[1] The Lower Road

The lever moves, but nothing happens. The system is ancient after all.

But just as you're about to give up on it as out of repair, something behind the wall moves with a thunk, and then the sound of gears spinning follows. The right door grumbles down from the ceiling and settles in place with a small explosion of dust that's been kicked out of the way by its weight. The lever might work again, but you'll have to wait to find out, because the noise has awakened something, and you hear a tik... tikytiky-tik-tik-tik as more feet than you have begin to move on the stonework inside the left branch of the passage.

As Laaesh reinvigorates his light, the creature making the otherworldly echoes on the stone comes into view, slowly extricating itself from its hole. It looks like the spider had grown a bit bigger than the hallway it had made its nest. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it had swollen up bigger from decay and rot after it died - not that its death seemed to bother it overly much. You get a good look into the interior of its dead carcass - dried out flesh and encrusted blood - as it raises itself to its full height, front legs searching for... what? Is it possible it couldn't see you? It doesn't directly attack at any rate.

The long-dead spider pauses for a moment, uncertain whether it heard - or more likely felt anything. But then the rumbling starts behind it, and it turns, quicker than you would have thought possible... quicker than you could have reacted to had it decided to leap at you... and slides back into the passage that it came from, heading for the phantom sound.

Now's your chance to do something while it's distracted, but you know it will probably be back, and soon.

Cualli dashes toward the switch, intent on flipping it back to close the door on the spider-thing, but his movement isn't quiet. The spider whirls and skitters back toward the door. One leg reaches out to wrap around Cualli's leg, but as he feels himself start to lose his balance, he manages to pull the lever.

The door slams down on the spider's leg, just before more of him can get out of his tunnel. Cualli's leg is released as the spider tries to pull its leg free. It twitches erratically but it seems that for now, it's stuck.

The other thing that happens when the lever is pulled is that the other side of the passage opens up again. The room on this side is ancient, full of crumbling scrolls and rusted bits of metal that were probably meant to be pieces of machinery at some point in the distant past.

At the other end of the room is another door, and a lever next to it that presumably works just the same as the previous one.

Alas, the vast majority of the items in this room crumble at the slightest breeze, so when Laaesh moves past them, there's a slow flurry of ancient parchments that soon cover the floor. Ah well. At least the machinery is still here. It looks like the sort of gears you'd see in a children's puzzle toy back in Sharn, but at a larger scale. There is one design that survives as well, but only because it was etched into the desk underneath. It appears to be a magical lattice of some sort, but more than that cannot be determined because of the crudeness of the sketch.