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Whelp, Niko and the catboys made minced meat of the giants. One grabbed me but didn't hold me for long.

After the battle had begun, all of the villagers fled the area, so when we emerged, we found ourselves all alone at the dig site. We retrieved some guy named Farrokh that we'd picked up somewhere, and headed back down into the dig area to search for the relics. I guess Farrokh was a scion of Ard, and wanted some ring with an anchor on it, if we were to find it at this site.

Anyway, in the dig site we had several places to search. The main room where the battle with the giants had occurred was an obvious place to look, and three tunnels that forked off from the hallway to the main room were worth perusing as well. Of the tunnels, the first one had a landslide at the end, the second tunnel had a trap and a crypt containing not much of interest, and the third one had a trap with a big multi-tonne stone block that almost crushed me, and a chamber at the end with a suspicious box sitting on a table in the center of it.

The chamber of the third hallway was obviously boobie-trapped all around, so we had George climb across the ceiling and mark the traps as he found them. The stairs were rigged to fall it was noted, so we all jumped over them. We approached the box and opened it. It had the skeleton of a child in it wrapped in silks. I lifted it and retrieved 3 items under it: a ring with an anchor, a diadem, and a xiphos.

As I lifted the xiphos, it triggered a secret compartment in the wall to open to reveal another chest, this one in good condition and _very_ boobie-trapped. We decided to tie a rope securely to it, all head back up into the tunnel, and just pull the chest up to us using the rope.

It's a good thing we erred on the side of caution; pulling the chest via the rope from the place where it had rested for so long caused the ceiling and stairway at the end of the hallway to collapse, making the way impassable. So, now we had two collapsed tunnels and one set of artifacts that might be the relics for which we were looking, but of which I was beginning to think were actually decoys. The far-more boobie-trapped box seemed a much more likely candidate for containing actual supernatural relics. But none of us had any abilities or gifts that would allow us to determine if the items we held were actual relics or just valuable if mundane artifacts.

Having hit a dead-end in our relic-search, we decided to revisit the painted wall before going to requisition help in digging out the two tunnels. We banged around on the wall for a while and determined that it was probably hollow behind it… pretty much everywhere. So, I told Niko to go at it with his axe. He hesitated for some baffling reason, then finally swung his axe right through it. And actually, I found that even I could simply poke my spear through it with little effort.

So while the boys were inventorying the loot behind it, mostly just your run-of-the-mill grave goods – horse skeleton, chariot, jars of wine and other foodstuffs – I went up and down the main hallway from the large room to the reclining Buddha, poking the walls with my spear looking for other fake walls that might lead to further hidden chambers off to the side. But, alas, I found nothing. And so, it was now time to sit down and decide what to do about excavating the two collapsed tunnels.

After discussing and arguing it for an absurdly long time, we finally decided upon a course of action. While Jack, Farrokh, and our escort stayed at the dig site keeping an eye on things, the rest of us traveled to the village in which we'd picked up Farrokh and hired about 20 workers, purchasing some prosaic digging supplies along the way as well. We brought the workers back and set them immediately to digging out the tunnel we had collapsed.

After about a week of digging, the workers finally made a break-through. We all headed down into the dig area and, after setting the workers onto working on the other collapsed hallway, George was sent crawling into the tiny hole they had tunneled out in order to find the chest.

George was able to find the end of the rope attached to the box, and so he simply used that and pulled the box the rest of the way out carefully.

So, now we had the box that had been so important that it had been rigged to collapse the tunnel. Carefully working the lid, George felt a trap mechanism inside the box, and so stopped, leaving it be for the moment. We decided to take the box to the Japanese dig site and have them x-ray it and analyse it… carefully.

After making the several hour trek with the box and then waiting another couple of hours at the other site, the Japanese returned and told us the x-ray machine showed nothing inside, but that they had slipped a fibre optic cable inside and saw that inside sat a ring, a statue of an owl and a harp.

George sweet-talked the Japanese and convinced them to let him use the fibre optic eye to look over the inside more carefully, and to examine the trap he knew was attached to the lid. After poking around for a few minutes with the eye, he determined that the trap consisted of four upside-down glass vials, stoppered at the bottoms, with the stoppers attached to cables that when the lid was lifted, would release their contents down into the box, doing daddy-only-knows what to the contents or the person opening it.

After fretting for a few minutes about how to get it open, I suggested trying to drill the side. The Japanese archeology team all started talking at once, all up-in-arms about my suggestion. So we fretted some more about how to do it and finally I put my foot down about the drill. With much hemming and hawing, the Japanese fetched their best drill and then became all up-in-arms about the fact that their super-powerful-awesome drill couldn't even put a dent in the side of the box. I couldn't help laughing loudly at that. Okay, it figures. So the box was definitely magical.

Again we went back to discussing endlessly how we'd go about opening it. After a few more hours of talking it out, we finally decided to do the following: fill the box with sand to keep the artifacts in place (so as not to hurt the vials), then turn the box upside down, then lift the box off of the lid so that the vials would retain their contents (since the trap was relying on gravity to empty the vials when the box was opened upright).

With much trepidation, George carefully opened the lid, slid a knife around to each linkage point for the traps, cutting the lines carefully, and then lifted the box the rest of the way off. Some of the liquid, whatever it was, managed to escape, but ended up sizzling or burning the sand we'd packed inside the box, and failing to harm either us or the artifacts. Quickly we retrieved the artifacts and moved them away from the box area to keep them safe. I put them, with the other artifacts we'd acquired, in my utility bag while George spent some time disabling the trap and extracting it from the box, leaving the box intact so we could bring it back with us.

We returned to the camp and I handed the second anchor ring to Farrokh so that he now had both. At least one of them should be the actual relic for which he had been searching.

And so, back to camp, back to waiting. It took another week and a half's time to break through into the second tunnel. This one had been a lot tougher since apparently the cave-in had existed for far longer, perhaps centuries, allowing the rock to really settle together.

But, they did eventually break through, and once again we sent George in on all fours to go inspect the chamber, searching for traps.

Inside, he was to discover, were eight 12-ft tall alabaster statues of hoplites with spears, and…. another box on a raised block *groan*. Wonderful. Having already figured out a way to deal with this type of situation, back we treked to the Japanese campsite, and, after some more sweet-talking, we returned with their fibre optic eye. This time we all headed into the room, George having already marked the traps, and stood in wait while Jack disabled the trap attached to the back of the box, George slipped the eye in to inspect the contents.

Inside; the skeleton of another child, wrapped in expensive silks. It was all he could really tell without moving the box.

Given the degree of trap set on the previous box in the other tunnel, we all agreed that some caution was in order.

Once again we attached a rope to the box, all crawled back into the tunnel, and waited alertly while George carefully pulled it toward us. About halfway through the room that the statues started getting… “anxious.” As in, moving a little. So, George stopped pulling, and we all filed back into the room to take a look. I suggested destroying the statues. George made a gagging sound not unlike the Japanese had when I'd suggested drilling the box. Even Niko found the suggestion distasteful and hesitated.

After a short discussion, we finally agreed to destroy all but one statue, the one farthest from the tunnel into the hallway, just to see what it did when we pulled the box the rest of the way across the room.

Baaaack into the tunnel we filled again and George resumed his pulling.

Predictably, the one remaining statue animated and activated as the box reached the far edge of the room, and it walked toward it with purpose, seeming to be intent on retrieving it more than attacking. George and Niko immediately jumped into the room and took up battle positions. The two had made minced alabaster of the thing just as I had finished filing back into the room. Well then!

With that last roadblock taken care of (I hoped!), we all filed back out into the tunnel, and George resumed his blessedly final leg of pulling. Once extracted from the room, George, not noticing any further traps on the thing, opened it.

Lamely, this box was what it had appeared to be: the burial coffin for the son of a king. It was filled with expensive but non-magical artifacts, burial gifts. We decided (George convinced the rest of us) to return it to the tunnel and leave it for the Japanese team to come and catalogue, along with the rest of the non-magical dig site, and we would be on our way.