You press on down the tunnel. Bob seems relieved to be in motion again.
The passage slopes up gradually, never turning, until the last patches of water on the floor are gone. Then it suddenly ends at a T-junction - or, more precisely, runs into a perpendicular passage which is much rougher, with more twists and turns and an uneven floor. It is still a worked tunnel, though, as it is braced by wooden beams. A few yards down the cooridor to the left is a niche with no floor and a metal ladder bolted to the rear wall. At the bottom of the ladder you can see another passage paralleling this one, its floor lined by cart tracks.
You decide to pause at the intersection for a time while Lilli scouts a short distance down each passage. She soon returns, reporting that each of them soon branch off into galleries and side passages which slope steeply away. Meanwhlie, Gil has been examining the ladder, and he realizes that each time he moves away and then looks down the shaft again, the tunnel at the bottom has changed slightly. At first it ran in the exact same direction as the cross-arm of the T, but each time he looked back it had changed by a few imperceptible degrees. Now it already veers off at an angle.
You are back in the shifting maze.
[sblock=Skill Challenge]
Ok, back to the skill challenge. Final round! The rules are
here, with an addendum
here.
A reminder that, as this is final round, you can now use the Go For Broke action - your rolls are at -5, but if you succeed, you gain an extra success. (The linked rules post says that you must decide this as a group, but I'll loosen that up a bit: you can each decide individually whether you want to Go For Broke.)
The DC for contributing skill checks is
19, and the DC for Aid Another is
10. You have 3 successes total, and need 8 for total victory or 6 for partial victory.
For this round the skills you can use are:
Arcana (primary skill)
Athletics
Dungeoneering (primary skill)
Nature
Perception
Stealth
Primary skills get +2. Reusing the same skill gets a -2 for each use after the first. You can use skills that aren't on the above list, but you need to check with me first to convince me that it makes sense.
You've already used Dungeoneering, Bluff, Stealth, and History. If you don't want to take the penalty for reusing skills, it's not too late to go back and explore the umber hulk tunnel, which will have a different set of challenges.
[/sblock]