[Well, there goes all our auxilliary importable haulers.]
Eric wandered through the dark halls, scribbling notes on a piece of white cloth with charcoal.
The place was a mess, with half-collapsed sections everywhere. He'd entered through what looked like a community meeting and dining hall, ringed by small rooms with piles of rotted wood in them; beds, and small stone dressers. The room was long, with vaulted ceilings and 2 stories tall with catwalks and rampways. There was a larger doorway at the opposite end of the room from the breach point, leading out into a hall. The hall was about 50 meters long, ending at a four-way intersection. Other rooms off the hall weren't nearly as grandiose as the living quarters, and seemed to be storage rooms or office and work areas, mostly containing tiny shreds of rotten fabric and wood, some metal nails, rusted metal tools, shelving dug straight into the walls and desk surfaces left of solid stone when the rooms were carved out. At the intersection, he looked down the hallways to either side, both being straight rampways that would descend a little over 5 meters at a time, with a 3-meter-wide flat area for intersecting hallways. To the right, it ascended, and to the left, descended. The hallway straight ahead of him didn't seem more interesting than the one he'd come down, but it was dark enough without torchlight that he couldn't really see the end. Sending Bugly ahead, with strobe lights on extra-bright-but-not-seizure-inducing, he surveyed that hall as well. Unlike the other hall, it was focused entirely on industry, with many workshop areas and medium-sized stockpiles. Nothing as impressive as a dwarven industrial sector, unless this settlement had only survived a year, which would be ridiculous. At the end of the hall was a perfectly boring wall, as he may leave if he intended for a section of the fortress to be expandable.
There was surprisingly little worth looting, but enough to be worth an archaeological study. Perhaps he could even get the dwarves warmed up to the concept of actually studying ancient cultures. Luckily there were no signs of life whatsoever; the floor was caked in dust a quarter inch thick, and with no signs of being disturbed.
Returning to the intersection, he turned left and ascended up the ramps. He knew he was 10 stories below the soil level, and the incline wasn't too steep, so it seemed the most logical decision to figure out where this ruin's entrance had been. The lightly vaulted ceiling made it all seem larger than it really was, at 5 meters across. At the top of the ramps, just below the soil, was a short hallway leading into a large open room with a steeply vaulted ceiling, reaching high into the soil layers and having been built of thick stone blocks. There had been a massive collapse on the left half of the room; most of it was buried under a mound of dirt. The ceiling on the other half was showing wear as well, with little bits of debris strewn everywhere. At the far end, 50 meters away, was a large arched doorway, flooded with broken stone and loose soil. It would take a while to excavate that. There was water damage as well. In fact, water had clearly been running down the rampway in small ribbons, leaving one or two miniature canyons where the surface had been eroded, by more than a couple inches.
Finally, he descended down the ramps to the level of the breaching, and was about to continue further down when he spotted glowing orange eyes staring at him from the darkness, deep below. Many, many eyes. There was chirping, squealing, growing in intensity. Crundles. A horde of crundles. They must have felt the air in the ruins disturbed, but the ruins would almost have to be linked to the caverns through some means...
The mass of scaly flesh was practically screaming with excitement. Then, one of them ran upwards, just a few feet. Then another, and another, a few more feet. Then they charged, squealing with glee at the prospect of an easy meal. Eric ordered Bugly and Betty up front, to begin writhing in light and attempt to intimidate them. It didn't work. Within seconds, the first few crundles had reached the beasts, and were tossed like ragdolls. Eric entered the fray between the centipedes, and began swinging his pick into the horde, missing for the most part. They scratched and bit at him, but soon the howls of pain from their comrades overpowered their eagerness to fight, and they retreated back into the darkness. Eric surveyed the damage; he'd only sustained superficial wounds to his legs and arms, the centipedes didn't appear to take any damage, but they'd only killed perhaps half a dozen of the creatures, with a few more too crippled to retreat. The centipedes had a feast while Eric sat for a minute.
"And here I was hoping this place was only cursed by ancient undead..." he muttered.
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 265680 times)