[@DarkHuntress], [@A Lowly Wretch]

John simply watched and listened.  This world had rules.  However, the nature of those rules was almost completely unknown.  It was pointless to try and make sense of it all right now.  When the creature across the table gave no indication of having heard him, he turned his eyes to "Lady Evadne" as she described the situation as "freaky".  She was right.  She was also proving to be remarkably resilient, mentally.  John felt a mild admiration that faded quickly into analytical calm as he looked at the floor, or rather the hole in it, and replied to Rosemarie.

"Freaky indeed.  But, before we decide what to do as a group... we should try to get the group back together again, if we can."

He sighed as he moved his weak body to the edge of the hole and looked down, listening for the slime.  Clearly, for all the adaptability of her new form, she lacked the ability to suspend her assumptions and accept the world around her.  It was indeed dark down there and John could hear something moving around.  He had a sinking feeling that the slime girl was right, Craig was that uninspired.  Then again, the sinking feeling might have something to do with the structural damage that the slime girl had caused on her way through the floor.

"How far down is it?"  He murmured as he felt around the edge of the hole for a loose enough bit of wood.

Finding one, he dropped it under the lip of the hole and listened for the sound of the impact.  He was trying to not hit the girl, Cynthia... if he recalled.  The delay was notable.  It was probably at least fifteen feet, a ridiculous depth for a mere cellar.  If there was an actual dungeon zone underneath this tavern... it would make retrieving the corrosive slime girl... difficult.

"Cynthia?  That was your name, right?  At the risk of tripping a flag and falling prey to numerous TV tropes... Hold still!  I'm gonna try somethin'!"  While he was trying to be reassuring, with a bad combination of a fake British accent mixed with a south-central American one, he was also lying down on the dirty tavern floor and extending his hand down into the hole and trying to concentrate on how it felt right before had charred the table.  He saw the faint glow of flickering flames around his hand and concentrated on trusting his body to know how to do what he had in mind.  The flames moved away from the back of his hand, only slightly singing the sleeve of his robe, and gathered below his palm.  The ruddy light from it was still too faint to illuminate much more than a candle.  So, he loosed it.  The Fire Bolt seemed to leap from his hand toward the floor below, impacting with a dull flash a few feet away from Cynthia.  In that faint flash, he saw several pairs of glittering eyes and shapes about the size of a medium dog.

"I can't get down there from here and my character's magic doesn't include levitation.  All I can do is try to cover you from here with fire!"  Then he had a thought and his eyes squeezed shut as he gathered his determination.  This would be risky.  "I'll try to send down some help!  Just... don't panic and remember what that body did to the floor!  The rats aren't going to want to eat that!"

Pulling himself away from the hole and up to a kneeling position, Fardur Nearsigt took a deep breath.  His hands began to glow a pale and unpleasant green and tendrils of glowing green fluid extended from the skin of his hands, waving about as though searching for something.  "Stay clear for a minute..."  He said quietly, to everyone and no-one.  Then he began.

The tendrils twisted around each other until they formed a ball of pulsing ooze that floated between his hands, a few inches above the floor.  The ball grew in size as a few minutes passed and a small shape began to grow inside it, a shape with oddly jointed legs and a spiked outer body.  It grew until it was about the size of an obese Chihuahua.  Then the glow became brighter before suddenly fading as the ball burst and dissolved into a mess of glowing droplets that sunk into Fardur's hands as well as his clothes and the floor.  In the space where it had been was a twitching bug with a spiked shell and a mean disposition.  This last was demonstrated by the fact that John was barely able to dodge its attempt to stab his hand with a claw.

"So I can make them but they don't start off liking me, eh..."  He said wryly.  Then his head tipped to the side for a moment and he suddenly turned around and kicked backward, knocking the Spiky Beetle just hard enough for it to slip into the hole and fall.  After he heard it impact, he returned to the edge of the hole and fired another Fire Bolt into the floor, between the slime and the fallen bug to deter it from venting its anger on her.  "Don't bug the bug and it'll probably go after the rats!  You need to focus on finding a way back up here!"  He called down, wishing that he hadn't forgotten to include a simple light spell in his character's spell list.