I have decided to stop fighting this and accept that this is a novella, so Part I is going up the Patreon this month at a suitable cliffhanger and Part II will drop next month. Realistically, this could end up being 15K words, which is considerably more than the official deal anyway.
So, I guess you want to hear about the traps.
Traps are an exaggerated problem in this line of work. If you’re still living in your basic ruin, it’s not really a ruin, and there are no better traps than ‘twenty guys standing guard’ and ‘you are actually just robbing me, you know’ to keep us salvage archeologists out of your storage space. If it’s an abandoned ruin, then there’s nobody to do maintenance or reload the giant stone ball once it’s crushed some poor idiot who can’t estimate weights properly. As for the oldest ones? The Old American sites? They didn’t use anything worse than alarm bells. I mean, they didn’t even use pits full of spikes, and everybody does those. You get the feeling that they were just better people, back before the Discovery.
That being said, we ended up having a trapped corridor between us and Bigwave’s Coronet. And this wasn’t the better-safe-than-sorry kind of anti-theft design, either. Whoever made this was feeling pretty mean.
I should set the scene first. The sinkholes that swallowed Merida (catchy title, that) had been remarkably expansive. We were finding entire blocks of collapsed buildings down here — and by ‘we’ I mean me, Jim, and Ev. Turns out Le and Ev were twins with a knack for always knowing where the other was, and what she was feeling. That was coming in handy down here; Le was topside with Bigwave, and Ev was leading us along below. It was more useful than it sounds, since between the two groups we could usually keep going in the right direction. Expansive sinkholes or not, there were a lot of twisty tunnels down here, and they all looked alike.