As they travelled down the spiral staircase, Theli decided to question them regarding various things.
"How many of you are there down here?" he asked, a simple question the two guards were unable to answer precisely, all he got from them was that they were quite numerous but few enough to be sure to cross path with everyone were they to walk around for a while.
"What do you think is outside?" he then asked and the only answer they had was danger, the outside was danger in their mind.
"Is there no danger down there?" he then asked, expecting them to correct their statement but to his surprise, they said something quite frivolous.
"There is barely any danger, the only injury anyone can get is through clumsiness, there is nothing else but us down there" responded the female guard, the male guard nodded in confirmation.
'They truly believe that?' thought Theli as he sent another question their way, it seemed like they were slowly forgetting that they were supposed to be afraid of him.
"Is everyone just like you two? Thin and weak? Prone to just hide in a corner instead of running away?" he asked, breathing down on their necks, rendering them mute for a few moments before they answered as truthfully as they could.
"Yes, we never fight and none of us have ever met the danger of the outside" answered the male guard as if his life depended on it, it did.
"Then, what do you people do with your lives?" he then asked, he was starting to believe these people would make for quite the observation colleagues, Raphus Cucullatus but with human form and intellect, this was doomed to yield something.
"What we do? We just move around and speak, we relay ourselves the guard duty and sometime we listen to our king speak" answered the female guard, from the sounds of it, these people didn't even eat at all or even drink.
He asked them that question afterwards and they indeed didn't, saying that they only felt some discomfort when they were on guard duty up there, the environment also sounded nice.
As they arrived at a flat zone, Theli told them to halt their movements a bit and asked another question.
Asking whether it would take a long time to get there or not, when they said that it would, he smiled decided to begin an experiment.
During the rest of the trip, the two guards were left completely placid, unable to do anything but look terrified and walk down the flight of stairs.
They were weak in every aspect, if there was no catch and what they said turned out to be true in all cases then, it would still be a very fun experience but would certainly lack the challenge factor, surely, with some luck their king is either aware of the outside and lies to them or maybe they are part of an experiment by some sort of creature of higher intelligence.
Surely he hadn't just run into people who lived carefree lives away from sorrow and pain, this would be unlikely, especially with beings that were clearly part of the human group, the chances of that being the case were incredibly low.
But not zero.
When they finally arrived, Theli was able to witness the magnificence of the enormous cave these people lived in, the rock that covered the wall seemed to be a slight variation a few sedimentary rocks, the ceilling was covered with bright blue crystals which casted light in the whole cave, he would need to find a way to get up there and get some.
The habitations were crudely made, they looked like tents and from what he could see, had two main components, stalagmites that had naturally formed and hung from their tip were what appeared to be blankets fashioned out of the hairs of its residents, seemed like they didn't have much ressources down here.
"Hey, you two, where is your king?" he asked the two guards to no avail, they seemed to have stopped hearing what was going on around them, he snapped his fingers in their faces a few times but seeing that it was useless, he decided to use some magic to clear their minds a bit, he wasn't very proficient with this kind of things yet but his birth ability allowed it to still work somewhat, the fact that they were so weak also helped.
Regaining their minds, they backed away from him in fear but didn't dare refuse his orders once he repeated them.
When they arrived, Theli was now much more certain that it was indeed just a hidden civilisation with no knowledge of anything whatsoever, as their king, instead of living like a king, in comparison to them at least, had the exact same kind of tent, in a random spot, it wasn't even the largest one.
Also, he didn't have any kind of crown or anything, in fact, the only two people that wore clothes made out of fabric were the two guards, everyone else walked around garbed in hair clothes.
They must have been regarding these clothes as some sort of armor, which when compared to tied some hairs around your crotch and chest if you were female, it might as well be a true set of armor.
Seeing that the king was actually just a mayor of sort, he decided to continue questionning the two guards, asking about the clothes they were wearing.
As expected, they had no idea where it had come from, it had just always been here, he made up some theories in his head to check for later.
Everyone was scared of the weird looking guy that had made his way in from the outside, especially when the two that had been on guard duty spoke of him as if he was a devil that had broken out of hell.
He looked around, checked every nook and cranny, shook every single piece of information out of every single person in this cave, collected samples of everything, at this point, he knew who everyone was and could predict their behavior with certainty due to them doing the same things all the time.
After spending a few weeks in there, Theli was able to notice that the inside of the cave did provide free sustainance for some reason that he couldn't pinpoint yet, the crystals seemed to be the source of it but it appeared like they lost that effect when broken of, so it must have been coming from above the crystals and channelled through them.
These crystals were pretty interesting, they weren't sentient in any shape or forme but seemed to be able to understand how to convert everything in the ground into food and diffuse it through its light.
This was a great discovery on top of the addition of many more colleagues in Theli's experiments, it would be hard to find them many uses since they were extremely weak, what would usually just be a bad hit could probably concuss them, maybe even straight up kill them.
So maybe they could be of use to learn how to apply as little force as possible.
Marking this fabulous place on a map as well as his mind, Theli left a magic circle hidden in a tunnel he had dug himself, had his fair share of fun and then left to investigate the shadowy creatures instead.