The Shushu

A reclusive, mute creature dwelling deep in the under-prison beneath the Grey Vale Cave — a roughly 7-foot, broad-shouldered humanoid (lanky but "60% shoulders") whose body is built of skull-and-flesh decoration around a single eye set in the center of its chest, and from whose shoulders a long, snaking eye-stalk can emerge to scout through soil. First encountered in Session 25 as the rock-dwelling "shusher" that hushed the party where it was dangerous to be loud; now revealed to be one and the same body the eye-stalk belongs to.

It is a quiet, almost gentle scholar-artificer: it keeps a hidden workshop (sealed for ages behind a cobwebbed door off the immortal-raiders' room), writes constantly at a desk, and communicates only by shushing, gesture, and surprisingly skilled drawings. Its workshop holds a pink-glowing teleport altar of very old, powerful magic.

("Shushu"/"shusher"/"Schusche" is a descriptor the party coined for the sound it makes, not a confirmed name.)

Session 29 (creature revealed)

• Found behind an ancient cobwebbed door Silithane uncovered in the dissolved council's room; opens it for the party and silently waves them in (then shushes Fenric when he tries to speak aloud).
• Confirmed to be the eye-stalk creature from the gobbler caves — the stalk slithers out of a shoulder-gap on display.
• Communicates with Fenric via written notes and drawings: warns, with a flattering sketch of Valmora on the platform and a worried second drawing, that its teleport altar sends a traveller to a second location (the crab room) but that they may not arrive as themselves — something is wrong with the machine, the runes, or the cobwebbed lever.
• Tends a powerful, long-dormant pink magical altar/portal; its true purpose, and whether the teleporter is part of Valmora's dead-gods quarry, are open.

Session 30 (named — Gerald)

• His name is Gerald, revealed once Valmora casts Tongues on him. He is a humble janitor — "a cleaner, not the maintenance" — who kept his machine-room hidden when the raiders stripped the prison.
• The prison's living memory. Gerald explains the facility was a "low-capacity rehabilitative detention site for minor offenders," run on a rehabilitation-first doctrine since "a time when there were multiple suns in the sky"; every inmate is jailed solely for stealing and drinking Ambrosia.
• The ice, and Alice. Describes how the worthy drink the Ambrosia and are frozen in the ice to outlast a coming meteor, then thawed when safe. His wife, Alice, is among the sleepers; Thalia happens to carry mail addressed to her, and her map and triangles helped Gerald find the place. He begs the party to leave the frozen be — "they are already saved."
• An accidental immortal. An Insight check shows Gerald wasn't meant to live: he stole a bottle of the elixir during the raid, drinking a spoiled batch that left him a tentacle-fleshed oddity but alive — "I am not the God, I just clean."
• The broken machine. His transportation device (the Session 29 teleport altar) runs on his janitor ID cube but is broken — the maintenance staff who could fix it were killed by the raiders. Silithane finds it utterly alien and can't safely repair it; Gerald won't let his mind be read. Thalia teaches him to read and write basic Common before he shuffles off, and Jex returns his journals.

Session 31

• Joined the Queen fight late, crawling up from the deep crack with his eye-stalk creatures ("a bunch of fucking eyes on stalks") to fight the last two Grabblers — though, as a janitor, "it's not his job to put the prisoners back."
• Saved by Silithane, who healed a perishing eye-creature, and shook his hand in thanks at the end.
• At the post-fight gathering, utterly baffled to find every other woodling wears an "I work here" badge — "What the fuck? I didn't know you guys all worked here" — and that all of theirs are merely painted on, unlike his real one.