More waving of dowels and chanting of incantations, now there's a waypoint at basecamp!

And, with the preparations done (and the party having spent some time resting afterwards so that Wrinkle could recover), Mischief will lead them through the door to the hidden passage.

The hidden passage starts off as a hollow branch of wood big enough to walk through with relatively normal gravity and a series of ropes nailed into the sides. Then there's a bank of fog and as they step into the fog gravity disappears. After a little bit, the fog clears but the gravity remains gone.

The rope continues to mark a path down this wooden passage and then to a large hole blown in the side where upon it circles around the edge and starts following the outside of the branch. Eventually it'll lead to a giant angler fish skeleton with a relatively small bramble seed growing out of it. Relatively small here meaning it's still 5 or 6 meters in diameter with thorny looking holes around a meter in diameter leading into more dense fog.

More places with no gravity. It seems common around here, as much or more than the other gravity trickery.

She'll psychically poke Wrinkle to make him stop getting distracted by the fogbank, then continues on to the skeleton. <I'll check to see if there's anything I can [take] from it in this state. Sandy, see just how strong this stuff is.>

To that effect, she leaps away from the branch-wall-thing and towards the skeleton, deftly clinging to it in a way that might not seem entirely natural, before extruding a portion of her shade through her suit, testing the ether in the area, finding that it remains as hospitable to shade as she expected, and then extending the extrusion into the bone she's clinging to and beginning to root around through its conceptual substructure to see if there were any relevant-feeling and sufficiently disentangled with the physical substance of the bones that she could plunder them for herself.

While Mischief does spooky Dungeon stuff, Sandy will throw out a grappling tentacle and hook onto the skeleton, wrap another tentacle around the guide-rope, and smoothly glide across the space as he shortens the first tentacle and extends the other. Once he's on the skeleton, he extends another couple tentacles to wrap around portions of it so that he's anchored firmly, places the palm of one hand against the bone, and begins to augment the muscles, sinews, and bones of that arm, transforming it from reasonably humanoid appendage in a biomechanical machine, steadily building tension in its tissues, preparing to ram a piston of dreamflesh toughened as much as he and Ounu could manage directly into the bone.

<Wrinkle, could you throw on some Strength and Hardness?>

<Yup!>

And he goes ahead and grabs another crystal dowel, waving and incanting once, layering etheric enhancement on all the flexile tissue in Sandy's piston-arm, and then a second time with slight differences to imbue the piston itself with even greater hardness.

<Thanks!>

And, after a while longer of charging up tension, he releases the piston. If there's any air, there's almost certainly a thunderous crack as it impacts the bone, pulling Sandy taught against the restraints he's anchoring himself with.

There is enough of an atmosphere to conduct sound it's about a tenth the pressure it was on Timber Hearth. The bone is pretty strong but not strong enough to stand up to magically augmented pistons of blunt force focused on a small area.

Well, the thunderous crack is a tenth as loud, then. Fortunately this area's Angler is distinctly dead, so they won't need to worry about developing combat protocols for one on the fly.

Regardless, he's go ahead and extend a net of thin woven tendrils to catch any fragments of bone that shattered away from the impact site, then pulling himself back to the guide rope with the bone-shards in tow.

<Definitely weirdly tough, tougher than any mundane animal's bones that I can recall. Tougher than we know how to make them, since I'm pretty sure that Hardness was relevant from how the impact felt.>

<Whatever weirdness it has, it's not magical or anything similar. It's 100% structural,> Mischief adds as she jumps back to the guide rope as well. She receives the shards from Sandy, retrieves a small vial from one of her suit's pockets, places them inside, then extrudes some shade through the vial and [takes] their structure, leaving only their abstract substance within the vial, then shares the metaphysical plunder with Wrinkle through the psychic link. <Might be something you can tinker with.>

Wrinkle receives the psychic emanation of the bone's material structure and struggles mightily against the urge to focus on dissecting it immediately, and succeeds, for now.

He is excited, though. At the very least this will have implications for Ounu's dreamflesh pattern-instillation techniques, and depending on how exactly the structural toughness effect works he might be able to use it to patch an issue he was having with how to construct the new teleporter core designs he was working on before. Also, depending on how much he's able to reverse engineer the process by which the Anglers develop this structure in their bones, he might be able to bust open an entire new production methodology with all kinds of results aside from just excellent material strength and toughness.

Mischief will give a tug on Wrinkle's psychic connection since it's looking like he might be getting distracted after all, and then will lead the group further on, scoping out wherever else the guide rope leads if anywhere, before considering which seed-portals are available (if there's more than just the one inside the Angler skeleton) and choosing which one they want to try next, based on whatever mapping of the Bramble's structure was available on the flight over here.

They've seen a map of the known explored seeds a few times now. This area doesn't have any known unexplored ones but there's a chance that there's one the Hearthians have missed. There's signs pointing towards the known portals and colored markers mounted as confirmation when they get closer. The seed here at the skeleton is apparently recursive. It just leads back into the pocket they're already in. It's also small enough that they probably can't fit through it's portals safely.

Is there anything in particular they're looking to see or find?

She has some methods for getting people through holes smaller than their heads, but if it doesn't go anywhere that sounds like a good way to waste time.

The actual mission goal here is to figure out if there's anything here that can help them find a way home, and that means...well, it's honestly not entirely clear. Anything particularly strange or interesting? Or else just a good path to known-unexplored seeds so they can push the frontier forward and hopefully find something relevant on their own.

Well if they can get through the narrow passages there is one small seed that leads into what seems to be a structure built out of stone. The Hearthians don't have the tools to actually get out of the room and despite continuous monitoring for most of a year there hasn't been anyone who opened the room. They can get there this way.

Alternatively, here's an efficient and relatively safe route to an area that they think still has more seeds to find.

Well, if the only issues are that the seed is small (which she has a shadow-trick to let them slip through, easier than she or Wrinkle having to actually cast passwall or something like that) and that there isn't a known way back out (which Wrinkle's new teleportation tunnel thing makes obsolete), they might as well check it out.

So, she'll go ahead and lead the party off to the seed that leads to the stone structure.

There's a few seeds they need to pass through before getting there but unless they're setting off more explosions like that avoiding the attention of the anglerfish will be easy. And then they can make their way through to explore this mysterious stone room.

Indeed, Mischief and Wrinkle make sure to (silently) cast a ring of silence before they go any deeper, and from there navigating to the seed is as simple as following the directions they've been given.

Regardless, they arrive at the small seed in good time. She extends her shade and gives it just the right twist, the seed's portals seeming to widen from the party's perspective as they approach it, while the party seems to stretch and squeeze into the shade.

On the other side...something feels eerily familiar.

He can feel it, the alien texture of the Hearthians world suddenly disappearing, gone not quite replaced by anything.

He can tell through the psychic link what the others are suspecting, and he immediately begins to cast a divination.

Before it's even done, he can tell where they are, just from the sense of the ether here.

"We're in the Dungeon."

She smiles, not that anyone can see it. "Home was closer than we thought, huh?"

She approaches the stone structure, which with this new information she's able to easily reinterpret as a chunk of the Dungeon, interacting strangely with the Bramble seed but still characteristically itself. She's familiar with the patterns of this place, the ebb and flow of its innate tendencies and rebellion against prediction.

"Now we just need to find out our way back out."

It won't be easy, especially not from the depth she can feel they're at, but it's far from impossible. At least for her.