Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2016 12:40 am
Regis gave a bemused chuckle. "Skulltulas are nimble and crafty - they could no doubt get through that door if we opened it up." He stopped for a moment, thinking. "Which begs the question - how are they taken care of? If they are fed, someone would have to come down here and feed them, and they would probably have to open the door to do so. Perhaps the Pilpherer's Phalanx has someone who is good at handling monsters like these? I'm not even sure if Skulltula can be domesticated..." He mused for moment, rubbing his chin. "Although I suppose if their food is broken down into small enough chunks, it could be fed through the bars of the cage. Still, I wonder..." He finished, trailing off as he looked around the room a little more intently, pausing only to eye Pepper's torch and take a small step back when it gets a bit too close for comfort. [Awareness Check]You’re clearly an ace combat specialist, you’ve no doubt fought through a lot of closed-in-areas, seeing how well you’ve performed in this hideout so far, do you think you can size up their bodies and see if you think they could fit through the door if we opened it for whatever reason?
As he did that, Pepper and Orpheous concluded their investigations. Pepper was unable to find anything smaller than bits of gravel inside their small protected space, but looking just outside the bars to where she could reach with her hands, she saw something startling - a bone. It was too small and broken to see exactly what kind of bone it is or what species it belongs too, but it was definitely a bone. Looking up from the immediate area, she could quickly spot the scattered, bony remains of some poor creature - possibly even another humanoid - laying on the floor close to the center of the room. The Skulltulas had been blocking their view of it at first, but as the spiders became more interested in their potential prey, they had moved a bit, allowing Pepper to see the pile of bones on the floor.
As Orpheous observed the spiders and waved his torch around, he discovered that they seemed to follow the light coming from the torch in his hand, but if he moved the torch too far away from his body, their gaze shifted back to his person. As he watched them, he could clearly tell they were hungry; drool was beginning to drip from their fanged mouths and their breathing slowly increased as Orpheous and the Skulltula stared each other down. One of them began watching Pepper, and advanced several steps towards the door when her search took her closer to the bars, though it stopped short of getting close enough to touch her. It clearly knows the boundaries of its territory.
"Ah-ha!" Said Regis suddenly, a grin beginning to form on his face. "I think I may have discerned the purpose of this room. Look up at the ceiling, there." He said, pointing towards the ceiling on the northern side of the room.
"See those support beams there?" He asked, indicating the wooden beams that run diagonally from the wall to the ceiling. "Those are only on the northern wall - there are no other such support beams along the other three walls of this room." If Orpheous or Pepper took a moment to look around the room, they would confirm this is true; an odd design flaw, perhaps?
"And look at the beams themselves. I don't think they're beams at all, but rather, part of a larger mechanical set up. I can't tell for certain from this distance, but it almost looks as if the beams don't actually join to the wall, but rather go inside of it through sets of slots in the stone. And if you look closely at the ceiling near the beams," He continued, "You can see slivers of light coming in from the floor above." This was also true; in a few places along the ceiling near the north wall, there appeared to be a few small cracks in the stonework, letting a tiny amount of light in.
"What's on the northern wall of the room just above us?" He asked rhetorically, grinning. "The levers for the door!" He exclaimed with his arms open, as if that one final fact was enough to reveal his train of thought, and he waited expectantly for Orpheous to finish it.