Today's Earth date: October 29, 1991

To thank us for our help with the cultists, Cuan has given us this world's equivalent of a blank check. Any gear, supplies, or entertainment we want is ours. No questions. No hesitations. We ask, we get.

Wilmond is loading up on healing supplies while Horcus and Rathain are coordinating a basecamp. We'll have a few dozen attendants accompany us to the Temple. They can't go inside, but they'll carry all our gear and several other items that Horcus wants us to have "just in case."

My job has been to study up on demons. They're the stuff of nightmares, more twisted and menacing than I'm able to describe. On the one hand, this will be dangerous. On the other hand, it will be nice to fight pure evil again. No negotiations. No worries about what's good for the people of this world. Just kill.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

***

"I have no idea what to do next," Wayne admitted to the party. Vanilli sat in the corner, his hands still bound.

Fergus' mouth had hung open in disbelief for the last hour. He didn't have any immediate suggestions either.

"He can't leave," Margo said. "That means he's not a danger to anyone outside the Temple."

"Could be lying," Hector said.

"What would he gain by lying?"

Hector shrugged.

"Taking the demon part out of it, he seems like a noncombatant to me," Armond said. "If this was a person, I don't think we'd be as worried."

Fergus raised a finger. "Yet, this is not a person. This is a demon."

"I don't disagree. Putting down a prisoner doesn't sit right for me regardless, especially when that prisoner is more civilian than soldier."

"Seems," Fergus corrected. "Seems more like a civilian than a soldier."

Wayne admitted he had feelings similar to Armond's, but he was just as suspicious as Fergus. He didn't tell the story out loud, but he thought of the old Earth parable about the scorpion and the frog.

Demons were evil by nature, at least that's what Wayne had heard in both of his lives. This was his first time seeing and meeting one. Vanilli didn't look like a pleasant being, but he hadn't done anything unpleasant. The stories said that every demon had to be culled when the Chosen Heroes came through and that the Heroes could not leave until the Temple was completely clear. A few cycles needed days to track down one demon they missed.

The barrier was supposed to block anyone but the Chosen Heroes from entering, but that wasn't accurate. Vanilli was proof that the Heroes could leave the Temple without killing all of the demons inside, so that part wasn't accurate either.

Or, perhaps, this floor didn't count as being inside the Temple?

We're getting off track. The question Wayne needed to answer was could he trust Vanilli not to harm anyone if they let him live? What would Earth Wayne, a hypothetical Chosen Hero, do?

Killing was a new development in his second life. Wayne had never been hunting in his previous life and had never been in a battle, so it wasn't like that version of Wayne would or could kill a demon. He would have been scared, though. Catatonically scared.

He wasn't scared now. His gut told him that Vanilli wasn't a threat.

"What's the third cassette?" Wayne asked.

"Huh?" Vanilli lifted and tilted his head.

"I already heard the Paula Abdul album, so that's one. You knew Milli Vanilli, so the second cassette is probably them. What's the third?"

Vanilli hesitated and said, "Culture Club."

"Culture Club? I don't know that band. Did the cassette come with a case?"

Vanilli pointed to a corner of the boombox table.

Wayne said he didn't see it.

"Look under the Great Gatsby."

Inspecting the cassette, Wayne smiled. "I forgot that Boy George had a band. Yeah, I remember these songs. You got pretty lucky. Maybe not with the Milli Vanilli, but two out of three isn't bad."

"Three out of three."

Wayne laughed. "You're right. I shouldn't shame someone for liking something I don't. My brother was into Paula Abdul. Way way way into." He hadn't thought of his family in… when was the last time, actually? "What did you think of Gatsby?" he asked.

"I don't understand the story but the writing is nice."

"Geez, yeah. I guess I took for granted how much an author assumes about their readers. Then again, I never thought I'd be talking about books in another world, so why not assume that?"

"I must ask," Vanilli said, softly. "Why didn't Daisy choose Gatsby?"

"I was in high school when I read this for the first time. Most of my class had the same question when we were done. The interpretation I liked the most was that they were in love with idealized versions of each other. Since they were the 'one who got away' for one another, they ended up chasing a fantasy that reality could never live up to."

Vanilli nodded slowly. "May I ask another question?"

Wayne said sure.

"Do many humans build their houses on eggs?"

"What? Ohhh." Wayne started to laugh. "The eggs in Gatsby are pieces of land, and I agree that's a confusing way to describe a place."

"All this time…" Vanilli shook his head and chuckled a bit to himself.

Wayne drew his knife and cut Vanilli's ropes. The demon froze, shocked by his sudden freedom.

"Nobody asked me if I wanted to come here either," Wayne said. "I just had to deal with it. I was fortunate to have a friend make that easier. You had to do it alone."

Fergus gave Wayne a hard stare. Wayne motioned that it was okay.

"Alright, Vanilli. Here's the plan. We were hired to map the Temple, so we'll work our way up from the bottom to finish what we haven't covered. I won't include these passages or the stairs you showed us, and we won't mention finding you here."

"Maps?" Vanilli asked. "So others are coming?"

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"No one can get inside but us. How that works is hard to explain, but it's the truth. Our map is purely academic, a rich guy with an interest in history and places he can't ever visit."

Vanilli glanced about, as if looking for the trap that had to be hidden somewhere.

"No tricks," Wayne said. "In fact, I think we can help each other, if you're interested."

"Speak your mind, human."

"Myself and my friend here would like to learn more about these passages, how you found them, and how they work. If they exist in this Temple, they probably exist in the others. Also, I'm looking for pages that look kind of like that." Wayne pointed to the The Space Gamer cover on the wall.

"You could kill me after I tell you all my secrets."

"Which is why this will be a trade. If you're interested, I'll come back with whatever you want. If I were you, I'd want something new to read, for example."

Vanilli said that was interesting.

"We can even start now." Wayne turned to Fergus. "Would you mind sharing your wine?"

"What wine?"

"We haven't done a run yet where you didn't pack booze. Get it out, please."

Fergus did as he was asked.

"Do you know what wine is?" Wayne asked Vanilli.

"I do, and yes, I would like a glass."

The bottle barely had enough wine to serve everyone, so Wayne went light on his own pour.

"Notes of cinnamon?" Vanilli asked, his nose over his wooden cup.

Fergus perked up. "What else do you smell?"

"Hmm. Oak, maybe?" Vanilli took a sip. "Yes, oak for sure."

The old scholar laughed. "Your palate is better than Wayne's."

When the drink was finished, Wayne said that they would be on their way. If Vanilli didn't mind, he'd like to exit through the hatch right there in the room. The demon climbed a ladder that Wayne didn't see in the room before. At the top, Vanilli tapped multiple tiles and pushed. The trapdoor swung open and slammed on the stone floor above, the impact echoing through the halls.

Wayne sent the rest of the party up the ladder first. Then he thanked Vanilli for the tour and went up the ladder also.

He found his party looking around to orient themselves. Wayne expected that to be tricky on this level because the party had just sort of appeared in the middle of it. As soon as they found the stairs up that confusion would be gone.

"Wayne."

He turned to see Vanilli standing on the ladder, looking out of the trap door. The demon extended his arm. His hand held a catalog page.

"In the interest of future trades."

"I'll return the generosity on my next visit," Wayne said, beaming at having a new page to run through Christmas List. When he looked up, the trapdoor was closed, and all signs of it ever being there were gone. Wayne traced his fingers where he knew the door's edge to be and still couldn't see or feel where the opening was.

Had there not been a page in his hand, Wayne might have questioned his sanity. This entire excursion had been one weird experience after another. He looked forward to seeing daylight again.

As for the Page of Power, which was 25 and 26, Wayne was pumped.

Overall, the page itself was in good condition, no ink spills or giant tears, but like the first ever page he found, several titles were scratched out. Compared to other pages, however, he had more options here than usual.

On page 25, above a sketched wreath with the line "'Tis the season for software savings," were a scratched out basketball game and a scratched out World War II flight simulator. The two visible games were It Came from the Desert and Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan. Wayne had never heard of It Came from the Desert, but the cover featured a giant ant and a screaming woman, retro B-movie horror style.

The blurb read:

Ants 20 feet tall are using your town as a human picnic basket. To spoil their lunch, you'll have to do better than a can of bug spray… especially when it's hard to tell the bugs from the Buicks.

That sounded amazing. One of his other goofier unlocks, Spellcasting 101 seemed disappointing at first, but the quirkier spells had ended up being quite useful. He hoped It Came from the Desert would be similar.

As for Tunnels & Trolls, the cover pictured a demon woman fighting a party of heroes. This particular era of gaming went heavy on big muscles and big boobs in promotional art. Tunnels & Trolls was no different, and the demon lady herself appeared to be naked or near to it, the title text conveniently obscuring the most salacious bits.

Wayne had never played the PC game but had read one of the tabletop rulebooks. One of his friends, his group's perma-Dungeon Master, bought Tunnels & Trolls because it promoted a "play by mail" option, which was pretty appealing pre-internet. As far as Wayne knew, his friend never actually used the books for gaming.

The catalog described it this way:

Duck arrows, ride thundering horses, and brave rough seas to find the wizard King Khazan. He's trapped in a magical trance while the world around him crumbles at the hand of the Death Empress Lerotra'hh!

Wayne heard Fergus clear his throat and looked up to see his party waiting on him. They had dungeon left to map, after all.

"One minute," Wayne said, apologetically. "I need to take care of this before we get more experience points."

Wayne dug ink out of his pack and circled Tunnels & Trolls. The success notifications delivered larger and larger doses of dopamine. If he wasn't addicted to this growth already, he soon would be, he wagered.

He had a new spell in his interface:

Dum Dum – Reduces a foe's IQ to 3. If the spell should fail, then the caster's IQ will drop.

The effect sounded useful, but he didn't like the idea of not knowing the rules for determining if the spell failed or not. Three IQ was maybe enough intelligence for his body to remember how to breathe but nothing else.

He wanted to get a better look at the backside of the page, but not wanting to delay his party further, he carefully stored the page in his rucksack for later. The important part was done: He filled his second open Christmas List for level 8, sparing him from losing it when he advanced to level 9.

"Appreciate your patience, everyone. Let's wrap this up so we can get out of here."

***

Fergus marveled at the pale blue crystal suspended in the middle of what the party believed was the portal room. Wayne estimated it was six stories tall or so, and it cast the same rippling, liquid light as the waterways everywhere else in the dungeon, as if the crystal itself was made of water.

"It's bigger than I thought it'd be," Fergus said. "Suppose you need a lot of magic to hold the world together, though."

Margo looked around the room at the decorative columns and four fountains surrounding the crystal. "Where is the portal?"

"The Heroes described it as 'under' the crystal. Perhaps a structure appears when a cycle begins? Alternatively, the portal could have no physical presence itself. Kind of like Wayne's Good Storage if you can imagine that but much larger and with demons inside."

They gave Fergus half an hour to sketch the crystal and the room's layout, as well as take notes of his observations and queries.

While he did that, Hector asked Wayne, "We should watch our backs. Seems like it could pop up anywhere with all those tunnels."

Wayne agreed but also believed Vanilli wouldn't bother them. Regardless, he assured Hector he was using Probe as often as he could just in case.

"Is it okay that we left him, though? Heroes kill demons, no exception."

Wayne smiled. "We're not Heroes, so we get to do this our way."

***

The party needed several minutes to adjust to the brightness of daylight, but they were outside with a complete map of the "public" Water Temple layout in their hands. As promised, Wayne omitted Vanilli's access tunnels, but he had written down as much as he could in his Documents. With those maps, the party should be able to return to where they went down the secret stairs as well as locate the hatch they used to ascend from Vanilli's basement apartment.

Whether they could figure out how to open them was a different problem for a different day.

Before they went down the ziggurat stairs to return to the wagon, Wayne asked the party to consider their visit to the Water Temple confidential, a clause Fergus had outlined in great detail in their contracts. In this case, they could share that Wayne entered the temple and came out with a complete map.

No sharing that the rest of the party could follow him inside, and definitely no discussion of Vanilli and his tunnels. That discretion included speaking with Sammy and Einig, who were waiting for them at the wagon. The boys knew the party went into the Temple, but they should know to keep that confidential. Wayne asked the party to keep the cook and the campmaster ignorant of Vanilli, though.

The party agreed, saying they assumed those secrets would be guarded.

"You should probably take this," Fergus said. He put his bag down and pulled out the bottle of wine they shared with Vanilli. The bottle was filled with the glowing water from inside the temple.

Wayne gave him a quizzical look.

"What? Who doesn't like souvenirs?"

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