping lightning across it at seemingly regular intervals. Clever Naethan was able to examine the room and managed to disable it; all without becoming zapped. Once we were past that room, we found ourselves in a series of hallways. One of the doors was closed, we examined the door and saw that the surface we had been touching that enabled the doors to open and close had a black stripe across the top of it. Naethan thought to try the playing card that we had been handed earlier by the beings that we had helped out before. The door made a strange sound but still refused to open. Vexed at this turn of events, we moved on and soon found ourselves at another such door. This time when Naethan tried the card, the door made a different sound and then opened. I noticed that the stripe across this touch surface was brown, which matched the color of the card that Naethan was carrying. We entered the room but soon found out that it was already occupied. One look at it’s desiccated face was enough to tell me that this fellow was no longer among the living. I attempted to lay down a spell of grease at it’s feet but it proved to be too nimble for such an action to slow it down. The fight quickly devolved into chaos with Mehdusa hiding under the table and Thoamros leaping atop it in, what I can only assume, an attempt to gain the high ground on it. The undead creature appeared to have the same form as the skeletons we had fought before. It was able to dispatch both Mehdusa and Naethan before leaping atop the table to deal with Thoamros. I took that opportunity to revive Naethan with a potion and he promptly used the same grease spell that I had used earlier to grease the surface of the table. This time, the zombie was unable to keep its footing and Thoamros was able to dispatch it with an expert shot to the head.

Naethan spent a moment to cast a spell to revive Mehdusa and I took a look around at what was now apparent to me that we were in some sort of conference room. We looted the corpse of the four-armed zombie but the only item of significance, other than its weapons, was another one of those playing card sized objects. The difference was this one appeared black, as opposed to the brown of the two cards that were already in our possession. Naethan and I looked at each other at the same time and realized that we had both come to the same conclusion, so we returned to the door that was previously inaccessible to us. The door opened and we laid eyes upon things that none of us had ever seen before. All of it was dark except for a large red button, the translation of the word above it, “reshoe,” had us all scratching our heads. With a pronouncement of, “God hates a coward,” Naethan pushed the button. The lights in the ceiling dimmed for a moment before coming back on and along with it, many more buttons were now lit up as well as the table that was at the center of the room. We gather around the table to see an image of the large cavern that we had passed through. I recognize that this is some sort of illusion but all of my attempts at divining how the spell was cast end in failure as I cannot find any evidence of magic actually being used to maintain it. We decide to move on and eventually find that all of the other hallways are blocked by rubble and come to the only door that we had left unexplored. We pass thru the doors and find ourselves in an office. There is a desk and a couch but what quickly catches our eyes is the blood stains all over one of the doors leading further in. We all fear the worst of the man we were sent here to find but we take a moment to examine the room before pressing on. On top of the desk is some sort of glowing glass screen with a lot of writing on it that makes no sense to me. Though I have studied this language where I can, all of my previous samples were much less dense than what I see before me and I know that we’ll have to come back to it when we are not so pressed for time. While I was doing that, Naethan found a metallic cylinder in one of the drawers that appears to shed light whenever a small button on it is pressed. Mehdusa took the time to examine the couch, while it has all the appearances of being leather, she could surmise that it is not actually leather. Thoamros simply spent the time with his weapon drawn and pointed at the bloody door in case “trouble” decided to come calling.

After our casual examination, we finally found the nerve to open the blood covered doors and soon saw that the entire hallway beyond it had also been splattered with blood everywhere. There also appeared to be shreds of metal all around as if this had been the site of a fierce battle. The, dried, blood eventually appeared to stop being splattered and looked more as if someone had been dragged. The end of the curving corridor ended in a pair of doors; only one of which had the trail leading thru it. We opened the doors with the blood leading up to it and found that the trail simply stopped at the edge. Puzzled, we entered the room and saw some cages arranged along one of the walls. The opposite wall was covered in some sort of writing but a strange voice entered our heads before I could go up to it to examine. It asked us if we had brought it any food like the red stuff that had been covering the floor earlier. We quickly found that the voice belonged to some sort of strange ooze that was sitting in one of the glass cages that had a side smashed in. We questioned it further but its interests only seem to be that of “food.” Feeling pity towards the creature, I fed it a piece of my jerky rations. It seemed to enjoy it and asked us for more. I promised to bring it more later and we exited out the other side of the room where the blood trail picked up once more.