The passages got narrower and narrower as they went along, gummed up and stopped as they were by huge drifts of sand, it seemed that Mandy really didn’t wish to be disturbed.

Eventually they were forced to resort to Mibbet’s ridiculous water magic to get through, (properly braced by Errol and Sir Leeroy of course, after the blowback incident during early practice they had realised that the Princess was somewhat blessed on the water magic front, but if used at full power the “blessing” became a curse, or at the very least a ridiculously overpowered sand blaster.

As they progressed they finally resolved the mystery as to what kind of creatures this place was built for, as the pictographs started to show image after image of long snouted bipedal alligator type creatures.

“Caymen, watch your step, if memory serves they were ridiculously strong and tall, but somewhat useless at magic without divine intervention. So expect manual traps.” Sir Leeroy said, quite failing to notice the slightly delayed spike trap that impaled where he had been stood a moment before, and just to make it even nastier did so from below.

Apparently a lot of the traps had been built with waterborne invaders in mind, so on the positive side almost every trap so far had been built without the expectation of sand gumming up the works. On the negative side every single door they had encountered so far had been 1. stuck 2. dependent on a manual turn wheel 3. rusted to the point of near unusability, or 4. missing the wheel, with the odd exception for 5. all of the above. It usually meant to get through them required using choppy as a lever in order to get the damned things open, knowing for a fact they would lock behind you, leaving you stuck between it and the second of the set. (According to Sir Leeroy Caymen often used double doors so that the next area could be properly flooded before they passed through it, as they didn’t like to walk where they could swim, and given that they were decent engineers making any area they were in flood wasn’t exactly a hardship for them. Even if it was a reversal of usual engineering sense that for humans at least usually suggested keeping water out of things as the priority.)

Progress was slow, but they were gradually getting there, the passages now were wider, albeit occasionally decorated by the remains of an ill advised explorer who decided to push their luck, where it was evident their luck should not be pushed. Resulting in their explorations reaching a rather pointed conclusion, which given that trap makers are usually fairly twisted individuals usually came from below. (A few trap makers over the years had tried the spinny blades, drills, and other fancy stuff, but in trapmaking all that meant was gross stuff gumming up the works. Or some smartass taking the overcomplicated panel puzzle systems as a personal challenge. Either way the end result was a useless trap and a smugly grinning adventurer sat there atop your fancy solar powered death ray you spent weeks tinkering with to get it just right, he’d just destroyed with a well placed makeup mirror compact. For this reason and because nobody wants the job of rolling the massive boulder back up to the top of the slope and setting it back in the mountings the classics were just the best.)

Finally they got out into a large open chamber, with a series of long convoluted gantries, which you couldn’t even bet wouldn’t drop out under you at random, as no bookie would ever take those odds, over a large basin filled with sand, and right at the end of the pipe nightmare they could see what looked to be the control system for the machine. (That or a sacrificial altar, maybe both it can be so hard to tell sometimes, especially since the decorations for both are often fairly interchangeable. They usually consist of 1. a sharp implement, or maybe a key covered in more sharp bits than anybody would care to count. 2. strange cryptic writing, or maybe a poorly instructed instruction manual, again it could go either way. 3. a series of icons of long forgotten deities, or maybe an employee of the month thing, and of course 4. long decayed food offerings, or somebody forgot to clean out the company food storage properly, either way the results are the same, and leave one wondering how long it will take before something in the area sprouts tentacles and starts devouring the innocent. (Hint the company food storage does that one much faster, and usually produces a much higher grade of repulsive soul sucking abomination, which will also nick everybody elses food and become an employee in it’s own right. This is why in every company there is always at least one entity that doesn’t understand the basics of human food labelling etiquette, and they will usually be promoted before the regular employees, as every amoral soul sucking creature there had to start off somewhere, and they usually run in packs commonly known as boards of directors. Which are realistically the only habitat they can survive in un-throttled.)

Of course first they had to got to it, which was not going to be easy given that those pipe gantries went on forever, and every inch had to be checked by rolling a heavy object over it first to make sure it wasn’t one of the ridiculous fake paths., luckily they had a few halfway decent sized rocks from Addy’s digging (don’t worry not her shiny rocks, she had a fair few core sample stones she had used at one point or another in the trip to check the local geology. They knew which were irreplaceable as Addy had a habit of sharing her hobbies, and it was a little hard to see a multiple tonne construct go full fangirl over a stripy pattern in a particular rock and not find it adorable.)

That plan worked fine, until a trap maker apparently a little smarter than the others who had created a bluff system. Meaning the floor fell out at the SECOND heavy thing to cross it, and dropped a whole section. Dumping Sir Leeroy, Errol, and Mibbet in the churning sand below.