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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Taboo" data-source="post: 331931" data-attributes="member: 5912">The secret coridoor and beyond....Sorry about the delay!  I hope the wait was worth it!!!  Taboo*******They came to a locked door. Thorin and Turk were in front as usual. Thorin listened at the door and didn’t seem to hear anything. He tried his handy key and as usual, it worked. Everyone followed Thorin and Turk through the door into an amazing, but dead end corridor. It was similar to what they’d seen before, frescos and mosaics. The natives of this place, wherever ‘this place’ was, depicted in various acts of life. One in particular caught Turk’s eye. It had a circular shape at the top with a pyramid shaped indent, although the indent was so slight it was almost beyond recognition. He called Kierwin over.“What do you think about using that little pyramid here? I know you think it does something important in this place.” He told her. So she got the pyramid out of a pouch she carried at her side and placed it in the indent Turk had found. It retracted into the wall and a door opened up, revealing a long corridor lined with stone animal heads.They decided to head into the newly discovered corridor, with Thorin and Turk in the lead as usual.  They passed a bear’s head which Thorin searched thoroughly, proclaiming the work to be well done but not finding anything special about it. Then Turk noticed his torchlight sparkle off something in the beak of an eagle’s head further down in the corridor ahead of them. He immediately went to investigate.Upon approaching it he finds that held in the beak is a large gold band. Reaching in he grasps it and the beak snaps closed on his wrist with a clang. Fortunately it closes on his gauntlet and he isn’t injured, but his hand is quite stuck. Calling out for help, the  party comes running. Thorin crowds in. Turk is trying to pry the beak apart with one hand, but without success, while Thorin  tries to study the mechanism. He figures out that it was some type of spring, but nobody had any idea how to disarm it. They both look at Giermund who shrugs his shoulders and says “I don’t know nothing about how to reset it.”They finally decided to try to break the stone to free Turk. In the meanwhile Turk wants loose and is praying to Pelor, especially so that Thorin doesn’t miss and hit him by accident when he sees Thorin grab up his large dwarven warhammer!With one quick, well placed blow, the stone eagle’s head crumbled and Turk was freed. He had a gold band to show for his trouble, not to mention learning not to go sticking his hand into something that very well may be trapped, without checking it out first! Although Thorin clapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him for doing it “The dwarven way.”They checked the rest of the animal heads, but didn’t find anything else, so they headed for the door they saw down the hall. Thorin and Turk were in front as usual, Minx and Kierwin were behind them, Snap and Giermund brought up the rear behind Osa and Rowena. This was the usual order since Kierwin was the main healer in case of serious injury and had some fighting ability. Minx could heal a little, and was a magic user. Snap could back them up and he could see in the dark, as well as help protect Rowena who followed directly behind Minx. That left Geirmund, who could fight like a scrapper, in the back behind Osa who followed Kierwin.  They could also help protect them in case of an ambush from the back if necessary, although they prayed that didn’t happen since that would be their weakest point.Thorin opened the door, they had pretty much worked out that this was the way it was going to be from now on. It seemed to work well, and it really needed to be a strong fighter who did it. Turk was really strong and Thorin was really, really strong.The sight inside surprised them, although by this point in the pyramid they figured nothing should!The sight that greeted them was a heap of trash in the center of a fifty or sixty foot square room. The trash didn’t surprise them as much as the ugly, three foot long beetles scattered throughout the room, beetles that glowed a reddish color deep within their chitinous shells.  They would have just shut the door and kept going, but scattered amongst the trash, they saw some interesting reflections from Turk’s torch. The group consensus was to kill the beetles and check out the pile.  Snap stepped up to the doorway and cast sleep on the beetles gathered near the pile, knocking a bunch of them out, Minx did the same. Turk and Thorin immediately took off for the group on the left. Kierwin followed. There were four beetles over on that side. Kierwin thought they looked big enough from the door, but up close, they looked almost immense!The beetles flexed their pincers anticipating fresh meat and blood.  The first found out how tough Turk’s armor was, and again, he was glad that he’d spent the extra gold on the banded mail! He attempted to hack at it with his greatsword but had trouble hitting the low creature without scraping his sword against the ground.Meanwhile, the beetle that Kierwin was facing off against was trying to pinch her leg off. It found her leather boot much to it’s liking. It didn’t draw much blood, but it got enough to know that it liked that too!  Oh, it was going for that again!Thorin had a pair of beetles to contend with. Neither of them had much luck as the surprisingly nimble dwarf hopped about on his stubby legs, and they didn’t much like the steel that their pincers encountered as he brought his dwarven war-axe around in a double handed grip and split one of them open. Of course there were some more of them and on the next try they just might make it through whatever carapace it was that this strange prey was wearing.By this time, Turk had gotten to land a blow on the beetle that had tried to rip his leg off at the knee. He’d put a rather deep gouge in its exoskeleton, but it was still alive although oozing a lot of ichor. Maybe it would bleed to death….Thorin slammed his waraxe through one of the bugs attacking him slicing the thing completely in half, ready to turn his attention on the one behind him next.Meanwhile, Snap had moved into the room, pulling his crossbow out. Kierwin attacked the beetle that had tried to snap her leg off, but although she hit it, her blade simply slid off the hard carapace with a scraping sound, not even wounding it. She was NOT a happy cleric!The beetle in front of Turk decided to make another go at it, going for the same spot it attacked earlier. It had no better success than it did the first time.  There was a faint metallic screech as its pincers scraped off his metal armored boots.This time the beetle attacking Kierwin didn’t bite quite as hard, and Kierwin breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t looking forward to another bite from that THING. It was an abomination against nature as far as she was concerned. Beetles weren’t supposed to be that Big!  They were supposed to scuttle around and eat refuse and carrion like good little cleaner-bugs, not chomp down on those who were perfectly healthy and in no danger of just up and dying without help! The beetle remaining in battle with Thorin tried to attack him, but had no better luck than the rest, which pleased Thorin immensely.Snap was too far from any beetles that were left awake to be attacked, so he took a shot with his crossbow and picked one off from his chosen spot. Turk finished his off with his next blow, it was obviously mortally wounded from the first blow but had refused to die. Kierwin tried again, hitting, but still unable to pierce that hard carapace. Thorin killed another beetle with his axe.They had blocked the line of sight and the door from the others, preventing them from helping, but managed finally to kill the rest of the beetles without taking anymore wounds.Fortunately, the sleep spells had helped tremendously as about a dozen beetles were in a magically induced slumber. Turk and Thorin were disappointed a little that they still hadn’t gotten a glimpse of the mysterious sorcerer’s face, but he had proven that he was trying to help them. That didn’t mean they trusted him, though!  Trust meant more than killing a few beetles.They proceeded to investigate the pile of trash, curious to know what was glittering in the torch light.  Most of it was pretty disgusting, but their search paid off in the end. They found three very nice pieces of turquoise (although they didn’t glitter, of course), and a very nice dagger. The dagger needed to be reworked a little, but it was a design none of them had ever seen before. It didn’t seem magical, but was very well balanced. They gave it to Minx, thinking that of all of them, she could use it most. Especially since she didn’t seem to really know how to use any other kind of weapon.  And she liked the dagger a lot, it was pretty for a ‘knife’.After searching the rest of the room, they were satisfied there was nothing else to find. They reentered the hallway. There was one last door to open.They opened the remaining door. What they found in there, again they were certainly not prepared for.  It was a small ship!? This post has been edited by DM-paulewaug for accuracy and is certified to be Close to the truth <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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