Subterranean Sugarbeast Safari

The chute ride is fairly straight and uneventful, at least until the last two levels that it passes through. There the signs of creeping decay and reclaiming nature had warped the chute slightly, and in a few places there was clearly some strange spatial temporal shenanigans going on. The second change is in the air itself, which becomes thick and heavy, hot like a jungle, with a cloying mist that limits vision through the underground labs and research areas. Esha didn't lie about the puffballs, which had a wonderfully soft airy and bouncy quality to them; which would have been almost like a pile of pillows, were it not that they also had the surface texture of warm cottage cheese crossed with flesh.

Indeed, the lower area seems to be filled with things that blur the boundaries of animal, vegetable, and mineral in concerning ways. The room the chute originally exited into appears to have been an old warehouse, though now it is overrun with junglesk greenery. One of the walls is completely knocked down, giving views into what look to be bio-labs, where creatures that look like a carrot's idea of a cross between a hermit crab and a jumping spider scurry here and there, wearing defunct beakers and lab glass as makeshift shells. A small group of what look to be liquid metal rabbits graze in a field of flowers that are concerningly toothy, and their reflective surface half-flashes from the yellowy pulses of warning beacons rotating in the labs. The whole roof of the dilapidated floor seems to be covered in a strange fungal or fleshy mass that pulsates in a sickly maroon hue like a cuttlefish, which seems to be the source of light for the greenery. The air smells of sulfur, moisture, and petrichor, with a bizarrely sweet and metallic aftertaste not unlike antifreeze.

Esha crouches not far off, next to a damaged emergency isolation door, examining claw marks in the steel. The door is folded inward like a used paper cup in a manner that would make a breaching charge look tame, and the goblin keeps one hand on her rifle as she examines it. "This is new. Looks like at least two carnivalfexs, plus some other things running around. We could try hacking the nanobot symbiotes but it's hard to get them to stand still." Esha motions to one of the liquid metal rabbits. Closer examination near the wall reveals some writing that mentions Exploration Team 316 Rally point this way -->, followed by a hasty scratch into the wall that says SYMBOLS HAVE BEEN COMPRO- and ends in a long drag mark. There is a concerning amount of brass littering the ground, though there are no signs of bodies or bullet holes. Here and there, one or two of the shells look similar to what goes into Esha's weapon, but the vast majority are not. Mercifully, the signs of the entry team look older than the damage to the door.