The roads in this strange ruined city weren’t cobbled. They were smooth and evenly-flattened cement, and despite the apparent thousands of years of neglect, were still in better shape than many streets were back home in the real world. Except, of course, for the places that had been rendered impassible.

“I mean,” Kaldalis said aloud when he found himself standing in a spot where a chasm had opened up, rendering the left side of an intersection impassible, “it’s not as bad as that pothole on Seneca, between Western and Alaskan Way. Whoever these folks were, they knew how to build a road.”

Kaldalis tried to absorb whatever information he could about the ancient civilization from the buildings he passed. The ceilings were low, but not too low, so he guessed that they were a shorter race, but not suyon short. With ceilings that were about seven feet up, they might have been five feet tall? Most of the buildings were crumbling, and he determined it to be too dangerous to explore, and the ones he could peek inside were desiccated to emptiness, just empty stone rooms. At least that told him that these people must have preferred furniture made of wood and other impermanent materials. Anything of stone or metal would have survived.

Some buildings were made with enough stone that he could determine some of their original purpose. He passed a building with an enormous stone oven that he could see through the large open front window. The column on the front right corner of the building was badly damaged by the collapsed building next to it, so he didn’t dare venture inside, but he thought it was probably a bakery. A few streets down, he came across a building filled with intact metal vats. The building was in good enough shape to creep inside and look around, but with centuries separating him from its original purpose, he could only guess at their purpose. Dye vats? Alcohol stills? Medical intervention pods? Whatever equipment had been around the vats had long since rotted, disintegrated, and been blown away. For all he knew, this was the chemical plant where Jack Nicholson fell into the chemical that turned him into the Joker.

The walk through the city was surreal. The silence was unnerving, but what bothered him most was feeling like he was just slightly too stupid to see what he was supposed to see. Was he supposed to be able to tell things about the people who lived here by looking at the desiccated husk of their civilization? He suspected he was, but didn’t have the cultural background to make the city come alive in his mind’s eye. All he could do was hold out hope that he might stumble onto an audio log that would just outright tell him what he was supposed to be learning from this experience.

One thing he did learn was that these people had an appreciation for the multi-panel art format that he personally associated with graphic novels. The smaller parks he’d seen were sitting areas with still-intact stone benches, decorated with now-petrified trees. Stone tablets stood in each one of them, artfully arranged to be clearly seen from the benches. Each tablet had a few carvings of humanoid figures performing what he interpreted as superhuman feats, all in a sequential order depicting a small story. The stone was worn down by time, and so he couldn’t tell details and features - they were all just smooth shapes barely standing out from smooth backgrounds - but the tablets looked like comic book pages. On this one, a humanoid with super speed ran circles around what looked like a fire, putting it out, presumably with the wind of its passage, even though he knew from a scientific perspective that it would just stoke the fire instead. In another, one humanoid was in a fight with a group of others - the group being depicted as taller than the lone would-be victim - and teleporting around to make them look foolish rather than actually fighting back.

“This is what happens,” he said, “when you don’t bag and board your comics properly.” He reached out and brushed his fingertips over the stone. “Was this a speech balloon here, now lost to time, or a part of the background? We may never know.”

He moved on, navigating around collapsed buildings and cracked chasms. He was glad he’d looked at the city more carefully from the stairs, taking advantage of the overhead view. His minimap was no help, only revealing his immediate surroundings. The minimap didn’t even cover how far his vision radius ran. It also marked all of the buildings as solid walls, even the ones he clearly could - and did - walk inside to explore. He supposed that it meant he couldn’t trust the minimap for exploration in dungeons. Then again, what could he trust it for? He hadn’t paid it much mind before. It wasn’t like this was a shocking betrayal of his trust.

What did feel shocking was when he finally saw what the people here looked like.

It was a statue in one of the small parks. He guessed, from having seen the size of the buildings, that it was larger than life at about nine feet tall. The statue was made of bronze, and while it had turned green with age, the details persisted. The statue was about three feet wide, and so when Kaldalis imagined it scaled down, it gave the impression of a broad, slightly pudgy figure. It had near-human proportions, with digitigrade legs, but very human-looking hands. Its face had a muzzle, and little holes in the sides indicated that the being must have had very wide and prominent whiskers, though whatever material may have been used on the statue to depict them had been outlived by the bronze. He guessed from the rough surface of the exposed parts of its body that the creature was covered in a thin layer of fur. A tail stretched from the base of its spine almost to the ground, thick with a blunt end. It wore a layered garment that left one side of its chest exposed, like an ornate toga, with another sheet that went around the shoulder and over the creature’s head like a hood. The garment was swept back, and it was posed as if running.

It looked surprisingly like a human-proportioned enhydra.

“Okay, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions,” he said carefully, “especially not the conclusion that my most paranoid reactions were right all along, but do I owe a couple of little fuzzballs an apology?” He stepped up and examined the statue more closely. “Or not…”

Looking closer, he could see major differences besides those that may have been artistic license by an intelligent sculptor. The enhydra had been characterized by longer arms, and less dexterous digits. This creature had arms that were close to human proportions, with humanlike hands. And while the face had a muzzle, the features were a lot more humanlike, with forward-facing eyes and a taller forehead. This was a different creature. But, perhaps, related.

“These,” Kaldalis guessed aloud, “are the humans. The enhydra are the apes. Related. Similar. A lot of shared features. But not the same.”

Without anyone to bounce the idea off of, he didn’t know what else to do with that hypothesis. All he could do was continue through the city, picking his way through the ruins as best he could, setting a quick pace. In the upper right of his vision, his friends’ health bars had been stable for a while. They must have finished with their mini-boss and were descending the stairs into the city.

If they weren’t in the city already, looking for him.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Heeey you guuuys! Shout back if you can hear me?”

Not only was he answered with silence, but the ruins seemed to swallow the sound. Not even an echo came back to him. He wasn’t even sure if his voice would reach them if they were on the next street over.

“Guess not,” he grumbled. “Onwards it is. I have to hurry up to the end of this little railroad so that I can wait for them to catch up to me on their railroad.”

Despite his words, he picked his way along carefully, keeping his eyes open for more hints as to the nature of this long-gone civilization. He lacked the knowledge to interpret the purpose of all of these buildings, but he liked finding the tablets etched with their little mini-comics. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he understood the shapes of the people he saw. What he interpreted as hair was the cloth hoods they wore. Their fighting stances and moves made sense now that he knew they had tooth and claw to fight with, and it wasn’t comical slaps and headbutts. What interested him more were the powers they were using. He saw some that appeared to float or fly. One of them appeared to have telekinetic powers. Another seemed to be invulnerable, wading into dangerous hazards with impunity.

It wasn’t until the last one, which was a particularly numerous group of tablets very close to the central courtyard he was working towards. This was a place of honor, and therefore a beloved figure. However, they didn’t appear to be doing anything that impressive. Sure, shooting lightning from their hands was impressive, but it was no different than…

Than what?

He realized then, that there was no real magic in this world. There hadn’t been a mage class at character creation. All the healing he’d experienced was alchemical. Everything else was just game mechanics.

What if these weren’t fictional characters? What if these strange otter people were the keepers of this world’s long-forgotten magic? What if that very magic had led to the collapse of their civilization?

He looked up and across the courtyard that was near at hand, where at the farthest edge of his vision radius, the shape of the library-like building loomed.

What if that magic - real magic, and real power, that he could mold and manipulate with his own two hands - was right there for the taking?