I coughed as the foul-smelling smoke caught in the back of my throat; it came from the mushrooms we were using to keep the fire going. Tom had sent his other pet, a ferret named Scar, to look for fuel, and mushrooms was all he had brought back, they were awful; they smouldered rather than burned. And they filled the air with the foulest smell I had ever met! “This is just like in the old legends!” Tom said, cheerfully broking into my line of thought, I looked blankly at him across the fire, “what is?” I asked “This!” he gestured around us at the darkness, the vertical wall, and the spot to my right where the floor vanished again into some abyss, “You know; ‘The valiant hero, kicked out of society, finds a mysterious dungeon. He explores the dungeon and becomes super powerful, frees a vampire girl who has been trapped for hundreds of years, then returns just in time to save the world from some looming disaster!” there was a moments silence as I looked from our surroundings to him, then slowly, I said, “if this were an old legend, one of us would have an awesome skill, and the other would be a beautiful girl. Secondly, we are not staying down here any longer than we can help, we are going to climb that wall back to the surface as soon as we have recovered enough to stand. And thirdly if any vampire shows up, we are getting as far away from it as we can as fast as we can!” I hoped that Tom got the message; I wanted to get out of here alive!

A single rivulet of sweat ran down my face as I felt for another hand hold, maybe just to the left of me, I strained for it; my arms at full extension, I had a hand hold! And then I felt the wall give, I tightened my grip; and it crumbled to powder in my hand and I was falling… again. When I landed Tom looked up at me from the fire he was trying to keep alight, I looked at him, the fall had been just long enough to wind me. “How far did you get?” Tom asked, “not even as far as last time!” I managed to gasp out. For the last few hours, we had been taking it in turns to try and climb the wall. It had not been going well; the wall was treacherous; it would take your wait for a few minutes of climbing, then it would give way and you would find yourself right back where you started. I struggled over to Tom and sat down to recover my breath, a moment later Scar appeared out of the darkness bringing a mushroom almost half his size with him. Scar deposited the mushroom at Toms feet and headed back off into the darkness. Tom added this latest prize to the other fungi that made up the fire. The smell of the fire had not gotten any better, and getting it to do any more than smoulder had proven impossible, looking at the sorry excuse of a fire I finally came to a conclusion I had been dreading; “We aren’t getting out of here by climbing that wall. I think we will have to try something else…” “Oh, yes?” Tom said, seeming to brighten at the very idea “do you have a plan?” “yes” I said and indicated over my shoulder, to were the floor dropped away, “I have a length of rope in my inventory, if we can find a way to secure it, we can climb down and look around.”

I cut some pieces from the rope we had used to get down to the floor, and handed them to Tom, there was a pause as he got Red, his pet fire mouse, out of whatever pocket or nook he had been sleeping in. In the darkness there was a very small ‘achoo’ and a second later we had light again! The rope burned only slightly better than the fugus, but we could see, and what we could see was the remains of a battle: three large corpses. I could identify two of them as the bear like monsters we had met in the dungeon above, but these were in far worse condition; one was missing an arm and the leg below what I guessed was its knee, the other had had its chest crushed, (bits of the rib cage were sticking out) the other corpse was unlike anything I had seen before; it was large, very large, and low slung, like a lizard, and it’s body seemed to be covered in scales or armer of some sort. The lizard’s tale ended in a club bigger than my head, the lizards’ head was damaged; I assumed by the bear monster. I found the sight unsettling, I had seen plenty of creatures die before in the dungeon, but in the dungeon the bodies would disappear in a matter of seconds; reabsorbed by the dungeon. To see the carnage left behind was unnerving. The room was large and, from what I could see, vaguely circular. A feeling of decay seemed to hang over it, the corpses added to this, but it was more than that; there were small piles of rubble at the base of the walls, mushrooms and toadstools grew everywhere but even the fungi seemed to be in the last stages of dying and were beginning to rot! ‘What was this place? Why was it here?’ the questions I had been too preoccupied to think about up till now began to surface “Hey look at this!” Toms exited voice filled the room with echoes, hoping against reason that he didn’t attract anything that might want to kill us, I went to see what he had found; it was a passage, or it had been a passage, it had fallen in and now was a pile of rubble, what remained was an archway; and it gave me the creeps: it had the right shape to it, but it didn’t look right to me, I didn’t get a chance to work out why it didn’t look right because Tom had already found another passage just a little further on, and this one actually went somewhere, and Tom seemed very keen to find out where. So, feeling uneasy I followed. We walked down that passage, and then down the next passage, the only thing we met were some Cave Mites; [About the size of my fist, Cave Mites have 10 legs encircling the body, the adventures’ journal calls them ‘the herbivore of spiders’] this passages were strange too, but at least I worked out why by now; they were very nearly caves, the walls, ceiling, floor, everything you could see, was cave like, but the shape was that of a passage, as if they had been made them! We carried on; we started past more places where the walls were starting to come apart, leaving little piles of rubble. The smell from the ubiquitous mushrooms filling the air adding to the strange ambience of the place, I began to think that the passages might carry on forever; that we might end up wondering in them until we ran out of food, and it was then that we met the giant lizard blocking the passage way up ahead.

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I was at a loss as to why the lizard didn’t attack us. It had clearly been a match for those bear monsters, so we could hardly be considered a challenge, but after a long minute had passed, and we were still breathing, I began to relax a little and think. And then I realised what had happened; the lizard had gotten its leg stuck when some of the tunnel wall collapsed and now it couldn’t move to attack us! It was stuck, any attempt to free itself only bringing more of the wall down! “Well, I guess we aren’t going that way.” I said turning to go back the way we had come, “we should kill it!” Tom said before, I turned back; wondering how long it would take for Toms’ hero delusions to get us both killed! Tom must have seen that I wasn’t sold on the idea because he continued; “it’s trapped, it would be kinder to kill it now than leave it to waste away over time. And then there is the experience points! Besides it must be weak after having that wall fall on it.” I hated to admit it but he did have a point. It is not every day that you get the opportunity to take out something that is 5 times your level, or more, presents itself. There was only one problem: how? “Do you have anything in your inventory that would penetrate that?” I asked looking at the lizards’ armoured scales, “Oh, well… maybe?” Tom pulled a rapier out of his inventory and handed it to me. I stood holding it for a second wondering how best to proceed, then I thought, ‘to hell with it!’ and just thrust it at the lizards’ side; it was like hitting rock, the rapier bounced off the lizards’ scales vibrating like a tuning fork, or maybe the shock just made my arm feel like it was vibrating. The point is it didn’t work! ‘We may need a different approach…’