Today's Earth date: March 11, 1992

Horcus and Wilmond won't stop talking about comic books. It was fun when it was everyone bullshitting, answering questions like MJ or Gwen Stacy? If you had to choose, which Fantastic Four power would you take? That kind of thing. A decent way to take our minds off how much we hate traveling the Cuts.

But then Wilmond mentioned Battleworld, and Horcus looked at him like they had just made some brilliant breakthrough.

Battleworld is from a Marvel Comics arc called Secret Wars. Basically, an alien kidnaps Earth's heroes and villains and transports them to a new planet–Battleworld–and has them fight. The alien in charge is called the Beyonder, and yeah, the plot sounds like a sort of cosmic video game.

This is the part they keep coming back to: At some point in the story, Doctor Doom takes the Beyonder's powers for himself.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

"I know everyone has been enjoying their time off, so I'll make this team meeting a quick one," Wayne said one morning in the common room of the Blackwell estate. "The first thing: you all now have your own cabin on the train. It's up to you how you want to use it, but we are thinking about changing our new town routine moving forward. Fergus is still adamant about maintaining his standard of comfort, we just might not need bedrooms. That's a work in progress."

"What do you mean by it's up to us?" Hector asked.

"The space is yours. Customize it as you see fit. Fergus has a budget set aside for everyone, but expenses beyond that are out of your own pockets."

Sammy raised his hand.

"God damn it, Sammy," Wayne said, exasperated. "Yes, you get your own car. You don't need to keep asking questions like that. You're a member of the party. Before the next hand goes up, Vanilli, you have one too. The only hiccup is we don't have a way to give both of you the Board command, but we all have to stay together for this to work, anyway."

"What do you mean?" Margo asked.

"The train has to be 'in' that town for the Board command to work. Armond tried while Fergus and I went to Mudsville. So we can't all spread out to a bunch of different cities and still share the train. There's a workaround, but that's the crux of it."

"Understood."

"Also, we need your ideas," Wayne said. "Our three biggest problems to solve: We need a better way to grind experience, we need a more consistent and non-horrific way to get demon material, and we need ideas for where to set our station exits in each town."

Other than Fergus, Sammy, and Vanilli, everyone had their hands up.

"That's a lot of questions." Wayne pointed at Margo.

"Why is experience an issue?" she asked.

"We all saw how much safer we'd all be with more levels," Wayne said. "But grinding on random encounters and what we can scare up in the woods has gotten really slow."

"We are on pace with the Heroes, though, right?" Margo asked. "And we've found demon material?"

"That's true, but the Heroes never fought Charybdis or Three Deaths. We're using the same roads, but our journey has been far more unpredictable. I'd feel better if we were all stronger."

"Are you sure this isn't about something else?" she asked.

"Not sure what you mean."

"Did Luke make you feel inadequate?"

The party giggled, minus Wayne.

"Not inadequate," Wayne stammered. "He simply showed us how much better we could be."

"He feels inadequate," Fergus said, nodding sagely.

"I do not!"

Wayne coughed. "As for demon material, we need more if we want to work with it again."

"What Wayne hasn't said is why we are interested in this," Fergus interjected. "Vanilli gave a woman a new arm using demon material. That's incredible, and he learned that he enjoyed helping someone simply because he could. I'm ashamed that none of us had that one on our lists of simple pleasures."

Fergus waved his finger at everyone jokingly.

"The problem is demon material. It's a very finite resource, and what we do have access to comes from demons who were forcibly remade into monsters. That's pretty horrific, and more horrific would be converting demons ourselves. Vanilli is proof that our ideas of demons aren't accurate, so using them would be like using a person."

"But a dead person is okay?" Armond asked, smirking.

"In Wayne's world, there is a concept called 'organ donation.' The remains of the dead are used to give others life. Part of the practice is asking a person if they want to do that before they die, and we will admittedly not be doing that here, but it's close. I have suitably adjusted my values and am okay with it."

Armond laughed. "I'm in favor. I know a lot of people who would take a skeleton limb to replace what they lost."

"Excellent," Fergus said. "To make sure no one missed this point, let me say it again. We can set our train station exits anywhere in a town, but we need a place that is both discreet and accessible for wagons. All ideas welcome."

When no one had any more questions, Wayne delivered the last announcement: They were preparing to run the Earth Temple. The party would revisit the Dead Zone on their way, but they wouldn't linger because of how much time the Earth Temple would demand.

"Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day."

"How are things with Sheeri?" Armond asked. The rest of the party's heads nodded that they too wanted to know the answer.

"I shouldn't have leaked her personal business to you," Wayne said.

"That's not why we care."

"We're talking. I don't know."

Margo stood. "Come on, guys. We've abused Wayne to the point that we are punching down."

Fergus held the door open–which included holding it up so it didn't fall off the one hinge–and let Wayne in first. They were in the same part of town as General Poltur's black site, which is to say that traffic was minimal and most of the buildings on this stretch were in various states of abandonment.

The building Fergus led Wayne to was in exceptionally bad condition, which was the first thing Fergus insisted was advantageous about the property. The price reflected its appeal.

The vision Fergus shared was to build a quick-access hub in every town they visited, or at least most of them, and that hub had a few components.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

First, they needed a secure location for their station exit. Having privacy coming and going was not just preferred, but it was necessary to keep cranksters from messing with their comm station. Fergus didn't see any way to protect a comm station that didn't involve having total control over the exit.

The real trick, though, was that he wanted to apply what they learned from Vanilli's Cold Storage door hanging open to build a travel network between cities. If they could have as many Goods Storage cars on the train as they wanted, they could set one permanent door per town and just never close it.

In the mood for some fresh halibut from the Cuan restaurant you love but you're in Iomallach? Board the train, walk to the Cuan car, and walk out through that door.

"Security is the biggest concern," Fergus said. "I remembered you telling me about Perris' vault, and that's the kind of security we need."

"Expensive, between the train bucks we spend for the car and the gold we spend on securing it, but I see the value."

"I suspect a few shipments through the network would cover our costs. The speed alone would be worth a premium, so we may not need to move a few tons of dirt again."

"You've thought it through," Wayne said, impressed.

"The vision is larger, but let's see if the first phase works out."

Wayne closed his eyes and started to laugh. "You already bought this, didn't you?"

"Absolutely."

"After all the passenger purchases, we're empty on train bucks," Wayne said.

"Going back to our grinding problem."

"Yeah, but we'll earn them back, eventually."

"That's true," Fergus agreed. "We should stop at Vientuls on the way back from the Temple. Then we'd never have to go through the Cuts again."

"Dislike it that much?"

"If the dwarves left a switch to bring the ocean back, I'm flipping it."

Wayne stared at Fergus.

"Okay, I wouldn't destroy an entire ecosystem and a small town just because I hate the way sweat pools in my underwear. But it's close."

"I'm leaving for the Cuts the day after tomorrow," Wayne said. "You sure you don't want to stay in town one more night?"

Wayne and Sheeri sat on the roof of the gatehouse, looking down on Iomallach in the dark. He carried her up with Blitz, imagining it as a sort of Aladdin magic carpet moment, but he wasn't sure how the gesture landed for her.

"I have clients in Bata. I need to see them and then catch a boat down the coast to Cuan. There's not a lot of work for an art dealer in this town, and the business I thought I had out west didn't pan out."

"Sorry to hear that."

"We'll cross paths again," she said. A soft breeze rippled through her red hair, and she kept her eyes on the view.

"Things have been weird since… you know," Wayne said hesitantly.

"Everyone dies but me," she said. "You're fun, but that's all this can be."

"I don't know what living as long as you do must be like."

"Sure you do. One day your life was one way, and the next, it was all gone. Right? That's what every one hundred years is like for me. It's a whole new world with all new people by then."

"Yeah, that sounds like it sucks."

"Mmhmm." Sheeri wiggled her feet. "You're the only person who has ever known. Did you know that?"

"That's a pretty good run, and I was an exception. If it weren't for Vanilli, I wouldn't have figured it out."

"Why did you go to such lengths to get him to the surface?"

"What do you mean?"

"Most people would have left a person there," Sheeri said, swaying her body to bump her shoulder against Wayne's. "They would definitely leave a demon. All that money, hassle, and risk?"

"It wasn't some big effort to do the right thing," Wayne admitted. "Honestly, it was pretty easy to help him. The worst part was the second walk down, and that wasn't even all that bad because of the Diary."

"Still."

Wayne shrugged. "Do you mind if I ask you about it?"

"It's been fun watching you try to work up the courage," Sheeri teased. "I don't mind. Ask."

"Did you come through one of the Temples like Vanilli?"

Sheeri shook her head. "I remember the hells, and then I woke up in the summoning room. I don't know what happened in between."

"The summoning room?"

"Same place as you. It was late and off-cycle, and I knew what humans do to my kind, so I snuck out and built from there."

"How long ago?"

"Eight cycles."

Wayne nodded. "Diary access?"

"Nope. Little bit of demon magic and my mind."

"See, that's impressive," Wayne said. "They gave me a place to live and threw a bunch of gold at me, and I still thought I had it rough. You built from zero. Actual nothing."

"I think I like flattery."

"That's a new realization?"

She bumped shoulders again, but this time a little harder. "The first two hundred years were difficult," she said softly. "I kept getting attached to people, and it destroyed me. It got easier after I realized that."

"And stopped getting attached."

"Mmhmm."

Wayne nodded and listened to someone playing the guitar on the street below.

"Aren't you going to try changing my mind?"

"You've thought about this for eight hundred years. Like you said, I don't have anywhere near enough time to unpack that."

Sheeri giggled. "That's an awful joke."

"I liked it."

"Have you heard the Fifth Temple theory?"

Wayne didn't mind the topic pivot. He was happy to talk about something different. "I haven't."

"You've seen the Temple Poem, right?"

He had. It was a common four-line poem that also served as a design element. The nature of the ancient language and the way it shaped its letters made it visually pleasing to repeat over and over like patterns on Christmas ribbons. This was said to be an old human language that died out after the Temples were built, specifically not dwarvish.

Which Wayne was pretty sure was just another trick of the first dwarves. The dwarvish in the Water Temple basement suggested that dwarves built them instead of humans, as was widely believed.

Translated, the poem read:

Water on the beach

Earth beneath the trees

Fire in the field

Air above the peak

Apparently, it was poetic genius in the original language and was not as lame as it sounded translated.

While researching the Air Temple, which was the most difficult Temple to study because it was on a floating island, a researcher noticed that the poem was different for one repetition near the tip of the ziggurat, one paragraph in a design with thousands of repetitions of the same text.

This variant read:

Water under the ocean

Earth beneath the sand

Fire in the field

Air above the peak

"Interesting," Wayne said. He remembered seeing the books Kryss left on the return cart in the Iomallach library and smiled. "So this is a relatively new find?"

"And not widely known."

"There are plenty of deserts on the Free Continent," Wayne thought aloud, "but that messes with the symmetry of it."

"Two Temples for two continents," Sheeri said, nodding.

"The Bata Desert then? That's a big desert."

Sheeri laughed. "You covered a lot of ground in thirty seconds."

Knowing how bad the first dwarves really were at following-through on projects made it easy for Wayne to imagine part of an update being overlooked. It was like finding a Nintendo Switch button icon in your PlayStation game because someone on the porting team forgot to change that one item. And then it got through the certification team for the console. When some games have eighty or more hours of content, it was only natural for something to slip through, eventually.

"Does Blackwell let you take other jobs?" Sheeri asked.

"Yes. We agreed on that upfront."

"No one's given you a lead on a fifth Temple?"

"You did," Wayne said.

"I'll cover expenses, and we split the return fifty-fifty after I recoup."

Wayne thought. "Fergus needs to weigh-in, but I'm okay with you making your investment back before we split. What's the lead?"

"I'll have it delivered to the Blackwell Estate before you leave."

"Preserving the mystery?"

Sheeri smiled. "Maybe a bit, but I also don't want our night to be all business."

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