Stimulants, Cave Chokers and Labyrinths

Last week, I discovered that two full scoops of yerba mate drunk in tea at roughly 6:00 pm will keep me completely awake and alert until about 1:30 am. I'm just as glad to have discovered this before school started (which was this morning). Last night I dropped it down to one scoop and that was just about perfect. It was just starting to wear off as we called it a night (with 7 Cavern Chokers still alive and blocking the way), so I had no trouble sleeping.

So last night we climbed down a hole to a teleporting ladder rung, found a dragon frozen into a statue, scared off a bunch of R.O.U.S's, lost one player to a labyrinth when he wanted to go through a door to see what was on the other side, and explored the one non-magical doorway only to be attacked by cave chokers. There's also a magical lock, which seems to require us to find sufficient magical gems to unlock it (unless the other "half" requires something different), only I've started wondering if getting it unlocked will be what releases the dragon. Possibly I'm just paranoid, but I think Dovra will want to do several more Arcana checks next time, specifically asking about a connection between the dragon and the lock.

We'll probably all need to go into the labyrinth at some point. OOC, we've all seen the strangely mutating door locations and appearance of runes and/or gems in some of the rooms. Philip thinks that the number associated with the symbol gives information about which door to go through, while I wondered if it might be a distance indicator (like how many turns it will take to get out from that location). I also kept some rough notes, and looking at them there is a potential pattern. Our hapless half-orc was following blue-light, and it looks like each time the door had rotated one door counter clockwise from the prior door. The problem is that I didn't keep notes on the green light, so I don't know if the pattern held there as well. It's something, at least.