Today's Earth date: December 11, 1991

No one has heard from Horcus in days. Disappearing for long stretches to grind is normal for him, but Wilmond believes this is different. Horcus was too angry to be thinking clearly, and the Cuts are supposed to be particularly brutal on travelers. And that's without assassins after us.

I don't want to leave [redacted] even for a few days, but I can't leave Horcus to die. I agreed to a rescue mission, but I'm coming back to Vientuls as soon as we find Horcus.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

The next chamber was larger than the first. Perfectly square, it had a checkerboard pattern of stone platforms and pools of water. Each of those platforms looked to be roughly fifteen feet across, and the same was true of the pools of water. A draw-bridge-looking door was on the wall opposite of where the party came in, and a shaft of white light shone down from the ceiling, illuminating the first solid platform in front of that door.

Several stories up, bleachers wrapped the perimeter, but no one sat in the seats of this arena. Other than a regular repetition of decorative naga statues, there was no sign of anything resembling a living creature.

The only sound in the chamber was the dripping of water.

"Fair to assume there's a problem behind door number one over there?" Fergus asked, quietly.

"Probably," Wayne said.

After advancing only a few feet, the gate slammed shut behind the party and the drawbridge ahead fell forward, thundering as it bounced off the floor. A cyclops with the same inflated bodybuilder physique as the zombies stepped out of the darkness. He was two stories tall and carried a giant treble hook tied to a chain.

As Skycat sped in to investigate, Camera reported that the boss was an "unusual cyclops."

Once the monster had fully stepped into the light, it spread its arms and roared at the ceiling. A flood of gray spilled over the cyclops, and its head began to elongate as if it were taffy being stretched. The mouth expanded and widened. Four more rows of teeth grew behind the first jagged set, and the cyclops' eye turned jet black.

Camera now labeled the boss "wereshark cyclops."

Wayne was about to shout a strategy to his party, but his words caught in his throat. Across the room, the wereshark cyclops flailed its arms in a panic and staggered about the platform, dropping its weapon to claw at the base of its new and incredibly terrifying shark head.

Not at its head. At its gills.

"Don't let it in the water!" Wayne yelled, Blitzing ahead.

The wereshark cyclops tipped to dive into one of the water squares. Wayne used Wink-Wing to pull the monster forward "two spaces." It faceplanted on stone instead of entering water. He tried the Upsidaisy spell next, but the cyclops resisted it and didn't move.

Wayne shoulderchecked the monster to again keep it from diving. The monster swiveled to smash him with a hammer fist. Wayne raised his sword to block, but before he could activate Easy Out, the world around him slowed. He couldn't move, and the massive fist descended toward him, moving with the speed of an old lady doing Tai Chi in the park.

Something deep within Wayne told him to mash his block button and the words "Guard the Net!" blinked in his vision. Was this the dunk block from Pat Riley Basketball?

He didn't have a block button, so he mentally repeated Block-Block-Block as quickly as he could.

The world sped back up again as an invisible crowd cheered for Wayne. His arm, moving on its own, parried the fist to the side. A whistle blow from Personal Foul immediately followed and the wereshark cyclops collapsed, unmoving.

Wayne believed the boss had suffocated.

"It might turn!" Fergus yelled from across the room.

Right. All of the monsters they had seen thus far were zombie weresharks. They too had transformed and then immediately suffocated, presumably.

Swinging his sword like he was chopping wood, Wayne hurried to sever the boss's head from its body. He saw the monster begin to twitch and the one black eye flutter, but then the head rolled away. All of the movement stopped.

Wayne gave his party time to catch up, their zig-zag journey across the checkerboard pattern taking far more time than simply walking the length of the room.

Margo kicked the boss's shark nose to make sure it was dead. It was.

"So 'wereshark' like 'werewolf?" Armond asked. When Wayne nodded, the cleric looked up at the light. "Is this supposed to be moonlight, then? It's definitely still day outside."

"Can't have the boss not transform, I guess," Wayne said.

"I doubted we would find a dungeon stranger than Julian's Tomb," Fergus said. "Weresharks that immediately suffocate when they transform out of water? Pretty damn strange."

"Remember that this opened around the time the weresnail died. If those events are connected, then no one was supposed to ever be in here, just like the bridge wasn't supposed to collapse."

"Another unfinished dungeon then?" Hector asked.

"Seems that way," Fergus answered. "I'm not sure if that explains the naga statues, but the shark motif makes sense for a wereshark boss at least."

"Maybe they planned to add nagas and never got around to it?" Wayne proposed.

Fergus agreed that was likely the reason. "Still, I have a hard time imagining how those two themes could ever work together."

Walking over the fallen drawbridge and into the chamber where the cyclops originated, Wayne saw a pedestal. A blue sapphire square about the width and thickness of a young adult novel sat on it, and a beam of light shone directly down, making the gem-surface sparkle. The object looked like the right size to fit in the smallest part of the socket the Governess had asked the party about.

Ignoring his Indiana Jones instincts, Wayne picked up the item.

Resource Values.

Bridge of the Ocean Moon Key, Average Value of [no sales data available].

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Yeah, this had to refer to the Vientuls bridge.

"Does it say anything?" Fergus asked.

"No value, but it's called the 'Bridge of the Ocean Moon Key.'"

Fergus wrinkled his face but didn't reply.

"Look at this," Margo said from behind the pedestal. "That hatch is already open."

In previous dungeons, they needed Margo's Prism skill to spot dwarvish writing and symbols that were invisible to human eyes. In other dwarven structures, that was how they found hidden doors that led to basements and side tunnels. Here, the door was already wide open.

The room below housed a familiar collection of pedestals, each holding a Diagnostic Cube. Like they found before, access to this dungeon was set to Forgemaster, but the cubes representing the monsters were different. All of their faces were blank except for the active face, the one facing up. Wereshark warriors were the only enemy listed for the dungeon, and the wereshark cyclops was the only boss.

An ancient script wrapped the room, etched into the stone walls. This was dwarvish, but it was an older dialect Wayne and Fergus had been unable to translate. They had an extensive transcript from Julian's Tomb where they found the same writing.

Instead of transcribing it all now, Wayne slowly panned around the room to capture all of the details with Replay Camera. He could do the tedious work of transcription later, a task he wouldn't have put off if they had any leads on translating the language. But they didn't, so he spared himself the urgency.

But Wayne had amassed a sizable amount of reference material for translating the traditional dwarvish he saw in the room.

"Can you translate this for me really quick, Wayne?" Fergus pointed to a cube in the corner. Like the others, all but one of its faces were blank, and the blank surfaces were uncharacteristically rough, like they had been chiseled but not sanded smooth.

After some searching in his documents, Wayne read the translation to Fergus:

Region Override: Zombification

Not wanting to learn how far the defined region was, Wayne flipped that cube over, facing a blank side up. He believed that turned off the zombification override.

"Good idea," Fergus said.

Like the dungeon outside of Asplugha, this hidden floor had two side rooms. One had tables and workbenches for Forgemasters–but no tools–and the other had four cots. Several lines of dwarvish were scrawled on one of the walls by hand in chalk, not chiseled like the text on the Diagnostic Cubes.

Wayne asked for a moment and sat on one of the cots to transcribe and translate the text.

Twenty minutes later, he was done:

2.1.1 Water to Earth

2.1.2 Naga Update

2.1.3 Wereshark fix

2.1.4 Wereshark fix

2.1.5 Wereshark fix

2.1.6 Wereshark fix

2.1.7 Zombie override

2.1.8 Project terminated, dormant protocols

"These look like patchnotes," Wayne explained. "When people in my world made changes to a game, they kept a log like this so it was easy to see what changed and when."

"Is it weird for this to be the first time we're seeing them, though?" Armond asked.

Fergus shook his head. "Anything permanent was etched in stone. This is chalk. I don't think it was meant to be left up, but then again, why wash the walls if you're closing the dungeon for good?" After a pause, Fergus asked, "Are you okay, Wayne?"

"We're at fault here. We're triggering dead content."

"You didn't design the system or the dungeons," Fergus argued. "The first dwarves deserve the blame, by my calculation."

"We have no doubts about the connection, though, and we're still traveling. If we go back home, no more of these will trigger."

"I can understand the self-flagellation, to a degree. However, mere days ago we saw more evidence of ratmen fleshmancers, and they were using fish parts. If they're repurposing monsters like these already, that means they have already found another dungeon that we aren't aware of."

"The rat sharks could breathe," Hector observed.

"Hector makes an excellent point," Fergus continued. "The rats have not only found monster parts to use, but they have managed to improve upon the first dwarf design. For rats to solve a problem the first dwarves couldn't… That's not something we can walk away from–Not as Royal Scholars and not as citizens of this world."

Wayne didn't answer. He stared at the patch notes on the wall.

"My last point of persuasion, and then I'll leave you to your thoughts: These monsters were always here. It might be hundreds of years from now, but they would hurt people eventually, and no one would understand what was happening, let alone have the resources to fix it."

"I'll think about it," Wayne said.

"Unrelated, but did Probe pick up any treasure?" Fergus asked.

Wayne shook his head.

"Shame. At least the crab man had loot."

Wayne and his party stood with Governess and a few soldiers at the edge of what used to be the Vientuls bridge.

"My Diary says this is a bridge key, but I have no actual idea what will happen if we use it," Wayne said.

"A bridge can't collapse twice," the Governess said, "and if another slug attacks, you're all here to take care of it, right?"

Wayne shook his head curtly at Fergus to stop his friend from correcting the Governess with a lecture on the differences between slugs and snails. Fergus frowned but closed his mouth.

"So insert it then?" Wayne asked.

Margo and Hector couldn't contain their childish giggles.

The Governess, either having not heard or having simply ignored them, nodded. "On with it."

Kneeling next to the socket, Wayne reached into the square hole and inserted the sapphire square into the slot. It was a perfect fit but only slid in halfway.

Nothing happened.

Wayne wiggled the square in place and pressed gently. He felt a soft click.

Across the gap where the bridge formerly connected to a rocky outcropping, blue coral sprouted and grew horizontally at a rapid pace, layering onto itself like a 3D printer. While the growth reached to cross the void, yellow coral wove through the blue, creating a thicker, more solid platform, as if the blue coral was a frame and the yellow was concrete.

The process continued until the blue coral connected just feet from where Wayne and his party stood, the yellow coral catching up a few minutes later. Then the yellow coral rose vertically at the outside edges, forming a railing of sorts.

The shape of the bridge had the bends and twists of organic growth, but there was a straight path down the middle. Vientuls had a bridge again.

To be safe, Wayne activated Probe. He didn't see any red dots indicating enemies, and the new bridge appeared on his HUD map as well. Wayne noticed, however, that no one who had watched the structure sprout from nothing was willing to walk on it.

"Want me to test it?" he asked the Governess. "I can kind of fly. Kind of."

"I am aware. I heard about the strange man soaring over our city during the slug attack, and I would very much appreciate your help testing the integrity of our new bridge."

Wayne waved all of the observers well back from the edge of the coral. He used Insect Flute and waited for Outlawson to drop from the sky. When the bug mount landed, he ignored the shocked gasps of Vientuls' guard and Governess. He climbed on, and urged Outlawson to scuttle across the bridge.

If he was testing the strength of the bridge, Wayne figured he ought to do so with more weight than just his own. He made it all the way across, paused for a moment to appreciate the view of the Cuts as well as the Lighthouse towering in the distance, its size dwarfing the nearby smudge that was Iomallach. Coming back across, he didn't hear or see any signs that the bridge was anything but solid and stable.

"I'm not an engineer, but it seems safe to me," Wayne said. "This is a first-dwarf structure, and everything else they built was supposed to last forever, so hopefully this is the same."

"It has much more character than the old bridge," the Governess observed. "We will be conservative for our first several crossings to be safe."

"Very wise," Fergus said.

"Now, I believe I owe you all a referral."

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