Tirana's Lair, Part 5 (Desnus (V) 1st, 4709 AR)

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The heroes continued their exploration.

Recycler: This impressive piece of machinery is the complex’s recycling unit. When a creature dies and is placed inside the crucible, the machine breaks down the corpse and leaches any remaining life force from it. The machine then concentrates and extrudes the leached life force, via the spigot, in the form of cure potions. The process takes 1 hour, and the strength of the potion is proportional to the vitality of the creature processed. Corpses must remain mostly intact for this process to work, making divided bodies useless.

There are obscure diagrams engraved on the machine’s carapace. To use this device, the heroes pulled the leftmost lever, forcing open the crucible door and revealing a steel-lined alcove big enough to hold a Large creature. Opening the door caused the light to glow red. Placing a corpse inside and pulling the lever again closed the door. When that happened, pulling the right lever initiated the extraction sequence and switched the light to green. After 1 hour, the appropriate potion spilled out into the waiting flask, and the light switched back to amber. This process completely destroys any body subjected to it, regardless of size.

Vivisection Room. This immaculately clean room is set up like an operating theater. Near the west wall, two freestanding steel tables with an inch-high lip around the rim contain the splayed and mutilated bodies of a dog-headed man and an elven woman. The man’s skin is flayed in long flaps and held open by metal hooks and clamps to reveal the organs within. The woman has had her eyes removed, but her body is otherwise untouched. Along the other walls, tables hold trays of gleaming knives and strange, barbed utensils. The room stinks of chemicals and blood. The heroes recognized the corpses on the table as that of a hound archon and Aeriel, both dead for several days.

Inside the room was a tall man with white hair and a bloodstained lab coat, with a collar that flipped up to cover the lower half of his face. Over his bloodshot eyes rested a pair of leather goggles inset with dark lenses. When the heroes entered this room unbidden, he immediately attacked.

The man had a giant zombie assisting him with his experiments, and was surrounded by an invisible but tangible field of force. When pressed, he attempted to force a retreat causing some of the heroes to become panicked. He did not flee and fought to the death.

The Menagerie. The stench in this hallway is horrendous. Two rows of steel cages line the center aisle, their bars thick steel lattices that glow softly in the half-light. Inside each cell languishes a different monstrosity, slumped carelessly in piles of straw or its own filth.

A variety of monsters are captured and bound here. Many of the cages contain only corpses, but a girallon, a grick, and a blinded basilisk still twitch listlessly in their cells, diseased.

Shambling Nightmare. Hundreds of planters and flowerpots in stacks and rows dominate this room, obviously once carefully organized but long since overgrown and neglected. Thick mats of thorny green vines climb the walls and ceiling, and a carpet of moss and roots covers the floor. A fountain on the east wall is carved to resemble an owl’s head belching a stream of glowing blue water into a basin, and a squared ring of trenching filled with the same water dominates the center of the floor. Both are choked with lilies and other, less identifiable plant matter.

Both the fountain and trench are 5 feet deep and filled more than halfway with the glowing, weed-choked water. A stone chest sits at the bottom of the wall pool.

Two twisted masses of dry, thorny vines wrapped thickly around misshapen clumps of cacti rose on two trunk-like legs, reeking of rot and freshly turned earth. The vines defended this place fiercely against the heroes. When the heroes first arrived, the vines hid in the southern corners of the room before attacking without warning.

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