We consider the large flooded room ahead and Bael decides that it is manta ray time.
Swimming below the surface he immediately notices a stairwell heading down about 15′ and sheer drops to either side. This is not a room we can walk through. While swimming about he notices a flash of white to one side, suddenly a white shark attacks but luckily he is able to twist away. Time for a swift exit!! He swims back to the doorway and manages to avoid another attack. While the shark circles for another attack he removes the cloak and the door is slammed shut.
We ponder on options and Morgan suggests the other passage. It turns a corner and after a while there are steps to a raised section. No secret doors are found so we continue down a corresponding set of steps and continue down the corridor. it seems some large carnivorous fish live here as they take a bite of Isis’ leg. Varys casts Sleep and the float to the surface. Rob mutters something about swim bladders while Isis dispatched them with her spear. Amber and Morgan now start considering the possibility of lacing these fish with poison in an attempt to kill the shark. Rob favours bringing in canoes to allow us to float about these flooded halls…
In the here and now, all agree to continue down this passage, which ends at a door.
We open it and immediately get caught in a flood of water that sweeps us into the room. Doh! Heads bash and shins bark off stone benches that sit before a small altar. A bone mace hangs on the wall.
Amber picks up the mace while Varys et al search the altar. Varys finds a hidden compartment containing a load of gold and some coral statuettes that looks pretty valuable!! \o/ No secret doors are found in the room, and we are feeling pretty dirty and tired so decide to head back to the village to rest and enquire about poisons. On the way out we collect the cannibal chief’s head as proof that we’ve done the job asked.
Umlat and Talking Chief Fano meet us and are pleased if a little disquieted to see the head and ask if we found the other cannibals. We admit we haven’t and we still plan to explore Taboo Island further.
They don’t have any poisons for use so we ponder other options. The canoe idea is abandoned due to them being too big to fit into the passages. Amber suggests ladders to get us up to the other side of the rotten floor we fell through. All agree so we spend a couple of days resting and making two ladders.
Refreshed (and levelled up in some cases) we return to Taboo Island and enter through the temple steps. Before going any further we decide to do a sweep of the rest of the island looking for the remaining cannibals. After a couple hours we are done, with no sign of them… As we pass through the ‘wall’ that we broke down we take a moment to check if we can tell whether it was built to keep things from the temple out, or to keep things from below down below. We decide it was built from the temple side, which tends to rule out the possibility of the cannibals hiding down below.
We return to the main temple chamber and search harder for secret doors – two are found. One that may lead to the bas-relief and one diagonally opposite.
The first door does indeed take us to behind the bas relief. There is a LOT of dust and some rags on the floor. There are levers, and corroded brass speaking tube and some ropes hanging from the ceiling. The ropes snap, the levers are jammed and the speaking tube is blocked, so we head back.
The other door leads us around to a platform that must be behind the ‘face’ carved at the end of the main chamber. There are holes for the eyes, and some kind of piston. It moves, but we can’t work out what it does. Rob goes to watch from the chamber, but nothing really happens except he notices a musty smell…
While this examination is occurring, Varys manages to fall through a rotten trapdoor. He lands on a pile of gunk and in the light of his torch sees a large room with statues around the edge. On those statues are snakes… There’s an exit to the north.
He calls the others down and as they descend he notices a shiny in the NE corner and a large puddle in the SE. We attack the snakes which turn out to be spitting cobras. They manage to blind Varys and Amber but are killed by the others. The venom is washed from their eyes, but sight doesn’t return just yet…
While Amber is scrambling on the floor she hits a pressure pad and a portcullis drops, blocking the entrance!! Time to look for a secret door type way out of here…
We find one in the corner with the puddle. Rob checks the door more carefully and considers that it’s a VERY tight fit and that there may well be a ton of water backed up on the other side – hence the puddle. We decide to attempt to lift the portcullis instead. Minerva, Morgan, Bael and finally Isis manage to lift it and Rob is able to drive in some iron spikes to hold it up…