Re: Fires of Creation: Mechanical Mysteries
After picking what they like from the Skulk's trade, the party continues on, crossing the makeshift settlement and arriving at the great, pock-marked, Numerian steel wall bisecting the cavern. Set in the wall about five feet above the cave floor is a recessed circle of steel which the party informs Kelaria is a doorway which will need to be pried open. With a crowbar and the proper application of leverage and muscle, the recessed wall of steel slides up and into the ceiling, revealing rooms and halls of grey steel and white plastic well-lit by artificial, stale, diffused lights behind translucent panels much sturdier than glass. In places this metal structure has collapsed under the weight of the cave's ruddy rock, but the party leads Kelaria ahead through the halls and a smaller room with strange decorations of tubes and nozzles and a lit panel with the strange characters she's seen before on metal beasts in the past.
The metal rooms then suddenly give way to a narrow cave and the air quickly becomes hot and dry, quite a change from the cool, damp caves accessed by the underwater tunnel. After a twist in the cave, the path opens up unexpectedly into a vast, sweltering desert beneath a red sun and sky. A breeze which could never exist indoors pushes the sands about as they slowly cover and erase the disturbance of what must have been a recent battle--hurried footsteps and scattered bones are slowly being lost to the dunes and the carcass of some grotesque, tentacle beast rots away in its shell, but the beast's shell, a spiky, coral-like structure taller than a man might never be lost. In fact, as far as the eye can see in this desert caldera of sorts the sands are littered with these eerie, coral remains.
Once Kelaria's awe and disbelief at this Buried World have eased, the party continues eastward across the desert, following the trail of footsteps left by themselves and others who went before, arriving at another cave in the desert's surrounding rock walls.
See Group 9 Map for reference.