Sallis and I retraced our steps back through the tunnels to the first cavern, the one with the bismuth crystals. After dumping the armored slugs out from the makeshift bags we had fashioned from our robes, we counted 18 sleeping squams that we had carried between the two of us.
Sallis growled in frustration as she inspected her untied robe. The slime from the bottom of the beasts had permeated through much of the coarse cloth, and the idea of putting the soaked heavy robe back on was unappetizing. I tugged at the fabric and thought about what to do for a moment while Sallis worked at scraping as much of the slime from her own as she could, before she started to tear the robe into long strips and pieces. She used a few larger dry pieces of the cloth and the strips to tie a makeshift two-piece outfit for herself.
“Oh, duh. Good idea.” I started tearing my robe up as well, setting the drier pieces of cloth off to one side.
“You’ve only known’a the trials for a month, I've been thinkin’ n’ planning for years.” She wound up the long strips of slimy cloth from the rest of her robe into a coil and looped it over her chest. “Ready to go find that dusted vent?”
I picked up my own bundle of cloth after having tied strips of cloth around my own feet and knees. “Yep, let's go.”
She flashed me a grin, produced another small blob of light that she wrapped up in a small piece of scrap cloth to make a crude lantern and we headed back into the tunnels. This time we took the right-hand path at the fork and headed north, quickly realizing that while the southern path narrowed, this one widened. Sallis and I were able to walk side by side after a few minutes of travel, and the huge carved bricks of the dwarven crafted tunnel once again gave way to natural looking stone.
Something about this section felt especially false, like it was a very realistic set purposefully designed to look like natural stone. I ran my hand along the wall and checked the readout from my gauntlet, which informed me that this area was made of basalt.
“Are we still headed down-wind?”
Sallis nodded in reply, focused and sweeping her gaze over every inch of the tunnel. I took the hint and did not speak again while we continued. We traveled for a few minutes longer before the tunnel opened up into a tall and rocky chamber with no obvious exits. Here, the wind was becoming obvious even to me, and I noticed I was sweating despite the breeze. After exploring around for a few minutes, Sallis climbed up one of the walls and discovered a passage that continued on.
I climbed up after her and we kept the pace up, not exactly jogging nor walking but somewhere in between. A hurried ‘I have places to be’ cadence to our footfalls that eventually led us to another open chamber where a sulfurous smell tainted the warming air. This cavern was larger than any of the chambers I had seen so far, and I knew it because the large room was already lit with the dull orange glow of a trio of hot volcanic vents that spat heat distortions, bright flickering sparks, and clouds of steam and gas up into a large hole in the ceiling.
“Yes! We found them!” Sallis exclaimed, and we both moved towards the vents in the center of the room.
The heat intensified as we got closer, and I noticed that one of the billowing vents was built up with a light colored crust around the edge of the steaming pit.
“Looks like a sulfur buildup?” I commented, looking over at Sallis.
She was grinning and looked like she was already typing up our report into the chat UI when I looked at her, so I turned back to the vent and crept closer, wanting to see how close I could get before the heat became too much for me.
I made it to within 15 feet of the glowing heat before, despite my footwraps, the basalt of the floor became too hot for me to push forward any farther. I backed up a few feet and crouched down, ideas about how we could use this spinning through my mind when a red flash broke away from the orange of the hottest looking vent and scurried across the floor in my direction.
Reflexively, I raised my foot and prepared to smash down on it only to be interrupted by Max.
“No! Nope. Bad idea, back up and hit it with a rock or something.”
I half jumped half fell backwards, propelling myself onto the ground and rolling away to the side at Max’s warning.
“What are you doing?” Sallis asked, giving me an amused look.
“There's something small and fast.” I scrambled to my feet and looked around for whatever the thing was, Max’s helpful red outline highlighted a smallish insect that was skittering in my general direction. It was a scorpion with its tail held high, pale and spindly and about the size of a mobile comm.
“There!” I said, pointing at it before starting to look around for something to throw at the bug.
Sallis finally saw it in the dim light from the vents as I pointed it out. “Got it, good eye. Those things are venomous.” She walked over to it and calmly scooped it up, grabbing it by its tail before crushing its head between two fingers.
I watched her, amazed at how well she had handled it compared to the slugs. “Woah, looks like they’re no problem for you.”
She smiled at me and shrugged before pulling the carcass into her inventory. “Not at all, they’re not all slimy like those cracked squams. Their stinger can't make it through most dwarven skin either.”
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“Just another reminder because I’ve been so good lately and the robes are starting to come off. She said carapace, not skin. She might look half naked and curvy, with hair and skin and all that, but remember that's all just an illusion. She's a huge flightless beetle with terrifying mandibles and tentacles coming off her back.”
I tried to smile back at her, despite Max distracting me by hammering in a point that was already well driven into me. The memory of Kazzads true form looming over me in the fabrication pit was still a sharp memory that my mind often wore away at in the night.
“Thanks. Hopefully there was just the one of them.” I replied, brushing off some small pebbles and dust that clung to my sweaty skin from when I had rolled across the ground.
“I’ll look around for more of them, it would actually be good to collect a number of them for components. Their venom has some rare chems.”
I nodded and scanned around the large chamber, eyeing the shadowy corners where the dull orange light from the vents did not reach. The blue topographic outlines of Max’s darkvision filled out the rest of the details for me, revealing a wide circular and domed room with two exits across from the hall we had entered through in the south. A message from Kazek pinged into my inbox, and I noticed it had a little dropdown box that opened and listed out our entire Row as recipients.
Kazek: Sallis’s group has discovered a vent chamber. I’ve marked it on the attached map. The command center will be moving to this location to start setting up for smelting and refinement. Team 1 - abandon your excavation of the collapsed tunnel and regroup at the vent chamber. Team 3 - carve vessels and bring back some of the brine you found. Team 2 - secure the Smolsquam and hold your areas.
Sallis and I busied ourselves searching and clearing the room while we waited for the others to show up. After determining that there were no ore veins or really anything of interest, other than some small boreholes that the scorpion had taken up residence in, we set to work starting to carve some pits out of the basalt floor.
Kazek and his command group arrived first, toting armloads of armored plates that
Lokra and Lurbolg had started to gather in the squam room. They dumped them next to one of the pits and Kazek strode over to us as we worked together to remove a cracked stone block from the floor.
“Let the others take care of that, I need you two to continue scouting ahead. Pick a tunnel and see where it leads.” He ordered, and without waiting for us to reply he walked away to where Bomilik had started to redraw the lines of the map into the floor.
Sallis frowned and looked over at me, I shrugged in response and rose to my feet. “Suits me fine, I’m useless at breaking stone until I can get some water and fluorine anyways.”
She grumbled something about big bossy britches, yet still rose to her feet alongside me. Following our orders, we both crossed the room and headed into the North-Eastern tunnel at a light jog.
We spent the next few hours clearing out a series of nothingburger rooms, empty caverns with minor resource deposits and long winding tunnels. The only thing of note was a large underground ravine with a ledge on each side of a 30ft gorge. We dropped a stone down the seemingly bottomless chasm and used the in-game timer to see how long it would take until we heard the rock hit the bottom of the chamber, and it took a full 15 seconds before we heard the stone shatter against the floor.
We doubled back after that and returned to the main chamber, finding that one of the other groups had arrived at the chamber and emptied out a couple of piles of ore-stones from their inventory near the pits into a growing stockpile. Bomilik had left the map to Kazek and Korfook and moved on to working on the pits. There was a small team carving out channels in the stone between some of the pits and mixing something into the outer layer of stone that caused it to take on a glossy sheen as they polished it with careful practiced motions.
I took a quick stop next to the pile of harvested squam plates and picked one up, noticing it was cracked in the middle and must have accounted for most of the weight of the slugs. The plate was heavy and dense, I hefted it in my hand for a moment before tossing it back onto the pile. Shaking off the distraction, I turned and rejoined Sallis where she was marking out the newly explored area on the communal map, licking her finger and using it to smear lines of caustic saliva onto the stone.
Kazek watched as she added the fruits of our scouting to the map, while I looked over the rest of it to see what the other teams had discovered. The team that went directly south had found a series of empty rooms that led to what they reported as an intentionally collapsed tunnel. Along the way they had found a couple of different useful types of stones including one room entirely formed from soapstone, represented by small samples left out on the map.
Jozoic’s team had taken the other passage that branched off from the bismuth room, which we were now calling the squam room, and discovered a branching maze of intersecting tunnels. At the end of the maze was a submerged corridor that they had gathered two large stone vats of heavily salted water from. One of the vats sat near the doorway, while the other had been emptied into a pit and set to a boil by adding heated stones.
With most of the Row back in the vent room, we quickly set about putting together a crude kiln, as well as creating more evaporation and mixing pits. Lokralda had come in from squam-tending and was busy smashing the metallic shells into a powder in one of the pits, while Bomilik had moved to mixing a quartz stone slurry in another pit to fill the brick molds that a few of the others were carving from the basalt.
I was given the task of filling molds and hauling the bricks around for awhile, before I ran out of work and had nothing better to do than stand watch at one of the doorways. While I waited around, I fashioned a makeshift satchel from some of the scraps of cloth from my robe so I could start collecting a stock of materials for my gauntlets. I picked up a chunk of stone that was heavy in fluorides from one of the piles of ore and placed it into the pouch next to a section of squam plate and a magnesium oxide heavy bit of basalt I had picked up while we were exploring.
I leaned against the wall, staring out into the dimly illuminated tunnel I was assigned to keep watch of, and tried to think of something useful I could be doing. What I really needed was a water vessel for hydrogen and oxygen, but none of the materials we had to work with so far would work well for that. Once we had some pure copper I could use it to beat out sheeting for a crude canteen, but that would be a few hours out according to Lokraldas estimates. Plus, I doubted that creating a canteen for myself would be high on the priority list for the first batches of the stuff.
My stomach rumbled as I thought the situation over, reminding me that I had skipped lunch and it was nearing dinner time. Maybe I should catch some sleep while I had the downtime? I kicked a small loose stone down the tunnel in frustration and grumbled to myself about the alleged need to hurry, the unclear rules and expectations for the trials, and my inability to help with the ongoing effort as I hurried up and waited.