Warning: if you're reading this log and you want to some day play in the published adventure "Canyon O' Doom", don't. Just because Dr. Vorpwhistle's response to things man was not meant to know is to whip out his notebook doesn't mean that you should be reading here. Maybe after you get your PhD and publish some papers.

After resting a few moments in the tunnel past the boneyard, they push on and find themselves in a large and very interesting cave. In the center of the cave is a raised dais on which sits an almost skeletal corpse, dressed in a loincloth and a large amount of heavy gold jewelry. The walls are painted in swirls of color, faded but still apparent. Niches in the walls contain dolls, pots, more jewelry, and so on. On the floor against the walls are stacked bones - apparently complete skeletons in little piles.

Dr. Haskins, of course, inspects everything. It seems like it might be Anasasi work, though the swirling colors are extremely unusual. He takes some of the jewelry out of one of the niches.

The skeleton on the dais wakes up. The piles also start reassembling themselves into complete skeletons. A confused melee ensues. Sophie leaps onto the head skeleton before it can rise, and ends up wrestling with it. It has some sort of strange breathing attack, and so Sophie manages to cut its head off. Another one of the skeletons picks it up, and there is little effect.

Meanwhile Bart somehow blends in with the skeletons, and they ignore him until he takes the king's head from the one holding it. It starts talking in his head, telling him what to do, but he mostly resists and ends up blowing the head apart with his gatling pistol (losing the end of a finger in the process) and running off, many of the skeletons chasing him.

Which is just as well, because before chasing Bart, the skeletons managed to claw up Robert very badly, scratching his face and ripping his neck enough that he nearly faints from loss of blood before calling a spirit to heal him. It is able to stop the bleeding, but he still looks pretty awful.

Finally, Sophie and Tobey cut the hands off the (headless but still frisky) king corpse and get Sophie free, and they smash a lantern into it, lighting it on fire. It burns up fairly quickly, and the other skeletons collapse. They then loot the tomb - there is perhaps $25000 in gold jewelry - and take some archaeologically interesting items as well. Then they retreat to another cave to rest.

The night passes with another visit from one of the flickering ghosts being the only disturbance. Dr. Haskins somehow chases it off. The next day they slog onward, following the talisman through the caves. Early on they encounter a large cave that has been a home for bats for far too long. The accumulated guano and ammonia fumes are pretty hard on the breathing members of the party, and the whole thing is disgusting, but they make it through.

Past that cave, the passage slowly spirals down. Glowing fungus begins growing on the walls, until by the end of the passage it is as illuminating as a moonlit night. The cavern at the end of the passage is huge - so big that they can't quite see the ceiling, and wider and longer than they can see. Or could see, if it weren't full of a strange fungal forest, huge mushrooms and molds as thick as a jungle. The forest smells extremely strange. Luckily, there is a path through it that they can follow, although the talisman pulls in a different direction. They decide to follow the path rather than hack through the fungus.

They are attacked by some sort of giant long-nosed bug, which chews on Robert a bit before its nose is hacked off and it retreats to die somewhere more inviting. They also encounter a patch of exploding puffballs, but manage not to get caught in the explosion. They are forced to hack their way around a pillbug the size of a locomotive, through some fungus that moans and sighs, and then ford a small stream. Tobey communes for a moment, and gets a good feeling about which way to go to get to where the talisman is leading.

Thanks to Jan Maessen and Andrea Humez for guest-starring as Edgar and Sophie.

MM: When we walked into the burial chamber, Tobey asked Edgar what usually happened when you disturb such a place. He admitted that bad things tended to happen these days. Tobey asked "Like the piles of bones turning into skeletons and trying to kill us?"