Seelah snorts. "I used to, but I'm a little rusty, and I don't have any lock picks on me." 

"Okay. So, we...try to find the keys, I guess," Lusilla sighs. "Next time I am going to leave a cultist alive, if I can, so I can ask them about it." 

"Fair." 

"Meanwhile I might as well check what's on the other side," Lusilla says, disappearing and then reappearing a round later. 

"Stairs," she reports. "A curved staircase. I didn't try following it up." 

"That's...probably a good idea. Lusilla, what circle spells can you cast as a sorcerer?" 

Mildly embarrassed squirm. "First."

"So that was just something you can do because of what you are?"

"Yeah?"

"How many times per day?"

"As many as I want?"

 "Okay. Can you tell us what else you can do like that? So that next time, it isn't a surprise?"

"Ah. Okay. I can fly, I can bop around like that, I can make something glow either a basically normal amount or really brightly, and I can make myself harder to see the brighter it is, all as much as I want. I can also do a fifth thing as much as I want I think but I don't know for sure 'cause I've never used it that much 'cause I never figured out what it does. Also I can, I think just once per day, talk to someone in their dreams."

"Thanks, I appreciate it." 

"You're welcome." Sigh. "If we can't find the keys maybe we should tell the others to bring a battering ram, when they come in." 

"Maybe. Or maybe we could just use Chief Sull's hard skull." 

Lusilla snorts, and sets back off for the blood hall, to start exploring side doors off of it. 

The next combatant they find is...upsetting, and not only because he doesn't allow them to take him alive. 

Lann stares at the dead Neather, sorrow and horror warring in his eyes. "Hovlan. His name was Hovlan." 

Lusilla shifts into human form for the sole purpose of putting a comforting hand on Lann's shoulder. "I don't understand. If he was also here to look for the missing children, why did he decide to fight us?" Sure, Lusilla's true form could be scary, but they had tried talking him down. And if Lann knew him...

Lann shakes his head. "You don't understand. He's been missing for years. He used to talk about wanting to try the Maze--I thought he was dead." 

"...Okay, I recognize that almost certainly something more complicated is wrong with him, but do you mind if I pop back out to where your chief and the others are waiting, for a sec, just to confirm that there isn't some kind of time fuckery on this place, and we haven't been gone for an alarmingly long time?"

"--Yeah, definitely do that." 

Lusilla disappears for a moment, then reappears a couple of rounds later. 

"Chief Sull confirms that we've only been in the Maze for a little while," she confirms with relief. 

"Good. I'm not surprised, though--there's something clearly wrong with Hovran. I mean," he smiles with a sort of gallows humor, "there was even before you caved his ribs in." 

"I'm sorry." 

"I'm not. I mean--I'm sorry we had to fight him, obviously; I'm not sorry he didn't succeed in killing any of us. But...look at him. It's like something was eating him from the inside."