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[bookofthegear]

You leave the room behind and spend twenty minutes trying to get the grille more or less back in place. It doesn’t really work, but you manage to wedge it into the opening so that at least it won’t fall over on anybody. You still give it a worried glance as you leave.

The only place left to go is down the stairs, so down you go. At the bottom, you find a smallish room with an alcove, a huge iron door that someone made specifically to be intimidating, and a sloping hallway to the south. You hear frog calls echoing in the distance from the hallway.

There’s a rusty faucet in the alcove. Jimmy says, “You know what’s weird?”

You are spoiled for choice, frankly, but you humor him. “What?”

“Every time somebody turns that faucet handle, it breaks. But every time I come down here, it’s wired back into place.”

You consider this. “Magic or plumbers, do you think?”

Jimmy makes a flailing gesture with his wings. “I don’t know. Maybe this is some kind of afterlife for plumbers and the bad ones have to stay here fixing the same faucet for all eternity.”

This is an interesting theory. It doesn’t body well for your dreams of treasure, but then again, plumbers get paid way better than adventurers.

[bookofthegear]

You search the room carefully, even though the space between your shoulderblades itches with the thought of secret doors and people leaping out while your back is turned. Jimmy keeps watch, which helps.

Your search confirms your earlier suspicions—somebody left this room in a big hurry, probably when they saw you setting to work with your screwdriver. That’s good? Maybe? They were more scared of you than you were of them?

Is that good?

There’s a low brick shelf that contains jars labeled in a language you don’t read, something swirly. Wedding invitation levels of swirly. The labels look hand-lettered, not mass produced. You’re guessing it’s food, though you have no plans to try it unless you’re on very short rations. You took a semester long class in what foods are safe to eat in a dungeon, and the lecture called “Botulism And You” has left you extremely wary of canned goods of unknown provenance.

The footprint in the firepit is roughly human foot shaped, but that’s the most you can say about it. The ash-mud is too goopy to hold fine detail. You can be fairly sure they didn’t step outside the firepit afterward, though, because there are no muddy footprints. Which means the only way they could go was up.

You look up the dark shaft above the firepit. The walls are black with soot. Obviously it was used as a chimney for some time. You don’t see any handholds. Possibly they had a rope, and pulled it up after themselves? If you hold the lantern just right, you can see what looks like a distorted handprint. It’s not impossible that they climbed up by bracing themselves against the walls, though you have no idea how they’d have gotten up there in the first place. You certainly can’t follow, even if you wanted to.

You saved the desk for last. It was swept clean, whatever was on it grabbed in a hurry, and the drawers were cleaned out. Except… You spot something far in the back and pull out a couple sheets of loose paper. They are covered in dense lines of the swirly writing, and drawings. Careful sketches of the faces of several humans.

Sleeping humans.

“That’s Two,” Jimmy says, his wings trembling slightly. “And Five.”

The drawing of Five has a small bird tucked up under her chin. You’re no artist, but it has the sort of start-and-stop, ragged-extra-lines look of something drawn from life. Which would mean…

“Oh, that’s creepy as fuck.” You glance up the chimney and wonder if someone is watching you and drawing a portrait right now.

[bookofthegear]

Your trusty Swiss Army knife makes…well, not short work of the grille. It takes awhile and your wrist gets sore, and there’s a dicey moment when it’s only attached to the wall by one screw and starts to twist, but eventually you get the huge metal grille loose. It clangs to the floor and you throw yourself against it, trying to slide it against the wall so you don’t get squished. The loud scraping sound probably alerted anyone in a half-mile radius, so you’ve rather lost the element of surprise, but no one attacks you.

There is indeed a layer of thin black cloth pinned across the opening. You move it aside with your walking stick. No one attacks you.

The alcove is only about two feet deep, just enough for someone to stand and watch. The east side dead-ends against the wall, while the west side opens into a larger space.

Possibly the most unsettling thing about this is that it appears the concrete wall here is all of three inches thick. The architecture here all feels so solid, like huge slabs were just poured in place, and seeing that some of them are nearly hollow…it’s a weird feeling. As if the whole place is a facade over something bigger and emptier. Or as if the walls might be full of silent observers.

Jimmy, unasked, hops down from your shoulder and peeks around the corner into the larger room. He gestures with a wing to let you know it’s clear.

The room is not large, maybe fifteen by fifteen, and clearly has been occupied for some time. There’s a crude firepit made of broken concrete bits, a square smoke hole in the ceiling, and a nest of blankets in the corner. (There’s a drain in the far corner that was probably for more biological concerns.) Perhaps most incongruous of all, there’s a wooden writing desk pushed against the wall that wouldn’t be out of place in any study or or office back home. It’s been swept clean, but there’s still a candle on it.

You touch the wax. It’s still warm. And the firepit is full of soggy ash, as if someone hastily dumped water over the fire.

There is a single bare footprint in the ashes.

[bookofthegear]

You fear no boredom! You go south, around a bend, and past a dripping pipe, whereupon the passage dead-ends at the remains of an enormous rusted grate. The grate overlooks darkness, and some thirty feet below, a ripple of water.

“Please don’t jump,” says Jimmy.

Good Lord, of course you’re not going to jump. Diving into water when you don’t know how deep it is or what may be lurking under the surface is just a fancy way of saying that you don’t value having unbroken bones.

“What’s calling down there?” you ask.

“Frogs,” Jimmy explains. “There’s a large room below full of them. They’re one of the nicest things in this place. But there’s another way! You don’t have to climb! Or dive!”

“Did you say it was boring so I wouldn’t come here and jump?”

Jimmy clears his throat and seems to avoid making eye contact. Uh-huh. You really think Basic Dungeon Survival ought to be a required class at Wentworth, not an elective.

You return to the passageway and are just coming up to the large metal grate when you don’t hear something.

It’s not exactly a sound. It’s more like a sound stopping, one that you weren’t aware you were hearing. You are almost certain it’s no longer coming from the other side of the grille.

The ironwork is delicate but worked closely together. It’s dark behind the grille…

Actually, it’s too dark. You lift your lantern and it’s still pitch black back there.

Jimmy makes a distrustful noise, but you’re already sliding one of the small screwdrivers of your Swiss Army Knife into a gap in the metal. It goes in about an inch, then meets a slight resistance.

“There’s a black cloth back there,” you murmur to Jimmy. He flutters something about sometimes having the feeling of being watched, then hunches down into his feathers.

The grille is held up by dozens of Phillips head screws concealed in the pattern. You could, possibly, unscrew them. There’s no way you can lower something that heavy quietly, though. And if Jimmy’s right, there might be someone on the other side.

Mind you, if they’re watching right now, they probably won’t be after you drop a three hundred pound metal grille on them…

[bookofthegear]

You follow the sound of buzzing and are amused to see the hobo sign for “bad tempered owner” chalked on the doorway. Then you step inside.

…whoa.

Jimmy said “clockwork bees” and it’s not that you doubted him, but that was like describing the Mona Lisa as “some paint on wood.” The bees gleam in the lantern light, striped with oiled bronze and shining brass, their eyes like beautifully faceted gems. And they fly! How can they fly? They’re far too heavy, surely, the internal workings must be full of gears and tiny mechanisms. Nevertheless they fly.

It’s not that you weren’t impressed with the labyrinth, but it’s mostly just looked like a bunker with gears and a few impressively dead guys. This, though…this is something.

You stand very still, admiring the huge mass of honeycomb that drapes across the enormous gears, and the honey gone red and black with age. You could sell a pound of that honey for a small fortune to the right collector. The money should just about cover your funeral expenses, because the bees will absolutely murder the fuck out of you.

Ah, well. Stealing a “live” bee is probably right out as well. You really would rather not add to Jimmy’s therapy bill. You take a last appreciative look at the graceful flight of the mechanical insects, then step back into the hall.

[bookofthegear]

Whatever’s in the pipe almost certainly isn’t an eighteen foot tall owl, but you just don’t feel like finding out. The guy who stuck his head in a pipe found out Why We Don’t Stick Our Head In Pipes, and look where it got him.

You head back up the ramp to the large room with the staircase. The dark alcove with the horse skull hanging hasn’t changed, but from this angle, you notice something on the floor there. Something that looks like…rags?

“DON’T TOUCH THE SKULL!” Jimmy shouts. In interpretive dance, this means performing directly in front of your face. You shove your hands in your pockets and hastily promise you won’t.

“A wall comes down right behind you if you do,” Jimmy says, as you approach what appears to be a semi-mummified corpse. “I tried to bring him water through the bars but I just couldn’t carry enough.”

“No one would expect you to,” you assure him. Let’s see…calculate how much therapy Jimmy would require afterward, multiply by the number of dead adventurers…

“Jimmy, exactly how many people have you worked with down here?”

“You’re number Eight.”

“Ah. And the previous seven all…?”

“Well…” He rubs the back of his neck with one wing. “I don’t actually know about Six. We got separated and I never found her again. I looked!” he adds, fluffing up defensively. “But it was dark and I couldn’t go very far, and—and—you’re looting that body?”

“Waste not, want not.” You got amazingly high marks in Looting. You could strip a body in eighteen seconds flat, provided they didn’t have a ridiculous number of pockets or badly knotted bootlaces. “So which number was this fellow?”

“That was Three. You saw Seven already.” You get the impression he doesn’t entirely approve of your work.

Three was a Wentworth graduate. You can tell by the class ring and the embroidered logo on his breast pocket. You help yourself to what little money he had and rifle through his backpack. It’s mostly duplicates of your own gear, but you take his matches and first aid kit, and a few other odds and ends, then leave the poor devil in peace.

You can see why he wanted to smash the horse skull, though. The nasty thing seems to pulse like a bad tooth. Definitely cursed.

The only way out of the staircase room is currently to the east. You follow the corridor to a crossroads. “There’s a clockwork beehive north,” Jimmy says, settling back to his role as tour guide. “South is boring. East goes to a staircase. Oh, and a big metal grille.” He fluffs his feathers again in clear distaste.

[bookofthegear]

…whoa.

Oh, because I forgot to do this earlier and people asked, your total run avoided fourteen definite deaths and one Bad Choice that, while not outright fatal, would have meant that your luck would turn sour. (That doesn’t have, like, a randomized effect, given that much of this is improv, but ropes would snap, rungs would break, just how potable IS that water, maybe the pointy people did actually see your light and are lying in wait, etc.)

(Yes, there are actually things you can do to piss off the labyrinth. I won’t go into any details, because that would be too easy, but they do tend to be fairly obviously Significant Choices.)

Overall, you made it much, much deeper into the maze than any other players have, and a couple times I had to scramble to think “Jeez, what IS in that next room, anyway?” because you’d outrun my mental map.

Good job! The cabbages are proud.

[bookofthegear]

Oh, because I forgot to do this earlier and people asked, your total run avoided fourteen definite deaths and one Bad Choice that, while not outright fatal, would have meant that your luck would turn sour. (That doesn’t have, like, a randomized effect, given that much of this is improv, but ropes would snap, rungs would break, just how potable IS that water, maybe the pointy people did actually see your light and are lying in wait, etc.)

(Yes, there are actually things you can do to piss off the labyrinth. I won’t go into any details, because that would be too easy, but they do tend to be fairly obviously Significant Choices.)

Overall, you made it much, much deeper into the maze than any other players have, and a couple times I had to scramble to think “Jeez, what IS in that next room, anyway?” because you’d outrun my mental map.

Good job! The cabbages are proud.

[bookofthegear]

“THAT” room is way too interesting a description for a bold adventurer like yourself to pass up. You stride confidently down the ramp. Jimmy’s claws tighten on your shoulder.

There’s some kind of mural on the passage wall, but you can’t make it out, and anyway it looks to have more to do with giant flaming avocados than with, say, wealth and glory. (And a spirit of scientific inquiry, naturally. It’s just that if, in plumbing the depths of the concrete maze, you happen to find some wealth that no one is using…well. Y’know.)

You’re honestly more concerned with what looks like high water marks in the room upstairs. Granted, it had dried out, but it is a basic rule of Dungeoneering not to get trapped by unexpected rising water, and the best way to do that is to know exactly when and how the water rises, and to arrange to be elsewhere. Jimmy, sadly, doesn’t have an answer.

“I’ve never seen it flooded…not personally…but I spend most of my time outside. Between, um, adventurers, I mean. Sometimes that takes weeks. It could flood then, and I’d never know.”

You’d rather like to know how many adventurers he’s worked with, but then you arrive at THAT room. It’s a largely featureless concrete box of a room, with two large pipes, one on top of the other, in the east wall. The pipes dribble rust and the occasional drop of water down the cement, and a metal grill of clear antiquity covers the bottom one.

The hobo sign for “danger,” three stacked diagonal lines, has been chalked beside the upper pipe.

There is also a thing on the floor. It is about four feet long, damp looking, and of a color one might generously call brownish. It has a certain…organic…lumpiness to it. The sort that usually involves time spent in a digestive tract.

You are not a biologist, but you’ve been in enough ruins to recognize an owl pellet when you see one.

You poke it a few times with the point of your walking stick. Bits of fabric and strands of hair fall away, revealing a gleam of bone. You poke again. Oh hey, they wore a retainer. Neat.

“He stuck his head in the pipe,” says Jimmy, sounding deeply discouraged. “That might have been ok, but then he said he saw something and crawled in, and…well. I couldn’t see what happened, but there was a lot of thrashing and screaming and what looked like bone hooks. It’s safe now, though!” he hastens to add. “It hasn’t ever come out of the pipe while I’ve been here. Err. I mean, I probably wouldn’t want to sleep here, though.”

“Fascinating,” you murmur. “What does it live on, I wonder? When it can’t get idiot?”

“Frogs, I think,” Jimmy says. “Big red ones. They’re all over.” He adds reluctantly, “Err…you’re not gonna try to fight it, are you?”

[bookofthegear]

When you went off to college, your parents presented you with a fancy Swiss Army knife. It has the knife, the other knife, the corkscrew, the flat AND Phillips screwdrivers, the tiny magnifying glass, the bottle opener, the other other knife, the file, and the very small saw, which should allow you to cut down any tree in the forest in approximately six months. (You have, however, lost the toothpick.)

Jimmy perches on top of your walking stick and gestures to the crack in the wall with one wing. “This entryway seems pretty stable,” he says. “Once you get deeper in, things move around a lot.”

You step through the crack in the wall and immediately see a wall covered in graffiti. The most interesting bit, so far as you’re concerned, is a white chalk mark of an arrow and a circle. You immediately recognize hobo sign, which you took a class in. While there are some questions as to how authentic the signs are to actual hobo culture, they were popular among dungeon delvers some fifty years ago.

This mark means “Don’t bother going this way.” The arrow is pointing east.

“There’s nothing much that way,” Jimmy confirms. “Just a painting of the Madonna of Leaves.”

You go west instead, and after some turns, you eventually reach a staircase going down, into a large room. Jimmy regales you with descriptions of what lies through the various doors, like a very small tour guide. “That way goes to some clockwork bees and eventually a scary door…nobody’s ever managed to get it open…that way is sometimes a creepy horse skull and sometimes a corridor that goes deeper in…looks like it’s the skull today…” He trails off, gazing south, where a ramp slopes down. “And then there’s that room.”

[bookofthegear]

Dungeoneering is your passion! Your vocation! You know how to navigate a maze, climb a crumbling wall, make fire with two sticks and the body of a vengeful slime mold. Heck, you graduated in the top sixty percent of your class!

The slightly bedraggled finch greets you. You recognize him immediately as a Dungeon Finch. “Hi. I’m Jimmy. Are you the next explorer?”

You’re a little concerned about that “next.” Jimmy shuffles awkwardly on his perch. “There were some…err…incidents. But I’m sure you’ll be fine!” This does not make you any less concerned.

Nevertheless, you are a Wentworth graduate! You have your pack, your bedroll, your lantern, rope, climbing gear, compass, first aid kit, unreliable guidebook, and a truly epic quantity of granola bars!

And, of course, a knife.

[bookofthegear]

Okay! Second verse, similar to the first! Let’s go!

You, friend, are the latest graduate of the Wentworth School Of Exploration and Adventure (Goooo Fighting Codfish!) the second-best explorer’s school in the city. You left behind your family’s oyster farm in pursuit of higher, better, possibly more fatal things.

It was at Wentworth that you first came across a reference to the works of Eland the Younger, that wandering naturalist, historian…okay, occasionally out-and-out liar…and his great fragmentary work, the Book of the Gear. It detailed his descent into a great clockwork labyrinth, filled with strange creatures and stone gears. Most scholars dismiss it outright as a fabrication. Wentworth professors clam up when it is mentioned, but the rumor among underclassmen is that multiple graduates have died in the labyrinth.

You, however, are determined to live a life of adventure! It took a lot of research and guesswork and a lot of slogging, but you eventually found yourself following a narrow track through the woods. It dead-ends at a stone wall with an immense crack in it. The edge of a stone gear taller than a man is just visible inside.

A small, somewhat bedraggled finch sits on a branch nearby, waiting.

Wentworth students are highly trained in the arts of adventuring, including Hiking, Skulking, Orienteering, and deciphering avian interpretive dance. Which brings us to the first question!

[bookofthegear]

There are times in life when you should hide, and times when you should run. The difficulty, as any adventurer will tell you, is telling which is which.

This was one of those times when you should have run.

You never get a look at the thing in the sunflower field, because the lantern’s off. But when it comes crashing through stalks toward you, you do try to skewer it with Grandma’s good stabbing knife. The point of the blade hits off something hard but oddly elastic, like bone, and slides along a surface full of bumps and hollows. Maybe it’s a skull. Maybe it’s something you’ve never even conceived of.

Whatever it is, it has…teeth? A grinder? Hard to say, since the excruciating pain is much more pressing than careful analysis of what has just seized hold of you.

“Jimmy, RUN!” you shout, which of course makes no sense—he’s going to fly, obviously—but given the circumstances, it seems rude to quibble. You feel the brush of feathers past your cheek as he takes to the air, and then there’s an explosion of light behind your eyes and you seem to be rushing down a dark tunnel toward it. What happens after that is Mystery, and not within the scope of this chronicle.

Probably, though, there are cabbages.

—YOU HAVE DIED—

[bookofthegear]

“Sure,” you say to yourself. “Spend the night in a field of possibly phase-shifting sunflowers! What could go wrong?”

Jimmy says “Um.” In interpretive bird-dance, this is a slow, wobbly wing-extension. You choose to pretend he is just stretching.

A bit concerned by the large bite taken out of the field, you decide to sleep hidden as deep within the plants as you can. You spend a few minutes working your way into the field, until you can no longer see the walls, or indeed, much of anything but leaves and the occasional nodding seed head. Then you pull out your bedroll and attempt to find a way to sleep between the plants.

You rapidly realize that sleeping on a concrete waffle-grid is excruciating. The walls are only a few inches tall and wide, but that is a lot when it’s digging into your ribcage. You try to pad things with blankets. You try to build up a slightly larger flat space with your unreliable guide book and your canteen. You use the pack itself as a pillow. You pile your rope up under your knees.

You are miserable.

Eventually you fall into a groggy half-sleep, the kind where you are thinking and then fall asleep for a few minutes, then wake up thinking the same thing, so you don’t really feel like you’ve slept at all. The sunflowers rustle around you. (Stupid sunflowers. They don’t have knees or shoulders or aching vertebrae. Stupid lucky sunflowers.)

At one point, you almost think you see a light from the far end of the room, where the painting of the field is. It looks like sunlight, as if the painted sun had become real. Then you open your eyes and everything is pitch black and you realize you were probably dreaming.

Just when you are starting to think that exploring would be more restful than lying here, wedged in fetal position between plants, you hear a noise.

Your first thought is that it’s a rattlesnake. Your second is that a rattlesnake that sounded like that would have to be forty feet long. It has that same rapid hollow straight-to-the-hindbrain quality, but deeper, and it goes on much too long, and you do not like it at all.

The sunflowers rustle again. Wind, or something moving through them?

You strain your ears, listening for footsteps, but all you hear is something like…breathing?

“Hhheeeeeeeehhh…”

The rattling sounds again. It’s hard to tell because it’s so loud, but it sounds like it might be coming closer. Your hand closes over Grandma’s knife, for all the good it may do you.

“Hheeeeeeeeeeeehhh…”

[bookofthegear]

The corridor continues south for a few dozen paces after you leave the sunflower field, then opens into a very large room. The ceiling is almost lost in shadow, but you can just make out a regular pattern of stripes high on the walls. It isn’t until you put that together with the trails of corrosion that you realize there’s a line of metal bars about twenty feet off the ground, which are bleeding rust down the concrete walls.

Running down the center of the room is a raised band of concrete about eight feet wide, also inset with metal bars. It takes you a minute, but you’re pretty sure that this is the sunken corridor you were in when you heard voices earlier. The ones that Jimmy didn’t like. Which means that the “pointy people” were standing about where you are now.

You look around nervously, but there’s no sign of anyone here now. You smell smoke, though, and follow your nose to the ashes of a fire. Charred ends of paper are all that remain, but the ashes are still just slightly warm. You pick up a scrap or two, hoping to see what they burned, but all you can pick out is a letter here and there, none of them useful.

There’s no obvious exits from the room. Well, no, that’s not entirely true. There’s an alcove in the western wall with no floor, and a shaft that drops sharply into darkness. That’s technically an exit, you suppose.

Jimmy yawns on your shoulder. “It’s been a pretty long day, Boss…” As soon as he says something, you realize you’re exhausted. But where will you sleep?

[bookofthegear]

You walk around the field of sunflowers, looking for some clue as to how they’re growing so far from the actual sun. You discover three things, the significance of which is unclear.

First of all, the sunflower field is larger than you expected. It’s only about eighteen plants wide, but it’s at least a hundred deep. You see metal pipes running over the ceiling, some of them dripping with condensation, which is certainly not enough moisture for normal plants to live on.

Second, on the back wall is a chalk drawing of a landscape. There’s a bright yellow sun overhead, blue sky, distant purple hills, and colorful drawings of sunflowers in the foreground. As far as the art goes, you’d put it somewhere around mid 18th-century advertisement quality, pre-Art Nouveau, definitely second-tier, what one of your professors used to call “realism without enthusiasm.” (Still, points for achieving even that with chalk on concrete, not the most forgiving of mediums.)

Third, something happened here, possibly not that long ago. You’re coming back up the long side when you see what looks almost like a bite taken out of the field. Nearly a dozen plants in a semi-circle have been torn apart. The ones in the middle are mere stumps, whereas the sunflowers on the edges are still alive, though the thick stems have broken and set the flower heads leaning drunkenly against their neighbors. There are dead leaves scattered everywhere. You reach down and pick one up and find that it is badly wilted but not dried out. Since you have no idea how long it takes for a sunflower leaf to dry out, or even if it would down here, you can’t say how long it’s been.

It does occur to you that the flowers from the middle plants—the ones down to stumps—are missing entirely, not just knocked over. Which might mean something, or nothing. This place has a way of making things seem significant even when you’re pretty sure they aren’t.

The sunflowers rustle again in that breeze that doesn’t touch your skin.

[bookofthegear]

Sunflowers! Sunflowers growing underground, a whole apparent field of them, the flowers a good eight inches across, with bright yellow petals and a central orange disk. Looking down, you see empty striped hulls littering the ground. No, the floor. The plants are growing out of more waffle-style indentations, one stalk per depression, with dark earth surrounded by shallow concrete walls.

You are not a biologist, but you spent enough time on Grandma’s cabbage farm to know that this is impossible.

Sunflowers don’t grow in the dark! It’s in the name! And plants that do grow in the dark are pale and spindly and turn weird colors! They’re certainly not dark green and lush, as if they’re growing in a personal sunbeam that just happens to be invisible to anyone else.

Honestly, it makes you a little angry. This place keeps doing just slightly impossible things, and you accepted that. You kept cool. You’re an adventurer. Now it feels like the labyrinth is just flaunting its unreality at you, like it broke some unspoken bargain.

As you stand there, seething for what you know is no good reason, the leaves rustle. You take a step back, worried that there’s something in the dense stand of plants—but no, it’s the sound of wind moving through the field, each plant bowing slightly, the leaves rippling until the breeze reaches you and…

Nothing.

Whatever wind is moving the sunflowers, it’s not happening here, like the light. Or maybe it’s the sunflowers that are somewhere else? You reach out, cautiously, and touch one.

It certainly feels like it’s here. The leaves are big and coarse and slightly rough. And the room smells like there are plants in it, an earthy greenhouse sort of smell. But it’s obvious that in some very real sense, these plants aren’t here. Or aren’t just here.

It’s enough to make your head hurt.

As you watch, still somewhat annoyed, you see movement out of the corner of your eye. A clockwork bee is perched on one of the flowers, busily collecting pollen.