We spent what probably counted as way too much time digging tiny mana crystals from dead rats. For the first part we had to listen to Lancelot and Morgan arguing about whether or not it was worth the effort, but we kept at it when Morgan suggested that perhaps it wasn’t worth the effort to make all those healing potions either, because that’s what she would be using those crystals for.

We were all glad to leave the room behind, and the stench of charred rat along with it. Shortly after we set off to explore the labyrinth some more, we hit a set of stairs leading down.

We stood at the top peering down. There were a lot of steps.

“You sure it’s coming from down there?” I said.

Sigrid nodded. “I can usually tell what direction the danger’s coming from.”

“But you don’t know what it is.”

“Nope.”

“You know,” Morgan said, ”this is pretty scary in person. I mean, it’s one thing to do this sort of stuff in a video game, but this is a whole lot scarier.”

“Who’s going first?” Lancelot said.

“I have a volunteer,” I said.

“You’re volunteering?”

“Heck no. I said I have a volunteer, I didn’t say it was me.”

I pulled out the bag of rats.

“What do you plan to do with that?” Lancelot said.

“Remember Sam’s squirrel in the forest?”

“You’re joking,” Morgan said.

“You want to use a baby rat as a scout?” Lancelot said.

“In a manner of speaking.” I fished my hand into the bag, then pulled it out quickly. “Ouch,” I said, sucking on my finger. “One of these bastards bit me.”

“It probably knows what you have in mind for it,” Morgan said with a sour face. “I doubt even a rat would want to be used as a guinea pig.”

“I wish we’d come across a room full of giant guinea pigs,” Sigrid said.

“That would be so cute!” Morgan said, the sourness vanishing instantly. “All those fluffy squeakers.”

I’d managed to nab a baby rat and pull it out. It wriggled in my hand and I nearly dropped it. It may have only been a baby, but it was still a giant rat, and quite a handful.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, and tossed it down the first few steps, as gently as I could. It landed on its feet and immediately scampered down the stairs, disappearing along the corridor at the bottom.

“Looks like the stairs are safe,” Lancelot said. I held my finger to my lips and cocked my ear toward the stairwell. A few seconds later there was a loud crash, then silence.

“Now what?” Lancelot whispered.

I shook my head and kept my finger to my lips. We all listened, then heard a soft metallic clink clink clink, like chains rattling, or maybe gears fitting together.

“Think it’s a trap?” Morgan said.

“Doesn’t sound like a monster,” I said.

“Toss another rat down?” Sigrid said.

“Nothing happened until it went past the bottom of the stairs. Does your danger sense say it’s safe for us to go down and see?” I said.

Sigrid shrugged, then after a deep breath she lifted her shield and began slowly descending the stairs, the rest of us in tow. When we reached the bottom we saw a long corridor stretching ahead of us, different than the ones we’d been wandering through up until then. It was about twenty feet wide with a flat ceiling twenty feet high, and instead of the veined marble blocks we’d seen so far, the floor, walls, and ceiling of this corridor were made of a smooth, seamless, pure white stone.

At the far end, some hundred or so feet away, there were more stairs, these ones leading back up again. About a third of the way down the corridor, there was a red stain on the floor, with a matching one on the ceiling directly above it.

“Is that your rat?” Sigrid said.

“What’s left of it, anyway,” Lancelot said.

An unnamed observer is not disappointed

“I think I know what this is,” I said, reaching into the bag for another rat. This one I bowled ahead of us, encouraging it to go down the corridor. It scampered forward, then when it hit the same space as the red stain, a section of the ceiling came crashing down, smashing the rat flat. A few moments later, the clinking began as chains attached to the four corners of the fallen ceiling section began lifting it back into place, revealing a second set of red stains. There were no solid bits of the rat remaining, no bones, no viscera, not even mana crystals. The section of ceiling that fell was solid stone, at least four feet thick, and had completely liquified the rodents.

An unnamed observer claps and laughs

A thoughtful observer worries about an unnamed observer

A curious observer can't figure out whether to reward or punish this

A curious observer will wait and see

“Yep, it’s a trap,” Morgan said. “Now we just need to figure out how to dismantle it without getting squished into soup.”

“I got this,” Kenji muttered, and slunk forward cautiously. When he got close to the rat remains he knelt on the floor, carefully scanning with his eyes and fingers, searching for any irregularity that might act as a trigger mechanism. He spent a long time doing this, searching every inch of the floor and up the walls, then suddenly stood up and started staring intently ahead of him. He began bobbing his head, cocking it up and down and from side to side. Then he turned back to us and shrugged.

“Nope. I don’t got this,” he said, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. “There’s like this almost invisible barrier right where the rats got smashed. You can only just see it when you look at the right angle. You know how smoke looks in a bright spotlight? It’s like that.”

I came over to take a look, and he was right. I could just barely see dust floating across a flat plane that spanned the entire width of the corridor and stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

“Like smoke in a spotlight,” I said.

“I figure it’s the trigger,” Kenji said. ”Sets off the trap when you pass through it, but I have no idea how to disarm it.”

“Maybe we don’t need to,” I said, reaching once more into the rat bag and pulling out two.

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I bowled the first one forward, and sure enough, it triggered the ceiling trap when it passed the invisible barrier. Crash! Then, as the chains raised the section back up, I sent the second rat under it. It scuttled past the remains of its squashed siblings and kept running down the hallway.

“Quick,” I said, “let’s go before it resets.”

We all dashed through the danger zone and made it safely to the other side before the trap had fully reset. We made it through just in time to see the rat that had gone ahead of us reach the stairs at the end of the corridor and scuttle up and out of sight.

“I never thought I’d be worried you’d run out of rats,” Morgan said.

I shook the bag. Several small things wriggled inside it. “We’re okay for a while.”

“Bag o' rats,” Lancelot said, grinning. “Who’d have thunk?”

There was a click behind us as the section of ceiling lifted into place and the trap reset. With Sigrid back in the lead, we resumed our progression down the corridor. When there were only about fifteen feet left Sigrid stopped abruptly and I almost walked into her back. “What is it? More danger?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

She gestured with her head directly in front of her.

Kenji slithered up and began inspecting the floor in front of us. After looking closely, he closed his eyes and slowly ran his fingertips back and forth over the floor. Then he grunted, and traced a straight line along the white floor.

“There’s a seam here,” he said.

“Really?” Morgan said. “I can’t see a thing.”

“It’s there.”

“I believe you. What do you think, another light trap?”

Kenji shook his head. “This is different. Maybe a pressure plate?”

“This sounds like a job for super-rat,” Lancelot said.

“Is it?” Morgan said. “We already watched one run through here and up the stairs.”

“Oh yeah,” Lancelot said.

“Maybe it wasn’t heavy enough to trigger it?” Kenji said.

“Maybe,” I said. “We can fix that.”

“We can?” Sigrid said.

I took a few steps back and pulled another rat from the bag. “Let’s hope this works.” I held the wriggling creature in both hands and focused on my affinity with Nature, willing the rat to grow. I could feel it get bigger, but the effect wasn’t much. I poured more mana into it and it grew a bit more, but still not enough.

“Daniel?” Sigrid said. “What’re you doing?”

“Gimme a minute,” I said.

Remembering how I’d combined Nature with Life to make a flower grow on the wall of thorns in the forest, I tried it again, only this time I kept focusing on enlarging the rat. That did the trick. The rat grew visibly larger, growing from the size of a housecat to larger than a goat in no time, and became proportionately heavier, too. I lost my grip and dropped it.

A curious observer finds this promising

The gigantified giant baby rat landed on its feet and made to dash back the way we’d come, but Lancelot was behind me and stomped an armored foot in its path.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said, shooing the beast in the other direction.

The rat turned around and charged past me toward the stairs leading up. As soon as it passed over Kenji’s invisible seam, the floor from that point right up to the bottom of the stairs dropped out from under it. It fell away in two sections like a set of double doors in the floor hinged at the edge of each side wall.

A pit trap. Right on.

The rat seemed to float in the air for a split second and I half-expected it to look at me and raise a little sign that read “Oh no!” before it plummeted down, but all it did was fall. I heard it land with a wet squelch at the bottom of the pit that had opened in front of us. It squeaked pathetically.

A curious observer was wrong

An unnamed observer disagrees

An unnamed observer thinks this lived up to its promise and more

We all looked at each other with wide eyes for a moment, then I cautiously crept forward to the edge of the pit and peered down. More than twenty feet below, it was impaled on one of the many long metal spikes that rose from the bottom of the pit, its little rat feet still pawing at the air, its little rat mouth with its pointy little rat teeth gasping as it struggled. The others joined me at the edge of the pit, all of us looking down.

“Oh god,” Kenji said.

At first, only the top few inches of the spike protruded from the rat, but as we watched, the poor creature sank, and more and more of the spike seemed to grow from its back, until after a few agonizing moments its legs stopped flailing, its tiny rat jaws stopped snapping at the air, and its pathetic squeaking also came to a merciful end. Even after its light went out, the creature continued its descent until at last it came to a rest at the bottom of the pit, a solid five feet of metal sticking up from it, smeared red with blood.

An unnamed observer is so happy right now

A curious observer thinks an unnamed observer needs help

“Well that was horrifying,” Morgan said.

“Let’s not fall in there,” Sigrid said.

I was still peering down into the pit at the rat. I stopped pouring mana into its growth and it immediately shrank back down to baby size. If it wasn't so god-awful it might've been funny, the little corpse seemingly wrapped around the bottom of the thick metal spike like a pink and red cuff. The bones and other remains of previous trap victims lay scattered around it on the floor of the pit.

“How do we get across?” Lancelot said.

Sigrid pointed to the wall at the side of the pit. “There.”

There was a sliver of floor that hadn’t fallen away, no more than a few inches wide, along the side of each wall.

“Not a problem,” Kenji said, and he quickly scampered along the side edge of the pit, safely reaching the bottom steps of the stairs on the other side before any of us could say or do anything to stop him.

“Sure, no problem for you,” Lancelot said, “but I’m about four times your size.” He flapped his arms, which clanked in his heavy plate armor. “And I’m trapped in a tin can.”

“I’d hardly say trapped,” Morgan said. “You could take off the armor.”

“But it’s so much work to put it back on.”

“So lazy,” she said, clicking her tongue. “Here, let me help you.”

As Morgan assisted Lance out of his armor, I turned to Sigrid. “Do you need to take off yours too or do you think you can make it?”

She gave me a hurt look. “Please.” Then, with a few quick steps along the edge, she demonstrated her athleticism and joined Kenji on the other side before posing like a gymnast after perfectly completing a floor routine. “You’re gonna have to give me a better reason than that if you want me to see me strip.”

As Morgan helped remove each piece of Lancelot’s armor she bundled it into her inventory. “Thank god you’re not naked under there,” she said.

“Like you haven’t seen it before,” Lancelot said, and she smacked his chest. “What?” he complained. “It’s true. And I don’t recall you complaining at the time.”

She smacked him again then turned to me. “It’s not what it sounds like.”

I raised my hands in front of me. “None of my business,” I said.

After the last piece of plate armor disappeared into her inventory, Morgan gave Lancelot a shove. “Go on and get across before I push you into the pit.”

Lancelot put his back to the wall and with very tentative steps carefully inched his way sideways along the edge of the pit, leaving me with Morgan.

“I don’t know why he said that,” she mumbled. “That was a long time ago.” I caught her glancing over at me, as though expecting me to say something, but I had no idea what I was supposed to say. I took a shot anyway.

“If I had to guess, I’d say he was trying to hurt you back.”

“Hurt me back? How did I hurt him in the first place?”

I looked at her. “Morgan, imagine that you liked me.”

She smirked.

“Whatever joke you’re about to make, choke it back,” I said. “I’m trying to help you here.”

The smirk vanished. “Sorry. Please go on.”

“If it helps, then let me rephrase: imagine that I am someone you liked, either now or sometime in the past. Now imagine I came out and said that I never want to see you without clothing on, how would that make you feel?”

She frowned.

“How’d you get to be so wise all of a sudden?”

I blurted out a sharp laugh. “Me? Wise? Nah. I just happen to be a bit of an expert when it comes to feelings of jealousy and insecurity.” Lancelot had finally made it to the other side. “Go on now, it’s your turn.”

With one last measuring look at me, Morgan skipped across to the other side. I was the last to cross, and I’d made it about halfway when there was a clanking sound from somewhere underneath that shook the few inches of stone under my feet. I wobbled and wavered and came this close to slipping, but somehow managed to keep my balance. There were more clanks and clicks, and the section of floor that had fallen away started to slowly ratchet back into place.

“You okay there?” Sigrid said as I pressed my back against the wall and waited for the panic to recede. Twenty-odd feet below me at the bottom of the pit, the corpse of the baby giant rat continued to bleed out on its giant metal skewer as the rising trap doors continued to slowly clink shut.

“Yup,” I said. “Peachy keen.”

“Deep breaths,” she said. “You got this.”

“Yup.”