Louis had managed to just wrench the nasty little machine
out of hide,and got fifty feet away from it when the aerial petrifying bomb blew up in a massive petrifying blast wave that turned everything to stone within 66 feet of the center of the blast.
Which meant 16 feet of Louis's massive body soaked up the energy
and immediately turned to stone.
His 20foot tail.
All that stone tail dragged him down and he bellowed in pain as his flesh and part slammed hard on the ground.
Louis was out for the count.
Hawk could see his friend needed help but he certainly didn't
know anything about automaton such as the one that now lay in stoney pieces all around the ground,as well as wires,coils,crytals and gears and gyroscopes.
So Hawk went back to the abandoned camp and noticed something Louis
had missed.
The boots and socks weren't just sitting there neatly stored for the night.
They looked like someone had been wearing them,walking in the direction of the long dead tree up on a hill,and had suddenly got yanked out of his or her boots instantly,leaving the boots and socks behind in mid-stride.
First Hawk followed the bootprints back to the tent and noted that as he
got near the tent the boottracks appeared more steady.
He looked in the tent.There were several of the frozen in place stone gargoyle machines off in one corner.
But the boottracks led up to another kind of machine,
This one was made of copper and was fashioned in the shape
of a small feral dragon.
Its chest plate was removed and Hawk could see the bellows and pump mechanism inside that chest cavity.There was a empty
glass container in there,and tubes exiting the dischsarge vessel and running into the closed,drawn in metal hinged arms at
the front of the machine.
On its neck was fastened the trip lever with the 'mouse bait',a shiny silvered gemstone.
Hawk could see that the talons of this metallic dragon machine were actually injector fangs.
Someone had been examining the machine,had taken off the machines cover plate and somehow set off the trap.
Whoever it was had taken those injector fangs to their sides and got the contents of the
discharge flesh.
So Hawk went back outside and followed the trail of the missing victim of the trap.
Ninety nine feet further from the boots,lay the first piece of clothing, a
vest with blood along its sides and the puncture holes from that
machines inhector fangs
Twenty three feet further along lay the first soft glove,the cloth
torn like the wearer had to pull the glove from a hook that lay within
it.
The ground here was all stone,so there was no animal or human tracks.
But a little further along the first two tracks started in a patch of mud.
A small human footprint,the right footprint.
But the next print,though human,was smudged,like someone had
fallen into the soft mud and left a bodycast of their obviously changing body.
Her ,Hawk realized now the victim was a woman,corset lay half sunk
in the mud,