[center][h3][color=C0392B]Rudolf Sagramore[/color][/h3][/center]

Well, whatever.

Despite the impression that he'd been getting ahead of himself, at the end of the day the lot of them still had no trouble carving through a raiding party as pedestrian as these fish, regardless of structure. In short order, the discrepancy in martial skill had sent their assailants packing, scrambling over themselves to get well clear of the flying blades, bolts, and bombs. It was with a click of the tongue that Rudolf wiped his blades clean of blood and Selene's haste left him once more, as the last of their hapless quarry ran itself headfirst into twinned gouts of flame, dragon's breath spewing from the walls at either side of the tight passage. The smell of charring flesh and black, oily smoke filled the stale air, but drew none of the characteristic flinches he often fought to suppress. Rather...

[i]Oh, look at that, pressure plates, how [u]familiar[/u].[/i][sup]1[/sup] a ceaselessly opinionated voice sneered in his mind, wafting about the dark like the acrid cinders of the heap of flash-fried fishman. Striding forward, the young swordsman found himself flashing back to one of the places that had forged him. It, too, was a deep, dark place, where one wrong step meant you never came back out.

[color=c0392b]"Oh boy,"[/color] he idly murmured, as a streak of purple light darted overhead on orders to survey as far down the passageway as they safely could. [color=c0392b]"I thought we'd miss out for a second. It's not a proper ancient site without a few traps to clear; I was beginning think Drana Asnaeu's forefathers weren't about the life."[/color]

If there was any bright side to skulking about Old Lunaris on his lonesome for as long as he had before everything went to hell, it was that the pretenses of archaeology left you familiar as any other brand of thief with the classical gauntlet of traps in the vein of what doubtless awaited.

[color=c0392b]"Alright, this ought to be pretty straightforward. Give me a minute. It's really not too different from the upper levels of Lunaris. Eos, if I could get some light here, please?"[/color]

[i]I should shred your chances of ever finding your place in the world for that insinuation.

[color=c0392b]You should be glad you trained me for this. It gets us in and out of here quicker.[/color][/i]

His flat, fangless sarcasm finished, he dropped to a knee before the offending tile, drawing a knife from one of the bandoliers that had survived this long on his person, and began to run his fingers carefully along its perimeter, certain not to let any pressure into the stone. It was disguised well among the worn, somewhat irregular grading of the pathway, but at the same time, he had to assume this plate, and thus the gaps that allowed it to move when stepped on at all, had been here for a good long while, and rarely, if ever, saw maintenance. 

His hand slid off the face, into a divot before it could catch upon the next block of ragged stonework, and then—

[color=c0392b][i]That's room enough.[/i][/color]

The blade of the knife was wedged into that little gap, deep as he dared to send it. With how wet this crawling descent was, what had no doubt once been a nigh-seamless installment had been worn away over time, by moisture, by wind, by the slow rot of whatever charred corpses had fallen over the boundary in the years this trap had warded away the unlucky or unworthy. Provided they were adequately sharp at the tips, with this Rudolf had proven that he could drive a wedge into that gap until it jammed the whole mechanism. Sure enough, a firm palm down on the carved stone saw it refuse to depress beyond a fraction of an inch— enough for any one of them to cross if they tread single file.

[color=c0392b]"Miina,"[/color] he called tonelessly, now producing his trusty stick of charcoal and marking the immobilized tile with a four-lined symbol that evoked a horned beast's visage— as good a Kirin as you could hope for in the circumstances. [color=c0392b]"Those knives 'Loki' threw your way, could I have them? I'll get the plates taken care of and we can move further in."[/color]

One quick nod and handoff later, and Rudolf set to work, donating his waterskin to the cause— by tracking the flow of each stream he pured out the mouth, he could locate the seams further up directly instead of playing a guessing game with each ragged tile. Water would always find a more direct path down to seep through, after all— it begged the question of whether or not, given this was the Crystal of Water they were trying to reach, there would be anything related they needed to be ready for as obstacle. A flooded chamber, a path only accessible by swimming, things like that—

Soon enough, he was made to pause as Selene streaked back into view from the gloom up ahead. Their report revealed little of what he'd been concerned with, and none of the specific ideas he'd pictured. Instead, she told the awaiting Kirins of a field of arcane mines[sup]2[/sup], swinging blades[sup]3[/sup], and a puzzle at the end— an assortment of sliding blocks[sup]4[/sup], each marked out to be arranged in a specific orientation to pass. From there, the fairy could forge no further.

Nodding to his tiny green assistant, Rudolf palmed the last throwing knife into a necessary space, and marked off the final pressure plate as she rejoined her purplescent sister. With how the path dropped off after this point, he was confident that the gouts of flame ended right around here— and by eliminating these specific plates, he'd ensured at least one corrected path they could take. All for the low cost of a few pilfered knives and a waterskin. Not a bad trade.

[color=c0392b]"Thanks,"[/color] he said, softly tossing the Red Mage the trio of throwing knives he'd not needed back to her one by one. [color=c0392b]"If we stay single file, those blades should keep things jammed without snapping, and we can yank them free on the way back out."[/color]

It would make sense that they didn't intend to permanently damage any of these— no guarantee the people that came after them down the path had such savory intentions as theirs[sup]5[/sup].
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[*][sub]1. Translator's Note: How [i]boring[/i]. Every idiot thinks they've reinvented the wheel when they upgrade from wiring their pressure plates to firespitters instead of darts, but these are fundamentally all the same 'don't pay attention to where you step and then the sides start attacking you' obstacle. You may as well just have a big swinging blade. He'll figure this out in three seconds.[/sub]
[*][sub]2. Oh Gods Above. Derivative bomb slop you could shove a sufficiently armored Skaellar through and clear, like that blight-stricken one that crawled under a log to go die this party had... what, half a week ago? He's the only one we never talked to, that guy. [/sub]
[*][sub]3. Bullshit. [i]Really?[/i] I was kidding. I was kidding, old fogeys. The joke was that being played out and uninspiring. you don't need to think, you just need to react. You make this for dummies?[/sub]
[*][sub]4. A [i]sliding block puzzle?[/i] Your only intellectual gating to the most sacred artifact of your entire slice of the continent is the single most brute-force friendly time waster? [i]This[/i] is why I maintain that Constructionalists like White Mages should be banned from making traps, they don't know how easy anything is to subvert if you have half a brain. Not even a single light puzzle, or liquid scale, or use of quicksilver fulmination, or anything that demands the ability to think in abstraction. Unbelievable. Come up with a cipher! Enforce specific input sequencing! Flood the room! Apply yourselves![/sub]
[*][sub]5. Yeah, great call. As a matter of fact, [i]have the last person through pull them while you go down[/i]. This wasn't even fun to watch you solve, I may as well see you try and reverse-engineer it from the opposite way later, if not us run into some fried Valheimr.[/sub]
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