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Some time, some where, some thing was going to pay for all this. She'd held hands and come down, nice as you please, but the dark haired girl was resenting every minute of it. They were not in sodding Disney World. Still, what choice did she have but to stay here with this lot? Her charcoal was rolled in her map paper and shoved in her pocket roughly, but say she mapped this place, would that nasty little map maker even keep his end of the deal and show her a way to a city? He'd not even given them more than a swallow of water, he was clearly one of Them, and these people were all in the same situation. Rosa had sorted out their names, now, she thought and got her first impressions - and in her usual judgemental way decided they were all stupid. Only Howl had treated her anywhere near what she considered nicely, Pyxis was like something out of an inane cartoon and Erin hadn't even said sorry for her inevitable betrayal back in the desert. And the rest were ignoring her arrival. However they like her had woken up here and the more people trying to find a way home, the better.

Besides. There was treasure and how heartening the prospect of treasure was. You could always do with more shiny things and Rosa intended to get her share of it.

So she took up a torch and let Howl light it before he went, then hung back to wait to go through the door. She'd go in behind the guy with the dreads....though she couldn't help it. She snickered softly when Hematite shoved Pyxis. Couldn't keep up the nice act forever after all this heat and thirst and being surrounded by morons. And hey, it was funny.

As soon as the way was clear, she'd go through the door.

Hematite glanced at the other girl still in the room, holding his torch up to throw the light between them both. It didn't look like either of them were going to budge on the door issue for some time. Despite not knowing a lot of things, Hematite did know that magic was inherently a pain in the a**. Ending up in the middle of a desert? Magic. Finding a bunch of random clue-finding senshi and teenagers in said desert? Also magic. A bunch of people casually walking through solid rock? Definitely magic. And he would have stayed right here if he'd had any hope that wandering the desert outside would be less bad than the inside of some ridiculous tomb. He'd die of heat during the day, but night was when all the animals came out. He had a bad feeling about that.

Hematite's resolve broke first. He stepped forward, stabbing the torch into the rock doorway before stepping through it.

"Oh my god." It was the first thing out of the mouth of Sailor Scylla. Everywhere, nothing but the glitter of treasure that she'd only dreamed of and seen in movies. There was a yellow glitter everywhere. The room was positively enchanting. Not for the monetary value of what lay here, but the historical value. If this was truly the treasure of kings... who knew what could be found here?! Purple eyes took in the mounds of treasure, and she stepped forward a few steps. It was impossible not to be impressed. Absolutely impossible. Still, the unabbreviated mass of gold was not what she had thought would be in such a trove. Where were the statues, the artwork? Gold was fine and dandy, but it was not treasure.

She stared open-mouthed for a split second longer, before the lights grew brighter. Behind her, her companions were coming through the door. She turned, back to the gold, to see their faces as they came into the room and saw the mounds of gold. "Isn't it beautiful?" she asked, once the last of her companions had come through the door. And then she turned back to stare over the room and the piles of treasure. Unequivocally; and each would have their own opinion of what these piles were worth.

It was gold, not water. There was shade, a roof, but it was not... no, this was no shelter. Not really.

If they assumed the riddle was speaking in the literal, this trove was most likely a test, or a trap. The moat that had dissolved the pieces of her straw made her nervous; she made sure not to get too close to it. "Cruel," she commented, "That they'd get us so parched, and then give us acid instead of water as our only liquid." She dropped another piece of straw into the small moat, to show her allies what she meant.

She didn't know if anyone else had noticed the small detail.

One hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty feet away (the approximate length of a football field, if she recalled) was another door. She frowned at it, eyes darting to the walls of gold that lined the only path. And then she had to look away, almost dazzled by the glitter of eight torches.

The little boy-girl-senshi, she noticed belatedly, was loaded down with torches. "Let me take some of those, sweetheart." she told him. "Please."

[GM Note: Note that this doesn't contain a bolded, non-passive action, and thus will not count toward your 24-hour posting requirement!]

The first thing Howl said when he made his way through the strange entrance was the first thing he had heard when he entered. "Acid?" Given enough time, he would manage to locate the mentioned deceiving liquid. However, his eyes were initially drawn to the piles of treasure. Scylla had not been all that impressed, Boreas seemed disappointed, and Howl now seemed to look at the glittering piles of wealth in a critical manner. He was the sort of boy who liked things that glittered, but he only liked very particular accents to his outfits. And these accents could only be made of the finest metals. Proof to such appreciation remained adorning his ponytail in the two hair sticks decorating his hair.

"I am with Mr. Boreas about this. I would rather have the basic essentials at the moment over these tacky trinkets." Howl's opinion about the piles of treasure was quite obvious.

As he continued to look around, he managed to catch the faint hint of a door on the opposite side of this strange cavern. It was a bit difficult to see, since there was a pile of treasure rather obnoxiously looming shortly ahead in their path.

"I would suggest moving forward, but it would seem the rest of our company has still yet to arrive, my companions." Turning back to the wall which he had just passed through, he found that strangely, there was no outline of a door here anymore.

"How rather strange." He didn't walk back to the wall to examine it, simply because others would be following him shortly.

While he waited for the others to exit, the teal-haired lad wandered up the set path a ways, casually sliding his sunglasses over his eyes while he continued to look at the piles of gold. He just couldn't stand what he was assuming to be a fake sheen to all of this treasure.

He really hadn't meant to set the desert-person on fire. Maybe their first meeting wasn't necessarily the most friendly (or sensible), but it was certainly nothing to kill him over. Pyxis tumbled through the door after being shoved, the bags of torch-sticks weighing just enough to send him sprawling on the floor. Fortunately, he seemed to have missed what the others were describing as "acid". He knew that it just meant he was supposed to keep his hands and feet inside the "ride" at all times.

"Oh, yes, thank you!" he responded to Scylla, smiling up at her as he stood and brushed himself off. He shook off some of the slings, holding them in the crooks of his elbows, careful not to drop the lit torch he was holding.

It wasn't until he shifted the flame from hand to hand that he saw the hoard of gold and other shiny things in front of him. Dropping the slings to the ground - more out of awe than any disrespect for his companion - he wandered dangerously close to the piles. The gleam hadn't attracted him out of any sort of greed, but Pyxis wasn't one to decline obtaining anything pretty and shiny. He thought of all of the jewelry he could make for himself and his friends; shiny shiny gold would make really good Christmas presents! "Too bad it's not really real," he mused aloud, retracting the hand that had very nearly brushed against the pile. "They wouldn't put it where all kinds of people could try and take it and all. 'cause that would be silly!"

Regardless of its authenticity, his eyes were huge and owlish as he examined the coins to determine how they were made, careful to keep the lit torch away from them. He would hate to catch the whole place on fire if the paint was flammable.

Scylla smiled at the other senshi, brightly colored and looking so very young, and reached out to grab the slings from the crook of the other figure's arm; she missed, however, as Pyxis caught sight of the piles of gold and gems in the room that they were in. Torch held carefully out to the side so that she did not set herself on fire, she bent into an odd little dip and lifted them up off the ground, slinging what he had dropped over her shoulder. It was almost a curtsy, back straight and knees being what bent; it kept her from pulling something silly, or flashing her companions, most of which were male.

Howl, Boreas, one of the female civilians and the little senshi were all moving towards the gold pile; frankly, Scylla agreed with the decision to get out of here. It was the Abu Syndrome, see. Eventually, someone would get greedy. "Remember what happened to the cave of Wonders when Abu touched the treasure." she said conversationally, aiming her voice towards Pyxis. It was easier to seem like she was talking to the child, but hopefully all of her companions would take the warning to heart.

"No, you're not the only one who finds something strange about the 'treasure'." she agreed with the girl and Raite. "And yes, I do." She flipped a small piece of the wood she had to Raite. The piece was two to three inches long, a slender little shards. She could only assume it came from a broken torch? But that was odd. She didn't think about it any further. Raite would surely tell her if anything happened. Instead, Scylla started toward the door, walking carefully along the path. She'd learned about traps from that game she and her sisters played. World of War...craft?

The carnelian-studded statue which Boreas examined turned out to be, simply, a big gold statue with a murky carnelian gem set in its forehead. Although the treasure piles generally had an oddness to their glittering, nothing in particular seemed to be odd about the way the statue shone in the light. Leaning in so close, it almost felt like there was a source of warmth somewhere nearby.

What Howl and Erin noticed, when examining the piles of gold, was that the reason they seemed to have such a strange glitter was that some of the pieces were . . . moving. No, not pieces -- when they squinted very hard and tried to keep their eyes on just one of them, they finally worked out that what they were looking at was actually a gold scarab beetle moving among the treasure. The creatures were everywhere among the gold, it seemed -- hundreds of them -- but the ones nearest to Erin and Howl seemed to be moving away, generally.

To Pyxis, the gold coins didn't turn out to be especially remarkable. The one unusual thing about them was that they weren't all of the same currency: they bore the stamped busts of several different faces, but to Pyxis, at least, none of the faces looked familiar.

The water in the moat was still and limpid. Even when Raite dropped the larger stick in it, it barely stirred the tiniest of ripples, and only for a moment -- then the stick was gone.

Upon reaching the far door without incident, Scylla could see that the moat was no wider here than anywhere else. It seemed they'd be able to step quite harmlessly over it -- if they could get the door open. Up close, the door turned out not to be stone, either -- it was a dull, unrefined metal of some kind.

[Rosaline Thyleman and Captain Hematite have died. Each will fall into a deeper coma for the duration of Tartaros, and wake up at the conclusion of the plotline. Please PM me if there are any questions.]

Rosaline Thyleman, making a closer investigation of the moat, knelt at one corner of the room and bent her torch toward the water. That was a mistake -- the water devoured the flame of her torch, and then she was in darkness. The others spun just in time to see her torch go out.

As they watched, suddenly several of the golden scarabs scuttled out from the nearest pile of treasure and over to Rosaline, who was kneeling, startled. They swarmed her -- literally, swarmed her -- and before any of the others could reach her, there was nothing to reach anymore: Rosaline was gone. Left in her place were a pair of gold earrings she had been wearing, but even the jewels they'd been studded with were gone. The scarabs had eaten everything, save the gold studs of her earrings.

Captain Hematite kicked one of the statues, a peculiar statue with carnelian eyes. Something terrible happened, just as terrible as what had befallen Rosaline just moments before: the statue fell back, cradled in a bed of coins and other valuables, but its eyes lit up as brightly as flame, crackling like sparklers. Fire burst forth, jumping from the statue's eyes to the flame at the end of Hematite's torch.

"INFIDEL!" came a crackling voice, out of the flame. It formed into a face, and then the face into a head and torso, and then a full body, streaming up from the fire. It had burning gold-red skin of flame, occasionally mottled with black, like sunspots, that disappeared again and manifested somewhere else. Its hair was a thick twist of smoke, and its clothing -- if that was what it was -- was a tunic of perpetually-shedding ash. This was, no doubt, a djinni like the inscription outside this room had warned them off. "THIEF!" it -- he? -- screamed. "SCAVENGING FOOL!"

The djinni grew, its flames snatching their way down Hematite's torch and swallowing him up. He was quickly immolated -- or, they hoped it was quick. For them, it seemed to last an eternity. The smell of it was terrible, the sight of it nearly impossible to bear.

All around the room, the carnelian was all universally glowing with flame: the carnelian fragment studding the forehead of the statue Boreas had been examing looked like it was full of fire, and he wisely took a few steps back from it. What was left of Hematite fell to the ground.

And the scarabs came.

Some of the gold accents from his uniform were left behind in their wake, but the only other reminder of the dead Negaverse captain was the horrible, meaty smell of charred flesh.

The djinni looked around the rest of the room with its flickering, sunspot eyes, then sank in around the statue Hematite had kicked like it was tethered there. It seemed frighteningly patient.

[Note that being killed by the djinni is normally a rollable action (i.e. there is some chance of survival).]