The Dungeon Dive Begins

Following Ulnarka’s lead, the party headed towards the temple. As they made their came up to the temple, the twins reached into their bags and pulled out some small trinkets; Marsha’s looked like it was some sort of snack made from seaweed and some kind of rice, Trisha’s was a piece of sandstone that was shaped into the form of a wave with an imitation of the staff that Aquaria’s statue had. Once they came up to the statue, the twins left their pieces on the offering plate at the foot of that statue they had only noticed upon recollection of their original visit.

After the twins did their offering ritual, the party moved over to where the hidden entrance was, and Ulnarka gently pressed the stone into the wall. A moment later, the lowering to produce stairs into the area below occurred. “I wonder what the chamber below was originally designed for,” pondered Molsalkisa aloud, “and also, when do you think it was transformed into a dungeon?”

“Hard to tell without more information to go on,” said Ariana as they descended the stairs; she also took out her lantern, and Molsalkisa sent a dancing mote of silver-green light into with a pair of silver-magenta and silver-cyan motes of light up ahead of the group. The group continued along the hallway until they came to the T-shaped intersection from before. It still looked barely big enough for Ulnarka or Molsalkisa to move through halls on either side of the intersection.

“So,” said Jonah, “left or right?”

“Good question,” said Molsalkisa, “any suggestions?”

“If we had a coin, we could flip it,” commented Trisha, “heads for one direction and tails for the other.”

The group suddenly heard the sound of a silver coin being tossed; the group all turned their attention to Ariana, “Heads we go left, and tails we go right,” she said in a deadpan voice. A moment later, she caught the coin in her left hand and took a look down at it; she saw the image of a watery face staring back at her, “Looks like heads; we take the left tunnel.

“Works for me,” said Molsalkisa, “Ulnarka takes point; she is the most combatively capable among us, and places like this often have…features that necessitate someone with combat experience.”

“It’s probably going to be a tight fit for a while,” said Ulnarka. A moment later, the lights shot off ahead of Ulnarka as she took her position, and Trisha took up the rear and Jonah in the middle between Marsha and Ariana.

Ariana lost her focus for a moment, thinking about how attractive Jonah’s back and ass were as the group got into its marching order. The party went on down the hallway for a noticeable amount of time; it really was a tight fit for Ulnarka and Molsalkisa. After going down the hallway for a few minutes, they all came to an iron door. There was no visible handle or knob on the door, so Ulnarka elected to just push the door open.

The door came open with a metallic creaking whine that indicated it clearly needed lubricating for quite some time; chances were that if anyone not as physically capable as Ulnarka had tried to open the door, then they would have found it to be rusted shut so much that they could not open the door. The party quickly filed into the room beyond.

The room beyond the door was a chamber forty feet wide with a fifty-foot ceiling. There was a pair of stone-looking doors on the other side of the room; they could be seen past the 3 columns that dominated the center of the room, and sets of 3 columns all dominated the corners of the room as well. Upon closer inspection, one column in each bundle had a neatly removed block that was a cube roughly six feet in dimension. As for where the missing blocks were, that seemed to escape notice in the cursory search of the room.

Looking around, Jonah, Trisha, and Molsalkisa didn’t quite find anything of note; while Marsha, Ariana, and Ulnarka managed to find the trick to the room, Ariana was the sharpest eye of the lot. The three found some surprisingly sturdy false flooring, and Ariana got lucky, finding a false wall panel in addition to a false floor piece. This left one column piece missing, but due to the uniform cutting of all the cubes and the spaces they came from, it was incredibly difficult to determine which cube went where; chances were that the cubes were rigged with some kind of trap if they were slotted into the wrong space, assuming the cube actually fit that specific space.

“How are we supposed to figure out where these go,” inquired Ariana as she held up her pair of cubic blocks.

“That’s a good question,” said Marsha, “they all seem to have pieces the same size cut from them, and they also seem to have avoided patterns in the structures to make identifying what goes where.”

“Maybe we can find some clues if we look around a bit more,” said Jonah, “besides, we’re still missing one of the pieces.”

“Can’t we just pass through the doors over there,” inquired Ulnarka as she gestured to the doors on the side opposing where they came in from.

“There’s a chance they are locked until the puzzle is solved,” said Molsalkisa.

“And on the off chance they aren’t,” continued Jonah, “some nutjob with a twisted sense of humor probably rigged the doors to each have their own traps to contend with, or maybe they are actually illusions designed to impose a disadvantage on finding the real door out of the room. You never with sorts of places.”

“Since when did you become so knowledgable about dungeons and the like,” inquired Molsalkisa to Jonah as she turned her attention towards him.

“Where the twins and I grew up,” said Jonah, “there are quite a few games, in different formats, that revolve around dungeons; exploring them, designing them, building them, and so on. Admittedly, some of those games are a bit more niche than others, but that’s the way it seems to roll at times.”

Jonah, Trisaha, and Molsalkisa began another search of the room. The three did considerably better this time around; all three found where the last cube was, but Trisha was the closest to the wall panel it was hidden behind, so she was the one to claim it. Jonah and Molsalkisa found the clues they were looking for, but Molsalkisa was better able to figure things out from what the two had learned. She directed each of the individuals with cubes to different locations and told them the exact angle at each of the cubes needed to be slotted in; it was a bit trickier with Ariana because she had to be told which cube went where a few times because she was having trouble remembering which cube came from which panel.

Eventually, the issue with the cubes and columns was resolved, and a passageway leading down appeared in the floor between the two doors; the doors also went from being doors made of stone to just unadorned pieces of the wall. “Looks like Jonah called it on the doors,” said Marash with a smirk as the party approached the previously hidden set of stairs, “I wonder how far down we’re going to go this time.”

“I hope not much further,” said Ulnarka, “being underground makes me a little uneasy, especially with these tight hallways.” Surprisingly enough, while the frame of the stairway was a bit tight, the stairwell itself was a bit more comfortable, with it being almost eight feet across. As the group descended, they passed the twenty-foot mark, then the forty-foot mark, then the sixty-foot mark; they finally encountered a new door just shy of the seventy-foot mark. The area was cold, almost like it was one of the deeper root cellars; the door impeding their progress appeared to be some kind of palm wood that was being reinforced with bronze; even the hinges and their bolts were bronze.