Grent cleared a path through the fans and led Kaldalis towards the town. Walking on a narrow strip of clear path between the rows of crops, Kaldalis got a slightly better look at what they were growing. Immediately to his left were rows of small greens that looked like a cross between lettuce and artichoke. Big leafy greens, but with a stiff backbone that ended each leaf in a thorny spine. On his left he could see the trees that he had believed to be olive trees. He felt like he was close, but the fruit he could see bunched on the branches weren’t the familiar green ovals. They were the right size, and grew in similar little bunches, but they were almond shaped, and an extremely deep red color like ripe apples.

“As I said,” Grent began, “we weren’t expecting you so soon. The council will be ready for you shortly. In the meantime, I hope you don’t mind if we take the scenic route.” The furry little creature gestured up at the town, where Kaldalis could see all the parts that had been missing from the ruins. “I believe your friends will be most upset with you if you don’t return with more insight into what we’ve left behind.”

What struck Kaldalis the most about the town was how colorful it was. Every time he saw Lataxinan ruins, they were bare stone. Beautiful in their own way, but nothing compared to this. Everywhere he looked, the stone was colorfully painted. On some buildings, it made them loud and gaudy, with clashing purples and yellows. Some were attractive and eye-catching, with complimentary blues and oranges. Some were subdued and beautiful, with shades of greens and earth tones. But nowhere could he see the color of bare stone.

The paint reminded Kaldalis of the mural he’d seen in the first dungeon. Where there were no carvings, there were colorful shapes that gave the vague impressions of faces. Some of them appeared Lataxinan, but others looked like the faces of animals. Kaldalis thought he recognised a few of them. One with a beaklike mouth, surrounded by curved shapes that suggested tentacles. That had to be a nautilobster. Another had a lot of triangular shapes that suggested teeth, which could have been a daemonraptor, or perhaps an irritator. Another fanged face had a very strange pear-shape in the middle that took Kaldalis a long moment to parse as the bat nose of a chiraptor - the armor-plated bat-monster he’d only seen in the dungeon.

Where there were carvings, the colors gave them depth and clarity. There were tablets here and there that looked even more like comic pages now that they were colored in vibrant hues, with the captions inked in stark white-on-black. Some of these stories were familiar ones, and others were new, but these were just decorative. None of the otterscratch text translated itself, and so none of these would teach Kaldalis anything.

Grent told him about the different facilities here that had allowed the Lataxinans to survive for centuries. Obviously, he had seen the farms, but the necessary changes to their processing and trade skills that had developed had taken years to perfect. The strange almond-shaped apple-olive fruits - called malivae - were a staple in every dish, and Grent showed Kaldalis the great metal vats where they were gathered and processed, either to be skinned and pitted for the flesh of the fruit, or pressed, boiled, and blended to extract their valuable oil. Either way, they produced a lot of unusable byproducts in their inedible pits and thick and bitter skins, and so the Lataxinans had needed a way to make that waste valuable. Apparently when crushed and ground, the resulting mulch was a usable fertilizer for ocean algae in the other chamber of the colony. The algae was the natural food of choice for many of the fish they had brought, and, in turn, the ground remains of the waste products of fish processing resulted in great fertilizer for the malivae trees.

Everywhere they went, Kaldalis drew every eye. Even without considering that he was a minor celebrity, he did stick out in a crowd. Grent did a good job of keeping it from becoming disruptive, loudly reminding people that their continued survival was dependent on all their daily tasks being completed, whether or not contact had finally been made. There was still no telling how long it would be before they could return to the physical realm.

“What am I going to have to do?” Kaldalis asked.

“The council will make everything clear,” Grent said, “I’m afraid even if I wanted to bend the rules, I don’t have their knowledge. They are the ones whose lines go back to Kran and his great plan. They know the course.”

At Kaldalis’s obvious impatience, the tour became a little more brisk, leading Kaldalis to the great blocky building in the middle of the dome. Kaldalis was already a fan of this council in comparison to Panbu and Baimer, since he didn’t get an unnecessary scheduling quest.

Or if he did, it didn’t appear, since he had no UI in here.

The great blocky building was much like the one in the Sunken Ruins dungeon. Full of shelves of scrolls and furnished as a library. Only it was bustling and busy. This was the only place where Kaldalis’s presence went ignored. The Lataxinans scanning the stacks, reading, and writing were too engrossed in their tasks to pay any attention to the appearance of a horned indigo intruder.

They moved through the building with purpose, climbing to the upper floor, towards where Kaldalis knew the tablet would be. Despite the power that represented, he saw no sign of security. Though he supposed that made sense. Who would try and sneak in here? It wasn’t like there was anyone here whose continued survival didn’t rely upon everything going smoothly.

“The council isn’t ready for you yet,” Grent said after conferring with some of the other Lataxinans. “Which is fortunate! You’ve had a long and stressful journey. I imagine you’re long overdue a brief break.” The Lataxinan gestured for Kaldalis to follow, leading him towards the far end of the upper floor.

Kaldalis met with something he hadn’t seen in a long time, and had not expected to see. A bathroom. Not just any bathroom, a proper bathroom. The Lataxinans were still on physical world rules. They still had to… evacuate. And they also had to physically wash themselves. The grit and grime of the day didn’t just naturally diminish over time.

Having been within the system that governed the world outside, Kaldalis didn’t need to avail himself of all the facilities, but he did accept the opportunity to wash. Mostly for the novelty of it.

The Lataxinans took his armor and underclothes to be quickly cleaned while he enjoyed a brief shower in private. All he had to wash off was a few hours worth of sweat, a little blood, and a thin layer of sea salt that had dried onto him after his initial failure to reach the Lataxinans. But it seemed foolish to waste this chance. Not to mention a moment of privacy might let him think things through before they got any farther.

But the feeling of an anachronistic hot shower was incredible. He couldn’t even begin to think about his troubles as the hot water melted the stress out of his muscles. Kaldalis immediately decided that as soon as he got back to Cotanaku, he was going to build a bathroom in his quarters. Even if he had to manually heat the water by hand for every shower, he was going to do this again.

Kaldalis’s clothes weren’t clean when he was finished, but the Lataxinans offered him a robe to wear while he waited. While it was very soft against his skin, the difference in stature between a Vathon and a Lataxinan meant that it just barely maintained a reasonable standard of decency.

“What’s going to happen if this takes too long?” Kaldalis asked while he tried to find a way to arrange himself that was both comfortable and modest.

“What do you mean?” Grent asked.

“If the council is ready before I am,” Kaldalis clarified. “I don’t have a quest sidebar in here, so I don’t know if there’s, like, a time limit on this, or-”

“Don’t worry,” Grent interrupted with a laugh. “I told you already we are not like Cerh and his ilk. If you asked the council the same question, they would ask you what benefit we could extract from such behavior. You’re here to help us. Why would we find an elaborate way to punish you for it?”

Kaldalis felt himself relax a bit more. Grent was right. Kaldalis was here to help. It was just nice to have the people he wanted to help recognize that for a change, and help him in turn.

“I only wish we had something else to offer you,” Grent grumbled. “I would offer you my finest and fanciest garb for the meeting, and let you keep it after, if only it would reach down to your knees.” The Lataxinan made a show of shielding his eyes as he looked up at Kaldalis.

Despite himself, Kaldalis laughed at that, though mostly at the picture of himself in a tiny toga-dress, rather than at the idea that he was subjecting his guide to a continuous wardrobe malfunction. Grent laughed as well, showing that the Lataxinan was taking it in stride.

Eventually, Kaldalis’s armor was fully cleaned, and as he got dressed, he was impressed by how it gleamed. Not only had it been scrubbed, but it had been polished as well, and he even detected a thin layer of protective wax to try and preserve the metal’s luster a little bit longer.

“Perfect timing,” Grent said with a smile when Kaldalis emerged. “The council is right this way.”