Episode 2

We leave the sludge and move the meat. Whatever is still going on in the corpses might be contained by the tarp. Ultimately, what I'm getting at is the sludge might be the leftover residue and not an acid type substance (just because the flesh is having that reaction, for whatever chem/magic reason, doesn't mean it will eat through the tarp). We don't know, and throwing a few corpses on a tarp and bagging them shouldn't take long.

Lay out tarp. Drag bodies. Wrap. Tie. Done. If it works, or just buys us time, that's great.

As Bryn gets higher, he feels some small amount of relief at least on breathing. Some of the vapors have definitely floated upward, but from the high vantage it seems like the thickest fog billows up and then sinks back down to linger around 5 to 8 feet off the floor.

At the top corner, Bryn has to transition from wall clinging to ceiling clinging. With his hands and feet stuck to the gritty wood beam ceiling, the weight of his body suspends down towards the floor so it is a different and more difficult weight to hold.

He makes it over to the sunken panel. The depth of the indention is a bit less than one foot, roughly the thickness of the great ceiling beams. The panel itself is roughly a 3' by 4' rectangle. Bryn gives it a careful push to test. The panel is a door, hinged on north long end, and it pivots to open!

Bryn shifts around to the south long end of the panel so that he could have the option to push the panel up and get grip on the interior floor of whatever might be inside. If there is spacing and if he decides to enter into a higher room, he would have the best chance to pull in on the broadest part of the pivot opening from opposite the hinges.

Bryn presses up lightly one more time, enough to peer his head around and try to get some sort of glimpse on what is inside. He looks in to darkness. Still the only light is coming from Kray's torch below.

A foul smell does waft out though, and Bryn gets a full whiff of it right in the face. It is a different stench than before. The sickened walking toxins below gave a smell of rot and sickness. This smells like pungent ammonia.

On the edge of the lip of the floor level of the upper space inside of the door, Bryn sees a pile of grimy filth. He focuses in on it and realizes it is a pile of some sort of small dropping, shit from something. It is not clear from this angle how much of it there is.

Inside of the upper room is completely dark.

Sizhen and Kray inspect the bodies and exchange ideas about what to do. Communications are frustrating, both men trying to speak Heshbaan in their intermediate mastery of it while under stress and coughing.

The torsos of the bodies are mostly eaten away, dissolved into a disgusting slime ooze that has sloughed out onto the stone floor. The abdomens are almost completely gone, as are the bodies’ necks. The chest cages are now just smoking bone with some of the globs of the sludge and tissue hanging on like wet minced meat.

The soft tissues of legs and arms are also dissolving rapidly, mostly so if they are in contact with the sludge. At this time the spines, skulls, more distant parts of the legs are still intact, at least tacitly so.

Using the tarps to fan fumes away has little beneficial effect.

The idea of rolling body remnants onto tarps might work or might not, depending on how much they remain intact when manipulated. As you mentioned, it would likely do little to clean up the sludge and oily fleshing grime that is smeared all over the floor and the greater source it seems of the toxin generation.

Sizhen looks again at the shudders. There is no glass in any of this. These were once large window opening that would lead to the outside air. Huge thick heavy hinged, cross-boarded wood shudders are closed and barred. On the inside of that are metal beams bolted into the wall horizontally and then other metal bands that run vertical from the floor to about 10 feet high on the doors themselves.

It makes for a formidable barrier. It is not clear if it could be broken at all, and if so it would take an extended timeframe with full effort and tools.

As the others are talking, Thorn thinks he sees something from the other room north beyond the cage gate door.

Peering through the smoke, he tries to focus. At first he is unsure, but then ... yes. It is.

Light.

Light from a lantern or a torch. Casting through the room and getting brighter.

Something or someone with a light is approaching, incoming somewhere from the west in the northern chamber beyond the gate door.

Sizhen was more correct than he wanted to be when he had assessed that the bodies were quickly deteriorating to a point where they would be difficult if not impossible to move.

With one pull on the skinny body's legs, an arm and shoulder sloughs off. The smoke billows out in a big pulse as the sludge and tissue is stirred. Trying to endure the closeness to the smoke source, he sling shifts the legs onto a tarp. The sludge smears out onto the floor and the tarp. The partial body is on the tarp and a pile of parts and dissolving tissue is on the floor beside.

It is tough to get into the smoking area to drag the tarp, but the men pull it away a few feet before having to move away coughing.

Developments and questions on responses

The ceiling door panel
Bryn is hanging from the ceiling, just outside of a door panel. No locks and door opens freely. Inside is darkness and droppings. Light inside may need to be a concern if he enters.
What does Bryn do?

An approaching light from the north room
Thorn is the first to see it; he is standing close to the north cage gate. The north gate is a cage like larger door with a lock and bolt mechanism keeping it closed and a smaller door build within it at the bottom, which had one lock mechanism on it. Just outside of the gate, hanging down on the western hall wall on the outside of the gate, is a chain length that rises upward and extends to the floor. The gate-door does allow enough spacing for arms/hands to reach out of it, but it is a rather tight fit with the obstruction of the cross-barred iron beams of the cage door.
The light was dim at first, now brightening, like an approach coming from a western origin in the next room north.
Is the light a sentry? A monster? A supernatural effect?
How do PCs prepare for or react to the coming light? What positions are taken? Is there a plan spoken through quickly?

Interior room projects
Is Ivor still striving to eventually break a statue free?
Are Sizhen, Kray and possibly others still trying to bag and move body remnants?

Thorn hears a voice talking around the corner. Although the view is obscured by the smoke, which even rolls through the gate door a ways into the short hall beyond to the north, Thorn can see the light coming closer.

Suddenly the rays of the light round the bend and shine clearly. It appears to be the light from a torch. It is like a heavy glow inside the obscurement in the cloud of gas. Thorn can see the glow, through the smoke, positioned just around the corner to the left in the short northern hall beyond the gate door.

Whoever or whatever is carrying the torch has apparently stopped. Thorn can see some residual movement though, in the way that the lighting shifts a bit back and forth as it casts from around the corner.

Thorn listens and hears a low voice, talking very quietly, but in a language he cannot understand.

Ivor points the crowbar out through one of the square openings. Once it is outside of the gate, he resets his grip and uses the crowbar for its reach. Hooking the chain, he works carefully to pull it towards him, getting it into his fingers delicately along with the crowbar. It is challenging and the movement has to be careful now.

He draws his arm back slowly, close enough for Thorn to reach out through another square and get the crowbar out of his hand when it is close enough. Now Ivor has a relatively stable grip on the chain alone. Although the angle is not optimal, Ivor is able to extend out and pull down as best as he can. He can feel the weight and give of the chain it is pulling something.

Meanwhile, Kray lights another torch. Coordinating with Bryn he tosses it up. Bryn snatches it out of the air with his sticky fingers.

As Ivor pulls the chain, the ceiling shudder that Bryn is investigating pops up softly. Then back down again. Then back up. Not all the way open, only bobbing up and down a few inches each time.

Kray, at the junction of watching Bryn and watching Ivor, sees the connection first. The chain is opening the ceiling door panel! Ivor does not quite have the angle to heave the chain directly down as someone could standing back in the outer hallway several feet, but it is pretty clear that the function of the chain has been discovered.

As Ivor is reaching out to manipulate the chain, he is the first to notice that further back past the chain is a heavy rope with knots tied in it. He cannot reach this, it is too far even for the crowbar, but it seems likely that it could be some other mechanism.

Just around the corner of the short north hallway, Ivor can see the light of a torch. Suddenly he hears a voice! He cannot understand, but it is a gravelly voice that sounds either angry or surprised.

Standing nearby, Trece catches a few words...
note="HypCo"]Only a fragment, but definitely recognizable as Otessite...
"...a strong one... have to take his arm."[/note]

Bryn steadies the torch briefly to make sure that it holds its burn. When it stabilizes, Bryn pushes up on the door using his head and shoulder, draws the torch in and around the lip of the ceiling/floor plane, and leans in enough to get a glimpse of the space above.

It takes a few moments to get bearings at the awkward angle and a change focus of vision past the closely held fire to the room beyond. Bryn gets his eyes adjusted to see a room empty of furniture or decor, for what he can see. At the floor level the room looks empty, save for a floor full of droppings. A quite staggering amount all over the floor. The ammonia smell of urine is so thick that Bryn can barely stand it.

Which brings Bryn's eyes inevitably upward, in a search for the likely horrible source of the defecation. He is shocked at what he sees....

note="Oxbox"]
Hanging high, from bars and brackets bolted to the high on the ceiling and walls of the upper room, Bryn sees rows of large bats!

They are larger than most other bats Bryn has ever seen, the size of two or maybe three stacked fists even with wings tucked in. They hang there in deathlike still slumber, their sickly pale flesh and course rugged hair fully visible in the basking glow of the torchlight. Long shadows cast out behind them, swinging back and forth as Bryn moves the torch. There are dozens of them!

Bryn cannot see the entire room, but he is looking to the south. Since the shutter panel pivots on the north, he cannot see the northern view, but he suspects that some sort of chain mechanism is connected to the top of the door panel and pulls from the chain which is likely routed from a northern direction.

Straight south is an indented threshold of a door. It is closed and has several boards nailed across it, suggesting that it is no longer used for entry.

To the east (Bryn's vantage left), Bryn sees two indentures with heavily shuddered windows. One seems completely boarded, the other is not, but it is unclear if it is operational for opening.

To the west (Bryn's vantage right), Bryn sees a heavy wooden door with iron braces. It is not boarded, but is soundly closed with a pivoting cross-bolt board thrown across it and firmly set in an anchor bracket.

Bryn holds his composure to look once more at the beefy bats. He sees that they have strange multi-armed wings, large cupping ears, and nasty snouts on them, long and tubular.

OOC: Ox, that's what Bryn can get from peering in. If you want the details of the other side of the room, the northern stretch part, then Bryn has to climb in and enter the room!

OOC: On the map, "Palace Upper Level 1st Floor", this is room #7. I hope you can see how it corresponds structurally to what I describe above, but as normal now the decor is nothing like the picture.[/note]

As Ivor grips the chain...

he feels a blast of pain, of metal crashing into his arm. He has been hit with a flanged mace!

Attack Hits at 18. (or not. Tell me if that is in fact a miss. I'm going by 17 AC of character sheet)
Damage 6.

Glancing up through the smoke, Ivor sees the outline of a large hulking figure standing further back. He cannot make out much detail, but it seems from the lay of the shadows from the light behind it that the figure is covered in a robe or cloak.