Being undead, Maris was quite well acquainted with the futility of life. He saw it practically every week in the faces of heavily armoured idiots charging towards him over a pile of dead Orcs. Or Lizard Men. Or Spider-Bats or Crepuscular Bone Gnawers, or Phantom Maggot Wraiths from the Lesser Plains of Xin or whatever else happened to be in whichever section of the dungeon complex he found himself in. There was a particular moment. Maris had learned to spot it after several years of practice. You had to be quick, because it only lasted a fraction of a second. But it was there. Just as they notice out of the corner of their eye that the guy on their left is having his tongue pulled out the back of his head, the wizard behind them is on fire and something they previously considered dead is launching itself violently upwards through their own spine. Just at this point a look flits momentarily across the hapless adventurers face. A look that says that, in the brief second before they die they fully understand that everything they've done up until this point was actually completely pointless in the worst possible way.
If Maris had a face, that's the look it would have been permanently fixed into.
Count the Rat-Things he'd been told. Count the sodding Rat-Things. This was a task that redefined hopelessness and pointlessness into such new levels of frustrating pointless hopelessness that Maris needed some new word to express the concept. It was.... It was....
Crap. Yes, that was the word. It was undoubtedly crap. Like the sort of challenge a particularly sarcastic dragon with a mean sense of humor might set to some champion or other because it simply can't bothered to eat him right now.
There were many problems with Skittering Rat-Things. You could say that they possessed a rudimentary intelligence. You could also say they possessed a sense of personal hygiene and were excellent pianists. That is you'd be either wrong, lying or about as intelligent as a Skittering Rat-Thing.
Maris had read once in one of the bestiaries that intelligent species tended to define their numerical systems based on the number of fingers they had. So humans count in units of ten. And the Undefinable Chaotic Vorg-Men from the Plains of Ooze-Void count in units of exploding heads. It's true that the rat-Things had three fingers, and did indeed use three as the base of their numeric system, but Maris was pretty sure this was a coincidence. The only time a Rat-Thing even looked at it's fingers was when they were holding food. The Rat-Thing numerical system, as far as Maris had been able to determine consisted of the units "Me", "Sex", and "Us". In that order.
Of course, this was part of the problem of having to count them. There were lots of them. Lots and lots. And they were always making more. Even if you somehow managed to nail them down long enough to count them, by the time you'd finished a fair percentage would have given birth and you'd have to start again. Even if you just killed the whole population and wrote down zero there'd be at least one of the little buggers hidden away somewhere. And Rat-Things being Rat-Things it wouldn't be long before there was a whole new teeming multitude.
This was a result of the other major problem with the Rat-Things: their enthusiasm. Everything they did, they did with the determined optimism of the truly stupid. They simply didn't understand the concept of failure. In the same way they didn't understand the concept of most words they couldn't spell. Which was all of them. Still, it did make them useful as a first line of defense. They could always be relied on to throw themselves rabidly at any intruders in waves of foul smelling chittering claws and teeth. Not that this ever really achieved much, but the casualties helped keep the Rat-Thing population under control, and the delay gave the orcs time to wake up and find their weapons after the previous nights drinking competition.
Maris finally stomped his way up the stairs, and out into the corridors of level one. His path was obstructed fairly quickly by a mouldering corpse, pinned to the wall by a row of mechanical spears. By the state of decay the corpse had been there for at least a week.
"Sloppy" He thought to himself as he started searching the wall for the hidden trap release. "Very sloppy".
Who leaves a trap unreset for a whole WEEK? Anyone coming up the corridor will see the way is blocked by traps and find another way around. even worse they'll be denied the questionable pleasures of having several large pointed objects violently thrust through their various significant organs. I mean, if you're going to go through all the trouble of putting these traps in then you want people to get some use out of them.
Finding the hidden panel at last Maris flipped it open and began turning the crank handle concealed within. With a rusty groan the spears began to retract into the wall, and the corpse flopped to the ground, as corpses are won't to do when they no longer have anything holding them upright. Maris made a few arcane gestures, and the corpse began to crawl slowly up the corridor, finally draping itself over a chunk of fallen masonry.
"Hmmmm... No. Needs something else" maris muttered to himself. The corpse fumbled around it's belt and took out it's mony pouch and a rusty dagger. It then went through a series of rather painful looking contortions as it tried to get the dagger to stick into it's back without falling out. This is not, it has to be said, the easiest thing in the world, but eventually it succeeded. It slumped back into position, opened the strings of it's money pouch and let a few coins fall on the floor in plain sight.
"There, that should do" Maris muttered again as he cut the strands of necromantic shadow energy animating the hapless cadaver. With any luck the next idiot through here will go straight for the corpse and run into the spear trap. Stepping carefully over the loose flagstone Maris proceeded up the corridor, making a mental note to get someone to come oil the spears at some point.
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