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Bloody Revelations     With the Tear Eater talismans in hand, there's really only one thing left to do: enter the Fortress of Crimson Ice.

    For a Deathlord's stronghold --their real one, rather than a conquered city or island-- it's almost laughably accessible, barely out of the way of Gradafes to the point of being barely a day's utterly mundane travel from that 'capital', and from there, an unimpeded stroll into a shadowland with open borders. It's situated in a small vale in the cold highlands, filled with painterly still clouds of floating dust and strange formations and 'cairns' of frozen ash, standing out under a midday sun that is a weird, icy blue, partially occluded by pitch black clouds.

    Not only are there no walls, no scouts or alarms (that anyone notices, if nothing else), no soldiers or traps, there is nothing even in the way of wild plasmic monsters or roving spectres. It's a *walk* up to the Manse of a Deathlord. It's as if they don't *want* to keep people out.

    The Fortress appears in the distance as little more than an uneasy miasma of red and purple haze, though as one approaches, it gains more definition. True to its name, it is built up out of parapets and walls and fortifications of red crystal, arranged in layers around a central, impossibly tall, turreted tower. The ruins of a much, much older building of nearly equal size are visible as its base, serving the purpose of a mountain rise or plateau for its foundations. Approaching further gives one a view of the cloud of blanched and indistinct ghosts hovering around it, as if begging entrance, despite the uncertainty of anything truly impeding them. Approaching even closer than that, and the surreal unpleasantness of the location begins to sink in.

    Unceasing, riotous sound seeps from the castle as it had sprung a leak, a thousand times louder, more vigorous, and more perverse than the Circus and the Tear Eaters combined. Reaching the gates, they are at least, finally, barred and shut, but it's a simple matter to get inside with what the group has. The more oppressive wall is the one of sound and sight and scent and colour and calamitous racket that hits them the instant they do, the noise and offensively degenerate view like a brick to the face.
Bloody Revelations     Packed into the ring-shaped courtyard, full to capacity, are thousands and thousands more ghosts, some very old and faded, while some are brand new. The mess would be hard to describe even for those actively looking at it. A randomly disorganized cavalcade of every form of debauched degeneracy imaginable has sprung up wall to wall and then half beyond imagination for measure. One would be fortunate indeed to locate something as tame as a feast excessive enough to please a late Roman emperor, having the temerity to exist here.

    Dens of drugs that leave participants gibbering screeching messes, consumption of foodstuffs sourced from who knows where with such addictive properties that eaters shovel them down as if dying of hunger, fantastically perverse orgies of hundreds of participants in a variety of ways that'd make even the most internet jaded recluse cringe and look away, brutal and sadistic spectacle executions and suicides before an audience, and even worse forms of instant, perverse, dopamine-soaked instant gratification are the order of everything.

    It'd be easier to shut out were it not for the oppressively uncanny air about it. It doesn't take a keen eye to notice the vast majority of the participants are evidently enjoying none of it, wearing haunted and hollow faces rather than ones of pleasure, or even going about their rituals with a look of outright desperation. Only the newest ghosts remain transcendental in their ecstasy, while the oldest can be seen going as far as repeatedly trying to kill themselves to gain the pleasure of the sweet release of death for a short while. Living entrants are looked at with burning jealousy, despair, and pity, by any and all around. Those silent, burnt out stares, are somehow so much louder than the carnival of depravity behind them.

    It's still a straight walk up to the central tower. A leisurely stroll, albeit one that involves shouldering through the least distasteful routes one can find. Purple crystal doors swing open to reveal a gargantuan hall of gold and onyx checkerboard tiles, sweeping spiral pillars of exotic extinct wood and rugs of long-vanished animals, indoor grown trees of golden fruits, entire waterfalls of wine, and-

    It's upside down. You're hanging from a ceiling of tiles and looking at a floor of arches. The door shuts on its own. You can hear distant, heavy, ominous stomping somewhere down the madly confusing maze of branching corridors.
Lezard Valeth Lezard hates this place on contact. Some might call him a sadist, but one look at the enforced debauchery beyond death just confirms that there are still levels to which the semi-mortal sorceror has yet to descend. Once they reach the castle, Lezard neatly withdraws some earplugs and puts them in, reducing the overbearing noise of the endless hell party.

    "We have just arrived and I already wish this place would be consumed in fire." Lezard states over the radio (because talking is effectively impossible with the noise), and glares with clear disdain and revulsion at the antics of the dead. There are still things that can make even his skin crawl.

    Anything that gets in their way will likely regret it as they move through the castle, Lezard making his way into the central tower with the others... And casually noting it is upside down. "Of course it is a descension instead of an ascension." Lezard mutters, stalking forward as his fingertips twitch, the mage considering how best to deal with the inevitable welcoming party and waves of Deathlord Bullcrap. It can't be /this/ easy or someone would have done it by now. Therefore, it is not. The onyl real question is precisely how the Deathlord is going to deal with insistently rude guests that she can't just immediately murder.
Starbound Flotilla     How, exactly, should one navigate a space like this? George knows. Why does George know that? Wonderful question! Next question.

    The correct way to navigate a space like this without suddenly provoking someone's cliqueish rage is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. A blasted hellscape of erotic, addictive, and otherwise self-indulgent shenanigans pursued self-destructively is meant to be navigated specifically by providing each person there some vague verbal tithe of respect, interest, and distance, while being extremely careful to avoid any sign that you, yourself, are liked better than anyone else, regardless of your advantages or innate aspects. Generally, any social context based partially on self-indulgent, mostly-erotic shenanigans has that basic social rule in place, you know. So, of course, George approaches that way. "Hey, cool guy, nice meal, you make it yourself?" He mutters on the way past. "Great flexibility and engineering on that fucking, love the work there. Hey, you having a good trip? Cool, cool, you're really reaching a great open-mindedness." People having absurd nonsense self-indulgent erotic shenanigans right next to the people in charge tend to be the ones you want to stay on the good side of.

    He steps inside, and he's on the ceiling. "Oh." He says. "Did we go in the back door on accident?" That would make even less sense, but he moves on fast from the confusion. "So, do we head /towards/ the footsteps or /away/? I'm thinking cautious-towards, on account of anyone that big running around probably knows where they're going, so we can figure the maze business more easily." He clambers over arches, heading further in, unless someone's coming out to greet them.
Staren     "Really? We can just walk there? No defenses at all? Why aren't we just hitting it with a nuclear missile?" Staren comments, long before they get close.

    And then they get close. Today he's wearing the skull faceplate on his helmet, so noone can see his expression. But even if he can kind of understand wanting to experience everything the human body and mind can, SEEING it like this is just... ineffable, in a bad way. "Why aren't we nuking this?"

    Once it's clear they're not destroying it, he moves in... to a place that's built upside down. Great. Of COURSE the deathlord ahs to be a weirdo. But upside down rooms is kind of a refreshing oddity compared to the mess outside.

    There are too many choices of ways to go. Staren starts sending drones on the off chance that the place isn't riddled with sometimes-on-sometimes-off teleport spells or space warping to foil mapping attempts.
Starbound Flotilla     "Nah, nah, this is how it works. The guy in charge surrounds themselves with all the people doing," George waves his hands back out the door, chatting to Staren. "This, and then if they're ever wanting you messed up, they can rile everyone up, you know? Even if everyone out there is basically miserable forever, or about to be, it's the social stuff about all that. You get to kinda insulate from the consequences." He lights up a cigarette. "And that's why /we/ are focusing on murders instead of debates or social movements or whatever."
Azure Armature Entering the area is easy. After stealing Pharoh Man's^5^5^5the Ancient Dead's power to unsanctify tribe members to get them in through the front door.

Thanks to the power of magi-artifice, now EVERYONE can get through the front door with little button-pin commbadge-like things. They're made out of blue jade.

They're the definition of trash artifacts people use like currency after someone decides to snap the Creation-Ruling Mandate in half, for the fourth time.

Only Staren has a comment that the heat-mirage Armature had become deems necessary to respond to.

"An order of operations problem. First the deathlord. Then you may use strategic weaponry on this site at your discretion."

The heat mirage (which is itself in the awful mirage of shitty drugs and awful lusts) continues in to the area of upside down arched cielings, and, kneeling, rests a shimmering hand on the ground. Tracers of circuitry spread outwards through the crystal, diffusing into cold blue motes that dim as they travel. "I'll pull a map of the area. If there are no defenses, this will be a very short journey."
Bloody Revelations     Trying to watch the drone feeds is almost worse than walking there oneself. With multiple screens together, the effect becomes several times as disorienting, as corridors unnaturally, gradually twist and unfold and re-fold several times, winding around each other, where one drone passes by another and the other doesn't even display it on its monitor.

    They pass through grandiose hall of thousands of perfectly arranged mirrors that make for losing all track of one's position in space, monumental art pieces and entire walls fashioned of elaborately and artistically mutilated corpses, softened like plastic and bent and chopped and decorated with flowers and jewels and metals into fountains and gardens, and unfathomable oddities of floating soulsteel components and contraptions humming with powerful arcane energy. They find at least two doors to lower (higher?) levels, on opposite sides of the vaguely rounded first floor, but they're the big kind that require two hands on each side, so they aren't going to be opened by a drone.

    George goes chasing after the stomping. When he's actually aiming for something, the twisting, turning, topsy turvy nonsense becomes significantly easier to navigate, in that direction alone. He may wish he'd been more selective about it. He crosses behind an intersection past an intersection past an intersection, and locates the source of the rhythmic, gargantuan crunches turning the corner away from him.

    For whatever reason, a warstrider is wandering the halls. Made of solid soulsteel and inlaid with bands of minute, glowing green runes, it's easily two and a half times the size of any he's seen so far. Beams of prickling light sweep back and forth from its visor slit, roving and flicking back and forth over its route. A massive, spiral cannon is affixed over one shoulder, while another bears a rack of three dozen javelin looking munitions. A triple-barreled rotating Essence weapon is affixed under one arm, with a weighted and bladed chain launcher embedded in its wrist, and the other is mounted with what looks like a sort of flamethrower hooked up to its power generator. A massive sword, humming ominously, is mounted over its back, between a pair of folded wings, with obvious places for jets. It's disgustingly huge, almost scraping the ceiling. Even more perversely, as far as he can tell, there seem to be no signs of a pilot.

    The radio crackles on with a degree of white noises common to ghost hunters listening for sounds in TV static. "A Manse like this draws on the raw power infinitely generated by the Labyrinth below. No doubt it pierces straight into the Underworld below it, and exits below even that. Even if it looks like it goes upward." The Deathknight on the other end says. "You won't find any luck setting fire to it. Or smashing it down. Nothing is as it seems. Countless conduits of pure Essence run through every major structural feature; if you can't commit to sabotaging its geomentic points, you'd need an army of sorcerers and heavy warships to slowly break it down, level by level." A pause. "If you thought one of those 'nuclear' weapons would do the trick, though, I will want one later."

    Magic mapping is largely incongruous with the inertial mapping done by the drones. Following the physical surfaces of the place makes for kind of a mess, as they seem to be actually there rather than being some kind of optical illusion. It provides, at least, clear paths to the two different doors Staren had located earlier.
Lezard Valeth "We aren't 'nuking it', nor am I summoning a meteor to crush the location, because it will not solve the problem efficiently." Lezard replies. He is about to explain why when Bloody beats him to the punch. He nods at that, and he shrugs. "However, what we can do is speed ourselves along to seek out the weak points in the structure and turn them to our own ends."

    While George goes and finds himself the Minostrider of the Labyrinth, Lezard begins looking about at the area, shifting his senses as he works to analyze the flows of local Essence and find optimal locations to begin disrupting, damming, or shifting the flows to begin cause cascading overloads in other places. Anything that can help point out the direction of the geomantic junctions will be noted and relayed to the others. Messing with the local feng shui is always fun.

"Let us see how quickly we can begin consigning this location to the inevitable degradation and dissolution they love so much. After all, it would be horrible for their philosophy if they thought they were not somehow subject to the same rules that they proclaim over all others." The last is spoken with soulsteel-heavy disdain.
Staren     Staren nods at the explanation. Of course. Crazy space warping and magical materials provide defenses against sheer force -- finally, some... actual interest in defense from this strange deathlord.

    Watching the drone feeds is troublesome -- Staren switches to a false-lighting, untextured 3D map on his HUD, and it still comes out a mess due to space warping. He's programmed the map software to handle such eventualities, but it's still troublesome to display all at once. "Well, I've found some doors, but they're too heavy for my drones to move. George? Where ya going, buddy? I don't think we should split up..."
Starbound Flotilla     "Huh? Oh, just finding the local Minotaur, you know how it is." George subvocalizes into a throat-mic. "Gotta keep an eye on things like that. Looks like the ghost of a machine. Anyone ever seen a warstrider wander around without a pilot? Scary look!"

    "Alright, so, can you science me up a route to the doors? I'm used to being upside down, but not reading maps for anything like that. Awful at geometry!" He mutters, but he does his best. If Staren doesn't mind giving some feed data, he's going to see if he can get at those doors, using what experience he has in navigating zero-gravity space stations. Can't deal with the geometric spacewarps, but a little benefit is better than none at all! He's going to try to use the noise of that big-ass warstrider to keep away from it, rather than memorizing its position or anything silly like that; with things like this, Labyrinth-like stuff, it's better to use what info is given. Time to get that door open!
Azure Armature "We are not." Armature agrees to Lezard's vexed reply. "Clearing off the disgusting patina that has grown up around the location was my objective. Hence, after the Deahthlord."

Geomantic sabotage, on the other hand, is something that appeals. Then again, geomantic underpinnings tend not to be 'all right at the door', so that preference is neither here nor there.

Following Staren's drones as a shimmer in the air to the door and trying to make sense of the map data as she goes, Blue gets to appreciate the Warstrider from a distance - a nice, safe, invisible distance, much as she is loath to trust her Vapor Mirage Strike Team system (that's the formal name, yes) when 'anything with an essence score' can 'heh come out' at her from maximum engagement range.

Which is measured in football fields. And she's a stealth EXPERT!

Reaching the door, she assesses the system, before gesturing Staren('s drone) towards one set of the controls and standing by the other. Stupid rikumfrakem don't-split-the-party-locks. Stupid CUTSCENE DOORS.

Armature waits for someone else to help her with the CUSCENE DOOR if the drone cannot grant her ingress. Fully-powered Death Manses were not a place she readily wished to phase through the walls in. She might get...

Necrotic Cooties.
Bloody Revelations     Measuring flows of magical energy is actually pretty helpful in terms of screwing with geomancy. Despite its fancy prioprietary name, it is essentially the art of playing bonsai tree with leylines, putting caps here, cutting it off there, warping and channeling them this way and that way, until it creates a perfect array of designs.

    Damaging 99% of it doesn't do much more than disabling the lights in a specific room, but Lezard can trace it to places where it converges and is regulated, mostly by the huge soulsteel contraptions, but sometimes with weirdly symbolic things, like the beautifully grotesque artworks, or a monolithic sculpture of a decadent four poster bed. The Abyssal on the radio, god knows where with that background noise, and in a proactive mood, helps him identify these less intuitive areas, and explain how to sabotage stuff like 'a statue'.

    Deciding not to charge the super killer quad weapon overboost AI-piloted Full Armour custom warstrider is . . . probably actually a wise move. Aside from the huge racket it'd cause, exhausting resources on an optional enemy right before the boss fight is just kind of a dumb idea. With a monitor of its position, and with its ??? intelligence being on an automated sentry mode, it's not super hard to skip by, like a horror monster in a walking simulator (with a severe lack of convenient closets).

    The given door opens through a long topsy turvy hall of gigantic proportions, decorated with hundreds of broken-necked hung corpses in fine dress throughout several entire ages, and then straight into a house-sized mirror, which proves to be some sort of portal or another to another giant mirror, which blackens and cracks behind the last of the group. The particular place it dumps them is another long walk, through endless rows upon rows of enchanted diamond capsules, bunched together with ebon pipes and soulsteel wires, bundled and plugged into enormous hanging machines that crackle with electricity. It's freezing cold, and smells of formaldehyde, with the 'glass' of each capsule being fogged with frosted humidity. Wiping any aside reveals a plethora of impossibly beautiful, corpse-pale bodies inside of them, each at varying stages of life, some even being downright embryonic. They aren't cadavers, though. They're alive and growing. Artificial and soulless, but functional, and quite probably augmented in some way. They look like they're sleeping. There is a replica First Age magitech console before each cluster, which might be informative, or might be extremely dangerous to fiddle with.

    Two more routes of intense fuckery lead through more branches, down (up?) spiral stairs that fork two ways. One leads to a colossal, round, black iron chamber that prickles with background static, filled with impossibly elaborate intersecting arrays of soulsteel spiderwebs, with tiny automata running back and forth across them, endlessly weaving and reweaving incredibly fine, recursive patterns. The other leads to a catwalk around a gigantic round pit, in which ranks of hundreds of figures stand, heads slumped and motionless. They are humanoid, but featureless and sexless, pitch black from top to bottom, and have lidless, staring, luminous white eyes. Tiny wires of magical light are injected into the back of their skulls, leading up to an ornate mandala of iron and candles that complicates navigating the area.
Staren     Staren recalls his drones (except the one watching WarMech) before going through the big door, which turns out to just lead to a mirror that's easy to determine is a portal. Staren's a little concerned about how the way back keeps closing, but... well. He's survived such things before.

    When Staren sees the array of crystals, he tries to look at how essense is flowing to figure out what STRANGE MAGITECH MACHINE this is, hypothesizing they're elements in a giant computer circuit before he realizes they're... cloning vats? Damn. Shame there's probably no way to get these out of here. He'll happily stop to mess with a computer console -- not trying to hack the system so much as glean details that might, added together, hint at a purpose for all this, or how long it's been going, or just how big this operation is.

    And then his drones catch a glimpse of the other areas. "No..."

    He starts working to confirm a new hypothesis: Has this deathlord created a giant virtual world and hooked all these people into it?!
Lezard Valeth If they don't need to deal with the hyper murder machine, there is no need to expend valuable resources doing so. Besides, if you break it, you can't turn it into a guard dog for your own house.

Lezard steadily sabotages basically anything he can get his hands on, rampantly unravelling the skein of Essence that is holding this place together as they go. He's not entirely sure as to how much it will take to put the place over the tipping point and cause the local environment to basically collapse under its own weight, but they'll deal with that when they get to it.

It'll probably take getting rid of the Deathlord. It's just how these things go. Still, the sight of the hundreds of corpses doesn't come as much of a shock. If anything, it's refreshing compared to the behavior outside. This? This he can comprehend.

The sight of what is on the other side of the mirror simply confirms it. Lezard takes one look at the capsules and scowls. "It appears I am not the only one who has made an investment into creating homunculi." He turns to the First Age console and examines it for a moment, looking to see if he can get specifics on the contents of the capsule and if there is anything notable about the contents.

    The other rooms are something to see. The kind of standing ritualistic complexity inherent to the environments therein is something Lezard appears to respect... as far as it goes. "One does not simply accidentally construct something like this." He hums to himself. "But what is the purpose?" From the darkness he withdraws the twisted staff of the Manus Catalyst. Carefully, he reaches out with it, pointing it up at the spiderwebs...

And then dispenses with all subtlety as he channels a blast of Dark Beads to shotgun straight into that delicate spiderweb. They're here to Break Crap after all.
Azure Armature It's a long parade of things that really should just jump out of the walls, and yet, don't. It would be simpler of the situation to leap out and flail its limbs in Azure's - or the party's, as she is still just-past visible - direction.

Armature lingers before the dark spiderwebs, the optic camouflage covering her fading away as she tugs down her scarf, a thoughtful smirk played across her face in slow motion. "This..."

"Could be useful."

Her gloved right hand's fingers work and stretch once, before she reachs out to place fingertips on the web, a thin screen of cold, mathematical essence dancing along her seeking digits.

After that, should she still be capable of continuing on, she probably has a colorful enw hairstyle and scarf accents.

The strange living automata is passed over, if not downright elbowed through, until Lezard starts shotgunning things. "Homunculi? I'm not familiar. Where I am from, artificial champions are made out of magical clay, but the vats they grow in are not dissimilar to this."

Thoughtfully (Again, if she's not vomiting necrotic essence), she considers. "This technology is a bit dated and inefficient though. Good. They still have room to be denied."
Starbound Flotilla     George is feeling like it was a good idea to deal with the minotaur situation in the much more traditional way. He's not, however, liking the architecture. "It's like someone did this like a schizophrenic. Who builds like this? This is /fucked up/." George mutters. "Seriously. I built some crazy-ass shit back in the day, and this is still wilder. Why are they doing this? This gotta be more than Labyrinth shit." He shakes his head as he pushes through, only wincing a bit at the cracked mirror.

    "So, bad luck for the Lover, or for us?" He asks cheerfully. "You know, we're supposed to open a gate in here, but I'm getting the impression we won't be finding the Third Place gate easily in here, on account of there's /too fucking many gates/." He winds up heading into the automata chamber, and pondering it intensely. "You talking like one of those VRMMOs? This ain't a gamer moment, exactly. These guys are looking purpose-built. I'm guessing whatever it is is gonna be going off in safe-mode when the web's down."

    If this is a catwalk, then the "under"-side of it should have some potential paths "up", right? Assuming they're still upside-down. Will take take them through the forms in the "pit"? Hopefully not, but he's searching out the route regardless of whether it does.
Bloody Revelations     Poking at the First Age replica consoles gets a lot of Old Realm and then piles and piles of technical information that is clearly not meant to be read by any kind of technician or servant. It's so dense, arcane, and mathematically abstract, that only someone with a surpassingly high degree of superhuman prowess could make heads or tails of it, and isn't tailored with a comprehensible UI in mind, but to someone's muscle memory and whim.

    It's really hard to tell what the bodies are for. Some of them appear to be showing something like brainwave activity, as in in deep REM, but with the logical task centers lit up as if processing something awake. Others are completely vacant; they're probably spare bodies, either for medical transplant purposes, or to shove souls into medically complete and spiritually attuned flesh instead of preserved cadavers. The bodies themselves exceed human parameters by a fair margin, physically and 'mana'wise, though not to a supersoldier extent.

    Entering the spider web room finds one's feet lightly glued to the floor in a magnetic sense, like wearing shoes meant to walk on the outside of a spaceship hull. This is well and good, because the floor is a depressed hemisphere and polished smooth, meaning one would otherwise be trying to get out like, appropriately, a spider in a bathtub.

    Azure Armature touches it, gets a power, and then quickly finds out what that power probably is, when the static thrumming builds immediately to a loud crescendo, the filaments of the web vibrate, and her and Lezards' feet are locked to the floor while some resonance in the array attempts to pull their souls out of their bodies and stick their ghosts to the web like . . . a spider web. Repeated blasting with Dark Bead causes it to corrode and fall apart after a short, excruciating period with a couple of points of aggravated damage involved, and lightning from the failing power source dances lethally around the room, making the exit to the door only somewhat less deadly.

    On the other end, the unnerving humanoid figures remain completely inert as George passes them by. He is correct in assuming that the passage would be a set of inverted stairs . . . directionally, from the walk around the room. Since nobody has fiddled excessively with anything, the field of figures at blankly listless attention remains exactly like that, doing their best terracotta soldiers imitation.

    It's only when one of the steps fails, and falls out from under him with a cringe-inducing clatterbang, that the one nearest to him 'activates', jerking as if awakening suddenly from sleep, and wildly turning on him on reflex. One of its featureless arms sprouts a row of massively oversized black blades, and the other hand warps into a spiral gun barrel of sorts, glowing with baleful energies within. It leaps straight to the catwalk from a cold stop on the ground, and attacks him with both using freakish strength and firepower, apparently having no mouth to make any kind of scary attack noise with, until he closes the door behind him, eerily cutting off all sound.
Bloody Revelations     The next, and hopefully penultimate, floor behind either direction, causes the opposite corridors to spiral together into a helical Bowser's Staircase leading a tremendous distance into the dark. Globules of luminous, pearlescent fluid, some the size of entire trucks, levitate slowly up (down) the shaft, in the space between the stairs, brushing past one another like the blobs in a lava lamp, and giving off insane levels of magical energy radiation.

    The stairs are awful. Specific steps end up making people disappear and start walking from several hundred steps back. Others retract right into the wall and try to drop them. Some explode. Others result in people being struck with necrotic lightning or gouts of pyre flame. Sometimes ectoplasmic spikes come out of the walls to skewer people in spirit, or shrieking undead fall out of a statue cavity and suicide tackle people into the no doubt absurdly deadly main shaft.

    It's temple of elemental evil bullshit except all on a five foot wide staircase that goes up a solid mile. Reaching the top, they converge on a single, gigantic, double door gateway made of what seems to be solid obsidian, covered top to bottom in rows and rows of descending arcane runes of sealing and blasphemous characters of barring entry, rendering it borderline impervious to any effort by the living to touch it.
Lezard Valeth The spiderweb proves to be even MORE ANNOYING than Lezard imagined. The moment it activates and rips his soul out, his mortal form flops bonelessly to the side as if puppet strings were cut. A translucent mimicry of Lezard flies through the air and is pinned to the web for several moments as he is stuck in agonizing pain, the web obviously trying to consume his soul for its tasty INTENSE POWER.

Lezard isn't having any of it. The moment the web tears, there is a roiling, thunderous burst as the spectre of Valeth promptly summons up Full Aggro Mode and begins purging the room with arcane firepower, not stopping until it is Really Goddamn Broken. His face is twisted in indignant rage, and it appears that 'not having a body' doesn't slow him down one bit in his DPS output.

Once that is over, Lezard looks about, looking indignant, and promptly slides right back into his body, which stands up and dusts itself off. "The /nerve/ of this woman." Lezard grates. "I have not been so grossly disrespected in... well, perhaps ever."

Leaving the scorched earth behind, Lezard turns and moves right around, leaving this damned place for the Stairwell To The Abyss.

The moment the first step pulls some janky Mario Maker 2 troll level crap on him, he begins starts teleporting past the steps, or failing that floating, because both are options.

Provided one of those options works, Lezard /pointedly/ lets someone else open the door. "If I am going to be forced to abandon my flesh to open this door, I will be very cross."
Starbound Flotilla     "NOBODY WARNED ME HOW DANGEROUS STAIRS ARE!" George is practically subvocally screaming once he winds up actually in a battle with the thing. He winds up wrestling inside the reach of the blades, grappling and trying to slam the humanoid with an electrified stun-baton until something overloads, and then trying to tear apart the elbows using high-power industrial prying equipment. "Shit shit shit, hey, get off!" Kick! He disengages fast, and shuts the door behind him -- ideally, with his friends in here as well.

    "Alright, so. Guys. Stairs bad." He says, panting. He flicks his spent cigarette, and lights up another one. "Watch out for 'em." He goes to head down... And it's awful. It's just awful. "Fucking typical, no chance to slide down the bannister." He spits under his breath, suffering horrid burns and blasts and /trying/ to handle it in an adventuring way, doing his best to defuse each step, but not being especially good at it. Fuck! If only he'd brought Pavo, then his flight might have made it a lot easier.

    Door. Tired. George is exhausted once he reaches the damn thing, panting and applying nanobandages to his body all over. "This is /stupid/." He mutters. "Anyone here dead? Hey, Staren, you're legally dead right? Died a couple times?" He sighs. "How do you open a door without touching it? It's like one of those riddles, fuck." He scratches his head. "Open sesame? Nah, too easy. Say please? No, too conceding. Maybe if I can..."

    Unless anyone else has a better idea, George is going to start applying his mining laser to the door's center gap; if that doesn't work, he's going to try laser-mining the /doorframe/, because you just can't ward /everything/ you know?
Staren     RESULTS INCONCLUSIVE. Oh well. Meanwhile, others set off traps so he doesn't have to. That's nice of them. When it comes to two staircases, after seeing what the others are dealing with he also floats over them, with a drone in front of him to hopefully trigger air traps.

    As for the door itself... does Staren count as alive right now? Maybe he can just open it. Barring that, he starts looking closely at how the door is designed and which way it opens, trying to figure out if he needs to push or pull, and then doing so with futuristic 10-foot-poles or rope and tape.
Azure Armature Gaining the power of AS YET TO BE DETERMINED SOUL SPIDERSHOT (GET EQUIPPED WITH: SPOOPY SOULSPINDLE), Azure is immediately accosted by the spiders on the webbed floor. The ennervating energies of the spiders begins frying away at her very color, paling and bleeding off wisps of blue energy. A flare of cool blue neon light washes 'away' from her like she was casting the light like an LED and not a standard power field, and Armature sends a blast of steam from a hollow in her palm back at the spiderwebbing (and spiders), riding the momentum up and away and leaving a heat-melted path in her exhaust. Tumbling back through the room's exit as Lezard blasts it entirely to pieces, it's a fucking horrorshow of awful tentacle-gun Tyrants.

Being the tactical espionage essence cannon sort, Armature moves through them like a VHS copy of the Cold War era favorite, "The Basics of CQC", fluidly moving between 'armbar-ing a tentacle with a blade attached' 'hipthrowing an abomination of spikes that fire spikes in every direction' and 'reverse powerbombing a tentacle with eyes into that spike dude'.

At the end, there's the Kaizo Mario//Wily 2-3 before Wily 4 segment, which frankly is the most absurd. As if sensing the scene transition, Azure looks at her wrist-sleeve data display, taps two holo-buttons, and disappears from the start of the STUPID FUCKING STAIRS PUZZLE---

        -- and reappears at the top in a beam of blue math-light. "That looked incredibly... suboptimal to participate in." She notes dryly.

At the door, the need for the hand of the unliving is called for to unseal it. "Step aside, George. You remember our use of the savages' ancestor for our eys of entry? That isn't the primary focus. If it's the grasp of death itself we need -- I have synthesized a new data tool temporarily out of the excess power."

Raising her right arm up, it wreaths in blue-white pyreflame, from the tips of her finger all the way to the shoulder. The whole arm sits in black silohuette within the pyre-flame, and armature's hair licks with highlights of the flame, her sapphire eyes bleaching white with black mechanical articulation on the inside.

"This [Crypt Grip] will remove this barrier."

It's Undeath Guts Arm -- and she levells it at the door's frame and shoves with a pyreflame-whoosh onto the door to throw the bustered weapon's strength at the door.