IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4

“Alright, kids, then we’re going to the second floor first,” Karjn declared. “We don’t want to be carrying loot while exploring. Keep your eyes open and be careful of illusions. When we’re done mapping it out, we’ll get back and kill the boss. Got it?”

“Yes ma’am!” Gwen said.

“Okay!” Maryll chirped with an excited bounce.

Ulfric grunted.

I smirked inwardly. They were going to find a small problem with that plan pretty soon.

“Then, let’s go. The stairs should be right over there.” She pointed at the second room in front of them.

They went in, and… stopped.

“Uh… isn’t there supposed to be a passage that way?” Gwen asked.

The wall was full of holes fit for little deco bugs, but there was no passage to be seen.

“Did she edit the floor just for us?” Karjn asked Ulfric. The man frowned and went up to the wall.

“This looks a little… hold on…”

He poked his fingers into the wall, digging along the sides of the passage until the edges of the wax slab I was using to close the way off was revealed.

“A fake wall,” he grunted. “Bee wax and dirt…” he rubbed his fingers together and scowled. “…spider web, too.”

“Okay, that’s clever,” Karjn cackled.

“I’m surprised she can do that,” Ulfric noted. “I’ve heard stories of people who tried to block parts of a dungeon off, and it blew up in their faces every time.” He raised his head to stare at my roof. “Did you find some kind of trick?”

I replied with an affirmative buzz of my wasps’ wings.

“Hm.” He grunted. “Good for you. Except…”

He pulled at the slab, probably to prove to me that my efforts were wasted, but I’d been ready for it. This was the third generation of wax slabs; on top of having an internal mesh of woven spider silk strands, this one had long lines of spider silk sticking out of its back side, made of bits of drag line that extended from the webs that reinforced the wax slab. On the other side of the slab, I had over thirty ants holding on the silk with their mandibles and pulling with all their might, along with a pair of beetles armed with convex barrels made of reinforced wax which served as pulleys. When Ulfric found that the slab would not budge, he tried forcing it with mana, and while he did succeed in making my beetles skid backward a few inches, he failed to really move the door aside, and gave up when his fingers gouged out a piece of the slab.

I had multiple samples of the equipment I needed to pull off this trick sitting in the bug chutes at strategic points, and could assemble it in under a minute if I needed to.