Today's Earth date: February 28, 1992

I keep forgetting to write these. By the end of the day… We've just been so busy that I can't even think by the time I'm back to my suite.

When we got back to Iomallach after dealing with the orcs and the other quests up by the desert, we were handed a stack of requests. Kill the monsters. Guard these wagons. Look for this missing child. Escort a royal guest through the city. Clean up a ratman nest on that farm over there.

It doesn't stop. And honestly, I've been thinking about [redacted]. I shouldn't use her name. I've been forgetting that more recently too.

I still have feelings for her, but I'm falling for both of the sisters we rescued. They're funny and sweet and supportive. Is it possible to have more than one true love? I wish I could talk to someone back home about this. Mom, Dad, Uncle Barry–anyone. What do I do in a situation like this?

The sooner we save the world, everything will be much simpler.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

The Forgemaster Hammer, Chisel, and Workbench were just as much building guides as they were crafting tools. For Vanilli, it happened by feel, which was also how he interfaced with the Water Temple. He never saw the writing the way Margo did, but Vanilli wasn't sure how to explain his process in any more detail than that.

When he handed the tools to Wayne or Fergus, they saw system menus, but only if they actively willed them to open. Simply handling the tools like they had done when they found them originally wasn't enough to activate the magic of the first dwarves. Once they knew the trick, though, navigating the Forgemaster menus was the same process as the system but was far more complex.

Vanilli learned that the set of tools Wayne provided had templates for skeleton monsters and nothing else. When Wayne and Fergus loaded a template, they saw a sort of blueprint on their HUD that guided them through the process. For Vanilli it was more instinctual.

There was also an option to freehand the sculpture process entirely, so it was possible to make monsters other than skeletons. There just weren't the preset templates for them.

When Wayne cleared the dungeon to find that particular set of Forgemaster tools, the rats had taken it over, but the final boss was a giant skeleton. It stood to reason that the rest of the dungeon would have been themed that way if it were ever opened officially.

There was a chance he had overlooked other tool options, and Vanilli freely admitted that could very well be the case given their timeline to study the tools. With no clear way to tell how far along Kryss' condition had progressed, a workable solution didn't have to be a perfect solution.

Kryss agreed.

Wayne waited down the hall during the procedure. Vanilli came and got him a few hours later and invited him back. Kryss said he was the only one she wanted to see.

He knocked gently and stepped inside. Kryss sat up in bed. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was pale and waxy. The last few days had been hard on her, but her eyes seemed bright, and her soft smile was genuine.

Wayne noticed immediately that her left arm–the one afflicted by the glitch–was wrapped in heavy gauze. He tried not to look at it. He didn't want her to feel uncomfortable.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, pulling a chair to the side of the bed.

As he did, he saw that Cold Goods Storage was still open in the room, giving him a clear view of the workbench. That felt a little macabre, even though the entire unit was perfectly clean. Working with Foregemaster tools wasn't a bloody Frankenstein affair, thankfully, but he closed it anyway. If it was making him uncomfortable, he assumed it did the same for Kryss.

"I'm tired, and it feels like I broke a fever," Kryss answered. "Everything hurts, but it hurts a lot less now."

"It got pretty bad, huh?"

"It was terrible. I felt like all of me was coming apart."

"I'm sorry."

"I was lucky you were there," Kryss said. "Thank you for your help."

"You should really thank Vanilli. None of us could have done that."

"I have. He's been very sweet through all of this."

"Really?" Wayne's voice betrayed more surprise than he intended.

"Yeah, I think I've got a bit of a crush on my savior. His eyes, his hair, and he's intelligent too? I'm sorry if that's awkward for you to hear."

Wayne laughed. "Not at all."

Which was a lie, of course. The awkward pressure was so powerful that Wayne felt like breaking one of his own fingers just to change the subject.

"He's a good guy," Wayne said. "I'm glad it worked out."

Kryss held up her bandaged arm to show it could move just fine. "It feels stronger than my good arm, but it's… it's not pretty."

"I'm sorry this happened to you."

"Tell me how bad it is?"

Wayne felt himself nodding, which the rest of him wasn't happy about. Who knew what sort of challenge he just signed up for, and he'd have to play it cool. Her arm could be made of earthworms and he'd have to smile and say it wasn't so bad.

When the gauze was gone, Kryss held up her left arm. No sign of the glitch remained, but her forearm and hand were bone.

No skin.

No muscle.

The Forgemaster tools they had could only build skeletons, so Vanilli replaced her glitch with the only thing he could make. Despite how it looked, she had full range of motion and strength as if it were human and healthy. The arm was also just as sensitive to touch as her right arm, but the sensation of her bones making direct contact with anything was a difficult adjustment to make.

"I'm a ghoul," Kryss said, sighing. "It's better than dead, but this isn't what I pictured when I thought about getting old."

"It's not as bad as you think," Wayne said.

Kryss scoffed. "I saw how big your eyes got."

"Surprising doesn't mean bad."

"Keep digging."

Wayne laughed. "I'm serious."

"It's fine," Kryss said sincerely. "I have plans to accessorize. This is not the weather for long gloves, but I can make do, I suppose."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I'm sure you will. Can I get you anything?"

"You've done enough, and I'm sorry."

Wayne stood but paused. "Sorry?"

"I wasn't fair to you when we spoke in the library," Kryss said. "I can be competitive. I shouldn't have let that trump friendship."

"Thank you for saying so, but it's fine. Billium says you can stay as long as you like, by the way."

Kryss nodded. "You say that like you're leaving."

"I have a guide to return to Mudsville. Vanilli is staying behind in case you need him."

"Oh, well, as long as him and those eyes are going to be here, I'll be okay."

Wayne wasn't idle while Vanilli worked to cure Kryss' affliction.

Cure might not be the best word because she ended up with an undead arm. Addressed? Resolved? Mitigated?

At any rate, Wayne kept busy while he stayed close to help Vanilli if he needed it.

He intended to start by reviewing all the footage from the Dead Zone using Replay Camera, hoping that perhaps they could learn something helpful by revisiting the events of that day with fresh eyes. When he attempted to play the files, however, the system said they were corrupted and could not be opened.

Next on his list was distributing the six stat-boosting potions the party found after defeating Charybdis and then determining what drinking an "Elixir of the Moon" would do if someone drank it.

After a great deal of discussion with the rest of the party, Hector drank the +10 hitpoints. Fergus got the +1 to intelligence. Margo claimed the +1 to agility, and Armond took the +1 to vitality. Wayne took both the +1 strength and the +1 to luck. He disliked taking two while everyone else got one, but the party decided–without him, for the most part–that Wayne was their primary damage dealer and that he was often separated from the party.

No one was sure exactly how luck affected Wayne's day-to-day life, but it couldn't hurt, they believed.

As for the eight bottles of "Elixir of the Moon," an alchemist they visited in Iomallach later in the day couldn't tell them exactly what would happen upon consumption, but she was definitive in one observation: the brew had a great deal in common with Polymorph potions. In this world, a polymorph effect was often permanent or required an additional Polymorph to undo.

The cutscene had suggested it was an antidote to the were-virus, so Wayne could see how Polymorph could play a part in reversing that process.

Wayne tucked the Elixirs into Goods Storage for the time being. Part of him thought, "What's the worst that could happen?" but then he remembered that's what a coworker said about plugging in the strange USB drive they found on the train that morning.

That turned into a long workday. A very long workday.

Wayne's last downtime project was unpacking his final unlock from Railroad Tycoon: Train Roster.

Most of the ability was unusable outside of what the system defined as a "town," so it sat untouched for the first half of the scramble to get Kryss back to Iomallach as soon as physically possible.

When he finally had a moment to sit still, he opened the menus, considered his two new options–Board or Build–and started with Board.

When he selected Board, he was presented with the option to choose Goods Storage or Cold Goods Storage. He chose the former because he knew Vanilli was working in the latter.

The system asked him if he wanted to designate his current location as the Iomallach station. Not knowing what that meant, Wayne said yes and clicked ahead.

There, in his room at the Blackwell estate, a dimensional door opened. Stepping through, he found that he was in his Goods Storage container, but he didn't enter in the usual place. Instead of stepping into one end of the long container, he came in through the side.

He had to slide a bookcase out of the way to get in, and when he did, he saw that Goods Storage now had three doors. There was the one he just came through and a door at either end of the container. The contents of Good Storage weren't laid out with those access points in mind, so Wayne shuffled some more items around and went through the door on his left.

Wayne stood on a small walkway that crossed over the top of a train car connection. Two thin chains ran down either side to keep him from stepping off into what was nothing but void. Goods Storage had become a railcar attached to a locomotive, but where this train existed seemed undefined.

Gravity and logic suggested that a train track had to be beneath his feet, but that wasn't the case. Everywhere he looked, being careful not to leave the train itself, was nothing but empty black.

When he boarded the locomotive, a 4-6-2 Pacific according to his system menus, Wayne found a DOS-style computer terminal. From that terminal, he could set a destination–but Iomallach was his only option, presently–and he could set permissions for his party. When he set permissions to "Full," he received a notification that any party member granted Full access would have access to the Board command.

Seconds after he switched Fergus' permissions to Full, Wayne heard the old scholar calling from the Goods Storage car, "Hello? Wayne?"

Wayne went to greet him.

"I can open Goods Storage now?" Fergus asked.

"Yes, but it's more than that." Wayne walked to the opposite end of Goods Storage and opened the door. As he expected, there was another walkway over the void and then a door to the Cold Goods Storage car. Stepping through it startled Vanilli. The demon was hard at work trying to figure out the first dwarf tools and hadn't anticipated new dimensional doors appearing without warning.

Fergus looked around Wayne, saw Vanilli looking back at them confused, and waved casually. They excused themselves and quietly shut the door to leave Vanilli to his work.

"This is confusing," Fergus said, back in Goods Storage. "I used the Board command in my room, entered through Goods Storage, and it looks like I could have walked right out of Cold Storage into a different room in the house?"

Wayne nodded.

"What else does it do?"

After showing Fergus the locomotive, Wayne shared his theory that visiting other towns would "connect" them to the train route. How that worked exactly, both in terms of the rules the system applied and the physics of the travel itself, was unknown to Wayne, but seeing a town selection on the engine interface made him reasonably certain he was correct.

He had only visited Iomallach since he activated Train Roster, so it stood to reason that visiting another town would add an additional stop.

That was a guess built on his growing desire for a quick travel option, so Wayne was aware he could be wildly off the mark.

They couldn't test that yet, but Wayne could open the Build Menu. From there, he could select a few dozen variations of Good Storage, optimized for everything from mail to milk, apparently, as well as several other types of passenger cars. He could choose a default car full of seats like a standard train, he could choose a car divided into multiple individual cabins, he could choose a car built to be one cabin for the whole car, or he could choose a "blank" passenger car, which was the same as the others except totally empty.

Wayne chose a passenger car with cabins for his first test. He placed it between the Engine and Goods Storage.

Fergus whistled as he opened a door to check each cabin. They weren't elaborately decorated, but they were outfitted with basic beds and mattresses with a small bathroom at one end.

"Stands to reason these other cars will follow us to the next town?" Fergus asked.

"Seems that way."

"Is this costing us gold?"

Wayne shook his head. "I can see a budget in dollars, but I'm not sure what it's based on. I'm hesitant to spend it all before we know if we can earn more, if that makes sense."

"It does indeed."

"If the train can travel between towns, we could make a killing with transport fees alone." When Wayne heard his own words out loud, he laughed. "Look at me getting excited about starting a shipping business."

"For our purposes, it doesn't need to be that structured," Fergus assured him. "A few deliveries here and there would keep us funded just fine."

"You're right. We'll know more when we try using this in a different town."

"Got to take Kenny back to Mudsville, right?"

Wayne sighed. "Yes, I do."

"Why did you adopt that demeanor just now? I thought you two were having fun?"

"We are, but thinking of Mudsville reminds me that we need to get back to the Dead Zone to loot the spawner, we haven't seen any siren traps, we haven't visited the Earth Temple, and who knows what Sanders and Targitaus have gotten up to."

Fergus made calming gestures. "I've been doing my part. Sanders is in the wind, and there are no leads on Targitaus. The rumor is that Sanders ratted on Targitaus to save his own skin and has gone into hiding."

"Any idea what Sanders said?"

Fergus shrugged. "We are not on the best of terms with local government at this time, as you may recall. Regardless, take a breath. We're not beholden to any deadlines."

"I can appreciate that, but it also means my list of stuff to do just keeps getting longer, and the longer it gets, the more anxiety I feel."

"Even if none of those items are urgent or all that important?"

"Correct."

Fergus patted Wayne. "I'm sorry, friend. Did you spend your life on Earth thinking like that?"

"Absolutely."

"Your mind must be a challenging place at times."

"Yeah. I hate it."

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