Today's Earth date: November 14, 1991

Fifty people must have ridden to the Temple with us. When we came out? Four soldiers. That's it. We have a long ass walk to Iomallach ahead of us, and that's our sendoff. Four soldiers who hate that they got posted here.

Four.

Couldn't have saved at least one fancy dinner for after we clear the Temple?

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

Wayne heard waves crashing against the shore when he woke. The doors to Sheeri's deck were open wide, a gentle wind flowing through the curtains, carrying the scent of the sea and the scent of roses in bloom. Sheeri had several on her deck that Wayne didn't see in the darkness of night.

He was alone in bed. "Sheeri?"

A dreamlike memory surfaced of feeling her kiss his head and seeing her bare body walk away. He realized now that was her goodbye. He found a folded note on her dining room table that confirmed it. She had already left for Teagaisg but didn't want to disturb his rest. She ended with her note saying, "Thank you for so many beautiful moments."

Looking around, Wayne wasn't sure how to feel. His head hurt a little bit from too much wine and not enough sleep, but emotionally… Should he be disappointed? Relieved?

Grateful. He should be grateful for the moments the way Sheeri was in her note.

He gathered his clothes, but before he let himself out, he noticed her walls were packed with art.

Fergus pressed Wayne for details about the evening with Sheeri the entire ride to the Underway Forest, interrupted only by the odd goblin or ratman attacks.

In quiet moments, when Fergus was not coming back to the topic with a new angle or twist on a question only to be rebuffed again, the party learned about their new abilities.

Tsu, the spell Fergus learned from Phantasy Star II, shot a laser beam straight down on an enemy, as if delivered from a satellite in orbit. The spell was immensely powerful, but it had two weaknesses: it used a great deal of mana, and an enemy could move out of the beam before taking the full power of the attack. Against goblins, that didn't really matter, but against an enemy like a den mother, timing the attack for when the monster was least mobile would be essential.

Margo's new skill Laser Shot was a skill that buffed up to three arrows if she fired quickly enough. These lasers were not near the scale and power of Fergus' Tsu spell, but they made her arrows much more dangerous. The laser seemed to be especially adept at getting through armor, and against an unarmored enemy, the arrow either went much deeper than a normal arrow could, often entirely through the creature.

Laser Shot had a cooldown, however, so Margo was likely limited to using the skill once per fight.

Armond learned the heal spell Nares, which they determined healed the whole party instead of a single target. It wasn't as flashy as shooting a laser from space, but it was certainly going to be useful.

Hector's new unlock provided a stat boost, so that didn't require any detective work. Wayne's abilities, meanwhile, were somewhat puzzling.

Toggling BGM Music from Pat Riley Basketball to on played music from the game as if an invisible sound system followed the party. The music seemed context sensitive, but Wayne wasn't entirely sure of the nuances between a few of the songs. The shift to battle music was distinct, however, or "game" music since this title was about basketball.

On Earth, Wayne found some chiptune music to be genuinely good. His brother liked chiptune music so much that he named one of their hamsters "Koji Kondo" after the Japanese composer behind the music of iconic games like Mario and Zelda. Koji ended up having babies with his own mother and then ate a few.

The hamster Koji. Not the composer Koji.

The chiptune music from Pat Riley Basketball had far too much percussion and jazzy vibrations to leave playing for any significant length of time. No one enjoyed it, which was particularly disappointing to Wayne. He had hoped to have a new theme song or motivating battle music to make random goblin encounters a touch more interesting, but alas, Pat Riley Basketball could not deliver.

The Fire Extinguisher spell from It Came from the Desert did exactly what it said it did. Casting it was like using a handheld fire extinguisher. It shot the same chemical smoke, could last as long as a normal tank on Earth could last, and it put out fires. In this case, Wayne's palms acted as the hose, so he needed to be careful to have his hands pointing away from his body before casting the spell. Like all of Wayne's life lessons, he learned that the hard way.

He couldn't figure out what Ferryboats from Railroad Tycoon enabled, but they also didn't spend any time at the ocean or along a river to fully test it.

Lastly, he had Super Soft Tires from Super Monaco GP. His other unlocks from that game improved Blitz, so he assumed that was the case here, but he figured out how almost entirely by accident. With Super Soft Tires toggled on, Wayne could run across surfaces regardless of orientation. If he Blitzed into a wall, for example, his body turned itself so that he ran up it. If he kept Blitzing, he'd run across the ceiling, upside down, never having to consciously execute the transition between surfaces.

He was puzzling through what other variables to test when Fergus asked again about Wayne's night with Sheeri.

"I said it was a nice night. I don't know what else to tell you."

"I'm not asking for anything pornographic," Fergus said.

"What are you asking for?"

"More emotion, I suppose? For it being a 'nice night,' you haven't seemed excited or uplifted."

Wayne told his friend that they were different on that front. Fergus liked to share his romantic joy, often oversharing, where Wayne didn't really want to talk about it at all.

Fergus gave up when they reached the treeline.

Hector and Outlawson stayed with Sammy to mind the wagon while Armond and Margo joined the scholars on the hike to Julian's tomb. The structure wasn't meant to be a tomb, of course, but it felt appropriate to call it that now. Wayne set a point with Navigation and used the HUD map to find the way. Not having a trail or road to follow made travel slow as they climbed over fallen trees or routed around an unexpected rise of stone.

Where they only needed to camp once when they used the druid egg to get to the tomb, they needed to camp twice on this trip, but they arrived eventually.

Their druid friend, the one with the plant for an arm, was waiting for them in the small clearing around the tomb. His wolf was not with him.

Returning here without the druid knowing was never a real possibility, but Wayne had hoped for it regardless. He didn't want to have this awkward conversation.

"Interesting that you found your way back," the druid said. "How did you counter my magic?"

"We didn't. My access to the Diary of the Gods makes getting lost… hard to do. I didn't know if your magic would affect it or not."

"That was not our arrangement."

"Fighting a banshee wasn't part of it either."

The druid was quiet.

Wayne waited him out.

"Your terms were found to be agreeable," the druid said after a while. "We would like to seal them with your Lord Blackwell directly before considering the pact active."

"I don't have any problem with that."

"Yet, you could provide him with the location."

Wayne shook his head. "Could but won't. I have valued our…" Saying friendship felt too forward, like being the first person in the relationship to use boyfriend or girlfriend. "...interactions. You helped get us to Cuan to stop Rebecca, and you've been fair with us at every turn."

"We also have great adoration for Lady Grinroot," Fergus added. Great adoration wasn't how Wayne would have put it, but okay.

"Yes, that too," Wayne said. "I'm not going to put all of that in jeopardy. I like the Underway Mountains and Forest, but I have seen very little of them. I'd like to come back some day. Leaving angry druids behind now would make that hard."

"Very well," the druid said. "Inform your Lord that Lady Grinroot will coordinate our meeting to finalize terms." The druid bowed and walked in the opposite direction and into the woods.

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"...Thanks!"

But he was already gone.

Turning to his party, Wayne asked if they wanted to go down or the next morning. "I vote now," Margo said. "Still have half a day, right? Not like there's a lich inside or anything."

Armond chuckled and agreed.

Through the barrier and down the stairs they went.

On their previous trip, they mapped everything but the last floor, so reaching Julian's room didn't take long at all.

Nor did searching it, but what they did find was hard to explain.

They found pieces of the dog that Wayne exploded, but they weren't flesh and blood. The ear and front paw they found were made from clay. Quite poorly at that.

The same clay wrapped around Julian's bones.

Wayne opened his mouth to ask about it, but Fergus beat him to it. "I have no idea," he said, eyes fixed on the odd bones. "There's real bone inside, see that white? I don't know why a lich would do this to themselves."

"Where did he get the clay?"

Fergus scanned the room. "A druid could likely conjure water, so the tomb's lack of liquid isn't an issue, but what about the substrate?"

The scholars reached the same conclusion at the same time: The tablets for Dwarven Diagnostic Cubes. Julian appeared to have ground down pieces of tablet and then mixed the powder with water to create a malleable clay.

That meant the odd lumpy dog was animated clay, which explained the dust and the odd remains that Wufbam left behind. A spell to breathe life into a sculpture sounded appropriate for a druid, even if neither Fergus nor Wayne knew of a spell capable of it, but why did the lich use the clay on himself?

No one in the party had a theory to share.

Fergus collected samples of the canine golem and wrapped up one of Julian's ulnas and one of his femurs. The lich's animal skin clothing was mostly intact and the party agreed to carefully collect and pack the rest of the remains. Returning those to the druids seemed like the most respectful thing to do. Wayne insisted the druids would notice the missing bones, but Fergus argued they wouldn't.

Otherwise, all this room had to offer otherwise was dwarvish on the wall, Dwarven Diagnostic Cubes, and several stone tablets. Wayne intended to copy down everything, of course, but they could see the rest of the floor before he did that.

If this level was meant to be a square, only one half, cut diagonally, was built. They found several hallways that ended abruptly with a raw rockface. Wayne saw pickaxe marks in the stone. The first dwarves were intending to dig this out, but stopped.

Like the previous floors, every room here was bare, including an open chamber similar in footprint to where they fought the Skeleton Lord. The ceilings were not nearly as high, maybe 10 feet at the most, but the floorspace was expansive.

And empty.

"Suppose we can have only so much excitement," Fergus said glumly.

"Wait," Margo said. "There's something there."

The rogue walked to a far corner and squatted to point at the floor.

"I think there's a trapdoor here," she said, tracing a square with her finger. Wayne didn't see anything different about this part of the room, but he also didn't have the Prism skill like Margo.

"What else do you see?" Fergus asked.

"Four dwarvish characters." Margo set down her pack and removed a piece of chalk. She outlined the location of the trap door and traced the characters only she could see.

Since only Wayne could see Documents in his HUD, Fergus brought a book on translating basic dwarvish. He said watching Wayne stare absently ahead for several hours did not sound pleasant, so he wanted to have his own references on hand. Though Fergus had his book, he didn't need it.

Before Wayne could find the characters in his notes, Fergus asked for the chalk and wrote "2, 3, 4, 1," one number for each character, read left to right.

"Does anyone mind if I try to open this?" Fergus asked. "No telling what happens if I'm wrong."

Armond and Margo went out of the room. If the runes were traps, they would be out of harm's way. Probably.

Fergus tapped the runes in the order they were numbered. Every inch of floor inside of Margo's chalk square sank noiselessly. Wayne waited for unpleasant surprises, saw none, and called Armond and Margo back in.

This room below had nine pedestals of the same style and dimension of the one they saw behind the skeleton lord's throne. They were spread evenly through the room in three neat rows, and only two of those pedestals held a Dwarven Diagnostic Cube. The room was plain and uninteresting otherwise. The walls were carved rock instead of bricks, and the floor was the same. The pedestals, the cubes, and the ceiling were the only parts that looked "finished."

"I'd like to translate these first," Fergus said. He didn't need to add "without moving anything." The scholar learned his lesson with the gargoyle crystal.

While Armond and Margo spread their bedrolls, Wayne and Fergus each took a cube and started the tedious process of translating dwarvish.

Wayne was the first to finish a side, the top of his cube in this case. Finding the right characters in his HUD was easier than turning pages in a book.

The top of the cube read:

Mode: Archive

Status: Legacy

This felt like programming vocabulary to Wayne. He wasn't a developer himself, but he worked around enough of them on Earth to learn how to talk about software. Archive meant filing away something that was no longer in use but might be useful later. And a legacy item–whether it was code or a feature–was no longer supported. Typically, that meant it had been replaced by something better.

The other four visible sides read:

Mode: Transition

Status: Legacy

Mode: Active

Status: Live

Mode: Active

Status: Beta

Mode: Diagnostic

Status: Live

Wayne was curious what the bottom said but was afraid moving the cube would turn the dungeon "on" when it read like it was currently "off." Treating the skeleton lord cube as treasure was looking like an error of judgment.

The top of Fergus' cube read:

Access: Forgemaster

The other four visible sides read:

Access: Heroes

Access: Nobility

Access: Wildlife

Access: Designated

"What are the odds this controls the barrier?" Fergus asked.

"That interpretation seems so straightforward that it's suspicious," Wayne said.

"Yes, yes. I feel that too. Yet, this room was not meant to be found. Just like Vanilli's tunnels weren't meant to be found. Placing traps where no one would ever go seems wasteful."

After some debate, they agreed to test the theory after they cataloged Julian's room, which went far more quickly than they expected. Two of the cubes were duplicates of the ones they found in the hidden chamber. The third was a skeleton boss cube, the same as the first Wayne had translated back in the Cuan University Library.

The tablets in the room, which Wayne and Fergus hypothesized to be "faces" for the cubes were duplicates of sides they had already translated. Wayne's Resource Values skill confirmed it:

Dwarven Diagnostic Plate, Average Value of [no sales data available].

None of the plates seemed organized or grouped in any specific way, but the text all matched up to what they had already translated.

Leaving the dwarvish on the wall.

That part of the expedition went more quickly than they expected as well. Neither of the scholars had these characters in their references. Determining that took some time, but not nearly as much time as translating all of it. Despite the characters being wholly new to him, Wayne was able to copy them down in Documents without issue. Translating text in the comfort of a library was easier, anyway.

Before, he would have worried about missing a critical clue in this text, a clue only useful inside the dungeon. While that was still a possibility, technically, Prism made him reasonably confident they had seen all there was to see. It took them longer to walk down here than it did to explore.

"I expected… more?" Wayne said when he was done mentally typing. Two new cubes were interesting finds, but every detail pointed to this being a project that was abandoned early. Its intended use and why it was abandoned were interesting topics, but nothing down here answered those questions, including Julian's use of ground up tablets.

"I too am disappointed. I do, however, feel more pity for Julian and Rebecca. There's absolutely nothing to occupy one's mind down here."

"Do you think they could talk to one another?"

"Interesting question," Fergus said. "They may have had each other's company. This is true."

"Do you want to head to the surface now or do you want to get some sleep first?" Wayne asked.

"Actually, I'd like to do an experiment."

Wayne raised an eyebrow.

"The cube I translated seems the most innocuous. I propose we change which side faces up and see if that has any effect on the dungeon. Blackwell would probably appreciate a way to go inside, after all."

Wayne had picked up and moved their first Diagnostic Cube without ending the world. What were the chances this one would do anything catastrophic?

Famous last words, Wayne thought.

With help from Urg, he pulled the cube off the pedestal and exposed the side previously facing into the pedestal. No earthquakes. No alarms. No giant skeletons. Moving the cube off the pedestal seemed to have no consequences whatsoever.

The newly visible said read:

Access: Open

Fergus asked Wayne to point that side up when he replaced the cube. Manipulating the cube felt like a strongman moving atlas stones–what Wayne imagined that to be like, at least. He had never moved something anywhere near that heavy in his previous life.

When the cube was back on the pedestal, nothing happened, again.

That wasn't unexpected. Fergus' hypothesis was that this change would remove the barrier around the tomb. That was a reasonable guess to Wayne as well.

On the surface, they realized they had no way to test the barrier. Their party had passed through it without issue and did so again. If it was down, how could they tell?

As Fergus pondered that puzzle, Armond pointed to the tomb roof. A finch bounced across the stone. Another joined him. They flapped and bounced and then flew away together.

The dove from the druid egg couldn't touch the roof on their first visit.

"I suppose that's as good an answer as any," Fergus mused, smiling at the birds.

If the cube was set to Access: Forgemaster when the barrier was up, an option that was listed separately from Access: Heroes, what did that classification mean, and why did it apply to Wayne and the Zeroes? Fergus was downright giddy about having more questions to puzzle over. Wayne, meanwhile, felt as though the expanding mystery would eventually drown him.

"Think Blackwell's people will experiment with the cubes?" Margo asked.

"I'm sure they would," Fergus said. "But I closed the entrance before we left and wiped the chalk away."

Margo furrowed her brow. "Why?"

"Part of a scholar's duty to discover knowledge extends to being a steward of that knowledge. Sharing this with others before we know what it is we are sharing would be irresponsible."

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