When everybody is gathered around the lift, Alynthar takes out his dagger and slices his hand open, then smears the blood across the activation rune.
"Well...alright, if you're sure."
Conall was surprised that Alynthar was offering to pony up the blood payment. Weren't demons supposed to be malicious, and evil? He'd have to reevaluate the man.
Charlie would wait door everyone else... And enable the lower left, top left and top right buttons. (Whichever are not already active of the three. Just let me know how much to pretend I do not have.)
Charlie steps onto the elevator and waits for someone else to send them up. "We will need the rope this time." She said once more, absent-mindedly.
The blood causes the runes to glow, the platform looks the same as it did last time.
Alynthar activates a second rune, then turns to Tanque and Shield. "I suppose the two of you should get the other two runes," he says to them.
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"Yes sir. Made it around the horn once already, it's my turn to take one for the team." Shield unsnaps the restraint from his survival knife, draws it out of the sheath, and pauses for a moment.
He looks back and forth between his empty open palm, the knife, and the runes. "Well... here goes nothing." Shield draws a line down the center of his palm with the small blade, and presses it to the lift's runes.
"I guess I'm in charge of the stop button again, what with my blood disease thing going on.." Conall chuckled darkly, as he once again drew blood, and placed it on the rune signifying stop."
"Mages and their traps...hey, Alynthar; how would you fortify a place like this, given the chance? Maybe a mage's guess can help us before we get turned into toads.". Conall paused for a moment, thinking on what his ancestors had asked him to do.
"Feel free to leave in all the wordy parts; I'm a little curious with all this around us now." he added with a smirk.
Tanque breathes a sigh of relief as Conall volunteers again.
I am not cutting myself for no reason. These…people… are mad….
Charlie gets one of the runes, Conall gets one, Alynthar gets one, and Shield gets one, looks like.
Charlie climbs aboard, and once everyone is on, pushes the button. It'd be a slow ride, giving everyone plenty of time to discuss the situation.
"In the future, I really do think the rune activation duties should be split between myself, since I won't be seeing combat, and Shield and Tanque, since they're the toughest." Alynthar says as the party clambers aboard the platform, leveling a one-eyed glare towards Tanque. He then turns toward Conall. "To answer your question, we'd need to know what kind of resources the creators had on hand, as well as how much time they had to prepare. The most basic of magical traps are spells such as Sepia Snake Sigil and Explosive Runes, both of which are dependent on the victim reading a particular sentence, and a Fire Trap spell, which does minor fire damage to anyone who opens a particular door or object. We have little to fear from any of these, however. Rune traps are rarely used due to their extremely limited applications compared to their cost, and fire trap causes so little injury that a healthy rabbit could survive it. The real risk is the more creative, more expensive spells that can be modified to a trap, such as Fireball or Cause Fear. Unfortunately, magical traps are extremely hard to detect. I suggest that we have Charlie move up front and investigate doors and possible trap points as we move along, as I expect that she would be the most likely to spot them. However, I doubt that Reya would be sending us to an area with too many magical traps, as the likelihood of our spotting them or surviving the ones we fail to spot is rather low. What we really need to worry about is more mundane traps, such as arrow slits and pit falls, and things such as those Demolishers we saw. I expect that Reya will send us to more dangerous areas only once we have gained experience, knowledge, and power.
Charlie listened and then nodded. She was the most likely to spot something that was amiss back home... though she hadn't quite acclimated to that since arriving. Things were different, with different rules. Ah well, learning would be half the battle.
"Sounds nasty"
"I guess I'll have to see it to make sense of it all..."
Tanque continues to hold his own counsel.
What is the grim guy gabbling on about? Magic? Weird!
Once they were all on the lift and pushed the button it began to rise. Slowly at first, but it started to speed up as the first few floors went by until the floors were just flashing lights going by. The stop button began to flash as they neared the top, above them a huge pile of stone closed off the remaining shaft and the elevator did not appear to be slowing down.
"Stopping!" Conall thrashed the stop rune with his fist.
Alarmed by the turn of events, Tanque drops into a defensive crouch, ready to leap up off the floor and defend himself from the roof if the floating platform crashes upwards.
With the other person doing the only thing Charlie reasonably can do to fix the problem, Charlie just watches overhead, not panicking. There wasn't any point in panicking, there was literally nothing they could do if the elevator did not work properly.
"See," Alynthar says sarcastically, "I told you this would end badly."