"Uh, am I the only one slightly weirded out about this? I'm not sure it's evil, but talking about eating people is creepy and not exactly what I expected to be doing this morning."

"See, I don't have a good handle on what's creepy, on account of having grown up in Geb. The fact that I haven't encountered any zombies since getting here makes this place a firm step up."

"They're already dead..." Lann shrugs, somewhat uncomfortably. 

"How much will it help? Because it is the kind of thing I would prefer not to do with people's bodies, even enemies, but if I had to choose between that principle and better odds at saving people..."

Luzai shakes her head. 

"I didn't know how big a deal it would be, somewhere that killing people for their blood wasn't perfectly acceptable," she repeats. "But if we end up killing anything that's juicier than a spider and not a person, I'll try to drain that; if the rats had outnumbered us less, yesterday, I'd have tried to catch and drink one." 

...Eating rats is definitely grosser than eating people, if you ask her.

"Rats are delicious, but we usually drain the blood out before cooking them. You'd fit in pretty well in Neathholm."

"Thanks!" 

She's going to get a good grade in civilized behavior, something that is normal to want, possible to achieve, and in any way a thing Wenduag is qualified to assess. 

"If you're not going to try to eat the corpses," which Lann APPRECIATES, don't get him wrong, "we should maybe move on." 

Anevia will loot his body, then, and come up with money, a key, and piece of paper with writing on it.

"It says here one of the hands is supposed to be in the unfinished section of the maze, wherever that is, finding a place to hide a 'paladin sword,' and the other is supposed to do something about a water elemental. That explains the flooding, so presumably that's the hand we just killed. If the elemental is strong enough to give these cultists trouble they could be a big help here - I don't suppose your wizarding education includes learning to speak Aquan? Also, there's some very dire imprecations about what she will do if she gets interrupted, which implies that either this Hosilla fellow has a very short fuse or we can inconvenience them pretty badly by doing just that."

"Sorry, I learned to talk to underdark ghouls instead of water elementals. Mechitar being--itself. Maybe we could communicate in pictures, or something." 

"Are any of you any good at sketches? I'm pretty rubbish at it myself, and given everything else we might just want to just steer clear of them then. Less risk of them not being able to tell the difference between us and Baphomet cultists.

"I would consider myself okay at them but you're probably right." 

Then Wenduag can lead them back out of the flooded zone to her best guess of where an unfinished section could be.

The sounds of their footsteps echo despite their efforts to be quiet, but the hallways are just as eerily empty as before. The sign of the next inhabited location hits their nose before their eyes or ears, particularly Luzai’s. One of the rooms ahead smells like fresh blood, and judging by the distance, there’s an awful lot of it. 

Luzai claps her hands over her nose and mouth. 

"Blood," she says, in a muffled, strangled voice, trying to look grossed out instead of hungry. 

If anyone else notices her decision, they're too polite to comment.

Or, that is, they have their own reasons not to bring it up.

The possibility of walking into the scene of a fight makes their group even more cautious, but when they arrive at the room in question it doesn't live up to their expectations. The large, spacious hall seems like the kind of place that might even be comfortable, with better lighting and pictures on the wall and furniture, if it weren't for the fountain of blood at the other end. There's clearly some magic involved, because the liquid still looks fresh and clean rather than dusty or clotted from however long it's been here, and the surrounding walls are significantly less splattered with dried blood than you would expect. For most of the people in their party, however, it is still a fairly disturbing sight - especially if you stop to compare how much blood a body contains to the volume of the fixture.

...Okay, detect magic time, is that blood pool necromancy or transmutation or what. 

Definitely necromancy. How’s her spellcraft?

Well, she's all of level two, so, ten. 

Then despite her skills, it’s not clear exactly what kind of magic is maintaining the fountain. Whatever it is is unlikely to hurt her, though.

"I think this probably goes without saying, but that fountain is some kind of horrifying necromantic abomination and nobody should touch it." 

“That seems like it would be good advice anyway. It looks like it’s not, uh, actively evil at least?”

Really though that only rules out a small number of the ways that a necromantic blood fountain could be very bad news.