How do you spell...

nekromansers make zombies. i think also dead can any become zombies without nekromansers but i never seen one become like that. zombies are very stinky but maybe new zombies are not very stinky.

That's really very close, C is a kind of bullshit letter. "Do you know of any necromancers' names or anything so I could read things they wrote about zombies?"

tumbo wumbo. bartleby. but i dont think they wrote about zombies.

After a pause, he clarifies,

they are cats. i dont know necromancers not cats.

"I guessed in the first case. ...do you suppose if we brought these zombies to your colony they would know what to make of them?"

maybe dr beanies knows. maybe tumbo wumbo knows. better than stay here.

"Alrighty then."

Cam sets about packaging the ?zombies? for transport, bundling them each up and stacking them in a cart that will follow him.

Some of them provide token protest but are not strong, coordinated or mentally coherent enough to more than wiggle haplessly in their bundles during the stacking.

The cats know the way out. Up the tunnel and through the lava caverns. They pass some other dead creatures of mysterious nature on the way up. Humans enveloped in small towers of the same dark mutated flesh that was binding the humanpile together. Leathery black humanoids with slitted eyes and horns, often accompanied by pitchforks. A bizarre large furry beast with three stumps for heads, which look healed over with old scars. Out of the corners of their eyes they might catch more of the leathery pitchforky humanoids darting in the shadows, but they look afraid to confront the party.

They pass the body of a ginger cat that's looks like it's been crushed by something heavy, and underneath it the remains of what was presumably the original copy of the scientific instruments Cam conjured for Solaire.

Solaire stops them to recover some effects from the site, and takes a minute to focus and torch the body to ash.

Pitchforks! Way to play to stereotype, guys!

Poor kitty. It was a noble cause.

Past the lava caverns they ascend through a circular metal hatch into what the cats called the bunker. Some sort of bomb shelter or military bunker, it seems. It seems inhabited, with cans littered around, graffiti on the walls, bullet casings strewn about, the sound of something too loud to be rats in the vents, and the occasional distant clanking echoing down the hallways. They don't see a soul, however, and do see the rare dead human body with evidence of cat mauling. The bodies look deformed to varying degrees—not the biological impossibilities of the gray creatures downstairs, but simply cancerous, mutated or otherwise afflicted, plausibly related to the spills of phosphorescent fluid and large hazardous waste containers spyable through cracked doors.

The bunker is really deep, it turns out, with flights and flights of stairs to climb before they finally see the exit, a huge vault door large enough to drive a tank through. Solaire guides them to a smaller human-sized entrance to the side that's clearly suffered damage from a break-in. It's barricaded from this side of the door, but the obstructions aren't difficult to move out of the way with some elbow grease.

Then they're outside.

It's late night. Arid desert and shrubs stretch as far as the eye can see, but an unmaintained dirt path and the haze of light pollution on the horizon suggest civilization to be found, though not particularly close by.

"How did you guys get in? Someplace too small for me?"

They broke in through the side entrance! It must have been barricaded some point after their break-in, Solaire explains, probably on account of the original mechanism having been damaged and demonstrably bypassable.

Other cats have been in here, he thinks, but he's not sure how they managed it. Maybe there are vents around.

"What were other cats doing here?"