Age of Ashes

After regrouping in the northern room, the group moves to inspect the armored body. However, upon doing so, the lump it's resting on rises out of the water, revealing itself to be a large creature with a turtle-like shell. It also reveals itself to not be alone, a second matching creature rising out of the water next to it.

Helga murders the hell out of the turtle things. She gets hit once in return but the critters are dead!

As the second one thuds to the ground, Gin reloads her pistol before spinning it back into its holster. She then wordlessly approaches the corpses to see if there's anything valuable that can be stripped off them.

With a defeated sigh, after the dead body's been turned over of everything it's worth, she steps forward and closes the dead man's eyes before proffering a small prayer of her own for his soul in Infernal. "May you find peace in your wanderings and be delivered swiftly to your next life." She stands and scoops up some of the mud from the ground, eyes resting on the beasts as she gives them the same prayer, before turning to Helga and offering to patch her up with some of the glowing paste. Jill, meanwhile, turns her knife around a few times before crouching next to the beasts, prodding them to see if her knife might be up to the task of skinning them for parts.

Afterwards, the group moves toward the northmost door out of the room, behind which they find a great beast of a wolf, snarling at Gin, "And here I was about to go hunting, but it seems lunch delivered itself today!"

"Who, me?" Gin asks, hand instinctively reaching for her pistol. "Nah, you don't want to try me, unless you want a mouthful of lead, and probably a bellyful of my friend's axe. And if you don't believe me, you could try asking the two turtles in this room."

The beast reacts with something akin to a chortle, "A goblin, huh? Wouldn't be the first time one of their kind tried to escape my jaws, won't be the last!"

Helga lets out a growl at that and steps forth. "Outta the way, Gin, I'm going to get me a pelt coat!"

Combat ensues and Helga almost gets vored. Once the warg is dead and she is free, she spitefully chops its head off. Adelle just quietly shakes her head while all those injuries get patched up.

While the others are patching up Helga after her near-digestion experience, Gin looks through the room. In the desk she finds a book, some kind of law book from a quick skim, and more interestingly three scrolls stashed in a false bottom. Holding up the scrolls, she looks back over at the rest of the group. "Any of you any good with these things?"

Conferva's shuts her eyes while she bandages herself, having already seen to Helga's wounds and tossing her a handkerchief to clean the various bits of chyme and sludge off of her. After wrapping her own wounds with some more healing paste, she looks up at Gin and tilts her head at the scrolls. "It couldn't hurt to have a look myself, is it a language you cannot read, or is it the subject matter that gives you pause?" Jill steps her way up and peers at the scrolls alongside Gin, leaning a bit over her shoulder to get a clearer view.

"Scrolls like these almost always have some mystical mumbo jumbo on them, and my upbringing didn't exactly lend itself to much magical know-how," Gin replies, before offering the scrolls to Jill.

Jill speaks up for the first time in a bit, pointing at some of the words on the first of the scrolls with her bootknife. "ooh, i know of this one. I can hold onto it, if you'd like?" She suggests, while Conferva in the background rolls her eyes. She continues, "have you ever set up a piece of twine or rope, or what have you, that when someone steps through it sets nearby bells or whistles to activity? It's akin to that, but applied magically and you need a password to enter!" There's a bit of sparkle to her eyes while she looks it over again.

The group moves deeper into the fort after identifying the scrolls, through a dusty abandoned library and into a prisoner holding area. As they move to inspect the lockers in that room, skeletons of former prisoners abandoned to their fate in the cages rattle to life and accost the party

The group makes fairly quick work of the skeletons, reducing them once again to lifeless corpses.

Afterwards, the group turns their attention to the room around them, and the combo of Jill and Conferva find a pair of locked lockers. Once again flicking her picks out of their sheath, she approaches one of them, crouching down and slipping the rods in with a practiced grace. She jiggles them for a moment, then more, and then curses as one of them snaps in half with a loud crack.

Pulling the broken lockpick out, she slips it into a pocket before flicking her other wrist, producing a backup. "This is why you always carry a spare," She says, slipping the new rod in and continuing the effort. This time it goes smoothly, the lock quickly popping open. Moving over to the other, she pops it open almost easily, before slipping the picks back into their compartment.

Conferva singles out the unique tome on the floor and gently picks it up, brushing it off best she can before handing it off to Jill to hold for the moment.She scans the rest of the room and spots a well-concealed door on the western wall, pulling at the handle with a frustrated sigh. "Hard to notice, behind a secret door itself, and locked. Something either precious, dangerous, or a mix of the two is locked behind this." Jill places the book into Conferva's bag for her while she muses, and eyes up both the tile and the wall. She speaks up to Gin, "'ve you got any ideas, hot-shot? Looks like these two," she points between the wall and the tile, "are somehow connected. Pressure plate maybe? Wall's too clean to not have been fussed with recently, either."

"Definitely a pressure pad, something sharp in the wall, I'm guessing a spear. Gimme just a moment and I'll see about that door you found," She says, crouching by the tile. Flicking a somewhat thicker rod out of her wrist-sheath, she uses it to carefully pry up the edge of the tile, and after a fair bit of finagling, manages to get some debris lodged in to prevent the pad from tripping. "That should be that. Now let's see about that door of yours," She says, standing up and swapping out the mini crowbar for a more standard set of picks.

"Definitely good work, didn't even notice it when we walked in, though I was a bit distracted by the trap," She says, examining the door. "Lock seems a bit simple though," She says, as with a simple jiggle she manages to unlatch it. Opening the door doesn't lead anywhere particularly interesting though, as it seems to just be a hidden back door.

One door leads to what might have been a mess hall once, but at this point is just a pile of tables and chairs reduced to little more than an opportunist's kindling and firewood.

The next, on the other hand, opens to a room with a blackened floor, and poking one's head further into the room reveals a pit in the floor at the widest part of the room, stained crimson with a pentagram in the bottom.

There's someone in here, for once; a tall figure in armor matching the ruined sets you've seen elsewhere in the citadel, battling a small winged creature, though, battling is a bit of an overstatement as no sooner do you take in the sight as the armored figure drives their greatsword through the creature's chest, killing it.

Adelle snaps to attention, immediately recognizing the man's armor. "Ser Hellknight! Pleased to meet you. My name is Adelle Baudin."

The Hellknight turns to face Adelle, but no sooner does he start to acknowledge her than more creatures matching the first drop from the ceiling; turning to face them, the figure grumbles "Great, more bloody hell monkeys. Well, if you're so eager to talk, you'll need to lend a hand first."

The group dispatches the "hell monkeys" with ease. Chop chop, ice bolt, beheadings....Helga looks up at the Hell Knight. "So, what's up, tall, dark, and broody?"

The knight ignores the goblin addressing him while he ensures each imp corpse is freed of it's head, "The sloppiness my predecessors showed in their withdrawal here borders on shameful, really. Always ensure each and every pest from the abyss is thoroughly and truly destroyed."

"Now then," he says, turning to Adelle, "You've given me your name, and in turn, I will grace you with mine. I am Armiger Alak Stagram, of the Order of the Nail. Formerly of this very citadel, and now of our Citadel Vraid in Varista. Your assistance betrays you as more than simple looters, so perhaps you'd be inclined to share why you're here?"

"Well met. Did you know my uncle Gerard? He served here, with your Order." Adelle pauses, then continues "Anyway, since the Hellknights left, a clan of goblins has been living here. We're looking for them."

"Did he now? I can't say I did; our order had abandoned this citadel before I was more than a fresh faced recruit. I've only seen a small area of this citadel since arriving today, so I neither know nor care about any squatter problems, much less involving those little green-skinned menaces, he sneers.

"Well, as your order abandoned the citadel so long ago, we might wonder just what you're doing here. We're quite a way from Varisia, and I doubt cleaning up pests left here so long ago was what brought you all this way," Gin says, holstering her pistol and taking up a position against a wall where she can comfortably scowl at the rude Hellknight.