Today's Earth date: January 12, 1992

We just finished another run to the desert and back. We were going to start the next run right away, but Horcus caught wind of a moneymaking idea.

There are fighting pits just outside of Iomallach, and there is big time betting action. Since we can crush pretty much any person we've ever met in this world, Horcus thinks we can win a few big bets before they bar us from competing any more.

His squire thinks it would be a great way to build our legend too. She's always in favor of anything that raises Horcus' fame.

Seeing her gush over him made me realize how long it's been since I've seen her. Worse, I realized how long I've gone without thinking about her.

Those gaps are getting larger. I feel terrible about that.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

The last two days of the festival were far less eventful, especially for Wayne and the Zeroes. True to his word, Billium stayed on top of the problem of getting their collective investments back, with Fergus checking in regularly to be sure the Zeroes would get their due cut.

As for Targitaus the monster dealer, he was in the wind. The party took a triumphant trip out to his ranch to confront him about his use of–or complicity with–ratman fleshmancy, but they found his ranch mostly vacated. A skeleton crew of staff members stayed behind, so the grounds weren't abandoned completely, but they denied knowing anything about any strange monster deals. The party believed them. Every one they met was a low-level grunt just trying to feed their families.

Having no real proof of Targitaus' potential treachery, the Zeroes couldn't press the issue very hard. They had no legal authority to search the property or seize anything that might constitute evidence. However, they did observe that the harpy cages were now completely empty. When Hector and Margo scouted the ranch only a few days ago, they saw dozens of the winged beasts on the premises.

And they were all gone.

Suspicious? Definitely, but again, it was not proof of anything. Wayne left word of his concerns with General Poltur's people. The guard he spoke with promised Poltur would be in touch.

Fergus, meanwhile, shared their suspicions with the local chapter of Royal Scholars. They weren't a government authority, but they had more connections in Iomallach than Wayne or Fergus, and they respected the pair enough to hear them out about their findings and concerns. If anyone could get the ear of an official who did have authority to investigate, it would be the Royal Scholars.

The party agreed to visit the Lighthouse in the meantime with two motivations: to be thorough, and to give everyone a chance to see the view from the top if they so desired. Neither Wayne's Probe or his own ascent to the top revealed anything of interest, but it was a dwarven-made structure. Margo's Prism might reveal something, though that felt unlikely.

Before they departed, Wayne had two new game unlocks to use from his level up. Oddworld: Abe's Exodus was the obvious choice for one of those slots. The second slot, however, was not easy to fill.

The back of the Abe's Exodus GamePro spread was half an ad for Twisted Metal III, an arcade-style car battling game and half an ad that featured a planet with an asteroid bursting through. Both of the backside pages had ink spilled over them, but the worst of it was on the planet page. Wayne couldn't confirm what game the ad featured without having the next page over.

So, in addition to Twisted Metal III, he had the following games open on his catalog pages to choose from: Days of Thunder, Ninja Spirit, T.V. Sports Football, Bloodywolf, Devil's Crush, and Megafortress.

Wayne circled Ninja Spirit, reasoning that it sounded like it had the most potential for worthwhile abilities:

Enter a supernatural world of evil to avenge your father's death at the hands of a Ninja spirit! Unleash your incredible weapons and the mystical power of your Alter Egos to fight the terrible forces of the Dark Side.

Earning him this new spell:

Righteous Cloud - the Magic Sword – Can be used to attack in four directions. Also effective against an enemy throwing knives and bombs.

Righteous Cloud triggered four ethereal blades to slice around Wayne simultaneously. Each attack was a downward chop, and he could rotate where around him the attack triggered–but could not control the spacing. They were always exactly ninety degrees apart.

Instant bonus swords? Yes, please.

Though he was most excited for Oddworld: Abe's Exodus, the first unlock was a bit of a letdown:

Fart – Abe can fart at any time by Pressing X. You can use farts to annoy Mudokons (making them take a single step away from you…that's ANOTHER hint, by the way). You can also possess farts and do nasty things after drinking from a SoulStorm™ brew machine.

Lacking a SoulStorm™ brew machine, using Fart pushed all enemies around him away by five feet. No possession skill like Wayne expected, but he hoped his Fart ability would improve as he leveled.

Because right now, Wayne cut wind with the grandeur of a mid-summer country music festival portajohn, which was unpleasant for everyone, most of all Wayne. He was always at the epicenter, so he got the worst of it.

The classic law of nature that made it possible for a person to be unbothered by their own flatulence did not apply to the Fart skill, much to Wayne's chagrin.

As the wagon neared the Lighthouse, Wayne reiterated that everyone present was welcome to make a trip to the top. That was a six-day commitment with a guide. Though Wayne could use Rise to bring everyone to the top floor, he had no way of getting them back down safely, nor did he know his way around the labyrinthian layout well enough to lead them down on foot.

Every party member, which included their cook as well as their quartermaster, wanted to see the view, giving Wayne six days to kill before the party would reconvene. If Margo's Prism revealed anything interesting, she would use Voice to let Wayne know, at which point he would use Rise to join them in the Lighthouse. Barring that, however, Wayne had to find something to do.

The guides they hired were a young husband-wife pair who reminded Wayne of the kind of people who did whitewater rafting tours. Their love for their work was clear, and they seemed genuinely excited to make yet another hike up.

Wayne saw them off and returned to the inn to order breakfast. Before his eggs and bacon were ready, Margo pinged him.

"The first floor, right inside the entrance, is covered in dwarvish," she reported. "Looks a lot like the basement access points we've seen before but with way more writing."

"On my way."

The guard at the bottom of the Lighthouse attempted to bar Wayne from entering, but the Zero Hero held up a waterskin and insisted that one of his party members needed it. He promised not to go above the first floor if the guides had already started the ascent.

He knew they hadn't, of course.

"You forgot this," Wayne said, holding up the waterskin for Margo as he entered the Lighthouse.

"Thank you," she said out loud. With Voice, she added, "I think there are two entrances here. One is really big, but it looks like there's a hatch in the southeast corner. Not sure how to chalk the script with the guides around, though."

"I can fix that," Fergus said. "Let's get a move on!" he grumbled. "Margo's got her water, so can we start the tour now, please?"

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The guides seemed startled by Fergus' sudden frustration but they began leading the party up the first set of stairs.

Before Margo could get to work with her chalk, Vanilli appeared next to Wayne. "I can open it."

"You know what's going on?"

"It's not subtle."

"By all means then."

Vanilli went to the corner Margo referenced and tapped out a pattern on the floor with his foot. A hatch opened.

"Thank you," Wayne said. Vanilli nodded and followed Margo up the stairs.

Wayne dropped down the hatch and shut it behind him.

What he found was disorienting. The hatch deposited him on an exact copy of the first floor, but it was inverted. The floor was now the ceiling, turning the path up to the second floor into a hole in the ground with a stair-shaped structure running overhead.

The room was packed with hammers, chisels, pickaxes, and shovels. Several of the same style of cots they had seen in other dungeons were stacked against the wall as if for storage rather than for use, and a workbench seemed to be buried beneath them. He saw three piles of blank cube tablets and found one tablet with writing etched into its surface. This tablet, however, was not sized for cubes. It looked more like the size of a standard piece of printing paper.

Resource Values.

Forgemaster Memo, Average Value of [no sales data available].

When Wayne translated the text, he found that it read:

Project Change Order 1.9.9b:

In light of beta tester data and broader budget challenges, the following steps are to be taken immediately:

-Halt all Lighthouse development.

-Shutter basement levels completely.

-Set all trigger and logic cubes to Forgemaster Access Only and implement dormancy protocols.

-Gather all tools and salvageable resources for redistribution to active projects.

The S on "Levels" caught his eye. Plural meant more than one, making this basement different from the other control-room-style basements he had explored previously. Even the Water Temple had only a single basement floor, but the Lighthouse sounded as if it had several.

Looking through the hole to the next lower floor, he shined Light about the immediate space. This too looked like an inverted duplicate, but this duplicate was of the second floor.

Wayne had the suspicion that the pattern of upside down copies would continue, potentially mirroring the entirety of the above-ground lighthouse, a full fifty floors down. The possible size of the unexplored space gave him pause. Covering that much ground by himself would be pretty lonely, but more importantly, he might trigger monster Spawners.

Were his party not with him when he explored the dungeon outside of Vientuls, he very well could have been overwhelmed by the zombie wereshark horde. Traveling down meant he could use Rise as an easy escape in an emergency, so he was unlikely to die if a fight went poorly. His larger concern was accidentally turning the dungeon back on–if he hadn't already–and being unable to contain the enemies that followed. Waiting to take that risk felt wise.

The beginnings of a plan coalesced in Wayne's mind. If getting to the top of the tower took three days with an experienced guide, his party would need much more than a week to thoroughly explore all fifty floors below the Lighthouse. That timing was based on walking alone. If they encountered monsters, well, estimating how long a fifty-floor crawl would take in that case was difficult. It could be closer to a month, depending.

Wayne used Voice to relay his findings to Fergus directly.

"Should we turn around and come back down?"

"No, go enjoy yourselves. I'm going to use the time to research and stock up on provisions. That means I won't be immediately near the Lighthouse like we planned, though. Are you okay if backup is a few hours away?"

"Given that you already went up all fifty floors, that seems fine to me."

Before Wayne hit Rise to return to the ground floor, he used Periscope to make sure no one was around to witness his appearance. It was safe.

Rise.

Wayne stepped out the front door and Blitzed to hop across the tourist trap town to reach the wagon.

Goods Storage.

When he saw the dimensional door open outside of the Lighthouse inn, Wayne smiled. That made this all so much easier.

If the Royal Library in the Capital was this world's equivalent of the Library of Congress, the Iomallach collection was the equivalent of a relatively under-funded high school library. It wasn't useless by any stretch, but Wayne couldn't help but be disappointed. In the Capital, the world's most preeminent sources were always within reach. That would not be the case in Iomallach.

Fortunately, their collection on local topics was thorough enough for Wayne's purposes.

Unfortunately, the library was so small that he couldn't avoid the person he found when he arrived.

"Oh! The Champion graces me with his presence." Lady Kryss of the Swiftwood Trading Company smiled. "I'm surprised you're still in town."

The last time Wayne had seen Kryss, she was shutting her door in his face after what was a very enjoyable date. Their physical age difference was a deal-breaker for her even if their mental ages were equal. She had three books open in front of her and a notebook full of pencil-written notes.

"This… This is a surprise."

"Why? You know I have similar interests."

Wayne shook his head. "We're just a good ways away from Teagaisg is all."

"I had business on the Free Continent that took me close enough to Bata, in time for the festival too."

"So you saw the match?"

Kryss's smile filled with a new kind of warmth, making her gentle, always-sleepy face alluring and endearing. The lock of black hair that drifted down in front of her face made her expression all the more powerful. "I certainly did. I liked your bikini."

Wayne laughed. "You did? I've been worried it's not the right color for me."

"Running into the mouth of a firebreathing monster was an interesting tactic also."

"It wasn't intentional," Wayne admitted. "I couldn't see anything in the fire and vastly overestimated how much distance I had to work with."

"It looked very impressive."

Wayne bowed his head. "Well, thank you. I didn't mean to interrupt, though. I'll let you get back to it."

She gave Wayne a little wave and returned her attention to her books.

Was she just being nice or was that flirtatious? Wayne nearly pinged Fergus with Voice to talk to him about it, like he was back in high school stretching the corded phone to his room, but he resisted. He was sincere in wanting his party to enjoy themselves. Gossip could wait.

The documents Wayne sought were bound in an oversized book, three feet in length as well as in width. The monstrosity of reference material had fifty-four pages, fifty of which were detailed maps of every floor in the Lighthouse. Claiming the only other table in this section of the library, he studied to get a sense of the information he had to work with.

The maps were to scale and marked three types of data: the locations of stairwells, doors, and hazards. A few of the floors had more than one set of stairs going up, but many of the staircases were a functional deadend. You would wander around the next floor up for hours before you figured that out. A few of the doors were locked with the greater worry being doors that locked behind you. There were quite a few of those.

As for hazards, the Lighthouse didn't have any mechanical traps, but it did have holes in the floors. The least dangerous dropped you down a level. The most dangerous lined up enough holes to drop you five floors or more.

Wayne closed his eyes and tried to imagine how the paper map's orientation would shift if it were inverted. As he feared, doing that interpretation on the fly would be difficult. He would need to ask the library scribe to mirror the pages when he made copies for Wayne.

The robed gentleman at the only reference desk informed Wayne that Iomallach did not have a dedicated library scribe. Any copies he wanted, he either had to do it himself or commission an outside resource out of his own pocket. Feeling a bit defeated, Wayne returned to his table to decide how he would personally manage copying that many maps.

Kryss was in his seat, looking at the map of the second floor. She didn't look away from the book when he sat down across from her.

"Researching the Lighthouse, huh?" She glanced up to watch his reaction. "What do you know that I don't?"

"I'm just reading."

"Is this a Blackwell project?"

Wayne shook his head. "I don't share his business any more than I share yours."

"Your party made quite an impression on Penelope when you cleared her dig. And since then, you found a ruin outside of Cuan and then another outside of Vientuls?"

"I can talk to you about the Asplugha dungeon since that job was for you. You know I can't say anything about anything else."

Kryss studied him. "How are you doing it? Does it have to do with your Diary access?"

With those questions, Wayne reached across the table and pulled the giant book toward him and away from Kryss. "I don't mean to be rude, but…"

"No, it's fine," Kryss said, standing. "I had to try. Good luck with your reading."

She returned to her table, sitting with her back to Wayne, and resumed her own research.

Wayne released a soft sigh. After a few minutes of looking over the maps again, he decided on his best course of action. He would transcribe the maps into a smaller format. Hiring an outside scribe was tempting, but his party was too low on funds for unnecessary expenses.

He stepped out to get the materials he needed. When he returned an hour later, Lady Kryss had departed. Stealing a peek at the books on the return cart, he saw she was reading about the desert north east of Iomallach. Or did she know he would look and left these books to throw him off the trail?

Settling into the library's only tracing table, Wayne opened the first map. He carefully positioned it over the glass. Sunlight coming in through a window reflected off a mirror near Wayne's feet to illuminate the paper from below, but Wayne wasn't doing a true tracing. He used the light to make a temporary version of the flipped layout, which he then sketched into a blank journal.

This was going to take forever.

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