Kaldalis was moving before he realized what he was doing.

He didn’t know what a clicking sound in the wall should mean, but his experiences in dungeons had long ago taught him that anything could be a threat, from the biggest dragon down to the smallest bunny.

So, tank instincts took over and he hurled himself at Haldir, tackling him to the ground.

The clicking sound in the wall became a whirr, and Kaldalis braced for the worst. A spinning blade was his expectation, but it could have been anything; a jet of flame wouldn’t be surprising, nor would a stream of arrows or a wall of spikes. A full second passed with nothing happening, just that whirring sound. Kaldalis looked up.

The triangle Haldir had touched had been pushed into the wall by about a quarter-inch, but nothing else was different. Just that whirring noise.

“Um,” Haldir said, sprawled beneath Kaldalis. “Hello?”

“Get down, mister president!” Myrin yelled, barely getting through the first two words before the rest was garbled by laughter.

“Er, sorry,” Kaldalis said, struggling back to his feet before offering his hand to help Haldir up. “I thought something was going to happen.”

“Something did,” Balrim said, stepping up to the wall and looking at the depressed triangle. “Just not something dangerous. This is a switch of some sort. Not sure what it does, though.”

“The whirring sound is worrying,” Haldir admitted, stepping back and looking at the whole wall again. “I’m not sure what to make of it.”

“Maybe it’s not all the way in,” Kaldalis suggested.

Like a true noob, Balrim reached out and pushed on the triangle.

There was a ratcheting click as the triangle sank into the wall by about three inches. The whirring sound redoubled for a moment, and all four of them flinched back, bracing for something. It continued unabated, but there was a click and a snap, and instead of the sudden springing of a deathtrap, a hidden door opened.

The door was in the mural wall, and was shaped so that the seams lined up with the lines of the geometric shapes of the mural, hiding it from cursory inspection. It didn’t swing all the way open, but just popped out of flush.

Myrin was the closest and she nudged the door open a bit wider to peek inside.

“It’s a dead end,” she quickly reported, “but there’s something in here.” She didn’t wait for a response before opening the door a little wider and heading in.

“Yeah, just wander off,” Balrim called as he gave a huff before following, “that sounds like the best possible course of action.”

With a shared shrug, Kaldalis and Haldir followed right behind Balrim.

The square room beyond the oddly-shaped door was cramped for four people, maybe six or seven feet on a side. Unlike the rest of the place, the sealing on this room had been tight, and so the air was musty, but not damp. No moss lined these walls.

Myrin was hunkered down, examining what looked to be some sort of mechanical device.

“What do we have?” Kaldalis asked.

“Loot?” Myrin said. She reached over and started fiddling with the device. “Maybe loot. But maybe also instant death?”

“It’s usually one or the other, not both,” Balrim said.

The device itself was a cylinder about two feet long and one foot wide, with an obvious seam about halfway up it with a ridged bit that looked like a cogwheel set into it. As Myrin started to fiddle with it, it was apparent that it was fastened to the floor. A six-inch shaft jutted out of it and into the wall.

“It looks like it opens up here,” Myrin said. She tentatively touched the gear in the middle of the cylinder and started to manually twist it. It obviously fought her, forcing her to grunt with effort to get it about a quarter-turn. Turning it seemed to be causing the seam just below it to widen, but as soon as she let go, the cog spun back into its previous position, sealing the tiny gap nearly instantly.

“Okay, so maybe we could cheese it like that,” Balrim said, “but there has to be an intended solution.” He pointed around the room. “Check the walls, there might be another panel in here.”

The quartet spread out to check the surrounding walls, but they had barely started searching when Myrin found a panel about three feet off the ground, right above the device. It looked like a similar arrangement as the gate they’d dealt with earlier. There was a system of gears at the top and bottom, separated by a small gap with a shaft for two gears to bridge the gap. The lower system of gears connected to a shaft that vanished into a hole in the stone, presumably going straight down to the cylindrical device.

“We only have the two gears,” Balrim observed. “Do we really want to use them here?”

“They can’t possibly be hiding fewer gears than we’d need to continue,” Kaldalis said. “If there wasn’t enough, then it would be possible to get stuck and unable to continue. No skilled dungeon designer would set something up like that.”

“Okay,” Balrim said, pointing to the upper system of gears. “But there’s another problem. These gears aren’t moving. We can connect the gears, but if they aren’t moving nothing is going to happen. And there’s no obvious chain here to pull.”

“That whirring noise is still going on in the other room,” Kaldalis observed. “There’s some automated system running something. Maybe it should be connected here?”

“Alright,” Balrim said, handing their loose gears to Myrin, “then let’s start searching again.”

Balrim and Myrin started checking in the room they were all in, while Kaldalis and Haldir returned to the room with a mural to search there. The whirring was much louder in the mural room, and while Haldir decided to scrape what little moss he could find from the other walls to search for new panels, Kaldalis put his ear to the wall, following the sound.

It was loudest right beneath the left side of the mural, where the abstract shapes looked like a larger figure delivering a speech to a gathering, but no matter how he searched, there was no panel here. The sound was definitely moving left to right, though, and while he wanted to follow it away from the nose - where the button was - he had to follow it the other direction, towards the door. Whatever mechanical power was being provided, it was reaching this point, but being blocked from that smaller room; whatever the problem was, it would be resolved in between here and there, not by following the noise to its source.

Picking his way along the wall, following the whirring noise, Kaldalis poked and prodded at every geometric shape painted on the stone. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he suspected he was in the right place to find it by following the sound towards the mechanism they wanted to activate.

It wasn’t until he was checking right next to the oddly-shaped door that one of the shapes shifted. It was a rhombus that only shifted a little, but it shifted, and as soon as Kaldalis pressed down on it again, it clicked. When he let go, it popped open like a cabinet door, revealing the source of the problem.

The inside of the small cabinet area looked like a gearbox. There was a spinning shaft sticking out of the stone from the direction he had been following, and two still shafts, one of them going straight down, while the other went into the back wall of the cabinet, obviously into the room with the device.

The spinning shaft didn’t reach the gear assembly, denying the rest of the system any power. Kaldalis took a moment to inspect the system, trying to figure out what went wrong. The walls inside were damp, and while not covered in moss, there was a discolored layer of lichen spreading from the outside in. There was some debris in the bottom of the cabinet, and he carefully reached in and swept it out with his hand, keeping cautious of the spinning shaft.

“Hey Haldir?” Kaldalis called out. “What do you make of this?”

The other vathon stopped clearing the moss and moved to join Kaldalis in examining the cabinet gearbox.

“This is definitely what we’re looking for.” Haldir carefully reached in, taking a small piece of the debris and holding it up where they could see it. “And I think this is the problem right here?”

“What is it?”

“Wood. Rotted wood,” Haldir said, flicking the fragment away. “There used to be some support structure in here to hold everything together. Too long without maintenance or attention in wet conditions destroyed it.”

“Easy fix, though. I might have something for this. As long as you think it’s safe,” he added, quickly.

Haldir shrugged, but gestured for him to go ahead. Tentatively, Kaldalis searched his inventory, eventually finding the poisoned fang from the Irritator that he’d held onto. It was basically the right size to work as a tool, and by far more durable than just wood. Kaldalis wedged it diagonally between the gear assembly and the wall of the cabinet, and used it for leverage to push the still gears towards the spinning shaft.

Once the gears touched, the assembly started to spin. As Kaldalis wedged the tooth into place to hold the gear assembly together, two things happened. First, near at hand, they both heard Myrin yelp and Balrim curse, thankfully both in surprise rather than fear or pain.

The second thing was that a spinning blade whipped out of the wall near the mural’s nose, about four feet off the ground. The blade shuddered at the apex of its slash, and rather than sawing out and retreating back in, there was a loud snapping and the wobbling whine of a breaking spring. The sawblade was launched out of the slot it emerged from and ripped through the air, burying itself in the stone wall on the opposite side of the small room. The blade vibrated there for a long moment.

Kaldalis found himself halfway through a string of curses before he got control of his heart rate at the sudden trap triggering. He blew out a deep breath and tried to compose himself.

“Spinning blades,” he said at last, “it had to be spinning blades, huh?”

He looked over at Haldir, and stopped himself from laughing when he saw the other man’s expression. His usual greenish hue had turned sickly pale as he stared wide-eyed at the glittering edge of the blade buried eight inches into solid stone.

“That…” Haldir started, and then stopped, swallowing. “That could have been me. If this mechanism had been in place, I’d be-”

“You’d be fine.” Kaldalis patted Haldir on the shoulder. “I tackled you as soon as the switch clicked, remember? ‘Get down, mister president’?”

Haldir’s eyes finally tore away from the blade to Kaldalis’s face. “You saved my life.”

“Not really,” Kaldalis pointed out, “but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“Thank you,” Haldir said.

“There’s loot!” Myrin called from the next room, interrupting. “But don’t bother coming in here, I got dibs!”

Kaldalis rolled his eyes. “This was a team effort, remember? Maybe we should talk through this before just handing stuff out?”

“It’s got attack speed on it,” Balrim said in a disappointed tone.

Haldir and Kaldalis exchanged a look.

“Yeah, okay,” Kaldalis said. “You can keep it. Just get back out here and we’ll get moving. I’ve come here to kill monsters and solve puzzles, and we’re all out of puzzles.”