Luckily for us, I didn't detach too much of the upper part of the cave. I pushed out a dome of Nebula while totally not panicking and deflected the worst of it around, resulting in just a light coating of dust settling on us like a nasty blanket.

Well, us minus István. This time I was actually watching, and the dust just avoided him. As in, just before it would have landed on his clothes, it took a sharp turn and decided to just nope out sideways. As a result, it missed and fell on the floor.

"So that's how you do that," I said.

"Do what?" He asked. I'd say he was feigning innocence, but my comment was out of right field, so it was genuine confusion.

"Keep your clothes so clean."

Celistar, who had been about to step forward (while brushing off her shoulders), stopped dead. Clearly, it wasn't just me who was interested.

"Oh, yes. I emit my Nebula across my entire surface area. It is pretty easy to do when your Alignment is as mine is. A 'steam clean', if you will."

Well, that's one mystery solved. Was it just that we never asked him, or was he only admitting it now that I had his method clocked? I honestly couldn't remember if I'd ever just straight-up prodded him for the answer.

Either way.

"So we're in a cave." Viktor said in a very 'shit or get off the pot' manner - another colorful expression I knew courtesy of Grandpa.

"Yup, a cave." I said.

"Do we keep going deeper or go back?"

"Which one do you want to do?" I asked. It seemed like we'd done things in the interest of everyone here but Viktor, so I figured I'd hand off the baton to him for once.

He seemed a bit confused now that the choice had been passed to him. That didn't last long.

"Definitely deeper. I know there's nothing to fight out there," he jerked a giant thumb over his shoulder, "but there might be something deeper."

I couldn't fault the man's logic.

"Deeper it is, then."

We proceeded forward, stepping over the fairy ring of busted rocks that I'd unintentionally created when I deflected the debris from the ceiling. Oddly enough, the top of the cave had been pretty smooth, without a passel of poky protrusions potentially performing perforations.

Alliterations aside, I'd have expected the jungle to thin as we moved in deeper, but it did the exact opposite. As if fighting, all the trees slowly grew bigger, even if that meant there were fewer of them.

The faintest of familiar scents brushed past my olfactories, perking them up posthaste.

It had the scent of a campfire, but with hints of the lamp oil we used back at the Circle, mixed in with something entirely more acrid, like someone was cooking a shoe.

What? There was a very odd guy who used to live in our vicinity at one point. He enjoyed sole-food. The tall tales he used to tell us kids were… creative, which helped make up for the lack of narrative consistency, integrity, and the fact that the character's names would change frequently, sometimes even over the course of the same sentence. You kind of figured it out, since he only really had three of them anyway.

I somehow doubted Crazy Dave was here, though.

Which left other sources of fire - and minus this being some sort of dragon's lair, I'm pretty sure that meant humans.

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Even if there had been a dragon at one point, I'm pretty sure that humongous thing we cut down to size(s) back at the city probably would have nommed on it by now just for the extra Lizard Alignment-calories.

That still left the question of why they were here, and for what purpose. From what I'd gathered from before, this place was a somewhat unnatural area created by the Will of the World and these were usually uninhabited by sentient creatures.

But at the same time, Celistar had told me it was not normal for there to be only one type of creature inhabiting one either. Or for it to have a city with esoteric rules or really any of the other things that had happened. In other words, 'Here be weird, yo.'

So there wasn't really a kind of usable precedent on what to expect. If there were other people, and if they were doing something here, it could be spirits or something else strange summoned by the Will of the World.

Who knows?

Speaking of strange stuff. There had been a whole-ass city, Mistral, at the start of our journey into the canyon - why was that there if the rumors of the 'ruins' hadn't been? I'd run that past Celistar, but she just kind of gave me a shrug, which while adorable (as was the custom), answered nothing.

It could have something to do with the way people were treating the canyon at the entrance as some sort of goofy livestock farm - a prime example being Viktor's giant lizard drumsticks - and either didn't go far enough in or the abandoned city hadn't been recessed into the mountaintop at the time. The sheer walls untouched by weathering and how clean the whole city was, suggested it hadn't been there for long.

Which also left the terrifying possibility that the signs of people we were increasingly picking up on could have something to do with the appearance of the city. I shook the thought out of my head, as it was fairly silly to think that people with the kind of technology to drill a city with reality defying portals into a mountain probably wouldn't be resorting to fire just to cook and light the area they were living in.

Or so I hoped.

Eventually we came across a trail, which seemed rather recently beaten down, which was good, but had been beaten into a fairly soft, muddy consistency, which was bad. We didn't exactly want to tip these people off we were here if they landed on the unfriendly side of the spectrum.

So we skirted the trail and moved somewhat parallel to it, with Viktor being insanely good at moving quietly for someone of his size. Elder Mountain must have been born with some mouse feet or something.

We had to slow down after a while because the underbrush was getting thicker, which was interesting. Usually this jungle would strangle out anything small enough not to fight back, but here it appeared something had disturbed that balance.

A short while later, we found out what: there was a line of charcoal at the edge of what was clearly a hand-hewn clearing. Someone had went to a fair bit of trouble to hack down all the trees in the area and then chip them into pieces, burn the pieces, then spread them around.

Trying to scare the trees with their dead? Interesting approach. Seemed to work as well, which made me want to try it before I looked closer and realized that there was some sort of nasty energy leaking out of it. A distant, dickhead relative of Nebula.

It gave off this slimy, sticky vibe that felt like it was making me dirty just sensing it.

"That stuff is nasty," I warned the others in my group under my breath. "Don't touch it."

István held back a hand he'd been reaching out with to prod at the ersatz barrier. "Noted."

Celistar was getting the look again, the one where she knew something about what was going on, but couldn't remember well enough to recall it. Probably a side effect of living an absurdly long time.

Or maybe nature spirits were naturally airheads?

Looking across the clearing, we could see tents made out of material similar to ones we'd brought, only much larger in size.

So not natives to this whole weird section of the map then, as these were no permanent accommodations.

Who then? Celistar's I-should-be-remembering-something sickness was reaching epidemic levels, with her actively tapping her forehead as if she could jar the memories loose with physical force.

I wasn't able to help with that in any way, so I kept my eyes trained forward. For all the artistry on the tents, as well as some of the fairly elaborate furniture, there was no one using it. The camp itself was silent at the moment. I sat down on the ground, tucking my legs underneath me to try to keep the fancy clothing I had from getting too nasty.

You'd think that the light colors and elaborate costuming we were all wearing would be a detriment to stealth, but quite honestly the jungle was so thick that all you could see when I sat was my eyes and the top of my head, and that was only if you looked through the leaves just so.

"We wait?" Viktor asked, clearly not very content to do so.

"Unfortunately, yes." I replied. As much as I could appreciate an approach consisting of punch first, punch second, punch third, and then when everyone is dead, try to ask questions... It was probably best if we figured out what was going on here first.

Then we can punch them.

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