The gnoll shakes his head slowly. "Don't know. Maybe the doorframe is the counterbalance for the floor. We walk in far enough, the whole thing tips open at the center and slides us into a pit full of Acid-Vomiting Devil Monkeys. It explains why the Mistress there and her sarcaphogus are both floating... if they're real. The doorframe doesn't smell like a trap to me but maybe it contains something." Shaggar blinks his red eyes at the halfling. "Sorry to be unhelpful."
Javi looks over at the massive gnoll. You’re unsure if it’s possible for him to invest more sarcasm in his whisper. ”Thanks for so unhelpfully showing me the otherwise unseen signs of what could very well be a halfling-devouring trap. Sheesh. So unhelpful.”
”Now … Acid-Vomiting Devil Monkeys … that sounds delightful.” Otherwise, he continues to wait to see if the team has any better plans then him challenging the possible traps.
Shaggar looks in his large sack. "If I had a heavy corpse in here, I'd throw it into the room to see if it will spring the trap."
Javi gives a considering look. If we're willing to lose the time and risk the trap again, I can get you a giant spider corpse."
The gnoll gives a snarling grin, laying his ears flat in amusement. "I hear outer-plane spider tastes like crab - pity to waste that. I think sayyidah Rosalia and her friend might provide suitable ballast."
The woman snorts as she observers Lyrian's spellcasting, before his flowery words. She answers him in the same tongue.
At the hushed back-and-forth in Taldane between Shaggar and Javi, the woman's smile changes to a scowl.
Rosalia's gaze flicks to the woman but she whispers as quickly and quietly as she can to them, "The spider corpse was actually pretty light. All legs, felt sort of... hollow. Ugh. My skin is crawling just remembering it..."
Javi’s eyebrows try to climb off the top of his head when the big woman’s face scowls at him. ”Wait … Shaggar, is she talking to us?” Javi looks over at where he thinks Smart might be, ”Smart, are we dealing with another … um … clamor like you, here?”
Javi hears no answer from Smart.
.
Shaggar translates the woman's words for the team. He adds his own thoughts in Taldane, "If I tie off with a rope, I could attempt to trip the trap. I might weigh enough. But I'd rather deal with this woman out here."
He watches the pharaoh carefully, trying to determine what she is, before responding in both the ancient tongue and the modern one so his allies know his play. "The pharaohs weren't gods, just the demented refuse of the muzzle-less races. Now they are boneshards and rot... and you are even less than they. Let us see your fury, false-god."
The woman's eyes narrow at Shaggar's words, then she smiles coldly.
She begins to gesture and murmur an incantation.
Javi lowers his goggles to look back over the room's traps, especially any architectural clues. The spellcasting catches his attention, as well.
Shaggar perks his ears amiably at the woman's insult. He comments to his allies, "Apparently the sayyidah can't tell the difference between dogs and hyenas. Perhaps I shouldn't expect more from a race that worshipped jackals and cats."
He drops his axe and pulls the bow off his shoulder, knocks an arrow, and fires it at the floating woman. "She smells like one of the dead but perhaps an illusion masks her. Consider that in your attacks... when you kill this harpy."
Even in face of the unknown, Heldar cannot help but smile at the exchange between Shaggar and Javi, but his visage shifts dramatically as the woman before them begins intoning the words of a spell - "She casts! Beware friends!"
Taking a step back, he casts a spell of his own, to bolster his companions.
Javi: Unfortunately you don't notice any new details about the room. You are taking Shaggar's word on the crack he says he saw, because, squint as you might, the dense mosaic pattern makes it harder to see that crack. You do notice that where the wall comes near to where you are (the doorway into the room), the floor doesn't seem quite flush with the wall, there might be a small crack-gap there too. You can deduce via your knowledge of machinery that it's probable the floor moves somehow, but beyond that, ehh, who knows. Acid-Vomiting Devil Monkeys is as good a guess as any.
The dark objects in the alcoves along the walls look heavy? Disks of metal or stone, maybe? Hard to tell much else about them from here.
"She cast defensive armor upon herself!" Rosalia shouts.
In response to the spell, Shaggar lifts his bow even as Heldar's warning rings out, but the woman is calmly continuing to do whatever it is she's doing. You see her draw a thin length of bone from a fold in her pleated robes and touch herself with it, murmuring beneath her breath.
Shaggar looses an arrow at the pharaoh's figure. It streaks straight towards her-- then shatters in mid-air, as if it had hit a wall. A half-second later, Lyrian's arrow does the same thing.
Rosalia glares at the floor and quickly casts a spell on herself, making her rise into the air. She flies forward, skimmming over the mosaic floor, not touching it-- then stops abruptly, yelling, "Ow!"
The woman only smiles sardonically at Rosalia having run into whatever arrested the arrow's forward progress.
"Bah! Screw it!" Javi grabs the ropes coiled over his shoulder with one hand, pulling it free over his head and tossing it back behind the group. "I'll see if I can bypass the floor traps and find a way around that invisible wall. If I look like I need help, yank me back.”
Then he stalks into the room, finding his way along the left side, his free hand sliding across the surface of the wall next to him. The rope—still tied around his waist—trails behind him.
Javi drops his rope and dashes across the floor, only to run into the same wall that has apparently stopped Rosalia and the arrows. The floor does not noticeably sink under his weight or otherwise shift, though as he runs along he can notice that it seems to be not-quite-flush to the outer wall all around. As he pats hurriedly around, his fingers confirm that the invisible barrier seems to stretch all the way to the wall, even into the alcove, as far as his arms will reach anyway.
Round 2
Looking up at Javi and at Rosalia, the woman smiles languidly. She stretches, wriggles her fingers a little, and casts another spell, then saunters back to the far wall.
"She just cast shield!" Rosalia yells. "And I'm pretty sure this is a wall of force! It can't be dispelled!"
Javi’s attention span begins getting the better of him.
”This is getting boring fast,” he complains in Osiriani before giving the woman a quick glance, ”I mean, I think I’ve seen that kind of magic done by magicians in the markets. Should we head back down?”
Then he reaches over to the nearest dark object in the alcove, trying to drag it a few feet so it’s in the most south-western portion of the mosaic floor where it meets the invisible wall.
Tapping ahead of him with his bow, Lyrian advances towards the open room.
Javi goes to drag one of the dark discs out of its alcove and onto the floor... It's very heavy, made of a black metal that seems denser than mere iron.
Despite the moment of realizing it's much heavier than he was expecting, the mighty mite manages to wrestle, push, and finally topple-over one of the disks out of the alcove and onto the mosaic'ed floor. The floor shudders a bit beneath his feet at the weight landing heavily on it, but doesn't otherwise move.
"Rosalia" - Heldar calls out to his companion - "What chances do we have to get through this? Can we 'break' it with weapon or spell? Can we use magic to move inside?" - he questions.
"Not unless you can teleport," Rosalia retorts. "It blocks the effect of nearly any spell. The only good thing is she can't target us with spells through it either." Rosalia kicks at the invisible wall, pointlessly, hovering in mid-air as she thinks. She flies along the wall, and zips up to the ceiling (thirty feet above) to verify what Javi's eyes were telling him-- it's a real ceiling, solid, stone. Rosalia also checks that the wall of force seems to go all the way up, and all the way down, and to each side.
"You can physically break them," she says grimly, "but you really better have a battering ram if you're trying that."
"Let's just leave," says Lyrian. "There is plenty more of this place and we can always come back."
Javi goes to drag one of the dark discs out of its alcove and onto the floor... It's very heavy, made of a black metal that seems denser than mere iron.
Shaggar shoulders his bow and picks up his axe again, making no move to enter the room. He nods his approval at Rosalia's efforts to find the edge of the force wall. "Fighting on her terms is no good. Fall back as sayyid Lyrian suggests."
Javi... it's Black Sabbath! ...I mean... you think the outside of each disc (the discs are about two feet across) are lead, but when you moved the one it felt like something heavy was flowing around inside? With your experience of counterweights in various traps, you know mercury in liquid form is pretty heavy. The discs are solid and sealed, not very decorated, and really just seem designed to weigh a lot. In fact, it is fair to call them... weights. Hm.
"That might just be the wisest way to proceed" - the oracle answers both Shaggar and Lyrian - "I don't think we have a way to surpass such a powerful spell"
Even as he drags the heavy weight in place, Javi nods along to the 'bug out' plan.
Lyrian also he is done. Magnificence spent.
Round 3
The woman looks over at your group with a sweet smile, and presses a stone on the wall where she is standing. Several things happen simultaneously.
A door opens behind the woman, leading into a small chamber beyond, where a golden throne is visible. There is also a figure there: large and looming, seemingly made of bronze, a humanoid body with the head of a lioness.
The floor beneath Javi's feet drops a foot with a sudden lurch, and the floor on the other side of the invisible barrier rises by the same amount.
Shaggar, Heldar, Lyrian (and Rook and Hatyah) have only a brief glimpse of all of this, however, before a heavy stone door drops abruptly on their side with a loud BAM, kicking up little clouds of dust.
"No..." - Heldar stammers as the massive door falls down, his mind racing, trying to find a way to get to his companions - "Lyrian, try to find a way to revert the mechanism?" - he requests, then turns to Shaggar - "Can you break this down?"
Lastly, the oracle stares intently at the massive door, and shouts - "Rosalia! Javi! Stay close to the door - I will keep you healed if need be!"
Heldar waits for his companion's feedback on how to obviate the obstacle in front of them.
Shaggar growls and tries to catch the descending block too late. He examines the stone as he listens to Heldar's entreaty and the possible response from the far side. "Sayyid Lyrian, if you have some skill at getting such doors open, use it."
The gnoll wedges the edge of his axe in the small fissure at the bottom of the block and signals Hatyah to come forward. He maneuvers the hyena beneath the axe handle until it rests on her powerful shoulders. He growls a set of commands to her. Then he squats down nearby, back to the door, and hooks his claws beneath the block as well. At another barked command, they both try to lift/lever the door open.
His luck still high, Lyrian tries to find a way to lift the heavy door once again.
Working like a well-oiled team, Shaggar and Hatyah put their backs to it, while Lyrian hurriedly scans for a device or mechanism.
Unfortunately, Lyrian sees no catch or lever-- with his acute awareness of the stone block, he's pretty sure it fell as a dead weight after being released from up within the wall, and that only brute strength will suffice to budge it.
Fortunately, you guys brought some brute strength.
Shaggar's muscles strain and his sinews tremble, while Hatyah's claws click along the floor as she scrabble for purchase on the marble. Lifting a four-inch-thick slab of marble is no easy task, but adrenaline courses through Shaggar and he growls as he manages, with Hatyah's help, to huff and puff the stone slab about one vertical foot in the air. It weighs somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand pounds, so, you know, congrats to you.
You don't think you'll be able to hold it there long. Something to wedge under it might be a good idea.
Looking into the room through the foot-wide gap, you see.... Rosalia's feet, and in short order, Rosalia's head, as she cranes down to see the gap that's appeared.
"Javi!" she yells. "They got it open, come on!"
The floor in the room appears to be level again. On the other side of the invisible wall, the lion-headed golem is slowly but ponderously starting to retrieve weights from the alcove-- Javi seems to have been engaged in the same thing, as there are more weighs now on his side of the floor as well.
The pharoah is sitting in the golden throne on the far side, her lovely face a picture in ugly displeasure as she registers you have gotten the door open on your side.
”That was quick!” Javi grunts as he heaves on one of the heavy weights. ”Shaggar was somewhat right … the mosaic floor is on a swivel that runs under the invisible wall.”
He seems to engaged with wrestling weights to comment further.
The prodigious muscles in Shaggar's back, arms, and legs strain to hold the block up. Hatyah is similarly pressed to support the weight. The gnoll hisses, "Someone get a chock, weight, or something under this door. I can't hold it for long."
"Maybe some of those weights?!" - Heldar responds to Shaggar - "Javi?"
Lyrian does just that, snatching up the spikes, analyzing the door with an expert eye and hammering the spikes into the tracks in which the door moves.
Thinking and acting quickly, Lyrian spikes the grooves of the door, taking the pressure off Shaggar and keeping that 1-foot gap there as an emergency exit for Javi and Rosalia.
In the next six seconds, Rosalia darts down and shimmies a little awkwardly through the gap. Shaggar would probably not fit at all, but Rosalia is a slim human female, and manages it alright, even if she pops a button off a boot and bangs her shoulder a little. Javi squeezes through after her, having less trouble and being used to tight places.
The last glimpse you see of the room involves the creature on the other size continuing to stack weights.... and then the floor on your side of the room rises, completely blocking the one-foot gap you guys forced in the door and sealing off your view of the room.
Rosalia takes a few deep breaths. "Good you guys got the door open," she says to the others, and picks up Rook for a quick , glad-to-be-alive cuddle, despite Rook's mewing protest.