The ritual cave is at the end of a tunnel that opens up into an even larger volcanic cavern complete with lakes of lava. Depending on zoom level he might catch other humannish things the cats went through on their way down, though scale makes it hard to distinguish details. No apparent secret tunnels visible on the external surface of a volumetric cutout. Is he taking cross-sections?

Yes, he's looking down from the top, taking off the top inch or so at a time, and repeat.

Largely uninteresting volcano. When his slicing passes through the bodypile there appears to be something black, dense and glassy composing a good chunk of its inner volume and anchored to the ground beneath it.

...huh.

"There might be something under these folks." He says this aloud, they're going to notice if he starts moving them around.

"Meow?"

He looks at the section. Makes a gagging sound like he's about to vomit, then spits out a black glassy shard the size of a thumb. It looks like the conjuration of whatever is inside the pile, but... deeper, like its facets are windows into bottomless void, and you could fall into it if you just tripped the right way.

He looks at the pile of bodies.

cut open/ he asks. i think that is it

Uh, reminder that if they die I go home, maybe we can just lift them out of the way?

The pile of bodies appears to still be capable of making rude gestures at them and clawing unsuccessful at their cemented mouths despite Sir Meowalot having removed 30% of their limbs through violence, so cutting a hole in them does not to Solaire sound terribly likely to be what does them in, but he doesn't have a strong opinion on the subject.

are you strong enough. sir meowalot maybe strong but cant lift high.

Can he poke at the sections? Is the pile in fact peelable from the rock? It appears so, but the conjured gray flesh also appears to be... getting slightly mushy...?

Cam gauges from the model how thick the pile is and then creates a layer of ice under it in a ring, and then more of that on up, and then when they clear the black thing he will be able to grow one side a bit higher than the other to slide them onto the floor and shatter the ice.

The humanpile is trying to scream bloody murder the whole time (more than they already were) and turns out to be... somewhat more stuck to the the rock than the conjuration indicates. They're definitely losing skin, or what passes for it under there as the ice pries them upwards, and getting literally bent out of shape against the competing stresses.

Ah shit. He stops when he sees blood. "Uh, how much clearance do you need, Solaire?"

Well, they don't have blood. A bloodless kind of humanpile. But there's definitely gray fleshy detritus.

The shard isn't that large and can definitely fit through that clearance but they might needs to bore or melt a hole and... use some kind of grabby arm thing. Or have Solaire squeeze through. Solaire flattens himself against the ground and compares the height of the iceage with a paw.

It's only a couple inches tall right now. If it doesn't need to be that precisely placed then melting a hole and flicking it through should do.

There was no specific information about placement conferred by the psychic. Solaire reads the manual, sets up the recording equipment, gets Sir Meowalot to back off, then once the hole is ready, flicks it in.

The ominous black shard snaps towards the ominous large rock under the peoplepile like it's magnetized and sparks with a flash of bright violet. The Coven screams, muffled through the cement, and doesn't stop screaming as red light pours through the ice crack, then out their eyes. The pile seems to rise like dough, stretching upwards and upwards until it splits.

Black crystal breaks through the mound of bloodless flesh, growing higher and higher in shifting facets like it's pushing through from a higher-dimensional space. Waves of red pulse through the crystal faster and faster until it all blurs together in a sea of red and black. The air in the cavern whips into a storm, but the strange energy of the place seems to be draining, not swelling, and the ground is getting cold, lava dimming into rock.

The agglomerated bodies are still howling as the dark mutated flesh that joins them together bubbles and sloughs—melting into the obelisk and blowing away into ashy residue, like whatever infused it with false vitality is being resorbed. What could be termed the original human parts of the pile slides down in the ash and rot-melt, scrabbling with what arms are still connected to their torsos to get away, still somehow clinging to existence half-unmade.

HOLY SHIT THAT'S THE SECOND MOST FUCKED UP THING HE'S EVER SEEN

"Ohhh shit I guess I'm probably on my way out hope that was helpful bye cats! Fill this in if you want me back!" Circle rolled up and rubber banded and plastic-wrapped and out of the way of the mess.

The obelisk has detached from the ground and hovers in the air, shimmering red. The shard that they stuck onto it has been absorbed, or rotated into a fourth dimension, or whatever. The instruments happily beep and boop away, recording data.

The unpiled guys are kind of taking a long time to die? They're not losing blood or anything, due to the aforementioned lack thereof. The ones who are missing most of their torso slump and don't get up more promptly, but the ones more intact manage to keep crawling on still. The bodies shudder as mist rises from them and swirls into the obelisk.

If there were a single one of the discorporated bodies Solaire might try putting it on ice, but there are still like four or five crawling around and he doesn't have the intelligence to keep that many frozen, so they can try or pass on the whatever Cam just gave them.

One of the relatively more complete but recent quiesced ones is... maybe not as quiesced as believed? Its fingers are twitching.

Cam's still here. Degraded binding still hanging on.

...are they separating from each other at all?

Yes, with the connective tissue dissolved, they're now separate detached upper bodies crawling feebly across the floor.

...maybe one of the survivors counts as his summoner. He will set about patching them up insofar as he can be confident of their medical needs.

If he's putting parts back and closing open wounds it doesn't seem to hurt, and is maybe staving off the degeneration for those still conscious, but one by one they're still dropping.

It seems a lot of them, moreso for the ones patched, are not quite dead dead, though. Insensate, and demonstrating absence of most vital signs, yes, but twitching, and the occasional rasp as chests spasm.

Cam is still here.

The obelisk is still glowing red and floating, but the wind has died down and it's not doing anything else.

"Any minute now the relevant one of these weirdos is going to kick it and then I will vanish. Probably. According to conventional understanding, by which reckoning I should not be in this universe at all. So, uh, that over there is a circle that if you unroll it and fill in the gap, summons me, if you want anything," he tells the cats.

Unroll? Reroll.

He is eyeing the bodies uneasily.

what is universe