As you walk East past the old ale barrels now repurposed for ore, you see several areas where the false floors have collapsed.
Alice peeks down into the abyssThis mine is riddled with holes! We must be more careful with explosives...
Memorize the gaps! I don't want anyone to fall down there if we gotta retreat fast.
Curious crystals of glittering aquamarine minerals seem to have grown after the walls have been dug. Appearing like flowstone but with bursts of crystalline structure that no one can identify seem to also have a slimy mold growing on them. Though they don't give off their own light, any speckle of light is reflected off these damp glimmering surfaces. Ashley attempts to use her prospector's pick to take a sample but the crystals are harder than the iron of her tool and refuse to chip or dislodge. She can sense a magic property of the mineral and the structure indicates it's grown up instead of settled down, seeping up from some lower part of the mine rather then flowing down from the action of percolating water.
Ohh, finally something pretty in this mine! But this growth does not seem natural. Do they feed on Mana or something?
Alice also tries to remove one with her dagger
After you snake around the fallen floors, you come to a rickety bridge, haplessly placed across a chasm.
The air becomes oppressively humid and stale here, smelling faintly of sulfur, damp and decay. Though the bridge seems sturdy enough, only one can cross at a time, so naturally Cat goes first followed by the rest of you.
Where the slime covering the crystals have spilled out over the floor, bioluminescent fungal fruiting bodies have grown, giving the cavern a other-worldly appearance. The foul draft from the chasm below is warm and a hole that looks like it wasn't dug by a miner is just a few meters down, it looks natural, almost like a large animal borrowed here.
Alice carefully traverses the bridge.Hmm, I don't like this! We can't get back if this collapses! And what made this hole? Looks like a good place to ambush an snatch off people.
Alice tries to determine if the burrow is fresh.Entering further into the cavern, the outcroppings give way to dense carpets of the weird fungi covering large sections of the floor in this cavern amid the brightly glimmering crystals. Aside from the glowing heads, the growth includes puffballs a foot across, weird shelf fungus also is growing on the walls and stalagmites, a couple of them are large with stalks and caps a good five feet tall. Some of the puffballs glow with an eerie aqua phosphorescence to match the crystals.
Ohh, even nicer! I like fungi! My Trees would look similar in heterotrophic fungus mode! But they need an organic food source. And wouldn't glow unless required. This stuff again looks like it's growing from - magic?
Alice takes her 10ft pole and pokes the puffball in the NW corner, ready to move back should it release spores or something. If it does nothing, Alice uses Phagocytosis on a fungus to determine if it is an ordinary living being.Cat, is this edible?
