The first steps beyond the archway set an interesting stage.

Within seconds, Kaldalis felt like he was drenched in humidity. The air was dank and damp, but breathable. Despite being so close to the ocean, the dampness didn’t have a smell of salt to it. That fact alone was curious, but there was so much more to wonder about.

This first room was something like a courtyard, large and open. Every vertical surface (and even some of the horizontal) was overgrown with moss, but the shapes beneath were not natural formations. Other, denser plantlife grew in the corners where wall met floor, but it didn’t have the same shaggy look as the moss. There didn’t appear to be much - if any - softer soil past the stairs, and so every surface was hard stone. Each piece was clearly cut at right angles, or rounded in even arcs.

Myrin stopped at one of them and raked the edge of her greatsword down the mossy stone. The moss came off cleanly, revealing delicate carvings up the rounded side of the block of stone. It wasn’t anything that looked like words or hieroglyphics, however. Just decorative patterns.

“What is this?” Kaldalis asked, mostly rhetorically.

“A column,” Myrin said. She ran her hand up the side to the edge. The pattern didn’t have an ending point that Kaldalis could see. “It looks like this is supposed to continue, but the upper part…” She ran her hand down the adjacent side. “This is smooth. Not broken. What else could a stack of cylindrical blocks be?”

Almost in response, Balrim snorted.

“What?” Myrin whirled on him, planting her hands on her hips. “You got something to say?”

“You’re both nerds,” Balrim said, pointing over Myrin’s shoulder.

Behind her, the nearest wall of the cave was a lumpy mass of moss. As Kaldalis’s eyes focused, he could see that the lumps were set at regular intervals, and ran from floor to ceiling. A wavy pattern. Columns. Not every one of them was intact - a few stopped short - but enough of them went up to the top to hold up the oddly smooth ceiling. As he looked, he could see that up there a few places didn’t have enough moisture to support the mossy growth, and the cut stone that showed through was a light grey with an almost green tint.

“How is-” Kaldalis blinked a few times, and stopped, looking around. “Wait. How are we seeing down here? We don’t have torches. And no sunlight?” He waved his hand back and forth in front of his face. “Are we…” He looked over at Myrin and Balrim, looking at their eyes. “Do we have darkvision?”

Balrim let out a sharp laugh at that. “I hope not. It kills any ability to build tension and introduce interesting challenges and barriers.”

“Good point. I’ve never seen a ruling for how darkvision interacts with grue,” Kaldalis said with a chuckle. “But the question remains: how are we seeing?”

“It reminds me of how things looked underwater,” Myrin said. “The way the murky darkness just kind of cleared out for us.”

Kaldalis thought that made sense.

As he squinted ahead to the far end of the strange courtyard, the darkness closed in, blocking out vision of the far end. Just as when he was in the water, it wouldn’t have made sense for the game to render him blinded and helpless. The game - and by extension, Monsoon - would benefit from him being able to see what was around him. The stream wouldn’t get any viewers if all the action was happening in darkness. Similarly, it had long ago been determined that torch-handling - while critical to the text-based adventure genre - wasn’t exactly the most thrilling of gameplay elements in an MMO, having been eliminated from Colossus before it was even in beta.

With that mystery solved for now, the quartet continued forward. Kaldalis took the lead, because no one else really seemed inclined. He was also the tank, but that seemed inconsequential for now. There were no monsters here.

The end of the courtyard came with another stone archway. Beyond that, there were a few stairs down into a tighter hallway with a much lower ceiling.

Out of curiosity, Kaldalis reached up and touched the moss-covered ceiling. His hand came away slightly damp.

“We’re beneath the water table,” Kaldalis said. “Is this safe? We’re only like fifty feet away from the beach here.”

“Just don’t punch a hole in the stone wall,” Myrin said. “Simple.”

“It’s probably fine,” Balrim said with a smirk. “I mean, really. What are the odds that a wall is going to collapse and lead to a thrilling chase sequence against a wall of water?”

“Now that you’ve said it out loud?” Myrin laughed and rolled her eyes. “Probably zero.”

Kaldalis looked to Haldir, but the man seemed either oblivious to their conversation, or like he hadn’t been programmed to have any input here.

It really made him appreciate the fact that Rundan didn’t have private chat options for the players. Otherwise, he might be tempted to send Balrim and Myrin a “not sure if trolling or just an NPC” meme every time Haldir did something odd, which might cause them to laugh out loud. And then they’d have to come up with excuses, like they were back in highschool.

Better to just avoid the whole thing.

Kaldalis continued forward. The tighter hallway continued for a dozen feet, and then curved around to the left. By Kaldalis’s sense of direction, it was taking them away from the ocean, giving him hope that they might not end up underwater by the end of this.

Perhaps as they went farther inland, they might find a larger cavern system.

Kaldalis was hopeful that they might even find some safe haven with easy access to the surface. It would be easier - and safer - to move everyone underground and establish an encampment down here where the Infernal Horde couldn’t find them.

The hallway ended, opening up into a larger room, and Kaldalis drew up short as his vision radius revealed what was beyond.

It was the first pack of monsters in the dungeon.

There were only two of them, but they were something he’d not seen before. Giant beetles, about the size of a motorcycle. Their shells were a shimmering purple-blue, in contrast to the surrounding green moss. Roughly eight feet long from one end to the other, though they had enormous pincer-like jaws that stuck out another two feet off of the fronts of their heads. They were ambling about, using their pincers to scrape at the mossy floor before scuttling their bug-eyed faces towards the scraped spot, presumably to feed.

The room itself was large enough for a proper fight. While the walls had that same lumpy moss-covered column look, the ceiling was only about ten feet up instead of twenty. There was a spot in the middle of the room where there was something growing that looked like a scraggly shrubbery instead of moss, which was interesting. Kaldalis wondered if it would be a part of some puzzle later on in the dungeon. Perhaps the thorny branches would be needed to start a fire for a torch puzzle.

“First pack, everyone,” Kaldalis said. “Are we ready?”

“Almost,” Haldir said, reaching back and producing a handful of red bottles. “I meant to hand these out at breakfast, but I didn’t want to be getting funny looks from the other adventurers.”

“I was wondering when these were going to come out,” Myrin said, reaching out to accept the handful of bottles. “I was kind of afraid you were just going to hoard them forever.”

“What’s the point of that?” Haldir laughed as he produced another handful. And then another. “You and I gathered the materials and did the work to make these yesterday. We ought to get value out of them, and now might be the time.”

There were something like forty of them total - so ten bottles each. Kaldalis examined them when he got his first handful.

Minor Healing Potion

Restore 20% of your maximum hit points (Max 500)

“Thank you,” Kaldalis said, first to Haldir, and then again to Myrin. “I appreciate the prep work. I feel like a bum showing up with nothing.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Myrin said, giving him a playful punch to the thigh. “You’ll get me back sooner or later. Maybe take me fishing sometime. I can’t stand it when I don’t have someone to bullshit with.”

“Sounds great,” Kaldalis said, before tucking his potions away. The others did the same. “Are we ready now?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” Myrin said, getting her sword out and tensing to charge.

“Wait,” Kaldalis said, smiling as he looked back at Balrim. “A good tank always waits for word from the healer. Are you ready?”

“Hold on,” Balrim said. “One thing first.”

Kaldalis waited.

Balrim’s slit-pupiled eyes stared back at him impassively.

A moment passed.

And then another.

Myrin started shifting from foot to foot. Kaldalis held fast, though.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Balrim said at last, brandishing his bow. “Lead on!”

“Of course,” Kaldalis said, but he hesitated, tilting his head at the ruddy-scaled talsar. “But what was that about? Some settings menu thing?”

“Oh, no,” Balrim said. “I was just seeing if you would actually wait for me.”

Kaldalis’s brow furrowed and he gave Balrim a look that was not just confused, but downright incredulous. Balrim’s reptilian expression didn’t change at all. No sign of mirth or anything. The guy had a hell of a poker face. Even when Kaldalis knew he was fucking with him, he could find no sign of malicious glee that the prank had come to fruition.

“Alright then,” Kaldalis said, rolling his eyes and turning his attention to the fight to come. “What’s our battle cry today?”

Myrin looked thoughtful for a moment. “I mean, there is the classic? Leer-”

“Don’t. Do not finish that,” Balrim snapped, glaring at her. “Just, no. I’m sick of it. It was funny ten years ago, but it’s been run into the ground. Just let it rest and we can come back to it in another decade.”

“How about this one?” Kaldalis said, holding his spear in one hand and holding the other up with two fingers raised. “Engage!”

And without waiting for a response, he charged into the room.