Archimedes is a recent addition to their party and none of them knows how to approach him.

Any attempt to strike up a conversation with him is met with an awkward silence. He isn’t ignoring them by any means; he responds to their observations and questions with nothing more than a nod or maybe a quiet hum if they’re lucky. They all chalk his silence up on just not being comfortable with them yet.

But he is pretty quick to establish his place in the pecking order, his silence be damned. Where everyone else is comfortable following the dungeon haunt wherever it pointed them, Archimedes hesitates, being so bold as to ask what the meaning of them going this or that direction is and if they should even trust someone who can’t even see where he’s going.

He’s new here. He’ll learn.

Any doubts on the validity of Wraith’s navigational skills fly out the window as he watches the haunt climb down the narrow stone steps of the tower. How it knows where to put its feet will forever be a mystery, and Archimedes watches in wonder as Wraith never once bumps into the narrow walls nor slips a foot on his way down. It shouldn’t be possible—you need your vision in order to navigate the dungeons—but the spirit makes it possible, forcing the dungeons to bend to its will as it cuts through them like a precision knife. But Archimedes knows Wraith isn’t always as lucky. The spears in his shoulder tell him such.

“Do you know where we’re going?” He finally asks, the silence between them growing overwhelming.

The phantasmal hand that’s been slowly walking its fingers down the courser’s bony back stops just to wag a single digit at him. No, we don’t know where we’re going? Or no, stop asking stupid questions? He pins his ears back at the hand and in reply it flips him off. The gesture and its meaning are foreign to him, but it doesn’t take an expert to know it means to be obscene. Basil and Frankie laugh from behind him.

He means to ignore the hand for the rest of the time they’re down in the dungeons, but that’s hard to do when Haunter insists on grabbing at pieces of his mane when it isn’t getting the attention it wants. It pokes and prods and even slaps at him until finally, having grown fed up, Archimedes snaps his teeth at the hand. He delights in how Haunter scurries back to Wraith.

They’ve been descending through the tower for what feels like ages until finally it spills out into a large workshop, mostly empty except for the rickety old tool bench situated in the center of the room. An odd place for it to be, but Archimedes thinks nothing of it. The dungeons never were straightforward or logical, anyway.

When he steps closer, the contents of the workbench become apparent. There are scrolls depicting ancient arcane rituals combined with dusty bottles of strange liquids he’s too afraid to investigate further for fear of poisoning, but they all looked like viable items to be sold to the local merchant.

“Be sure to watch yourselves here,” Wraith warns them, “there are—”

Archimedes makes a grab for a scroll and accidentally knocks over a book. It clatters to the floor, masking the sound of metal gears grinding against each other and clicking into place.

“—traps in place,” the haunt finished with a sigh.

There’s no time for Archimedes to react when the room starts spinning. He watches as his companions carousel around him several times before descending through the tower they’d just come from, leaving him standing all alone on the central pillar. He calls out to the group, panic ringing clear in his voice, and the echoing call of Basil’s shout is swallowed up by the void.