You leave the room behind and spend twenty minutes trying to get the grille more or less back in place. It doesn’t really work, but you manage to wedge it into the opening so that at least it won’t fall over on anybody. You still give it a worried glance as you leave.
The only place left to go is down the stairs, so down you go. At the bottom, you find a smallish room with an alcove, a huge iron door that someone made specifically to be intimidating, and a sloping hallway to the south. You hear frog calls echoing in the distance from the hallway.
There’s a rusty faucet in the alcove. Jimmy says, “You know what’s weird?”
You are spoiled for choice, frankly, but you humor him. “What?”
“Every time somebody turns that faucet handle, it breaks. But every time I come down here, it’s wired back into place.”
You consider this. “Magic or plumbers, do you think?”
Jimmy makes a flailing gesture with his wings. “I don’t know. Maybe this is some kind of afterlife for plumbers and the bad ones have to stay here fixing the same faucet for all eternity.”
This is an interesting theory. It doesn’t body well for your dreams of treasure, but then again, plumbers get paid way better than adventurers.
Your options include…
Turn the faucet! Make more work for the plumbers!
Investigate the deliberately creepy door.
Follow the hallway south to the frogs.
Oysters have no afterlife. They join the great oyster overmind and are reborn.
