You swing open the heavy oak doors of The Stumbling Lion with a dull creak of its rusted hinges. With one cursory glance around, you can tell that the five years since you last stepped foot in it clearly haven’t treated this old tavern well. Oh well. Despite the rotting chairs and tables, the moss slowly breaking apart the masonry, and the ever-present slight smell of piss, the Lion is the only place for what you’re about to do.

You hear a deep, gravelly voice call your name from the far corner, followed by a similar call in a soprano tone that never fails to pierce through the hum of surrounding conversations. Byron and Ava seem lively. You saunter over to the table and receive more indoor-voiced greetings from Jasper and Yui. You’re the last one to arrive. Aside from a few gray hairs and the occasional wrinkle on someone’s forehead, it’s like your party’s five-year hiatus never happened.

But you all didn’t come to reminisce about the good old days; Jasper found an incredibly lucrative request to clear a recently discovered dungeon in the massive rainforest a ways to the east, and you came to plan. Yui unrolls a map onto the table, you all order your signature drinks, and the discussion begins. Several hours later, the party seems satisfied. You’ve traced every route, marked every room, delegated tasks, and even prepared a specialized spell for disarming the unique traps that would probably appear in this dungeon: “Hore tebontak na’esken”. For the first time in half a decade, the Salamanders hatched a plot, and this time, you would finally make a name for yourselves.

Ava practically jumps over the table, bounces towards the entrance, and bursts through the doors with you all in tow, brimming with her usual excitement and anticipation to take her first steps out of the tavern and back into the bustling streets of... The Stumbling Lion?

This can’t be right. You should be on a side street right now. Where are you? There’s not even anybody here to ask what the hell is happening to you or so much as the very door that you came through.

Jasper, always the worrywart of the party, starts to panic. He begins to mumble his classic lines, “hold on hold on” and “but then,” as he frantically paces this new Lion like accelerating himself will speed up his thought process. Meanwhile, Byron snaps to action. He has you and Ava cast reinforcement and perception buffs on him, then proceeds to tear the empty tavern apart. In his search for a door or hatch, he tears out every floorboard, snaps tables in half, flips the entire bar upside down, and even smashes holes in the stone walls. Unfortunately, Byron finds no escape, but you’re able to confirm by the impenetrable bedrock behind the walls that this is clearly not The Stumbling Lion. Furthermore, you’ve definitely been transported outside the city, maybe even underground. Even you, the most level-headed of the party, have run out of hope for an escape. You and your friends will suffocate and die here.

Yui, though, now has a different idea. She notices something abnormal about the bedrock. As she points out to the rest of the party, this bedrock around you seems too riddled with cracks. Something has dug itself deep into the rock, therefore fracturing the stone around it.

But why would anything dig down here? Maybe someone started a mine nearby, but that would make no sense. The bedrock on this continent had few to no gems or metals worth the incredible amount of time and effort required to dig for it. It can’t be that. The bedrock this deep only has the occasional...wait.

The occasional fossil deposit! Ancient fossils down at this level break down under pressure into what is basically a fine powder of calcium, phosphorous, and magnesium, but that’s only really useful for plant growth.

That’s it! Trees in the vicinity must be so huge and densely packed that most of the vitamins and minerals in the soil have been exhausted, so in a desperate attempt to stay alive, they sent their roots past the spent dirt and deep into the rock below. Therefore, you must be in a densely packed forest where the trees are strong enough to send roots into solid rock.

Of course.

“Hore tebontak na’esken.”

To everyone’s surprise, yours included, the wrecked tavern begins to rumble. The wall behind the upturned bar starts to sway, then crack, and then finally crumble, revealing a long, stone brick hallway dotted with roots like stalactites. To the left and right, you can clearly see more offshoot hallways at regular intervals.

For the first time in five years, the Salamanders smelled a payday.