I am Tohmas, a Talkative Nano who Tells Tales, and this is a Postcard from the Ninth World.
The next day, having used and regained all their recoveries, they start down the shaft again. When they hit level 6 they are almost immediately attacked by lizards who were waiting on them. There is an intense battle but again the characters are victorious.
They proceed down the corridors, meeting resistance the entire way. Eventually, they reach the room under the shuttle and find the walls covered in egg sacks. The lizards are breeding. They destroy all of the sacks except for three that they take with them. They then go down again.
Once again they are attacked as soon as the shuttle arrives. Clearing the initial guards, they go down the spiraling corridors.
These corridors are different. Instead of being an enclosed tunnel they are walkways over nothing, appearing as if they are falling through the air. Winds are rushing around them. They carefully make their way along the walkways to the next room.
This one turns out to be a large chamber; the largest they have seen in the complex. In the middle of the floor is a large, glowing white, portal. Surrounding it are seven pedestals and on each pedestal is a navigation crystal. Occasionally, another lizard flies upwards out of the portal and joins the others flying around the room.
The lizards attack and the characters retreat back to the floating walkways. A few minutes later, the lizards attack.
The fight is long but the characters are eventually victorious. Several lizards are kicked off the walkway and carried away by the winds; they never return.
Returning to the portal chamber, the characters attack the remaining lizards there. Even though more lizards occasionally appear through the portal, they eventually defeat the remaining guards. They start pulling the navigation crystals from their pedestals and immediately the portal closes.
Talking with Ada, they can finally piece together what had happened. The lizards had taken over Ada’s nightship. She and the rest of the crew (now missing) had erased their memories and records to prevent the lizards from getting to their homeworld. Undeterred, the lizards started visiting random places in the nightship, eventually finding their way to Earth.
There, they started looking for the old facilities of Ada’s people and eventually found the portal base. They immediately connected back to their homeworld and started bringing their people through, planning to use the Earth as their next “farm”.
The players realize that they have prevented an invasion of the Earth. There may be other lizards still on Earth, but without the navigation crystals, they will not be able to reconnect to their homeworld. Earth is (for now) safe.
They also know the coordinates of the lizard homeworld (from the navigation crystals) and the coordinates for Earth (from the symbols on the pedestals on which the crystals were resting). They realize that with the crystals they can now take the nightship (or the portal) anywhere in the galaxies. They can become explorers of the Night.
They all agree that this is a good idea. However, one of them had the Spore Launcher artifact run out during the battle and wanted to recover another one. They remember that when they were fighting the mechanical beast the bandits riding on its back were armed with launchers. They destroyed them with their own launcher, but they reasoned that the launcher should still be there, surrounded by the deadly blue plants. They decide to go back and recover it.