Yvette places a silver-plated pocket watch safely back inside the leather pouch at her hip, then continues her way through the narrow stone passageway, moving with the silent patience of a seasoned hunter. The sound of the water trickling over the stone paths can only mask so much, and she dares not make a sound while working.

Further in and the tunnel turns sharply, shrinking in on itself as if the workers who built them had forgotten to come back and finish the job. Perched against the walls of this corner is a wooden box, a little shorter than a person’s arm. Yvette crouches down to inspect it.

She taps the metal bars of the trap, but the creature inside doesn’t move. Satisfied, she carefully hauls a cloth-wrapped cage off of her back and places it on the stone floor beside her. 

Lifting the cover off the cage she unlatches the trap lid and unceremoniously grabs the woolly rat corpse by the tail, stuffing it into the cage with the rest of her bounty. Most men would need a torch in one hand to hunt these pitch black paths, but Yvette is no man, and her kind was made for stalking prey in the night. Her mouth twists up slightly in disgust as ties the tail of the newest rat corpse to the top of the cage with the rest. It makes it easier to count.

“Only six.” She quickly wraps it back up in cloth.

Yvette stares down the narrow passageway, then back the way she came. Both directions look almost identical. Rheonnik’s underground sewer system is still praised today as an architectural triumph, but for those unfortunate to earn a living navigating its long winding tunnels, the design oversights are rather glaring. 

The tunnels are narrow tall archways made of brick and stone, built around an existing stream system that the city turned into a sewer line. Pathways sprawl out from each entry point until you lose sense of where you are, and they rarely seem to branch off or reconnect. Parallel paths are connected only by small grated drainways, if anything at all. Making the job of maintaining the system far more annoying than it needed to be. For someone working quickly, the tunnels might take three hours to navigate at most. Checking and maintaining each trap adds another hour at least, two realistically. 

“Yesterday was a small catch too… Hadrian might think the Adventurer’s Guild are taking our work again.” She sighs, pulling down the light crossbow slung over her left shoulder, before pulling the cage back onto her back. “I can surely find more. One hour.”