Cel peers at the shattered stone, "I think I know what this was! The wardens enchanted this to seal off the caves probably..." he thinks for a second, "I think about two and a half centuries ago."
Looking over the stone a little more, "I don't know what kind of stone this is. I don't remember learning anything about the type of stone they used, but it sure is an interesting color! Maybe that's important?"
As he inspects the area he comes across something. "Hey! I found something!" Cel holds up a moldy carrot. "This is pretty fresh considering it's just starting to mold over. I mean, it's certainly warm enough in here to allow mold growth. Maybe it's some left over ration from the soldiers we're looking for!" he exclaims excitedly.
As he carefully treads upward around the diamonds and deeper into the cave, Xizoh sees that the color of the stone seems to get a bit darker. He thinks this may mean the cave is deeper underground. He also notices the air gets a bit warmer and even more saturated with water as he ascends.
After the seventh diamond, Xizoh notices the gleam of a very thin wire strung across cave at about ankle height. If he bends down to inspect it he immediately suspects it is a tripwire. He notes it is strung with fresh, unrusted metal wire.
In glancing around to see what the wire might do Xizoh notices a square hole in the cave ceiling seven feet across just above the trap, cleverly hidden with a broad piece of cloth about the same color as the cave walls. One corner of the cloth is hanging down on the other side of the trap. If Xizoh brings the light of his ioun torch to the other side of the hanging cloth he sees a large metal cage in the ceiling, ready to crash down on anyone unlucky enough to trip over the wire.
The bottom of the cage is spiked, and Xizoh thinks it might be heavy enough to hurt someone very badly if it fell on them rather than around them. Now that he knows what he's looking for he can see the marks of the spikes in the ground where the cage must have crashed in the past. He also notices the metal of the cage seems much older than the wire. By the rock color, the hole in the cave ceiling looks to have been built at the same time as the cave tunnel.
Seeing no motion or other signs of enemies, Xizoh carefully proceeds to source of light: a dim wooden torch close to burning out. The torch rests in an iron holder on the cave wall mounted at a comfortable height for casting light.
Next the torch on the same wall is an opening to either another tunnel or a chamber. Xizoh can't quite tell from where he stands.
Xizoh sees no one, and if he is very still he hears nothing but a soft, infrequent dripping from the wet cave walls.
As Anathema approaches the broken white stone, the snake makes the same observations as Xizoh about the way it once stood.
Xizoh in map 9.
Dulae, Henri, Alaina, Cel, and Anathema in map 7.
Active light sources:
Coin - Dulae
Ioun torch - Alaina
Wayfinder - Cel
Ioun torch - Xizoh
Torch (wooden)
"Yeah, got to agree with you on that Blonde, things are definitely strange. With this heat....." Alaina loosened a couple of straps of her armor and quite skillfully unbuttoned then removed her shirt from under it. Packing it away she then retightened the armor straps. "As I was saying, with this heat it's amazing there isn't steam in here, given the moisture."
Still slightly uncomfortable at the large serpent with them, the Wolf responded, "Traps, greaaat."
With Cel's excited discovery, "That's possible, or it could belong to whatever is causing this blasted heat and set the traps."
Henri gives Alaina a sly look as she removes her shirt. "Doesn't that chafe, Red?" Still, she removes her own poncho as she feels sweat drip down her forehead, but keeps the hat and goggles on. "Wouldn't want to get a rash." With a wink, she steps forward to take a look at the moldy carrot. "Could be something, Rabbit. Maybe a tasty snack for later?" she teases. "At least it means that something was in here." She glances into the darkness where Xizoh has moved. "Or it may be deeper into the cave. Seems like they have a bit of a trap fetish. We should be careful."
Cel follows suit and takes off the warm overcoat poncho furry thing that has been swaddling him. "Something that has access to carrots in the middle of winter. That means access to civilization! I can't say I know much about undead and misty monsters, but somehow I don't think carrots are on the menu."
The excitement is a bit too much for Cel at this point. "Lets go!" He starts to follow Xizoh's steps carefully to make sure he's avoiding traps, but also trying to keep enough distance to not obscure Xizoh with too much light as he tries to sneak around further in the cave.
Turing to Henri, "Not in the slightest. I had this specially tailored to be both protective comfortable. Believe me, you'd be surprised how often I fight like this." Raising her arms to show off the armor, the Wolf added, "Besides, it's not like you can see anything anyways."
Henri smiles as she nods, appraising the armor. "It is quite a fine piece of craftsmanship. My ol' leather can't compete with that. Still," She shrugs, turning away to follow Cel with an impish grin, "I don't really need to see anything. My memory still works." The gambler starts to swiftly wheel her way through the traps, moving gracefully in the way that only true elves can. "That's a good point, Rabbit. Real good point. There's definitely something intelligent behind this... at least this is just another clue that confirms it."
Curious, Xizoh steps forward to better inspect the opening, his chain held in a white knuckle grip. Please don't be ancient deathtrap, please don't be ancient deathtrap!
Dulae finishes casting her spell. “I can sense no evil nearby.”
She coughs a polite, quiet cough after Henri's comment to Alaina and busies herself with picking up her coin. No sense in announcing our presence to anyone returning to the cave. She holds its light loosely in front of her as she follows Cel and Henri, sword hand still at the ready.
Dulae bends down to examine the first diamond, holding the coin's light close to it.
Dulae notices there are thin cracks separating the diamond from the rest of the smooth cave floor, as though it is a tile engineered for some purpose. She can see that sufficient weight should depress it. The stonework is of excellent crasftmanship; it probably took weeks to implement dozens of tiles. She suspects these traps were made at the same time as the tunnels were built. The red color appears to be paint and it looks and smells relatively fresh, likely applied within the month.
Up close, the objects in the wall look like darts, probably launched when the diamonds are depressed.
Dulae frowns. “These dart traps look hundreds of years old.” She points to the red paint. “This is fresh paint though, in a warning color. I think whoever’s been using these tunnels lately has also been trying to avoid becoming a pincushion.”
She rises and follows Henri at a cautious distance, looking carefully for other traps or clues.
Slithering around the traps, Anathema displays its maw in a horrible facsimile of a grin. 'Undead sounds delicious right now. Perhaps a broiled mushroom sauce to accompany the necrotic flesh?"
As the party proceeds carefully around the traps, the bright red paint of the diamond tiles makes them easy to avoid. There are hefty darts embedded in the cave walls in line with some of the diamonds that look fairly deadly, but no sign of skeletons or other remains nearby.
Soon after the broken stone, the cave tunnel begins to noticeably slope upward. The party can see the light of Xizoh’s torch about 60 feet ahead gleaming off of the cave walls and ceiling from above.
Cel and Henri notice a patch of cave ceiling about 15 feet ahead of Cel doesn’t reflect the light of Xizoh’s torch as well as the rest of the cave surfaces seem to.
Xizoh in map 9.
Dulae, Henri, Cel, and Anathema in map 8.
Alaina in map 7.
Active light sources:
Coin - Dulae
Ioun torch - Alaina
Wayfinder - Cel
Ioun torch - Xizoh
Torch (wooden)
As Xizoh approaches the opening, the cave tunnel ahead still appears clear of danger. He notices nothing outside of a large, innocuous-looking stone with the same coloring as the cave walls in the middle of the path ahead.
The opening leads to a large chamber, roughly thirty feet wide and forty feet long. The cave ceiling looms higher than in the tunnel at 15 feet, making Xizoh wonder if this room was used for some kind of storage by the smugglers.
At the entrance he can see a line of evenly spaced worn holes in the ground leading him to think there is probably some kind of gate-like door that can be lowered. There is also an iron lever mounted at about chest height just outside the chamber.
Just past the entrance there is a small channel cut into the ground an inch wide and a few inches deep. If Xizoh gets closer to examine it, he sees there’s an inch or so of liquid in the channel that smells like lantern oil. Looking around the chamber, Xizoh sees that the channel follows the edge of the entire chamber.
About 15 feet into the chamber Xizoh recognizes two rows of red-painted diamonds that look exactly like those from the tunnel. To avoid putting weight on them presents a challenge: it would take a ten foot jump to clear them.
Beyond the red tiles, about 40 feet away, lie the motionless forms of four people in brown archaeologist's uniforms. It’s difficult for Xizoh to tell if they are breathing from this far away, and he can’t tell the color of their skin from their resting positions under their clothes and hair.
At the snake's comment, Alaina looked at him with a cocked eyebrow, "Something's wrong with you, really."
Cel stops dead noticing a patch of the ceiling a few feet ahead that doesn't reflect light like it should. He focuses intently on it to try to figure out what it might be, if there is movement, etc. "Xizoh passed by that think okay, so it must not be dangers...but what is it?!"
"Xizoh passed by that think okay, so it must not be dangers...but what is it?!"
It looks like this section of the cave ceiling doesn't have as many sharp edges as the rest of the cave walls and ceiling. If he stares very intently he thinks he sees Xizoh's torch back-lighting a bit of cloth hanging down at the back of the odd ceiling patch. Cel suspects someone has covered this part of the cave ceiling with cloth for some reason.
Cel sees no movement.
Xizoh in map 9.
Cel, Henri, Alaina, Dulae, and Anathema in map 8.
Active light sources:
Coin - Dulae
Ioun torch - Alaina
Wayfinder - Cel
Ioun torch - Xizoh
Torch (wooden)
Henri looked up towards the ceiling as she approaches the spot with the strange lighting. Scratching her head, she gives Cel a gentle pat to let him know that she's directly behind him. "See anything up there, little Rabbit?" She glances forward, and then at the snake. "Hey, as long as he doesn't try to eat me, he can say whatever creepy stuff he wants." She glances at the red diamonds. "Lucky for us, I guess."
"I think...it looks like some cloth is up there. It looks like it was hung up. Nothing is moving, though." Cel moves towards the wall, but avoiding the trap marking, and looks to see if there's anything he can climb.
Cel can see that the cave walls are wet and slippery and although the edges are jagged, there aren't many good handholds for a horizontal trajectory.
Cel walks underneath the cloth, takes a moment to look over the wall and starts to scale.
He gets part way up the wall, then steps wrong flinging his feet out from under him. He tries to hang on with the one hand, but it's just too slippery. The second he begins to fall there is a *WHOOSH* sound and the dust on the floor directly below him buffets out. Cel lands gently on his feet. He looks back at the group with a flat look on his face for a split second before a giant, sheepish grin splits his head from ear to ear.
He turns back to look at the problem after feeling out the route on the first go. He gets a better handle on how to shift his body to solve the problem. Knowing where the foothold is poor, he lets himself flag slightly before letting the opposite foot smear allowing the grip to come much easier on his hand. It turns out the remaining bit of the wall is MUCH less challenging, and he scampers the rest of the way up finding a nice place where the grips are solid and the outcroppings for his feet are enough to keep him balanced with minimal effort. Then, he leans in to inspect the current target of his curiosity...
Henri can see that the ceiling does look like it might be covered in cloth, now that Cel mentions it.
Cel carefully makes his way over to the cloth covering the ceiling. Nothing seems to be moving, and the tunnel looks clear.
As he cautiously steps under the cloth, Cel feels a sharp line of pressure against his ankle and hears a soft, metallic twang. Something very large immediately starts to fall through the cloth towards Cel.
Cel has a split second to see the cloth has been hiding a heavy iron cage, now rushing toward him. Cel dives away from the edges of the cage, just avoiding becoming skewered by its spiked base. He falls onto a diamond trap, which depresses under his weight a centimeter into the ground. Cel can hear the whistle of darts whizzing above him, some striking the cage as it hits the ground with a loud crash. As the dust from the impact settles and the wayward darts roll lazily down the sloped ground, Cel finds himself unharmed but trapped inside the cage.
The cage is made of a grid of sturdy wrought iron bars spaced a few inches apart. It looks very heavy and fairly old, though there's surprisingly little rust for it to have spent very long in a humid environment. The spikes at its base are settled into matching grooves that keep it from sliding on the sloped floor and make it hard to shift. There is no door. The top of the cage is open to the hole in the ceiling that it fell from, but there doesn't look to be a way out above. There are only a few inches of space between the top of the cage and the cave ceiling. The top of the cage is symmetrically attached to a heavy chain that presumably lifts it up.
Cel can see the chain runs over a pulley near the top of the hole in the ceiling and disappears into a small opening on the right side of the tunnel, 15 feet above him. From the color of the stone, the hole that houses the cage looks like it was made at the same time as the rest of the smuggler's tunnels.
The broad piece of dark grey cloth drifts harmlessly up against the cave wall. The rest of the group can see Cel, the tunnel, and the light from Xizoh's torch clearly through the cage bars.
Xizoh hears a loud, cacophonous clang from the direction of the rest of the party that sounds consistent with the heavy spiked metal cage falling down.
"Rabbit!" Without hesitation, Henri leaps over the crystal between her and the cage, and rushes towards the metal trap.
Henri reaches the cage and starts prodding at it, looking for some sort of weak spot. "No worries, little Rabbit, we'll get you outa here." Henri shoves her gloves back onto her hands before grabbing the cage and pulling upwards, hard.
Cel checks himself over for signs of harm, hands quite shaky, and finds himself relatively uninjured. "Um...shit." He pauses for a second and realizes something, he's not freaking out any where near as much as he should be. "Huh, well that's the biggest surprise of all!" he says to himself.
"Help please! I don't think I can climb out. There's a chain on a pulley up there, but it goes off towards the right wall. Let me see if I can look through the hole the chain is coming from and see if there's anything that might help us get me out."
<Insert climb checks here>
The cage does not budge from Henri's efforts. She recognizes that trying to lift the side resting furthest down the slope makes it even harder than it would be otherwise.
Alaina instinctively dropped her stance with her shield in front of her at the loud clang. Seeing Cel in his new cell, the Wolf maneuvered around the diamonds and got closer, "Dammit Cel, you just had to go and set something off didn't you?" Letting out a long sigh of relief, she then looked objectively at the cage.
Staring at the archeolgists, Xizoh pondered how best to get to them. The loud clang had him snapping towards the entrance.What the hell? That sounded metal...the cage!
Throwing a quick look at the four bodies lying out of reach, Xizoh gritted his teeth, then dashed out of the room. Going as fast as he could without stepping on the traps, he arrived to see Cel in the cage trap.
Giving Anathema a withering stare, Xizoh groaned in frustration. "You okay Cel?"
Feeling the doctor's anger, Anathema quietly darts between Dulae and the red diamond.
As soon as he nears the cage he veers up towards the pulley the young human had mentioned, attempting to slither up the way in blatant disregard of gravity
Cel attempts to climb up to where the chain attached to the cage disappears into the wall above. Cel succeeds on his second attempt.
The air is even warmer above the level of cave ceiling, and the walls are slick with water. Cel feels the moisture beading on his skin and clothes as he climbs.
If Cel brings the light of his wayfinder close to the hole he can see a dark, narrow space behind the stone. The chain loops through another pulley on the other side of the hole before leading downward along the tunnel wall. The chain is fairly taut beyond the second pulley. Cel can’t follow its entire path with his view through the small hole, but from the angle it looks as if whatever is maintaining the tension is anchored close to the tunnel wall where Xizoh is standing (on Xizoh’s left as he’s facing Cel).
Alaina observes there is some tension in the chain attached to the top of the cage, and infers the other end of the chain is likely attached to something that could be used to raise the cage.
She also sees the beginnings of rusted joints in two bars at the top right corner of the face of the cage closest to her. She suspects with time, effort, and a lot of strength they might be able to use gravity to their advantage to bend a hole big enough for Cel to crawl through. She figures with the level of deterioration it could take an hour of labor or more to bend the bars. She also notes the dart trap just beneath that corner.
Alaina perceives that the spikes on the bottom of the cage sit loosely enough in their grooves that it might be possible to tilt the cage by a few degrees. She isn’t sure if that would make a large enough opening to fit either Cel or Xizoh between the top of the cage and the tunnel ceiling.
Anathema deftly climbs to the top of the cage, but is unable to squeeze through the gap between the top of the cage and the tunnel ceiling to reach the chain or pulley.
All markers on map 8.
Cel in cage trap. ( “Muhahaha!” *cough* *splutter*)
Active light sources:
Coin - Dulae
Ioun torch - Alaina
Wayfinder - Cel
Ioun torch - Xizoh
Torch (wooden)
Dulae jumped at the loud crash, reaching for her sword for a tense moment. She rushes after the rest of the group to see if Cel was injured, or worse. She lets out a quiet breath after seeing he is well. “Altien’s mercy. Be careful, Rabbit.”
She examines the cage from behind Alaina. We'd better pick up the pace. That was loud enough to wake the dead.
From the ironwork Dulae concludes the cage probably dates back to the days of the smugglers. She notes this humidity must be very recent, otherwise the metal wouldn’t be nearly so well preserved.
She guesses the weight of the cage is somewhere between 1000 and 1500 pounds, which means she and someone with comparable strength have some shot at lifting at least one edge together. She realizes this likely wouldn’t do much good to help Xizoh reunite with the party.
She sees that there is a diamond dart trap where someone would have to stand to help lift, if they were to try that. Looking around, she notes that the only dart trap they have seen tripped was one that did not already have darts in the opposite wall. She wonders if the traps have more than one round armed.
Dulae scowls. “That must weigh half a ton, at least.” She says to Alaina, “I think we might have a shot at lifting an edge off the ground together, Miss Steele, although we’d need to do something about that dart trap first.”
Knowing full well of the trap right in front of her, Alaina looked for where the dart or darts would be coming from.
Breathing heavily from her futile efforts to lift the cage, Henri takes a step back from the thing. She glances at Dulae's comment, and looks to the floor, where the red diamond lies in warning. "Here, then." Henri slips her gloves back off again, and flicks out a pouch filled with various long and thin pieces of metal. Thieves' tools in hand, she crouches next to the diamond and gently picks at it, careful not to set it off, and attempts to disarm the mechanism.
After Cel has scampered up the cage to have a look at the mechanism, he comes back to the ground where everyone is now surrounding the cage. "The chain up there goes into the wall a short distance, then drops down. It was in the direction of where you just came from Xizoh. Is there a room over that way or something? I looks like the anchor can't be too far away from here."
"Well, from what I can see our only way to get at the chain mechanism would probably be to break through the wall right about...here," he says while pointing down at the wall. It dawns on him that what he just said is ridiculous and his face drops into one of frustration.
Alaina spots six round holes about a centimeter wide in the wall to her right. They’re spaced irregularly an average of 4 inches apart, spanning from the height of her torso to above her knees (maximum diameter spread of two feet). Judging by the darts in the opposite wall, she thinks they would fly reliably in a line roughly perpendicular to the plane of the wall.
Alaina notices most of the darts from the trap in Cel's cage fractured after impacting the cage. Seeing the darts are made of wood, she concludes a strong material, such as living steel, would most likely effectively stop them. She didn't get a good look at the velocity of the darts in the chaos, but she thinks it might be possible to slow them down by packing the holes very tightly.
Noting an odd sheen to the darts rolling past, she suspects they may be coated in poison.
Alaina also perceives that even if they do manage to lift the near edge of the cage and free Cel, it may not be very helpful to Xizoh.
Alaina’s ioun torch casts an advantageous light on the diamond tile. Henri sees there is a gap between the painted tile and the rest of the stone cave floor about a millimeter wide. She can tell the tile is designed to depress with weight. She thinks she could probably disable it by shimming a thin material in the gap around the tile, but it would take at least 10-20 minutes to do a robust job.
Henri has some familiarity with this type of compression trap. She is fairly sure the trigger mechanism fires when the tile is fully depressed, and that it resets when the weight is taken off the tile. She thinks they might be able to disable it by standing clear of the path of the darts and weighting the tile with something heavy.
After Cel draws his attention to the side of the cave (on this left), Xizoh notices his ioun torch is casting an odd shadow that looks like it could be a vertical recess about a foot and a half long at roughly chest height.
After her brief examination of the trap, Henri stands. "All right then, I can disable this thing if you give me about 10-20 minutes, but I don't know if we have that sort of time. However, if we can't get to the anchor, the only way to get Cel outta here is to lift, and we can't do that with the trap in the way." She rubs her chin thoughtfully. "We could put something heavy on the switch, since the thing only resets when it's let up, but that may make it still difficult for someone to stand there." She shrugs, giving the cage a swift kick out of frustration. "Still, that's the fastest way to do it so that's what I say we do. Unless someone has a better idea."
"Lift and block. We'll need something to put under the bars since everyone will have to go under this thing to move through the cave," Cel says with a bit of a dejected tone.
An idea occurs to Alaina, "Sergeant Toema, can I see your shield for a minute? I have an idea."
"You going to need some muscle? Xizoh looks almost sick as he says this, nervously running his hand through the back of his hair.
Dulae unstraps her shield and hands it to Alaina. "What do you have in mind, Miss Steele?"
To Xizoh she calls, "Perhaps, Mr. Shadelock." Dulae glances up at the taut chain. "It seems there must be some kind of recall device, but if we are unable to discover it, we may."
As the looked at the best way to hold both shields, the Wolf explained, "Something along the lines of 'I use both shields to make a wall to block the darts while Blonde steps on the trigger, then you retrieve the fallen darts and she uses them to jam the trigger in the down position.' Unless you had another idea?"
"Um, I think I should be the one to do that, Alaina. I...I think I can do a better job of deflecting than you can with the shields." Cel realizes that he may have just said he's better at her job than she is, and his eyes go wide. "I mean, um, I think I can be more safe from harm than you." He realizes that the second statement was not much better than he first. As the redness of his cheeks darken further he says, "Erm...I mean..." He finally shuts his mouth and just lets the silence around him be the environment to display what he meant. Anyone paying attention notices that there is a soft breeze around Cel that has been borderline imperceptible until he just now when he drew attention to it.