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Transporting a heavy chest full of coins up a tall flight of stairs was no picnic, even after Ehlissa offered to stuff her purse with coins to lighten the load.  Yrag kept urging them on, wishing for the relative safety of the surface world before he could take his time to search for false bottoms on the chest. 

Once they reached the top of the stairs and the ruined keep, Tenser watched intently as Yrag tipped over the chest and began tapping on the bottom.  He reached inside and shoveled out the coins with his hand so he could get to the bottom from the inside.  He tapped on the inside bottom and then all around the sides of the chest.  He slid his fist down to the bottom of the top-facing side, pulled down, and punched upward to see if he could make the wood perceptively buckle and judge how close to the bottom of the chest it was.

Frustrated by his lack of findings, Yrag glanced up at Tenser.  "Do they teach you anything about searching chests in wizard school?" Yrag asked with irritation in his voice.

"I must have missed that day," Tenser answered flatly.

Yrag grumbled and continued searching.

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Tenser was still fishing his hands through the copper pieces.  Yrag glanced down bitterly at his dented shield and wondered if all that copper would even be enough to pay for having the dent banged out.  But he remembered his first kill in a dungeon and his first taste of loot and could not begrudge Tenser his excitement at having won this prize, as slight as it was.  And Yrag still hoped to find more hidden in the chest, mixed in with all that copper. 

"Right," Yrag said at last.  He guessed they had been resting about 10 minutes since the battle and there was at least a 1 in 6 chance of something showing up soon to give them trouble again.  "Close up that chest.  We'll take the whole thing with us, topside..."

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That Tenser had mistaken this area behind the curtain for a room had only confirmed for Yrag that Tenser was not yet accustomed to 10-foot wide dungeon corridors.  Why so many dungeon corridors were exactly 10-feet wide Yrag could not guess nor would he ever bother to do so.  He didn't care.  Treatises on the subject sat on dusty shelves in the Library of Greyhawk, written by learned sages and prominent wizards.  Most of them had been driven mad by their own questions, though, so maybe Yrag was better off for not caring anyway.

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Ehlissa felt warm and not just because she was holding a lit torch and standing next to an ogre's burning loincloth.  Her cheeks were flush with anger from having seen the monster threaten Tenser.  Only once the monster bolted from the melee did Ehlissa realize she had to breath and that she had not breathed since before shouting at the ogre. 

Tenser adjusted his skullcap back into place.  The ogre had knocked him off-balance, but not off his feet as it had to Yrag. 

For both of them, it was a relief to see the backside of the monster as it fled.

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Yrag remained on the floor with the wind knocked out of him.  He could see that the situation was turning dire and Tenser looked to be the Eiger's next target.  An awful feeling welled up inside Yrag as the thought struck him that Tenser would be dead on the floor before Yrag could make it back up to his feet.

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The Kelbit warriors, referred to by Yrag and Tenser by their common name of "kobolds", hung back and let the Eiger living among them move forward.  Even the Kelbit used the derisive term of "ogre" for their foul, vicious, and powerful companion.  They hated it with a passion, for it bullied them constantly, but its strength was without peer on this level of the dungeon and made their clan strong by association.  Should the human intruders kill it, they would not mourn the ogre, even though its passing would leave them vulnerable.

Yrag, Tenser, and Ehlissa were lucky that the ogre felt so confident that it had strode out into the room to meet them halway instead of waiting in a doorway where it could not be flanked.  The torches worried it just a little, but the ogre planned to get rid of those nuisances just as soon as it had dealt with the swordsman...

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Tenser finished the last of the six kobolds sleeping before him, grabbed the little creature's tunic, and used it to wipe off the blood that was thick on his blade and hand.  The tunic was baggy and, upon inspection, both cut and pinned down to the kobold's size.  Perhaps it had once been a fine cote, looted from the barracks of the castle, or even taken off the body of some hapless victim the kobolds had themselves murdered.  This second theory made Tenser feel a little better about what he had done and he clung to it as truth.

There was little time for introspection.  There was still some sound of fighting in the other room, or perhaps it had moved on past that already, so dim had the clash of weapons and shields become.  Nor could he hear Yrag or Ehlissa shouting now.

Tenser parted the curtain and came back through the pillored hall to the entry room, only to spy Yrag and Ehlissa standing there, watching the northeast doorway.

At Tenser's approach, Yrag and Ehlissa snapped out of their passive stares.  The kobolds that had tried to ambush them from behind had been pushed back by Ehlissa's charmed kobold and the danger there seemed to have passed for the moment.  They turned away, with Ehlissa ready to follow Tenser and explore the new room he had found, but Yrag wanting to discuss whether they should press their advantage over the northeast kobolds. But first...

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