As it turned out, the vast cavern they had found themselves entering was merely an antechamber to the actual city proper. Here they found half a dozen large buildings that were most likely used as inns, taverns, and merchant facilities back in the days when there had been a fully functioning city here.  At one point, Talek’Tinal had been the capital of the Dwarven empire, and as such it had played host to a steady stream of adventurers, travelers, and dignitaries from other cities in the realm.

The signs of life were still evident, although centuries old. There were still wooden and stone goblets, bowls and fixtures littered throughout the buildings, most of them still sitting out on surfaces as if they had been recently used and left sitting there as the people got up and left for a town meeting. The only thing stranger than the state of those artifacts was the complete absence of any kind of metal. Not just swords, knives, and armor were missing either. No, every single piece of metal had been taken from the place as if it had been collected with extreme intent. No silverware, no pots or pans, no jewelry of any kind, which also raised questions about the stones there-in.

“It is more than likely used in the creation of other mechanical automatons. Gimbobble remarked matter-of-factly as the small group poked carefully through the remains of an inn’s great room for any artifacts of significance.

“So, is this what you needed to see down here?” Jumah asked, almost hopefully of the little gnome.

“As telling as this actually is, It is not really what I was after, no.”

The two porters were  on the other side of the room, poking through a pile of furs for anything of value as Jumah and Gimbobble spoke to one another in hushed tones. “Look, Gimbobble, I need you to know that as strong and fast as I can be, these machines, whatever they are, seem to be incredibly resilient to damage, even from my enchanted blades.” There was more than a little concern in Jumah’s voice as he spoke.

Gimbobble looked up at him with a quizzical expression on her face. “But Ma…. Jumah…” she corrected herself hastily, “You seem to have fared extremely well against the automatons thus far.”

Jumah sighed heavily, “I know, but we had a distinct tactical advantage here, one they didn’t know we were coming, and two, the sudden switch to the darkness. Coupled with my speed, we made out alright, but that isn’t a series of events that we should be relying on working in our favor going forward. Circumstances can change quickly and I don’t want your lives on the line when that happens to our disadvantage.”

Gimbobble seemed to look more thoughtful than usual for a moment before raising an eyebrow in Jumah’s direction. “What if we could turn another factor in our favor?”

Jumah crossed his arms across his chest and eyed the gnome suspiciously. “What factor?”

Gimbobble simply grinned from ear to ear as she slowly turned and made her way back out of the inn toward the entrance of the cave where the graveyard of parts lay strewn about.

Jumah followed her with a look of deep concern lining his face. He wasn’t at all sure he liked the situation, especially given a gnome’s propensity for overly complex plans. “Gimbobble, what are we…”

“Reinforcements!” She cut him off suddenly as she spun around in the middle of the junk pile to face him with a giant grin on her face, arms spread wide to indicate the pile of scrap at their feet.

Jumah gaped at her. He suddenly found himself at a complete loss for words. “You can’t be serious…” He finally managed to get out.

“Why not?” She mused. “They were obviously built by someone, and as such they have been given a set of instructions. Self replicate, protect, scavenge, and so forth. Who is to say that we cannot rebuild those instructions to suit our own purposes?”

“You mean beside the fact that we have only the barest idea of how the things work in the first place?” Jumah retorted as patiently as he could under the circumstances. He thought he may have come off a bit testily.

Gimbobble seemed not to notice, or was just too excited to care. Either way, she kept trudging forward with her line of thought as she bent to examine one of the destroyed machines more closely. “All we need to do is discern where the machine’s control center is and derive what sort of mechanism is in place to provide it direction.” She pulled a rolled up leather skin from one of her pockets and unrolled it on a clear patch of floor with a flick of her wrist, revealing a long row of tidily organized tools, each in its own little loop, pocket, pouch, or enclosure on the roll. Deftly she whipped a couple of tools out of the kit and bean fiddling with the head of one of the mechanical spiders. “I would imagine that it is nothing more than a difference engine, using some sort of preset, recorded documentation to provide checksum’s to balance environmental factors against. Probably using the Stombublean fractal algorithm to account for differences in perceptions… If we can just decode the checksum template then we will have an easy road into the machine’s reasoning faculties…”

Jumah stared at her as she plunged further and further into her own world. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but was suddenly cut off by an ear-piercing shriek from the inn where the other two gnomes had been left. In the space of a heartbeat Jumah turned and was out of sight, but not before blurting out authoritatively, “Stay here. Don’t move from this spot. I’ll be right back.”

He burst through the inn’s doorway in a flash, swords drawn and at the ready as he paused in the center of the large room to get a handle on the situation. In the corner, behind the pile of furs the porters had been poking though, he spied a stone staircase, heading up to the higher levels of the massive inn. A trail of wooden bowls and goblets leading up the stairs was a good indication as to where the gnomes had gone. Jumah vaulted across the room and took the stairs six at stride.

On the next level he saw a long hallway with a series of doors on either side, probably twenty in all he estimated as he searched for any sign of the gnomes. Another shriek from down the hall got him dashing toward its source. At the end of the hall, the corridor made a righ hand turn and headed into another long hallway with as many doors decorating its walls. But this time he caught sight of a door at the end of the hallway closing suddenly, and the faint patter of tiny feet on stone floors confirmed that the gnomes were near-by.

Closing the distance to the door in question, Jumah gathered his super-natural strength beneath him and give the ancient wooden door a mighty sidekick. The poor door didn’t stand a chance. With nothing more to reinforce its wooden slab than two wrought hinges and a catch, it was not up to the task of repelling the assault of an agitated lycanthrope.

The panel exploded in a shower of wood splinters. For an instant, the room behind the door was filled with a cloud of wood particles no larger than sawdust, and another ear-piercing shriek issued forth from the back corner of the room.

“Where is it?” Jumah bellowed as he spied the two gnomes cowering in the corner, behind the disintegrating remains of the bed’s mattress in the corner.

One of the diminutive gnomes raised a shaky hand and pointed toward the corner of the room nearest the remains of the door. Jumah spun around and adopted a defensive stance, swords at the ready as he crept toward the spot indicated by the gnome.

Jumah narrowed his eyes, focusing all of his senses on the corner where there stood a large wooden wardrobe and a small end-table with a stone basin on it. He saw no signs of a mechanical fiend anywhere. Prepared for anything he lowered his stance in an effort to see better under the wardrobe without compromising his defenses. As he was about to get a clear line of sight beneath the wardrobe, he heard a small scurrying sound from within the furniture and, with a questioning look over his shoulder toward the cowering gnomes, he slowly sheathed one of his swords and reached out to the handle on the wardrobe’s door.

With a deft yank, he jerked the doors open and took a step back, holding his sword at the ready for an attack. But no attack came. The wardrobe was empty, save for a pile of shredded, disintegrating, musty old cloth at the bottom. Again he looked over his shoulder at the gnomes, who were trying as hard as they could to sink into the floor of the room, shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, eyes glued to the pile of fabric.

Jumah returned his attention to the pile and, with the tip of his sword began sifting through it until, suddenly a large rat darted from beneath the pile, hit the floor with a small thump and skittered out the door and around the corner with such speed that Jumah thought it could possibly give him a run for his money. This event, coupled with the loudest, highest pitched scream he could ever remember hearing in his entire life, caused Jumah to spin violently around, his magical blade cleanly bifurcating the ancient wooden wardrobe and causing it to fall to the ground in a heap. One of the pieces of the decimated wardrobe fell into one of the legs of the end table next to it, which caused that ancient wood to splinter. The end table tilted violently, which dislodged the heavy stone basin on its surface. The basin dropped to the floor suddenly, but rather than thumping to a halt, or even rolling around the room a bit, the thing crashed through the ancient floor boards with a thunderous crash, causing a ripple of seismic activity to wash around the room.

In a massive cacophony of painful sound, the hole made by the basin quickly enlarge to encompass half the room, including the portion of the floor upon which Jumah stood as he witched the almost comical chain-reaction disbelievingly. A moment later, he dropped through the new void beneath his feet and with a sudden impact and an even louder crash, his world turned to darkness.