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As you are churning your way through your options here, it occurs to you that you should check that ailing Ounce Nodule of yours. You are long leagues away from any sort of conclusion about what happened and why – but you surmise that if the Witchwork continues to ail and you do not, then it might be that your time inside the cast has left you free and clear of the Strangeness. So it is you cautiously move into the room, and after finding somewhere to set down your 'stick, you commit yourself to the awkward work of digging through your 'sack while it is still on your back, behind you. You almost knock your wall-wand loose in the process, but before overlong you have managed to find the Nodule where you have it bundled up, away from the others. As you lay hands on it long before you lay eyes, you gather rather quickly that it is still hot and 'sweating' – but after you nearly dislocate your shoulder in the process of getting it out into the light of your 'stick, you see that things are not so constant after all. The fretful trembling has stopped entirely and the Nodule appears to be several shades darker … and oddly enough, larger. The immediate concern is that it has died or discharged, but for a Nodule like this, death would have a lot more … fanfare, so to speak. And neither the Nodules that you have discharged, nor the Nodules that you found discharged got darker or larger. Just what you needed, more fraying questions with no ready means to answer them – if any means at all! Though if you had to make a stake, you'd say that you had been Cleansed or were close enough to it.
Turning your attention back to the chest, you walk around your 'stick and heft one of the digging implements – a shovel – that has been left in the room, intending on using it as a prod to safety-check the chest. Before you use it though, you would like to walk around the chest, to see it from all angles – which you start to do, before you realize that you are going to need to take your 'stick with you, otherwise you aren't going to see much of anything on the far side of the room. Feeling dense as lead, you equip yourself accordingly and make your circuit of the room. The chest remains still, but more to the point, it is not making any noise – or at least, any that you can hear. That is a marked change, considering that when you first came through here, you were hearing rustling and movement as you walked through the arch. Could you be too late? You are fretting over this, all the while you circle the chest, each pass tighter than the last, hoping to hear or see some evidence of life. If there are any, they are not made apparent to you. Abruptly, you stop your circling and cut over to where the digging tools rest on top of the flagstones and take up the shovel once more. You approach the chest with the tool as a Guard might approach a presumably but not certainly downed highwayman with his pike – and you poke and prod as a Guard might as well.