Yulya places her hand on one of the crystals and tries to find out if magic flows through them. Her hand sinks into a gelatinous mucus like slime.
Magic indeed, she takes 2 necrotic damage from the living substrate.

Witnessing this, Alice discards the idea of eating any of those fungi with  heavy heart.
Ah figures. But they look so pretty...

Yulya shakes her aching hand and holds it to Alice - the living towel.

Damned, be careful what you touch, leave that to me!
Alice oozes neutralizing liquid on Yulya's hands to wash off the poison without getting it into her body

Ashley pulls out the dark crystal from her pack. "I bet this is worth something, I know this is the thing Tharden wanted, I bet it's worth a lot more than just ore, and powerful people could use this to speak to their demonic gods.

Alice's eyes narrow.
This thing...
I am still convinced that orb is magnitudes more dangerous than my ship. Not just because some shady sorcerer could use it to level up his pals or talk to evil gods. It's a portal! You saw what happened at the guild. Even under Freya's supervision that Orcas guy managed to intervene. And she couldn't have stopped him if I hadn't stink bombed everything. Imagine some idiot used the crystal on purpose to summon demons. Add a few human sacrifices and I bet it's not overly hard even for a rookie to open the gates of hell.



Alice begins to whisper
I've heard stories about this before. Monsters from the negative plane spilling over entire worlds. It's a runaway process like an avalanche. The more demons manifest, and the more carnage they create, the more mana leaks over, spawning new monstrosities. Eventually the barrier between the material and the negative plane breaks down over a vast area and - well, that's it. Not even the owl guy could seal off such gate once the avalanche is set off...

Alice musters Ashley.
What will you do with this ticking time bomb when we get back? Hand he crystal to the Rockseekers? Pretend we never found it? This must never fall into the wrong hands and we should only use it in an emergency. I wish that mecha goddess had given some advice what to do with it but she's not the most talkative...

Whatever. I think we're being fucked over by just about everyone here, from gods to bandits. But soon they'll learn what it means to mess with the wrong persons...

Alice proceeds to let out her anger at fungus puffballs when suddenly out of nowhere strange smoky dragons

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 abyss
This 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?

Now that's an interesting cave I like!

Alice Nya those guys were vulnerable to slashing Nya but you have no slashing weapon Nya! Take one of the shortswords we found Nya!

Hmm, not a bad idea, I always wanted to try this! At least until I get a slashing reach weapon!
Alice takes a shortsword, hones it and puts it in her pack.



After Rest, Alice moves beside Cat with her bow readies with a honed arrow. If there are no enemies, Alice inspects the barrels at the edge of the unexplored Western passage

Alice stops short of jumping into the lake to hide underwater as she realizes the threat is gone. She hesitantly returns to Yulya like a dog that has been caught doing something bad.
My apologies to let you see such shameful behavior. This body - is not made for fighting. I must regain my former strength...

Alice returns to the tent and hones her spear.
Still for those guys to revive - I should have disposed of their bodies earlier.
Yulya is this normal in this world or the work of some magic user?

Unable to cast, both zombies attempt to get free
Alice remains in control of her zombie, Nixie's unable to keep hers and he escapes the grapple, then stands, he casts Fear.
A phantasmal image of your worst nightmare appears above the zombie causing Olga, Helga, and Alice to quake with fear. Alice, Olga and Helga are frightened and will remain so until a successful saving throw. Olga and Helga are compelled to dash away next turn. Alice's line of sight is blocked giving her a saving throw or be compelled to dash away from Ghoul Zombie 2.

[Alice rolls a 1 with the d20 and decides to leave.]
With her body still in the puny liquid emergency survival mode, Alice cannot control her fear, disengages and dashes away as fast as she can.

[Alice, roll a 1d20+1d4 ("roll dice" is available online) vs DC15 to decide if you're compelled to disengage and dash away. If you roll a combined total of 14 or less, your turn will be to disengage and dash away.

If I gotta make a roll I wanna roll real dice.
So I looked up how to simulate this with d6, you tell me if it's correct!
d4: re-roll 5,6
d5: re-roll 6
d20: (d4-1)×5 + d5

Well just my luck - I rolled 1 and 1 for the d4 and d5 simulating the d20  - so 1. I don't even need to roll the d4 anymore, disengaging and dashing away it is. How humiliating...

Ha, so I'm not totally inept at the rules!
Too bad I missed twice but the guy shouldn't survive that missile barrage. Moving on to the next! And yeah, Ashley might wanna summon someone to protect Yulya!

Oh, since she's a warcaster now, did she lose concentration for BLESS or not?
We're prone right? Means we only have half movement after getting up? Should suffice.