some RE-assembly required

Errol went pale; he really didn’t like the sound of that wailing cry coming from the depths and was considering turning back when the exit sealed shut with a SLAM.

“Well, that isn’t good”, he mumbled.

“I’m more worried about the traps honestly; looking closely, only about half of them are geared towards intruder prevention.”

“Do I want to know what the other half are geared towards?” Mibbet asked,

“Probably not.”

“OK, then tell me anyway, please; I’d like to know what I’ve gotten into.”

“Containment, they are geared towards keeping the contents in.”

At that, Errol gave a nervous little whimper.

“Not really a required feature in many tombs, I reckon”, Mibbet replied, shouldering choppy for easier swinging.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Sir Leeroy sighed, “you would really bloody think so.”

It didn’t take long before the wailing sounds were joined by a not familiar, but worryingly unpleasant rattling shambling sound; on the positive side, whatever was making it was taking a while to get to them; on the negative side, it sounded like there were a lot of them, and they didn’t seem in a hurry to give up. Of the few virtues your average shambling horror possessed, the last one you wanted on the list was perseverance, and on the vices list, top of the list was singlemindedly following orders from something that wants you dead, or worse, UN-dead.

They braced as best they could for the coming darkness but apparently said darkness did not list punctuality as a trait. They were almost at the point of giving up on waiting and going looking when a skeleton emerged from the passage at a dead sprint, and to everybody's surprise, lunged at the first thing it encountered, a decorative statue.

Sir Leeroy suppressed a chuckle. “Well, we should move quietly and finish that one off; then I’ll explain”, Sir Leeroy whispered before pulling his hammer from his side and knocking the first skeleton block off.

“We should be glad whatever raised it was such a cheapskate” he grinned. The cool glowy gems in some skeletons eye sockets aren’t for decoration. See, skeletonisation tends to be a multi-step process, and like getting old, your eyes are the first thing to go. Empty eye sockets look cool, but things kinda need eyes. The downside is that they’ll probably figure that out fairly quickly, so expect the next lot to see eye to eye with us. For now, we’ll wait by the door take the heads off. It takes em days to find the damn things again, and without em they don’t believe they can think too well.”

Sure enough, the first wave was handled with a wave of decapitations, then rolling the skulls along the by now unjammed axe passage. But they didn’t expect the next encounter to be so easy.

“Now we know we have a real problem; see if it was a mindless dungeon core, it wouldn’t screw up creating mobs like that. To frag up that badly means a human or former human. A core would just exactly copy the design from another core since the damn things are networked.” Sir Leeroy explained, as sure enough, the next wave of the undead shambled into view. Sure enough, this lot definitely had eyes, and Mibbet figured that the red glowing eyes meant either 1. they were pissed off, or 2. their creator was a drama queen. (Reality was it was 3. all of the above.) It was times like this that Mibbet really wished Alba and Rascal were more compact, but they had figured half a tonne of winged bear would not be happy in narrow passages, and equal weight in enraged feline was not ideal in such a circumstance either, so the pair were back in the carriage, probably nicking half the food supplies as they spoke, but there was no use crying over spilt milk, so with the war cry “Die you hopless spawn-sucker” she lunged into the fray, quickly coming to the realisation that maybe she would have been better off using the flat of choppy as the enemies ribcage seemed to be rather stuck on the edge of the axe. Luckily a quick kick and a pull did help resolve the issue (though it felt kinda gross.)

Elvira, meanwhile, had popped some kind of weighted end stylised to look like a helmet on Spikey and was flailing them about to devastating effect (Mibbet was willing to bet she was going to be sore in the morning.

Errol, meanwhile, had screwed his courage to the sticking place but wasn’t having much luck. His usual tactic was to use a sword to jab at squishy and/or tender bits of the enemy, which the skeletons, being skeletons and all, were sadly deficient in. Plus, the time-honoured guard tactic of kicking em in the nadgers really backfires if your foot gets wedged in a pelvis. So he was hopping round on one leg, doing his best to hold his partner in the worlds most unpleasant and socially awkward dance in history (excluding, of course, his first boy/girl party) at bay. Until Sir Leeroy felt sorry for him and walloped his opponent in the back of the head.

“Errol, you have an almost unlimited supply of clubs; use em”, He grumbled.

Errol eventually managed to extricate himself from his fallen foe and then figured out what Sir Leeroy meant, sheathing his blade and drawing a femur with a disgusted grimace. He’d often heard his fellow guards joke about beating enemies with their own limbs, but he never imagined he would ever actually do it. That is until the first DONK, at which point he was back in the game, putting to use years of weak will round tubular objects (if you have ever received post in a tube or got your hands on wrapping paper and have siblings, you will understand this,) and pranking instinct in order to ensure his enemies were thoroughly Donked.

Sir Leeroy, after seeing that Errol was safe, readied his hammer in one hand and an old blackjack that was technically against regulations, but he didn’t care. Then waded into the fray.