Tallis, at the end of her rope and bracing herself against the rushing water, peered down into the abyss and thought that she could see a faint glow of light coming from below, but could make out no detail. Ever curious, Pandora decided to flit off down to see what was up; away she went and found that the waterfall fell in to a series of shelfstone pools, forming terraces leading down into a massive cavern, lit by some sort of bioluminescence and containing a large lake. More interestingly, she could see many humanoid creatures moving around down there — she doused her little fairy lamp to avoid detection and flittered closer to see more clearly.
The creatures were of three kinds:
The most numerous appeared to be slaves, hundreds of small grey-skinned humanoids with blank, white eyes, which were harvesting some sort of faintly luminous fungus and loading it into baskets; as well as the harvesters, there were files of them moving down and coming back up through a tunnel at the base of the shelfstone terraces.
The greys were being overseen by massively muscled humanoids, white-furred and with savage, bestial faces. They watched the slaves alertly, dealing out floggings at the least excuse (or with no excuse at all). Pandora counted a couple of dozen of them, but they all looked so similar to her that she couldn't be sure she counted them all (or whether she'd counted some twice).
Lastly, apparently overseeing the whole operation were three other humanoids — tall and slender, wearing elaborate robes, and being attended by retinues of both greys and beast-men. These creatures' most startling feature was the mass of powerful, writhing tentacles where their mouths should be, and their slick, mottled, greyish skin. "Ew!" thought Pandora, "nothing that ugly can be nice!" and fluttered back up to tell Tallis what she'd seen.
With the others hauling from above, Tallis made her way back to rejoin the others. Justin, in the meantime, had been industriously knocking lumps off stalagmites, ready for Pandora to turn them into ropes so that everyone could get down the cascade.
Quick summary of the rest of the session:
Tallis received a Divine Visitation, which gifted her with some of the powers of the Maiden. This turns out to be not so good for Vallana, since now every time Tallis looks at her she experiences scorching pains. Everyone made it down the ropes safely except for Jim, who was cruelly duped by Barsh and thrown down the shaft on the end of a rope. Unsurprisingly it almost killed him, hemp rope not being noted for its bungying capabilities. At some point the party's farting about was noticed by the Bad Guys down below, who started flinging ineffectual slingstones at them. More dangerous by far was a Mind Flayer which levitated up to them and attempted to brain-fry everyone; in a fit of amazing heroism, Justin took a running leap out to tackle it in mid air, whereupon it promptly snuck its nasty tentacles in his ears and up his nose and started to suck out his brain. Vallana saved the situation (sort of) by also leaping out and whacking it with he morning-star; regrettably she then plummeted 20 metres on to the rocks below, smashing one leg. The (now dead) mind flayer also plummeted, which meant that so did Justin, who was killed by the fall. The combined efforts of Tallis and Pandora managed to revive him before his spirit got too far away, and his near-death experience has led him to a desire to join some sort of excessively violent religious order such as the Sword Brethren.
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