“Hello!”

"Howdy."

"So are we going to the, uhhh.  Place?"

“Unless anyone has anything they’d rather do first?”

"I don't think so."

“Cool.”

And then they can proceed to the catacombs beneath the heavenly train! 

The ‘heavenly train’ seems to have been named mostly for the fact that all of its stops are about five stories high; it slithers around the center of the city at a sensible twenty miles per hour, and anything lower to the ground would have to go through a building. Under one of its stops is a commercial mausoleum - somewhere for people’s relatives to sell their bodies, after death, so that they can in turn be sold to necromancers. And below the commercial mausoleum is an entrance to the catacombs. 

Theophrastus has a very, very old set of tunnels, as is only proper for a very, very old city. Some of them have been repurposed for water and waste, or bits of the hell train (named, somewhat inauspiciously, for being the heaven train’s underground counterpart), or as pedestrian passageways. The majority, however, retain their original function as burial sites.

The entrance is a creaking, heavy door, with a weathered sign saying ‘caution: this section of the catacombs is only recommended for experienced adventurers’. The walls are inlaid with stone caskets, each with a small placard eroded into illegibility. There are little alchemical crystals, on the ceiling, radiating crisp coldness and an eerie blue light; the floor slopes gently downwards.

They previously hadn't been walking in any particular fashion; here, Jace positions herself behind Kamin and lets Zeke lead the way.

Morgan brings up the rear, checking behind them occasionally.

- and then there’s a horrible skeleton thing with weird white bone tentacles leaping out of one of the nooks in the walls -

And then Zeke slams it against a wall and it breaks into a thousand little pieces. One of the tentacles is still squirming; he stomps on it and it shatters.

Onward! 

Onward indeed.

They encounter a few more undead abominations over the next few minutes - this one with too many eyes, that one with too many teeth - that aren’t especially difficult to dispatch, and then they reach a three-way fork in the corridor.

"Should we pick randomly here or do any of these look promising to anyone.  Or feel promising; I'm less likely to discredit sourceless hunches in this situation than I am generally."

Morgan shrugs.

“Eh. Right?”

"Well, it's all right with me."

“Cool.”

Tromp, tromp, a couple of traps that they can contemptuously avoid, tromp, tromp -

They reach a door! It seems very innocuous; even between all of their ridiculous senses there isn’t anything obviously wrong with it. 

Morgan tries it.

It opens up to a large chamber, containing three doors and an animated pine tree.

”Halt! Be thy friend or foe, thou shall not pass!” thunders the animated tree, looking coniferously pleased with itself. “- I’ve always wanted to say that! I’ve only been alive for a few hours so that doesn’t mean all that much, really. Still.”

"Please?"

“If I had been going to give in to that amount of pressure I wouldn’t have been animated at all, I think,” the tree says contemplatively. 

"Pretty please with threats of violence on top?"

“I don’t think that I can surrender at all without defecting against the process that made me exist.”

"Well, it's kind of a shitty process."

“I don’t understand what you mean?”