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Darius and Kin stand guard with Balin at the eastern store room door to aid jarek if need be. As Jarek opens the new door, he rises quickly and lets off a dagger, calling "Balin" as he does, into the revealed room and then, following the momentum of his throw, he arches his body as he dives forwards just as an attacking dog pounces, missing him just barely. The dog skids to a halt and attempts to recover itself but Jarek is already away from it; he rolls forwards and rises halfway to his feet, and then propels himself forwards with venom His dagger was protruding lightly from an orc's chest - the aim of the throw. Clearly the orc had been asleep in a chair and was awakened by a sudden sharp pain; before it has chance to draw its sword, Jarek has driven the blade further in with the momentum of his lunge and the orc guard's eyes widen and blood spits forward from his mouth before he lolls, and sags, dead. Jarek turns quickly, fully expecting the dog to have been tearing pieces from him by now. Standing in the doorway to the room is Balin, a grin on his face and the huge gauntlets he took from the orc dog-keeper's room on his arms. The dog has no collar but Balin has managed to grab it roughly about the midriff with one arm anyway. It struggles impotently against his strength as the second gauntlet clamps its mouth shut, preventing any further barking.

Agreeing to try to find their comrades-in-arms, the party moves on, leaving the trapped door behind. They move quickly but carefully south, discovering the bound orc and returning him, still gagged, to the bed he had crawled from. Dalrylshana’s wishes to interrogate it but it is felt there is not time. Onwards the four move throught the next door, past two dead, broken orcs, which are assumed to be the work of the other half of the party, and upstairs to a lit corridor. Northwards then to a junction turning west and ignoring the details discovered for now. As Morin edges forward, Dalrylshana suddenly whispers - "Hold on, I think we've found them...." She's pointing at Sybelius, her cat, appearing mysteriously as he always does, from her robes. He looks woken recently from sleep and for a cat, there's an extremely obvious look of disappointment on its face. Dalrylshana points up the corridor. "I think Jax is very near!" Sure enough, a few seconds later, a small tatty mongrel appears at the western junction, tail wagging. Darius is there a second later, a look of relief on his face.

In a few tense moments, the party is fully reunited and the situation appraised: Jarek comes out of the room beyond the store area quickly and quietly, a large key in his hand, to be greeted, to his surprise by Suva, Darius and Dalrylshana. It transpires that the door Jarek had found and unlocked at the end of the long, foul-smelling room had a dozing guard behind it; Jarek dispatched the guard and Balin took care of a guard dog, grappling the dog to a standstill with his ludicrously oversized padded gauntlets and then breaking its neck to silence it.

Jiriki and Morin are on temporary watch at the north door of the t-junction but the entire party is essentially back together again - Dalrylshana, Suva, Jiriki and Morin having come searching for their comrades because they feared that they had set off an alarm downstairs.

Back at the guard room, still in his chair, an orc sits, a dagger hammered through his heart - Jarek takes this back roughly, wiping it down on the orc's tunic and proceeds to the west door, a barred metal gate.

The large key he has fits it perfectly and he takes no time to check for traps - beyond the gate is a long narrow corridor which has a series of small cells coming off it to one side. It's damp and unpleasant and by the smell, it would be a logical guess to assume that as part of their 'induction', prisoners are dragged through the urinal.

Only three cells are of any interest, most of them being empty: one has a trunk, small chest and two bags in it, another has a dwarf in it, his eyes rolling with madness and his shoulders twitching and the other holds a tall human, laying on a small, uncomfortable stone bed and shivering, feverish.

The heavy iron doors are locked by a curious mechanism - a set of four tumblers in a row, each with the alphabet inscribed around them.

Kin suggests moving the tumblers to spell “open” but the lock doesn’t give. Jarek finds only the semblance of some form of job roster in the guard room as Suva moves away from the gathered group and begins to fiddle with another of the locks.

Darius, meanwhile, tries to elicit some useful response from the inhabitants - it is unlikely from the design of the lock and thickness of the door that they would have a view of it (and thus feasibly a means of escape!) but regardless of this, fever for one and apparent madness for the other leave no response of value.

After a few moments, Suva rejoins the group a little annoyed - "I can certainly hear something..." he says, indicating that he has been listening at the tumblers and trying combinations but his skills are not up to the task.

Jarek smiles; this is his territory as much as Morin's and he relishes the opportunity to shine alone for a moment. He gestures for quiet and presses his ear to the tumblers, beginning to turn them when Balin indicates, rather absently, the scrap of paper with a large "four" on it, that he had found on the guard earlier.

Jarek pauses and sets back to work on the tumblers; armed with this information to aid and feeling, as much as hearing, the 'click' when the tumblers settle into the correct position, the door is soon opened – the word "open" is formed and then each tumbler moved up four places. A simple encryption.

Each door would appear to be set on the same mechanism and reveal their inhabitants with ease: trunk, small chest and two bags in one. The dwarf in the next is, perhaps, not insane but severely traumatised and in shock; he would appear to be a mountain dwarf, probably from the mines of Rin Duras.

The other occupant, shivering and feverish, is not entirely human on closer inspection: he has a partial short mane running down his back and his ears are slightly pointed, his eyes over-large and brown. There are no marking to his clothes of any note. He looks ill, whatever his species and is only vaguely aware of your presence. Somehow still in his hand, clasped so tight that blood now encrusts it, is a small golden brooch, seven tiny rubies upon it.