Cyroosta fled the scene of the ruin in a flurry of shouted orders, exclamations of concern, and mutterings of all the things she had to do to set things right again, whatever had happened inside. She rallied the local peasants, got Ciddar to drag a few burly sailors out of their berths, enlisted Maugis to go figure out this nasty sorcery in the ruin, and got a tear-streaked, sobbing Inyana to come in tow as well, with the Oomsh to comfort her. Less than an hour after the trouble began, you assembled outside the ruin, reminded the four farmers and three sailors of their duty, and headed inside.
You saw signs of an explosion at the crossroad of corridors, and followed a trail of acrid fluid back to the room with the fuming crucible. There, Maugis investigated the fluid and it lept out, but he incanted a quick Malkioni Banish spell and turned it into a haze of vapour, impressing almost everyone! But “Steve,” one of the farmers, had caught a lungful of toxic fumes and was retreating out of the cellar, coughing blood, when he spied a crowd of bottle-golem-things rushing out of the far corridor through the double doors. He fled back to where 2 comrades were arguing by the entrance. The others turned to confront the approaching mob; the sailors hoping that the clinking glass sounds indicated a surplus of booze on the way.
The battle with the headless, almost mindless bottle-men was long and hard. One of the farmers was knocked out early when a bottle choked him unconscious, and a sailor fell when a comrade hit him in the head with the blunt end of his spear, knocking the man off the bottle-thing he'd just pinned against the ground. Cyroosta proved herself a fiend with her enchanted silver dagger, shattering a few bottles, and “Sir Ciddar,” who'd arrived clanking along in full Baron Ronalio-heralded plate armour, showed his talent with his cutlass too. Even Maugis displayed a clever ability to knock the bottles into each other with his hefty new staff, and some of the peasants held their own well, too– the two farmers that had remained outside had gathered their courage and ventured inside, making themselves useful with spears and flails.
But then the sparkling sorcery of this place unleashed itself on your party with a flash, and almost all the remaining peasants fell victim to its shrinking curse, soon to be picked up by bottle-golems and plunked into fluid in their “bellies.” Meanwhile, Cyroosta and others had discovered that some golems held lots of fluid, and figures floating in it, and began to knock them over and free the curious contents. The fight continued, with the sparkling sorcery again spreading up your bodies, but the tide of battle had turned your way. Soon enough all the bottles (whose weakness was to be hit in the body hard enough to shatter them) lay in shards on the brick floors, including the ones that Maugis had adhered to the floor with his magic. Teamwork, flashes of skill, and clever talents had won the day- but were you in time to effect a rescue?
You rushed out of the ruin with all the bodies, large and small, that you could carry, and waited for the magic to fade. You noticed that you held the shrunken, comatose/enchanted bodies of your three warrior-leaders that had been trapped inside the bottles, and you resolved to head back in, once more rallied by Cyroosta. In the large central chamber, you found a furiously bubbling stone crucible of clear fluid that burned your exposed surfaces when you approached it, and in another corner there were old wooden pliths amidst various rubble (including remains of more bottle-things).
Toward the far end of the chamber, there were two great stone tables with small bottles atop them, most of which were still stoppered with wax plugs and full of fluids. One set held small, wizened specimens of what seemed to be 2nd Age beings (mostly human and naked), and the other held just fluids; all had remnants of labels that had decayed or faded. Indeed, this room had suffered some of the effects of the past seven or more centuries: piles of rubble had fallen from the sagging, water-damaged ceiling here and there, and the far corners of the room were collapsing inwards. You hastily, in a few trips, gathered all the small bottles and fled, sealing the doors behind you.
Outside, you investigated the bottles as a small crowd gathered, with Inyana shaking in a fit of worry (and later confiding that the land around her had been shaking with her a bit, too!) as she watched. One set of bottles seemed to have good effects on local plants, another bad, another nothing, and another sparkled– with further tests showing that it reversed the shrinking curse! But only four antidote bottles remained… applying them to your three shrunken heroes, you left the last one for later, with four peasants left with fates you had to consider. Again your Lords and Captain stood before you, weakened and scarred but alive; Inyana embraced her love and the sailors rejoiced at the rewards they'd glean from this (jockeying for favour to be the one to be un-shrunken!). In later experiments, another set of bottles proved to be violently explosive (leaving Cyroosta and Maugis barely standing), and yet another just effervesced and foamed.
You considered the power of the ruined place, how it must have been some God Learner sorceror's alchemy lab, with magics discovered to preserve life in economical little bottled packages, and decided it should be buried. Such secrets were too dangerous to risk others misusing, and you'd retrieved some interesting and perhaps powerful bottled potions that Cyroosta was eager to investigate further. Harrowing as the experience was, you then all had a good rest. Big questions remained for you to consider in the morning.
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