The small, glass statue glints in the light as you slip it from your pocket. For a second you admire the way the sodium lighting gleams off the polished surface, then remind yourself it is afterall a statue of a prawn, and stuff it into the slot.

Your ears are assaulted, ---- well more correctly mugged, beaten up and dumped into a river, by the massively amplified roar of what you first take to be several car horns in concert. After jamming your thumbs as far down your earholes as they'll go, you finally reduce the skull splitting sound enough to recognize it as actually a hugely amplified, and quite harmonic, trumpet fanfare. Clearly, whatever expense was spared on the door of destiny got lavished on a truly monstrous sound system.

a few nose vibrating notes later, and the trumpets stop just as the gate swings open. Removing your thumbs you sprint for the opening, hoping that the trumpets weren't the start of the 1812 overture, but luckily it just seems that the last trump has sounded, so you can progress forward with your eardrumbs intact.

for several more minutes you continue eastwards, the industrial light and total lack of magic around you now reminding you so strongly of buss or train stations that you half expect to see badly peeling posters and scrawled slogans on the walls, however obviously the dungeon has a far better litter management program than the average town council does, either that or there are fewer advertizers and graphettee scralling hooligans down here.

suddenly, the corridor ahead tales off and you find yourself stepping into a large round chamber nearly 30 feet across. You tense yourself, looking into the shadowey orange lit gloom feerfully, waiting for the attack, the puzle, the new diabolical and twisted horror.

As you step a few feet into the dark, a huge electric bulb above quickly snaps on with an audible click, bathing the space around you in harsh white light. You back against the wall, but the room is stil completely empty, and across the other side from the passageway you entered another corridor seems to lead off eastwards once again. Deciding that sticking around would be a bad idea, you begin to cross the dazling white floor towards the other passage.

though the outer floor of the room appears the standard metal, in the center is a long white painted oval covering most of the ground, around which are a number of black posts about five feet high. You can't help noticing that atop each post is a small metal box about the size of a camera, all pointing into the center of the ring.

sinse there is no way across the floor without treading into the oval you nervously enter, expecting doom at any second. However all that happens once you step onto the white floor is that you can now see the words printed in dramatic blue letters across it's center.

"boxing ring"

Looking around, you now see that from the front the box like objects on the poles are not just box like, but actually boxes! each has a small door and handle facing inwards, and each has a number printed on a small card stuck above the handle.

Briefly you hesitate. Such an abysmally bad pun as making a boxing ring by surrounding a ring with boxes has to mean something, and certainly some of those numbers look significant.

You wonder if you should try one of the boxes, or whether you should leave well alone and continue onwards.

Will you be able to box clever? or have you been outboxed.

 

open box 1973

open box 2001

open box 3791

open box 1138.

dont risk a box, just continue going east.

The horrible dungeons of dreadful doom.

copywrite2011 by Dark.