"So you made the emergency decision to set the teleportation destination in this mind flayer colony to save me?"
The two walked side by side through a corridor made of chitin. Renato curiously surveyed the alien architecture he had not had time to examine before, chatting with Klauthsura as he gradually pieced together what had happened.
A dark, keratinous layer covered the corridor walls, its surface patterned with orderly hexagonal honeycomb structures. The floor beneath their feet was slightly soft and springy, exerting a faint suction with each step.
"Not just for you. For myself, too."
The female dragonborn turned her head, Renato's face reflected in her golden, slit-pupiled eyes.
"The situation in the demiplane was far too chaotic. Drow and undead were still roaming outside the Royal Palace, and the battle between mythic beings overhead had begun destabilizing the entire demiplane."
"Determining spatial coordinates on-site would have taken at least one natural hour. The risk of waiting was already impossible to assess. And since you had fallen unconscious, I chose the safer option: I used the spatial coordinates previously recorded in the Psionics Beacon Eye and returned to the former colony's location..."
They came to a sphincter-like door formed from several overlapping rings of muscle tissue.
Renato watched the female dragonborn insert her slender hand into a slot beside the door. The muscle tissue immediately wrapped around her wrist, and an indicator light above the doorway began flashing continuously with a low hum.
He frowned slightly and pressed her further:
"But what if they hadn't abandoned this lair? In my experience, mind flayers aren't exactly a 'hospitable' race."
"That wouldn't have mattered," Klauthsura said, turning her wrist as a faint unlocking click came from the slot. "A new elder brain couldn't have emerged in the colony so quickly. Without