Kelaria was a strange creature, inclined to yell for hours somedays, utterly silent others.  But she truly had nothing to say when everything useful had already been said.  She took position to clobber or bash whatever came in.

After piling into the narrow hallway and gathering at the door in preparation, the party presses the nearby panel to reveal the unexplored room. The room reeks of stagnant water and decaying vegetation. A long trough of water runs along the walls of this room; a layer of brown scum and algae grows on the water’s surface and on the walls. A single workstation sits in the middle of the room connected to a large machine made of tubes and bubbling tanks of water.

Cain relaxes a bit when nothing immediately jumps out on them from inside. But remembering how things went with the vegepygmies, he does not relax too much. "Doesn't look like there is much of interest here. Unless something is hiding in the water."

"That thing offer there probably does something,"  Zorden commented with a gesture towards the workstation.  "but I don't know that it's what we are looking for as far as getting the torch going again.  So probably better to keep looking and come back if we run out of other options."

Ionaya adds, "While only a fool is not careful about the unknown, I'm not fearful of this too wet room."
Pausing for a moment, she looks around at everyone else, while a zephyr breeze swirls around the party. After the breeze fades, she starts to move back towards the more open hallway from which they came. "While I owe you all my life and I enjoy your company, I'm concerned about us being caught by ill intended beings in too close an area."

Morin hid a smirk as Ionaya declared she had no fear of the wet room they had just opened up, then proceeded to retreat from the open door without going in.  The others didn't seem too interested in checking out the room either, but Morin couldn't help but want to take a look.  After all, they were running out of rooms to search, and it wouldn't do to miss an opportunity because they didn't bother to look for it.

"Just one moment."  He called, sending in his unseen servant to poke around the scummy troughs with an unlit torch. If the magical disturbance didn't spook any beasties out of hiding, he moved in himself to give the place a quick once over.

"Do these vegetables not give the poor death we have seen?" Kelaria asked.  She had a healthy respect for the weird plants down here by now.

She tried to maintain a position out of the way but able to leap in and rescue.  Somehow.  How well she'd split the difference remained to be seen.

With no obvious threat present, the party spreads out into the oddly shaped hallway while Morin sends in the servant to root around. When nothing jumps out at the figment, the gnome follows it in and also finds nothing particularly useful. The machine here, like many in these ruins, seems to be used to study water ... or plants? ... in some way, but there's no telling how to work it or interpret it. The only thing he can tell from examining the overgrowing algae and scum is that the scum covering the seat of the workstation seems to have been pressed down for some time by a small, muscular rump.

"No dice."  Morin shook his head, as searching the room yielded no results.  He was a bit surprised to see the cheek marks on the seat by the workstation, though. That vegepygmy hadn't seemed like the computer-using type.  Hopefully they didn't just brain their best source of useful information.

"Looks like we've got one more room we haven't searched."  The gnome opined, looking over the map.  "Hopefully, that's our ticket." If there wasn't anything of note there, he was pretty much at a loss about where the party should go next.  Maybe figuring out Garmen's doohickey would be the real secret to fixing the torch?

"There was also a room I'd looked into earlier then locked."  Zorden reminded everyone.  "Couple of creatures in it, but no Khonnir Baine, so we didn't really see what it was for."

"Perhaps we just break something."  Kelaria suggested.  Because of course she did.  But if not breaking things wasn't working, maybe she was on to something with such a suggestion.

All these technological marvels just look like junk to Cain. Possibly valuable junk, but junk still.

"Alright, let's check out that room as well, and then we can decide where to next. It would help if we even knew what we were looking for. We do know there was somebody else down here about the time the torch went out. And I don't think we've found any of them yet, alive or dead, did we? Maybe finding them - or finding out what happened to them - would point us in the right direction."

Forming up once again the party heads north, still plotting where exactly to explore next and losing hope that these ruins will answer the question of the quenched torch. Through the northern doorway they find a circular room, central to this section of the buried ruins, which they have not yet explored. This unlit circular room is empty save for a panel of controls on the wall to the northwest. A coil of tubes dangling from the left side of the panel periodically flashes with sparks, while a single square window on the panel blinks with several lines of strange writing of various colors, with the final line flashing in dangerous red: [Language unknown:
Ter te: Etpl'fosata
Fiac ec: Buthatyin
Ureri e: Ing
Thepe in: Ourprerut
PAILLA: Unalnoal meicless—peomas lobeno wingunanol!]

"Well, that looks like it might not be the way it's supposed to be."  Zorden remarked, somewhat stating the obvious.

"Maybe we're in luck and... whatever this is, is the problem.  Assuming it can be fixed."

"Alright, if this is an elevator, then there must be much more to this place than what we have seen so far. Docking, Crew, Science - I guess that's where we are now - Engineering. Any idea if we can get this piece of junk to work again?"

Cain looks over the broken elevator, but since the task does not call for breaking it even more, he is at a loss on how to proceed.

"Oh, you read Androffan too?"  Morin asked, both impressed and a little disappointed.  He had thought he was the only one in the party who could translate the ancient language, and learning otherwise was a tiny bruise to his ego.

Returning to the issue at hand, he rubbed his chin in thought.  "Anyways, I think we already smashed what's left of the maintenance team on the way in. And while I may know a thing or two about a thing or two, I'm no elevator repairman.  BUT!"  He thrust a finger into the air, triumphantly.  "The existence of an elevator implies the existence of an elevator shaft!  And as luck would have it, we happen to be packing three hundred feet of climbing rope." 

The gnome started scrutinizing the walls, floors, and ceilings of the circular room as best he could, looking for some kind of hidden hatch.  "There's got to be a maintenance hatch somewhere around here. How else would they expect to fix a broken elevator, right? We've just got to find it, pop it open, and climb on up to engineering!  Or down to personnel, I guess.  But I'd imagine the "Turn on giant superlaser" button is more of an engineering thing."

12:19, Today: Morin Matzylford rolled 8,13 using d20+4,d20+8 with rolls of 4,5.  Perception and knowledge (engineering)

Bleh.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:20, Yesterday.

While Morin was looking, Zorden investigated the panel, looking to see if there was an obvious place for the coil of tubes to be put back.

Ionaya looked back and forth between Morin and Cain. "So, this 'Androfan', as you call it. It that the language that this writing on the wall is in? And you both can read it?"

She paused, briefly looking somewhat annoyed, "What is an elevator? Something that lifts things, I guess?" She then asked curiously.

Morin nodded, glad that at least someone knew less about Androffan architecture than him.  "Good guess! But despite the name, it can also lower things. It's like a big dumbwaiter, but for people."  The gnome paused, thinking to himself while he tapped around the room in search for a hidden latch or panel.  "Wait, do you know what a dumbwaiter is?  I'd imagine there's not a lot of those out here in the barbarian hinterlands.  Then again, if you asked me a week ago I'd say I didn't imagine there were a lot of post offices out here either, and I'd be dead wrong on that one! Anyways, a dumbwaiter is kinda like a small elevator, for food and dishes and stuff."

"Eh, just barely. It's a useful skill to have when trying to figure out which piece of numerian junk is valuable, and which is likely to blow up in one's face. Something they are prone to doing depressingly often, I may add." Cain explains to Morin as he join his search, though he is not quite sure what exactly they are looking for.

OOC: Hmm, never even occurred to me that the concept of an elevator could be unknown in the setting.
23:11, Today: Cain rolled 23 using 1d20+8 with rolls of 15.  Perception. – 23

The surrounding breeze intensified, becoming a small chill wind that whipped Ionaya's hair back and forth behind her, her eyes briefly crackling with blue-white plasma filaments. "Forgive me, Morin," she began tersely, her white haired brow furrowed in what looked like either frustration or anger, "But telling me that something is 'kinda like' something else I'm not sure about is telling me almost nothing about either, while encouraging me to feel that my lack of knowledge is my own fault."

"It's a big box that gets pulled up and down at the end of a rope."  Zorden commented somewhat idly on the conversation regarding dumb waiters as he continued to study the panel and tubes.

"When you're rich, you have slaves to carry things up and down your stairs.  When you have even more money, you have two slaves, one upstairs to put the things in the box and one down to pull them out, and the dumb waiter contraption is crafted and built into your home as a demonstration of your wealth.  I guess this is like that, only bigger, and operating like most everything else in this place, by knowledge mainly horded by the rich and powerful, like the Technic League, to make themselves even more rich at the expense of everyone they can get under their boots."
This message was last edited by the player at 22:40, Yesterday.

"Bah, what a waste.  It is better to traverse and gain strength so you can crush your enemies."  Kelaria complained, but reconsidered.  "Though such a thing could be useful in battle."

Her fertile mind began to imagine all the projectiles and supplies she could get up to the high ground with such a device.

"How much can this box weigh?  Why not tie a rope around it and hoist it out of the way?"

It takes only a cursory look at the sparking coils to get a good idea of the nature of the sparking, at least. Where one of the coils once connected to a socket in the side of the panel, the coupling has been warped and the coil will no longer attach. Significant enough power courses through the coil that it occasionally leaps to any nearby metal surface. Even though the coupling is made of Numerian steel, it shouldn't be too much trouble for a smith of Torch with access to a full foundry to bend it back into shape--though removing the coupling from its coil would require some skill or strength to free it and careful timing to avoid getting shocked.

Examining the makeup of this 'elevator' more closely, it is clear by stomping that the ground beneath the room is solid--if there were rooms below they have been replaced by packed rubble and stone since the makers abandoned the place. However prodding of the ceiling reveals a very slight echo. There are no access hatches or seams in the Numerian steel of the ceiling to be exploited, even along the light-emitting panels, so forcing through would require an impossible feat of strength or tools made to bypass the strength of Numerian steel.

"I think the broken bit here can be removed, but we'd likely need to take it back to the temple or councilor Baine to have it fixed."  Zorden commented.

ooc: what sort of effort/roll would it take to remove the coupling?

Also, is the arrangement as such that the coil and socket might be temporarily held together with a set of Grippers?