Will You Open The Chest?

[Sendicard]

You're a rogue named Cecellia, you have shiny long green hair in twin tails and a pair of rusty daggers. Your lockpick set is your most prized possession, kept clean and cared for even while your attack avenue falters and falls apart.
You take a moment to care about your statistics.

Cecellia: Level 3

Strength: 7

Constitution: 8

Dexterity: 16

Agility: 15

Intellect: 6

Wisdom 5

You have about a 100 gold to your name, mostly your party uses it to care about food and lodgings, this means equipment, techs, skills, traits, those kind of things are gotten almost exclusively through looting.
Your upkeep of 20 gold a night is static, and will not be altering until you decide to upgrade your quality of life. You make about 25 gold per adventure, leaving a measly 5 gold of profit. This is enough to treat yourself sometimes, or buy a new pair of badly made daggers every few weeks when yours fall apart in an enemy.

Your team is outleveling you because exp is based on damage done, and even the healer's staff is bonking harder than you. This is a regular cause of irritation, and you're worried they will abandon you soon. That's not the end of the world, you could start over with a level 1 group and be the cool superior for a few weeks, but level 1 quests are actually a net loss so you'd rather not do that if you don't have to.

Your skills are simple.
Lockpicking: Level 5
Carve: Level 3 - you whittle, it's calming.
Threat Detection: Level 2
Lying: Level 10

Your techs are also simple.
Dodge
Attack
Sneak Attack
Cry

And your traits are lacking. You'd love to buy some at some point, or maybe buy one off, but they're so expensive.
Bait
Cute
Poor
Malnourished

Enough of that, the setting is set. You now understand your situation, and why exactly this chest is alluring.

See, on this adventure you managed to spot a hidden panel, lifting it up and pressing a hidden button opened up a wall.
Your team was immediately worried, but you are broke and desperate, so you went into the dark room.
It immediately lit up with magical torches. Inside the room is very plain, white tile and tall.
Each side has holes for where arrows or spikes might jut out, but as far as you can tell there's no hidden trap doors or buttons on the floor to step on.

At the center of the room, is a wooden chest with metal plating. The lock is simple, you're sure you could unlock it.
Your team won't enter the room with you, the cowards.

Will You Open The Chest?
[X] Yes
[X] No

 

[Sendicard]

"Uh, Cecellia, that sounds like a really bad idea," one of your cowardly teammates decides to speak cowardly, "we're almost done for the day..."

You ignore him, he's a dumb brute anyway. He's spent a good portion of your adventuring time with you being crude and rude and stealing your damage. That's the problem, it's not that you can't kill things, it's that they won't let you. Why would they let you beat a monster to death for a full minute, or stab it and wait for it to bleed out from the rusty wounds, when they can walk up and kill it in seconds.

The richer get richer is the way of the adventuring world, and you're getting really sick of them actively decreasing your gains with this whole 'trying to protect you' thing and the dumb 'Everyone is getting attacked, keep up' argument.

Okay so it's not completely unfair, but they are a big part of the problem. If the situation doesn't change in one way or another, you will be sitting around begging low levels for a team while they go off and recruit some half-ling to take your place.

Change requires risk. Change is not something that just appears out of thin air, or that you wait for and lazily flopping around happens to hit the right trap door. Maybe some people get lucky enough to be approached by opportunity, but you weren't, and you never have been. Every exp you've gained, every coin, every item you've ever collected has been because you worked for it.
You're not about to start lying back and taking it now.

That doesn't change that this is dangerous. You eye the holes, finding that the holes are actually rather round. Some look different, with little metal slits to hold something in place. You shrug at that, nothing you can do about it, whip out your trusty lockpick set and get to work. You're a level 5 locksmith, and funnily enough, you actually manage to catch a trap just in time to disarm it. The trap was simple, two pins needed to be held up simultaniously and didn't want to click otherwise, once the pin behind your picks closed you'd be unable to remove your pick and would have to either break the chest or abandon your loot along with your lockpick.

None of that matters, your reflexes caught it, your danger sense tingled a little, and with a Dexterity of 16 you found such a low level trap pretty easy to deal with.
Your group has been taking things a little easy because of you, they've wanted you to get opportunities to get damage off so they didn't have to abandon you outright. That means you're actually in a level 3 area, which is more than good enough to handle this.

Even if it does mean they do so much more damage you're actually getting rail roaded harder from more angles. Good intentions, terrible execution.
You'd give them crap about it but you don't really care. You only know they're doing that because they're holding it over your head, while stealing your kills, and guilting you about it. If you're going to use good will to guilt someone, it's not good will, you're just an asshole.

Inside the chest there's nothing special. Some kind of cylinder with metal slates hanging off of all three- right.

Inserting it directly into one of the wall slots with the correct looking pattern - a process that took a few minutes of looking as they all varied slightly - the door to leave slams shut with a stone slate.
It seems that either they'll wait for you to get out, or they'll abandon you.

They're the ones who chose not to follow you, so by guild rules they abandoned you, not the other way around, so you'll at least still get your pay for the day, they can't screw you out of that.

Then the wall in front of you opens up, the proceed mechanic from the chest sliding away into the air. You jump for it possessively, but you're just not that tall and it's moving pretty fast. You miss it, land, and take a breath as you find a secret path that leads you deep into the darkness.

"Oh well." You pull out your rusty daggers, and get going down the walkway into the deep dark depths.
No automatically lighting up torches, unlike the other room, and you would have to find your way if it wasn't straight.

It's not long before a spider lands in your hair, which you immediately crush with the back of your blade against your head. Then another, which you do the same. Your spine crawls a little, and you start to wonder if this is just a hella spider deathtrap.

That is until you see a big purple chest surrounded by hundreds of the buggers. It has a spider ornament on the front, and it does seem like their mother is here and not very happy.
Damn-it, if they'd came with you maybe!

You lunge.

---

It's not a very good fight. While you can definitely say you won; corpses everywhere, guts in your hair, splatter in every direction, you can't say it was fun. You're heavily injured, you're pretty sure the team is never gonna give you the end of this even if they abandon you, and to make matters worse your hands are so slimy and slippery that picking the chest is more an exercise in futility than any sort of cool sly masterwork.

Eventually you figure out you can wipe your hands on the hanging webs, and it's a lot easier, but you have to be careful because there's already a precedent for traps in the chests.

Like it or not though, the chest does do what you say, and what you say is to obey. It swings open with an angry kick, and inside you find a cloak.
It seems a little too big for you, but that's fine, rogues are supposed to have billowing capes anyway, it's thematic.

[Cloak of Spiderwalk] Obtained
A simple reading of its description gives you a very good idea of what it does.

The Cloak of Spiderwalk is an artifact that allows the user to walk on walls, ceilings, and other surfaces that are normally in an angle humans and the like cannot walk there. It also allows you to walk and traverse spider web like it's normal terrain.

However, if you are not traversing through spider web, the cloak is stiff and loud, making it impossible to sneak or move quickly.

Click to shrink...

That's...
It's not the worst thing you've ever picked up, but as cool as walking on ceilings sounds, you don't plan to hire a dryad to help you and sneak attack is one of your only four techs.
One of which is Cry, which isn't even a useful yell it's actually tearing up and looking cute and pathetic while doing it. Which isn't very useful, because this is SV so there's no graphically picking you up and - well, you know, that can be left to your imagination you filthy perverts.

So the question is, sell it or wear it?
[]Sell it
[]Wear it

 

[Sendicard]

[]Overwhelmingly, Keep it

---

You decide you want the stupid cloak of walky walky climby whimy spiderness.
Okay that's immature, you're just sad to have gotten something useful instead of a priceless jewel to sell.

You never found your team when you made it out. You're sure they'll be at the normal meeting position tomorrow, so you're not super worried about it. You are worried about if there'll be a new rogue there to replace you, but not if they'll be there.

You do as you always do after a 'successful' adventure and walk around the market area in search of great deals that'll maybe save you a few more coins. Your guild card has about 125 gold in it now after that adventure, you already checked, they did pay you despite your disappearance at the end. Probably because they didn't have to drag you back, and you could make the argument that they abandoned you not the other way around. Twenty five gold just isn't enough to piss off the guild for, regardless of circumstances.

Discount Magic Items is the name that catches your eyes.
Some shops are dumb, some are fun, rarely do they contain the words 'magic' and 'discount' in the same line.
You head in without hesitating for even a second. A magic item could really strengthen you, especially if it's powerful and cheap.

You're immediately beset with the musty smell of old tomes and gear covered in cobwebs. It's depressingly decrepit, and despite all the items on display you kind of want to leave.
That is until you see the old elvish man behind the counter, scrolling through some squeaky clean book and rubbing down a glass counter. "Hello." You greet as you step into his view.

"Oh dear!" He jumps up, a little taken aback at your sudden appearance. "I need to put a bell up on that door."
You decide not to tell him you're a rogue and sneaking up on people is kind of your job. He knows, he's probably not an idiot and you're not disguised.

"What kind of items do you sell here?" You ask, knowing full well it's a magic shop.
It's probably hand me downs from previous adventurers and-

-"Crap." He says outright, closing his book and matching your gaze with a sense of brutal honesty. "Nothing in here will help you. Nothing will prove useful. Every single item that's here is here because it doesn't do what it was intended for, or has no use any longer."

"That's quite the sales pitch." You tease, looking around. "What about that?" You point at a giant sword hung up on the wall. It's got a golden hilt and backing that traces up the entire weapon. It's a jewel encrusted weapon positively sparking with magical energy, and despite the cobwebs covering it you're pretty sure it could cut you in half on accident. "That looks useful."

"That's the sword of Adrios slaying, one of the strongest magical blades to ever exist. It sears its targets down to the bone without even having to make a direct connection, and it's been said it can destroy a soul with but a single cut." He says with all the confidence in the world.

"And that's... bad?" You ask, eying it over once again.

"Well, it only damages Adrios." He explains.

"And Adrios is-"

"Dead." He says with such a flat manner you actually take an awkward step back, lest you sweat drop. "Someone really, really, really hated that guy. Now it rests here. You can have it for free if you can take it out of here."

"Well the gold alone would fetch a price." You observe. "What's the catch?"

"It's fifty thousand pounds and is held up by a broken stick of unmoving." He says. "We also sell broken sticks of unmoving."

"What's that?"

"It's a stick, that once activated, never moves... Ever. It's broken, there's no off switch. You think this is a prime place to open a shop like this? No, I just activated one above the doorway and was legally forced to build a shop around it." He snickers at the memory. "You won't find what you want here, unless you're deranged or looking for something very specific and odd."

"Ah.. Do you sell bags of holding for super cheap?" You ask.

"I have bags of dropping." He says. "One gold a piece."

"And that..."

"Drops things." He clarifies, leaning over the counter. "What'll it be?"

---

You vow to go back there sometime when you have a lot more money, and want something dumb to play with. You know it's not going anywhere, the stick of unmoving won't let him.
You find a nice little spot on your bed to place the cloak. It's super comfy, much comfier than the inn pillows, so it works great for under your head.

You drift off to sleep easily, thinking of tomorrow.

[]Meet up with the team. You're pretty sure you're on your last leg with them, and they steal a lot of your exp, but they're higher level so you can do better dungeons.
[]Go start over with a new team. They'll be weak, so you'll get a lions share of the exp early on, but the pay will be smaller.