The next morning, our heroes, Volt and Blaire, unexpectedly meet up with their friends Katt, Gladys, and Flame (an anthropomorphic Skitty, Glaceon, and Growlithe respectively), who had just recently stumbled upon the encampment during their travels. After a small amount of chitchat, the new team prepared to take on what challenges lied ahead of them, without the support of those coupons, tickets, or cards that Mic_128 described. Fortunately for them, the expeditionary group came well equipped for the job at hand. The 1st thing that they did was that they deployed scouting drones to survey the temple that used to house the shengonwu, as well as the surrounding area, for any traps and hostiles within the area.
After surveying the area, they found out that somebody else had recently attempted to loot the temple, with the remains of various Eggman robots (a few intact with little-to-no damage in the deeper parts of the temple: their energy drained by Metroids), golems, and Metroids (deeper parts of the temple). Despite this, many golems and a few Metroids were spotted actively lurking throughout the temple. The drones also detected many various traps throughout the temple (nothing that would affect a wide area though), some having been triggered/disabled by Eggman's robots. Finally, a few puzzles were detected, though all of them seemed to use smaller traps like poisoned darts or remotely summoning nearby golems.
The golems themselves varied in terms of shape and abilities (some could fly while others could only walk, some relied on melee attacks, some could shoot projectiles, some had flamethrowers or lightning guns, etc.), but all of them that were scanned so far were each made up of various gears and pistons with a small mana reactor to power it and an internal rune to act as its "brain." Normally, a golem as lethal as the golems in the temple would need a far more powerful reactor, but the usage of machinery allowed them to function with significantly less power needed. Moreover, due to their lack of electronics or electric power plants of any kind, they were immune to electricity and electromagnetic pulses (lightning guns, however, could be disabled with electrical attacks). However, these same gears can be easily jammed by an object stuck inside, so these golems were armored to help prevent such a thing from happening, though it's not a fullproof safety measure and can be bypassed with the proper knowledge (their weakest points were their joints).
Unfortunately, the drones were unable to explore the entire temple due to interference caused by something deep within the temple, and were unable to completely identify many of the traps or puzzles. Most of these traps here were partially identified in terms of how they were triggered, but couldn't be identified in terms of what they did; a few, however, couldn't be identified in terms of either how they were triggered or what they did.
With this information at hand, Blaire, Volt, Fang, Chisel, Katt, Gladys, Flame, and a small team of Koopas, Goombas, Toads, and Yoshis prepared to depart inside the temple to discover the fate of the shengonwu. In order to deal with the Golems, they could either target their joints or lure them into some of the temple's own traps. With some reverse engineering and modifications made on any disabled golems, they may also be able to "reprogram" any of the golems for various purposes (such as assisting them in exploring the temple and later, studying their designs as part of their secondary efforts of discovering what the ancient civilization was like). They may also be able to gather some information on the intruders by hacking into Eggman's robots' systems (provided that they are still intact). As for the Metroids, Gladys, and a few others with the proper equipment, could freeze them with a blast of frost at point blank range, making their normally elastic bodies easily susceptible to being shattered, which would kill the Metroids. Finally, some anti-venom was brought along in case anybody was poisoned by any of the traps.
Personal Note: Man, this is long, but I do think that it provided a great deal of detail on what our heroes were expected to deal with in the near-future while only advancing the story only slightly. I also wanted to introduce a few new heroes into the story.