S1 E 18: Stuck in the Middle Again

In which the gang suffers a little 'separation anxiety'...

• About to head back to Ophidra, but decided that since they hadn't completely cleared things, it would be hard to tell her they had; so they headed down to the entrance from inside the cave system, where they knew there were still a few gnoll guards oblivious to the destruction that the gang had so recently wrought.
• The gnoll guards spot Claude, and the element of surprise is lost, but the gnolls aren't much in a fight. Still, despite losing one and then another of their number, they hold their ground in the front entry, against the party coming at them from inside the rear part of the room
• Claude and Rongo trigger an old trap, huge stone slabs drops from the ceiling as each passes over a hidden plate; if they had been coming into the cave from the outside, they might have been squashed flat, but instead they find themselves separated from the rest of the party and as a second slab falls down, from each other.
• Claude scrabbles up into the mechanics of the thing and cuts one of the cables; in the end this might have just made it even harder to lift the stones, but they're already stuck so it doesn't matter that they're more stuck now. Claude can sense the ground is no more than 10' above him through relatively soft sedimentary soil that has collected on the slope of the canyon,
• The reason for the gnolls reluctance to run off is revealed; against the whole party they wouldn't have had a chance, but 2-on1?
• Well, they still don't have much of a chance. Rongo takes one out and the other one finally does run away. Rongo starts to give Chase but Mae, in giant serpent form, burrows up from under the second door, and after a long while spent on trying to sort out how to reopen the doors, they decide just to go back the way they came. Luckily the threat wasn't so bad this time, but a lesson is learned - watch out for ambushes and traps in narrow spaces.
• They return to Ophelia to find the altar literally coated in blood and several of the cultists missing; also she has two bodyguards who wave them through to her immediately with a familiar nod.
• She suggests that the caves are probably best left as they are now, rather than completely cleaned out, for fear that something even worse than gnolls and orcs might move in. Letting the bugbears, hobgoblins and goblins have it, and leaving the kobolds alone, certainly makes things easier. But there's still whatever is going on in cave G, and the rumors of the metal minotaur in his labyrinth are provocative, too - of course that thing or machine is guarding some fabled treasure. And someone - the kobolds perhaps? Suggested that the minotaur might have been placed there by Quindarin himself. In any event, Ophidra seemed pleased that the Yuan-ti temple had been cleansed, and had no other pressing directive for the gang other than to take care when spending and selling off their loot not to draw too much attention to the caves, which would send treasure hunters and tourists into a place where neither is desired and both might come to serious harm. She kept the large silver snake, naming it as Shesemu, as well as the strange golden figurines, but had no interest in anything else, including the staff of the adder and the staff of bat swarm.
• Ophedra helped them identify the strange glass eye filled with whirring components inside the music box they had found earlier. Taking it outside into the moonlight near the stroke of midnight, they saw that it cast a number at their feet: 327. A portentious number, Ophidra explained, citing the mathematical and numerological significance of the digits; as the threshold of midnight was crossed, the number ticked down to 326.