Burning books, Bob and a family reunion.

Liliana and Shadow continued to explore the Ziggurat, leaving the room with the gnomes behind to move through corridors, of packed earth and stored bone. It seemed this giant structure had been constructed and in some cases, rather than stone walls, they had simply filled the cavity with packed earth.
 
As they moved on they encountered several doors, which Shadow shrewdly identified as trapped. Liliana waved her hands in the air* as they got to the first one, then stopped, looking really put out and admitted, “I don’t have a spell for this”.
 
They decided to try opening the door with mage hand from a safe distance and Liliana dropped lucky with her mage hand and completely fluked picking a lock, though she pretended that it was all by design but could not work out how to disable the magical trap and so set it off by having the mage hand push open the door, whilst standing back to avoid the blast of what turned out to be a fireball. The smugness of besting the trap faded somewhat when she realised that the burial chamber they had entered had contained some books which were now incinerated. They did this to a second chamber too, in which Liliana found the traces of a book entitled Queen Aglathal, though only the spine remained legible, the pages were scorched and burned away. Liliana was bereft over the loss of books, telling Shadow that sometimes books were more useful than people.
 
Finally, they entered the burial chamber of Lord King Tenoch himself, after working out that there was a panel on the wall where the skulls could be rearranged to slide the door safely open without triggering the trap. Shadow also got chatting to the door, which seemed to have sentience and be made of a similar technology to him, so they decided they must be cousins.
 
Entering this room Liliana found and picked up two large books, one a medical journal bound in crocodile skin, which contained embalming details and teachings to assist with medicine. (Proficiency, if a person spends 15 hours reading it). The other was a history of Tenoch, the first in a line of self-described ‘good kings’. The 7 generations of people who built his tomb were granted the honour of being entombed with him, where their graves would be blessed by the priests who blessed Tenoch’s own resting place. While Shadow scouted around looking at the wall panels, which told of Tenoch’s good deeds, Liliana skimmed through the book, reading about his work in sorting irrigation, stamping out starvation and getting his people thriving.
 
On the floor they also found a skull, which when picked up introduced itself as Bob, who had been an advisor to Tenoch and had died 3,124 years ago. Bob was a fairly chatty soul, who did not wish to remain in the tomb and – in exchange for information – the others agreed to take him with them. Bob explained that they ziggurat had been built in stages, each ‘step’ of the pyramid its own separate building as more and more generations built this giant mausoleum.
 
They moved on leaving his sarcophagus sealed and grave undefiled. Doubling back a couple of rooms, they turned to the south, and found a room that they investigated to find had, at one point, been the vestry for this layer of the temple, but had been taken over and as Liliana described it ‘been bastardised’, to be repurposed by a necromantic cult.
 
Bringing Bob out, they looked at the room, which had a skeleton on a table, a diagram like a butchers diagram and embalming equipment but also two tanks full of green goo, that were joined by an electrical current that sizzled through the air like a Tesla coil.
 
Liliana pulled Bob out to ask him if the technology was familiar or if it looked futuristic to him. He said it looked like a futuristic, altered version of the cloning technology Queen Aglathal used (which she herself had ‘borrowed’ from somewhere). At one point he explained, cloning was the only way to sustain the population. He spoke of Queen Aglathal as a hero, who saved his people from the volcano, fed people from her own kitchen, built homes for the homesless, started collectives for farms, “It was really something”. He presumed she must be dead, and Liliana had the spine of a book that had perhaps laid in her tomb, but when she described the Aglathal they had met, Bob said she sounded similar enough that there might be a connection. Was this the same Aglathal? A descendent? Who knew.
 
Liliana found a lever to shut off the electrical current and they wandered the room, perplexed but morbidly fascinated by the operation and it’s purpose. Who was the necromancer and why had they repursued this room.
 
They resolved to return to the stair case they had entered by and descend to the next level.