IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4

“Break time,” Karjn called as they reached the summit of the mountain I’d created in my own rooms. Gwen and Maryll fell to the ground and groaned in relief.

Before them were two long rooms’ worth of perfectly even slope that was as steep as I could make them, leading to the hallway to my second floor, innocently in the middle of the opposite wall. The passage between the two rooms had expended so they formed a single contiguous room. The down slope continued in the hallway.

“Definitely… evil,” Gwen groaned.

“I vote we blow up the door to the quick path next time,” Maryll said. She’d grown increasingly less enthusiastic with every subsequent cliff room they had found. She reached up and wrung some water out of her hair. “At least it wasn’t honey this time.”

Ulfric tried to wring water out of his shirt with moderate success. Karjn sat down and wiped her brow with an annoyed growl.

“I really, really fucking hate cliff rooms,” she declared.

“At least there’s no climbing left to do, right?” Maryll voiced, looking down the slope that was all that separated them from the hallway leading to my second floor. “It’s just… down. That’s easy, right?”

“Maryll, what part of this makes you think it’s not a trap?” Gwen asked tiredly. “There’s probably like… hidden tripwires,” there were, “or hidden monster pits,” yes, “and giant boulders falling from the sky,” not exactly, but close enough, “waiting for us.”

[...]

They started going down the slope carefully, checking their footing on the stones as they did so. I waited until they were about twenty feet in before I sprung my first trap.

A bunch of wasps dropped wax balls ahead of them. These contained the blue goop that the spider lair generated as spider food, which just happened to be slimy and quite slippery on a hard floor. I noticed Gwen’s eyebrow twitch as she recognized the fluid.

“…slippery floor? Seriously?” Karjn sighed.

That was just part one.

Next, the webweavers I had near the roof cut a couple of threads, and down dropped a cylinder of wax about four feet wide and long enough to cover the entire room, which unfortunately bounced off the wall awkwardly, fell on its flat side, tipped over and crashed thunderously onto the sloped ground. The roller trap then proceeded to slide down the slope at an embarrassingly slow pace instead of rolling down as intended. Gwen, Karjn and Ulfric stared at it as it slid past them and ran into my tripwires, triggering all my traps one after the other in the process.

“I don’t think that was supposed to happen,” Gwen noted.

It wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t. The roller had gotten tangled into a set of emergency cables I’d set up in case it turned out to be too dangerous for them. I’d been pretty sure Ulfric at least could stop this version of the roller if he needed to––the real version was more like the size of a bus––but just in case…

Well, my care had scrapped this room’s test.

[...]

Karjn and Ulfric joined her soon enough, Gwen trailing behind with the back of her pants and the small of her back covered in blue goop. From the look on her face, she was not too happy about that.

[...]

“That roller would have hurt,” Gwen noted. She wiped her butt, looked at the slimy blue-colored mess on her hands and grimaced.

“Ulfric could have stopped it, right?” Maryll asked. “And besides, there was this thing,” she poked the back end of the roller. “There’s a couple of spider webs over there, I’m pretty sure they were meant to pull the roller up if we were in danger. Right?”

She looked up at one of my wasps. I made it nod.

“See? The trap probably failed because those were there anyway.”

She was right.