Today's Earth date: October 24, 1991

Cuan is holding a festival in our honor, a city-wide party. The hostage is still recovering, and we're told she'll need some time yet. That makes sense. Kidnapped by cultists and held for days and days with an undead army around you? I'd probably need time to process that too.

In fact, I wouldn't mind time to process myself. We have to attend all these parties as honored guests, but I can't take another person shaking my hand, talking about how amazing it would have been to see the Chosen Heroes conquer an entire army of undead or offering me a business partnership of this kind or another.

I'd rather sit in my room and not talk to anyone for a long time.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

***

Wayne and Fergus brought the entire wagon party to the entrance of the Water Temple, Sammy and Einrig included.

One by one, each person passed over the outermost threshold that Fergus insisted was where the barrier was. Or should be.

All of the Zeroes stepped across just fine. Sammy and Einrig, however, met a solid surface. Nothing visible impeded them, but they couldn't cross, even when Fergus tried pushing Sammy through in the name of science. From the other side, Sammy looked like he was smushed into a glass door. Fergus made sure to point out that the barrier was where he said it would be.

Their sample size was small, but the data pointed in one obvious direction: Those with system access passed through the barrier. Those without, did not.

The stories always went that only the Chosen Heroes could enter the temple, which was accurate, but the real gatekeeper was the system it turned out. Before Wayne, the Heroes were the only ones who could access the system, making this scenario an entirely original moment for this world.

Someone born here had never been inside a Temple. The crystals were responsible for preserving their very existence, and they couldn't see the magic for themselves.

"We'll get packed," Armond said.

"You guys weren't supposed to have to work this part."

"No sense in sending you alone if you don't have to, and I, for one, would like to see inside."

Hector and Margo agreed.

Sammy and Einrig were a little disappointed, but not crushingly so. Neither had much interest in dungeon crawling.

"Alright then," Wayne said. "We lost most of the day, so let's use the rest to prep and head in tomorrow morning."

***

An hour into exploring the Temple, Wayne had not seen a wall without a water feature. Everywhere he looked were fountains with arcing sprays or spouts that poured out of a wall and disappeared into the floor, not a single drop splashing away from the stream. In other places, those spouts fed channels that ran water through the floor as if it were grout. Every noise echoed, and the smell of ocean water followed them everywhere.

They had yet to see any torches or windows. Instead, the entire temple was lit like a night swim, all of the light coming from the water.

Not under the water. The water itself.

When Wayne tried to find the source of the light, he found none. Then he cupped two hands together and filled them. The liquid in his hands had the same rippled glow as the water coming from fountains or waterfalls.

They walked and walked and walked. The reliefs covering every vertical surface were beautiful, all intricate depictions of sea life, but after six hours of seeing them, the luster had gone dark for the party. Wayne did rubbings of a few and stopped. He'd need weeks to pencil rub the entire Temple. The only real surprises in their hike were the occasional points of battle damage. A gouge where an axe went wide. Crumbling corners from a powerful impact. Scorch marks from fire spells.

Fergus said demons didn't leave corpses. Wayne knew these halls were packed dense with enemies during a cycle, but that was difficult to imagine with nothing but emptiness everywhere the party looked. With no real objective other than to map all of it, they set out to find Artem's legendary fountain on the west side of the temple.

The temple had six floors, and each floor's west wall had several fountains. No specific fountain was more remarkable than the others to the party, so they had no way of knowing what impressed Artem.

Fergus was beside himself.

The moment was sad enough that Wayne couldn't tease his friend. Punching down wasn't fun.

How long they walked was difficult to say, but they needed what felt like a day to fully explore the first floor. With where the entrance was outside, seeming to have more structure above them, Wayne expected the option to go up or down from the entry floor, but their only choice was down.

Every floor down was more elaborate than the last, layers of bridges criss-crossing over one another, multiple levels of holding pools with waterfalls going down and fountain jets going up.

"You could fit a lot of demons in here," Hector observed. "What do they do before the Heroes arrive?"

"Grow and wait," Fergus said. "Not sure if they do welcome parties for the demons who come through the portals after them, but I doubt it."

"Shit. I'd be pissed too if I was locked in here."

The whole of the party agreed.

Each floor took more time to clear than the last. The party was a third of the way through floor 4 when they stopped to eat and sleep. Hector was on watch, and Wayne was the only other person awake. That wasn't by choice. He wanted to sleep but his mind ran and ran, from dwarven ruins to evil druids, from riding Outlawson to standing on Miss Kryss' porch with the door closed in his face.

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He used Probe endlessly as they explored the Temple, just as he did on any other excursion. The process was automatic at this point, hitting Probe every ten minutes out of pure habit. He did that now–Unable to sleep, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. After days of seeing only green dots, he didn't notice the red dot at first.

Wayne sat up straight.

The red dot was at the edge of his HUD in a faroff room still mostly covered by the HUD's fog of war. It moved back and forth intermittently, and sometimes sat still for long stretches. Eventually, it meandered out of range and didn't return.

***

"What monster would be in here off-cycle?" Wayne asked.

"Haven't the foggiest," Fergus admitted. "Shouldn't be possible for there to be any. The Heroes cleared out all the demons from last cycle, and no monsters can go through the barrier."

Wayne gave Fergus a skeptical look.

"Monsters should not get through the barrier, according to the literature."

"What does that mean for us?" Margo asked.

"For now, we be cautious and keep quiet," Wayne answered. "We've behaved like we're alone up until now, so game faces back on because we're heading over there to check it out."

The party nodded.

Wayne used Navigation to select the room where he saw the red dot. His HUD mapped a twisty route that required looping around a large section of the floor to reach their destination, a route that was roughly eight times as long as a straight shot from where the party rested to where Wayne saw the dot.

So they started walking, and Wayne kept using Probe. No red dots. Only green.

The crawl thus far had been dull, but at least the party could talk and joke to pass the time. Moving in silence with no visible threat made the trek feel somber even though it wasn't.

They reached the room where Wayne saw the dot.

In the center of the room was a body of water the size and shape of an above-ground pool. The water level here was even with the floor, perfectly so. Unlike other water features the party had seen thus far, this one didn't appear to flow anywhere–no small streams cut into the floor or elaborate fountain constructs. Yet, the water seemed fresh, and had a subtle motion to its surface. Wayne guessed the pool was fed from below.

"Look at this," Armond said.

The cleric pointed to the floor at the pool's edge, indicating the ghost of a dried puddle, a faint outline left by whatever sediment or chemicals in the water didn't evaporate into the air. This was the first such outline the party had seen in the Temple.

"Something was here," Hector said. "Can anyone tell where it went?"

Armond shook his head. "Don't see any water trail."

"So our monster roommate came to this room, splashed in the pool a little bit, and then left?" Fergus said. "Why would a monster do that?"

No one had the answer, of course, but they fanned out to search the room a second time to ensure the party hadn't overlooked anything.

Margo found something they missed: a dead minnow, dark brown and barely bigger than a finger tip. Its body easily blended with the dark floor, so much so that Wayne didn't see it at first, despite Margo's finger pointing right at it.

"How would a minnow get all the way over here?" Fergus asked.

"Bait," Armond answered, simply.

Fergus asked him to elaborate.

"Did a fair bit of fishing when we had time to kill. Live minnows are good bait, and I've never seen one jump out of the water. For it to be there, something put it there."

"What monster would be this careful and have the intelligence to use bait?" Fergus asked.

"Should probably ask a Royal Scholar about that." Armond grinned.

"Funny, funny," Fergus replied.

Wayne steered the conversation back on course by mentioning he hadn't noticed fish in the Temple waters at any point. Even now, looking into the pool, he didn't see any, and the water was perfectly clear.

Armond pointed to two tunnels at the bottom, some twenty feet down in the water. From above and from that distance, they were faint lines, easily missed. "Fish like to hide. They'd feel safer in there than out in the open."

"Which way did the monster go after?" Fergus asked Wayne.

He couldn't say for certain. Only a portion of the room was visible on his HUD and the room had three entrances. Two of those were off-screen entirely when he saw the dot, and it definitely didn't take the visible exit.

The party mapped the rest of the fourth floor. They didn't see any more hints of activity, and Wayne didn't see any red dots.

That changed halfway through the fifth floor, right when the party looked for a place to make camp. The red dot was on the other side of the wall, but the route to reach that room looked like a ten or fifteen minute walk, based on the path Navigation showed him.

The reappearance of the monster–or "a" monster. Fergus pointed out they had no way of knowing if this was the same dot as before–energized the party. They followed the route as quickly and quietly as they could. Before they departed, Margo asked Wayne if he could tell her when they were close enough that the monster may be able to hear them coming.

She wanted to stealth the rest of the way to get a look at what they were dealing with.

***

Everyone but Margo sat against the dungeon wall. As the party's rogue went ahead, Wayne watched her green dot slowly approach the red dot on his HUD. He disliked the idea of any of their party fighting a monster alone, but Margo insisted she had been practicing stealth in her off time. She might have been a locksmith's wife before, but in this life, she was a professional rogue.

Wayne thought it was interesting she described that change as two different lives. His own interest in a fresh start made it hard for him to argue against Margo's scouting proposal. He too was on his second life and wanted to take more risks this time around.

So he stared at his HUD, his heart pounding as if he were the one sneaking up on an unknown threat.

From weeks of working with it, Wayne knew the Regional Display from Railroad Tycoon lacked certain details. It did a poor job of distinguishing between vertical layers–flattening everything to one singular plane–and it didn't go as granular as to map furniture or other obstacles that might be in a room. He could tell what was a doorway and what was a hallway, but nothing more specific.

When Margo paused for long periods in the middle of a room, Wayne assured himself she was behind cover he couldn't see via his HUD. But each time her green dot moved again was a relief. The pessimistic end of his imagination pictured Margo stuck in a trap, bleeding out all alone. Her moving meant that wasn't the case.

They waited for what felt like an hour, but Wayne had no way of knowing if that was right or if his stress made five minutes seem eternal.

The important part was that Margo's green dot made a return trip, a touch faster than her trip out, but not by much. When the rogue finally rejoined the party, her face was creased with thought and confusion.

Fergus offered her a waterskin, which she graciously accepted. When she wiped her mouth off on her sleeve, she whispered, "I promise that I'm not joking or messing with you all in any way. I mean that. I'm being completely serious and reporting what I saw. Okay?"

The party nodded, curious as to why Margo felt she needed a preamble.

Margo took a deep breath. "I saw a demon, a small one, about Fergus' size."

"I thought you said no jokes," Fergus interrupted. Wayne shushed him.

"I don't know enough about demons to tell you what type, but it was humanoid with long teeth and long claws. Its back was to me, so those were just glimpses. It was in the water, so my size estimate might be off too, but I don't think so."

"Did it notice you or change its behavior in any way?"

Margo shook her head. "It was occupied. It splashed water on itself like it was bathing and sang along to a song. It was not a good singer."

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