Using your polearm for support, you climb to your feet.

"Ready to keep going?"

"Yeah!," Cici affirms with another full body nod as she launches into the air.

You make your way over to the large key that the boss dropped and pick it up.

It has a small chain attached to it, and the aesthetic feel of... well, this dungeon.

You turn back to the double doors--not the set you originally came through, but the doors on the opposite end of the sanctuary; doors that should, if you're correct, lead to a bridge over water and potentially, out of here entirely.

"Before I OD on mana potion," you begin, "or get eaten by a mimic, or drown in a maintenance tunnel... I'm seeing what's out there."

You cross the other half of the sanctuary. As you get a closer look at the far west set of double doors, you spy the larger than normal lock on them.

You pause at the door.

You nod to Cici, who nods back. "Ready!," she says.

You press the large key to the large lock.

It disappears.

You hear the big doors echo out a resounding click.

You and Cici push up against one of the doors until it's finally open, revealing...

a bridge

over the sludge, just like that sketch you found on the first night suggested.

A bridge away from the dungeon.

A bridge to something else entirely.

"What the fuck...?," you mutter, before screaming a more bewildered "WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK?!"

You stumble out onto the long stone bridge.

You slide your helmet off for a better look.

It can't be.

This can't

this can't all possibly be yours.

It can't ALL be your head.

Surely the fuck not.

"Daaamn Plaire," Cici remarks, "I don't mean to sound judgemental but... that's a lot of issues, girl."

You absent mindedly drop your helmet and halberd both as you stumble down the bridge.

"What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what IS all that? WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?!"

It's fucking massive. It's not just a dungeon, it's a whole god damn castle.

The overgrown ass lawn or garden or whatever, alone, by it the fuck self, appears bigger than the god damn prison you just fought your way out of. If your feelings about your dad and Addersfield are all in that shithole behind you, then what is ALL THAT?! What the fuck is this towering palace bullshit about?!

"Hey! We should take a break and discuss our next move," Cici finally suggests.

"AGREED," you blurt out. You have probably been staring into the distance for an uncomfortably long time.

Fuck it. Fuck thinking about it. Fuck the bronze-amber mist and the two moons and the shadows of a dozen massive gods beating on the FUCKING SKY, FUCK.

ALL OF IT.

You are gonna take a breather.

You and Cici, you're takin' a lil' breakerooski.

You collect your shit and the two of you return to the barrel room. Cici retrieves the toolbox on her way through the sanctuary (it was, somehow, not swallowed up by the dad wall).

"Do you need mana?," you ask. "I could hold you by your ankles and... try to dunk you, I guess. Baptize you in the butter barrel."

Cici looks from you to the barrels hesitantly before replying. "I... think I'm just gonna try to be more careful with my powers for a while. I saw how you reacted drinking that stuff, I don't trust it! I sure don't wanna just be dunked in it. I think I've got enough mana--if I don't try to block another thirty lightning bolts I should be good to go."

You're a bit skeptical of drinking more potion yourself, to be honest. You think you have a good three, maybe four fireballs left, and...

you can kind of still feel the lines that burning sour feeling traced through your body. Like a tingling in your nervous system, or maybe your veins--a network of... faint numbness, just under your skin. You imagine it'll reset when you wake up, but you're unsure about making it worse before letting it get better. ...Not if you don't have to.

You do feel like your amount of mana is growing, or maybe the simple act of existing here is just draining you more slowly. You don't feel as empty after that boss fight as you anticipated. ...Then again, you did basically speedrun it.

You heave a small sigh.

You really just... do not know.

Cici follows you to the heart room, where she joins you in laying down on the bed.

"This is a soft bed!," she comments. "I kinda want a bed like this."

"So we have the flooded maintenance tunnel to check out," you begin, "and the lower floors of the dungeon in general. The triangle thing should be downstairs, somewhere, and I think that ties to the candles--and if all that BULLSHIT out there is seriously part of this whole thing then we might want fast travel. ...Assuming that's what the candle does, which I am because it makes sense and god DAMMIT SOMETHING needs to make sense. In theory running out of mana shouldn't be a problem anymore, but we don't know if the juice is going to have side effects or not."

"Maybe the rest of the castle's from whoever made THIS room," Cici suggests. "This bed isn't YOUR bed, right? And you don't know the room?"

You shake your head. "No, this room's definitely out of place. ...The architecture on the rest of the castle looked a lot like the dungeon does, though. I mean, I haven't seen inside the rest of it to know for sure, but the outside looked... consistent? Like Crush Souls filtered through the HD of my brain." You pause, before adding a more frustrated "Why is it so fucking BIG?!"

Cici rolls over to look at you more directly. "Maybe smart people have bigger brain castles?"

You give a weary smile. "Somehow I doubt that's what's going on here."

You glance at the note still laying on the bed.

You haven't gotten a fresh response yet; probably won't until you reset the dungeon.

Reset... the castle?

Does it ALL reset?

Eleven remaining. Until what? What are the notes counting down to? You have eleven... nights? Attempts at this? Until something happens, and apparently you have a LOT of ground to cover.

You're not even sure what you're looking for yet.

Answers, obviously, but the dream seems intent on just dangling those in front of you, luring you farther and farther into its depths for the promise of crumbs while never giving you the whole damn thing.

...And there's still whatever Mayor Parsons is searching for.

Hmm.

"This fucking sucks," you finally conclude.

"Well, I like it," Cici replies. "Being a bird is cool! Magic shields are cool! And we're either going surfing or going outside, which are both cool as well. It's nothin' but cool from here on out, Plaire. We beat a boss! We exploded your dad. You gotta savor it!"

You hold up the note. "We have eleven nights left. I don't have time to savor shit, I shouldn't even be laying here right now."

"Look how much you've gotten done in just, what, five days? Eleven days is plenty of time, Plaire."

"It took me five fucking days to reach and kill ONE boss," you point out. "There's no telling how many more bosses are crammed into the rest of this bastard."

"How many could there be?," Cici asks. "They'd all have to be people you know, right?"

"...Yeah." She makes a good point; your mom's probably in the dream somewhere, but you can't imagine she'll be as tough of a fight as your father was. There's not a lot of other people you feel as negatively about as your dad.

"Lora," you mutter. "I dated her since elementary school, she probably has a whole fucking theme park dedicated to her here. ...Other than her, I have NO idea. The rest of the castle has to have something in it, though, and that was a metric shit ton of castle out there."

While staring at the ceiling, you heave a deep sigh.

You also think about that treasure chest.

The one in the vent room.

Behind the sometimes cracked door.

"...I have an idea," you suddenly declare. You sit up and scramble for the door, with Cici following.

You stop in the hallway. You glance one way, then to the stairs, before pointing toward the formerly cracked door. "Do me a favor--stay near that door, keep tabs on it. If a monster chest comes rampaging out of there, blast the shit out of it."

"Can do!," says Cici, attempting to salute with one of her wings before she flutters off toward the door in question.

You head downstairs, back to B1, and the hall that filled with poisonous gas when you came through with Kate last night.

You hustle toward the floor switch just outside the west door

you take a big breath

and you stomp the switch.

Immediately, the hallway begins to flood with green fumes, just like it did last night.

You run back to the stairs, rapidly ascending to the first floor and out of the toxic airspace.

"Plaire!," Cici yells from down the hall. "Something tried to break out for a second, but I think it gave up."

Indeed, the door that was cracked last night--but not tonight--is now visibly cracked. As far as you can tell, it's damaged in exactly the same way... as though the mimic, upon being exposed to poisonous gas, attempted to face slam its way out the door before succumbing to its status effect.

You step up and, after a small pause to steel yourself for the worst,

you open the cracked door.

Behind it is no chest at all; only a vent spewing poisonous gas where the chest once sat, and a small key on the floor right in front of you.

You pick up the key--

and to your... slight surprise, it looks identical to your house key.

"Fuckin' SCORE!," you announce, pumping your fists into the air. "Keys open chests, fake chests drop keys. I KNEW there had to be another way to get one. Suck it, dungeon."

"Pffft." Cici takes a moment to stifle her giggling, but it does not affect your swagger back into the hall.

AND, because of the gas trap setup, you can basically farm one (1) free key every night this way. You do ponder, briefly, if the mimic isn't meant to stay on the vent after becoming poisoned--because then when it vanishes, the key would just drop into the vent, disappearing entirely unless the mimic is beaten 'properly.' ...But whoever set all this up didn't account for the mimic reacting to the poison by trying to escape?

Maybe.

Maybe you're overthinking it.

The time has come to stop overthinking it. "We beat a boss, we solved a puzzle... sort of. We found an easy way to get an extra key. Let's do something stupid."

"Heck yeah!," Cici replies. "We gotta."

You return to the barrel room, and dump all the yellow drink out of one of the barrels before resealing it as thoroughly as you can.

You carry it to the flooded maintenance tunnel, which you unlocked before you fought Father Warden. Even empty, the barrel is still pretty heavy, and hauling it and your polearm at the same time's a little awkward. Cici still has the toolbox, though, and--

"Oh, duh," you blurt out, dropping the barrel at the top of the damp maintenance tunnel stairs. "Should we put the toolbox in the barrel? ...Would that fuck up the buoyancy? I feel like if you have to carry it you're gonna have trouble keeping up--"

"Yeah," Cici agrees, "dunno if that'd be too much weight or not. We could try it!"

After some finagling, you put the toolbox inside the barrel, then get the barrel down the stairs...

and into the rushing river of sewage.

"Let's gooo!," Cici shouts excitedly.

You step aboard as the barrel begins to drift down the tunnel. Cici hops onto the back of the barrel, holding her wings out and occasionally flapping to try and keep it steady.

You discover quickly that you can use your halberd to steer a bit, pushing off the walls to maneuver you side to side.

You also discover quickly that balancing on a moving barrel is a fucking task, and the flow of the ooze is accelerating you rapidly. You can slow down a smidge by sort of tilting your barrel to an angle, but if you turn it too much it starts to roll, Cici has difficulty getting a solid enough grip to prevent that entirely and one good roll would probably dump you into the water.

(Water in quotation marks. It may have a slightly different consistency here than it did in your starting room, but it's still so opaque you can scarcely begin to see through its surface, and you still sure as hell wouldn't drink it.)

It's difficult, but not impossible.

...Until you hit the first curve.

"Oh, fuck," you mutter.

Cici does you one better. "Ohhh shiiiIIIIIIT!"

The tunnel dips.

Widens.

The water rushes harder over and around large chunks of debris scattered about the middle of the tunnel.

It never really stops curving, never turns back into a straight angle--but it does branch off into two or three different pathways, all leading straight ahead into the darkness. At this point, Cici's single eye is acting as your headlight. Tail light?

Cici begins to take a more active role in driving the barrel.

"HOLY FUCK!," you shout as you lose almost any semblance of control. You shove your polearm out toward stone chunks as you pass them--not even trying to push yourself anywhere, just trying to get some friction and slow the fuck down. Your feet, likewise, are no longer as focused on steering as they are staying the fuck on.

It takes you a good several seconds to, with the help of Cici and her ridiculous bird strength, get shit back under control. You're fortunate that you don't crash straight into a wall or a random slab of brickwork or a pipe or whatever the fuck else is sticking out of the water and the tunnel

just keeps going.

Splitting.

Accelerating.

Turning ever so slightly downward, just enough to keep

speeding

things

up.

"Plaaaire," Cici yells, "I'm startin' to think this was a bad idea!"

"Starting to?!," you shout back through a manic giggle, "I regretted this decision as soon as we hit that fucking CORNER!"

You can barely hear each other over the sound of the rushing rapids. You have lost all sense of direction; you have not the slightest idea which paths you should be taking or where in the name of God this network of flooded tunnels is taking you. You feel like you are almost definitely going to die.

...And yet, the knowledge that you explicitly won't die turns the entire affair from the most frightening experience of your life to a maddening rollercoaster. Before you know it, both you and Cici are half screaming, half cackling manically. It is pitch fucking black except for Cici's forward facing glow.

Your screaming takes a dramatic and abrupt change in pitch when you hear what sounds like a giant shotgun going off behind you.

"OH DAMN, WHAT IS THAT?!" Cici releases the barrel, just briefly enough to spin around and unleash a barrage of arrows.

In the golden light cast by Cici's attack, it's easy to see what has emerged from the depths below.

For how clumsy they are on land, the chain cocoon snake monsters are apparently masterful fucking swimmers. You hear the creature screech as Cici's arrows find their way into its mouth, the water loudly sloshing about as the bastard thrashes.

You shove your halberd out, and Cici grabs it in her talons; you pull her back to your side just in time to hear the sound of jaws slamming shut behind you. You throw a glance back, and catch in your peripheral the chain monster dipping back under the sludge.

... There's a moment of relative quiet

but you can see the massive shadow under the surface steadily catching up, the creature swimming its way to beneath your barrel. You're not sure how much tunnel you have left to go--

"Plaire!," Cici yells, flapping back to the rear end of your barrel to help you steer. "That thing's gonna shark movie our asses if we don't do something!"

Wait. Shark movie, that's it!

"You were animal control!," you yell. "How would you stop a shark?!"

"You go for the GILLS or the EYES!," Cici shouts back.

Despite your attempts to push from side to side, the shadow beneath you keeps pace... and is steadily catching up, beginning to rise from below.

"What if it doesn't HAVE either of those?!," you reply.

Cici looks up at you. "Then... then you gotta do somethin' stupid!"

Done.

You shove the pointy end of your halberd into the barrel, throw a hand back and release a massive fireball just as the chain thing breaks the surface of the sludge. The force of the blast launches you forward; pressed into the polearm that's stuck in the barrel, you take it all with you, boosting forward and out of the path of the monster's mouth at the last second.

Cici, still hanging on the back of the barrel, fortunately possesses a mighty grip. "AHHHH!"

The tidal wave that ensues as the creature slams back down behind you almost sends you into the air, but you and Cici manage to regain control. You take a tight corner, the monster loudly slamming against and scraping across one of the walls as it continues to give chase.

You keep an eye on it, hoping it'll open its mouth facing you one more time--

But instead, it dives again.

"We need a new plan!," you frantically announce. "I don't have the mana to keep throwing fireballs!"

The shadow creeps up beneath you.

"I don't know!," Cici shouts. "Boost us ahead one more time, I'll try to shoot down at it as it's coming up!"

"Got it!"

You watch.

You wait.

You ready yourself.

As the shadow of the behemoth rises, Cici begins to rain arrows down into the water.

You are so fixated on the rising creature, your hand ready to release another blast and boost you forward, that you scarcely notice the oncoming drop until it's far, far too late.

You unleash the fire

the barrel shoots forward, out of the path of the chain snake

and you, and Cici, and the barrel go soaring into the air.

"Oh, fuck--!" you manage to blurt out as the polearm (and with it, the barrel) slips from your fingers.

You plummet, toward the darkness and the sewage, when suddenly--

"Plaire!" Cici shouts, "Feet together!"

You do as instructed

and slam feet first into a glowing shield, which has very suddenly manifested on the surface of the water.

The current carries you forward at about the same speed. You fumble for balance on the substantially tinier raft, Cici likewise fighting to find footing on your shoulder but for a moment

for a moment, you are almost stable, and also feel like the coolest person in the world.

It passes quickly.

The chain monster comes off the same ramp you did, hitting the water behind you with authority. It's like a bomb going off, and you have nothing to hold onto. Cici has nothing to hold onto, either, except you; in the ensuing tsunami whipped up by the crashing monster, the two of you are sent flying.

Cici attempts to take off into the air with you, but her talons slip as your armor almost comes loose; fightball pads really aren't made to function as bird handles, as you have already discovered.

You hit the surface of the sludge.

You sink into the murky depths.

Your first instinct is, of course, to panic. All you can see is black, with an occasional light dancing by through the dark water. The current is still carrying you forward; you tumble, turn, rapidly losing track of which way is up. You feel yourself brush across (and bounce off of) solid things, but you can never react fast enough to grab onto them as your body rushes by. You can't swim and the armor is definitely not helping. The fear of drowning alternates with the fear of being eaten, as you remember that big chain bastard is still in the water with you somewhere.

You feel like you are spiraling through the sewage for eternity, and yet, for only a few seconds before you are abruptly flushed into an empty jail cell.

You hit the floor with a dull thud, green-black water pouring atop you from a huge hole in the ceiling.

You have no idea where Cici is.

You crawl to your feet, and stumble out the door--thankful that it's unlocked. You're speculating on adrenaline, but you think you may have broken one or more dream ribs.

. . .

It slowly dawns on you that you know exactly where you are.

You wait, for a little bit, catching your breath and watching water ("water") pour out of the ceiling. Breathing hurts, but not as much as you think it would if you really had a broken rib. ...You've never had a broken rib, you're just guessing. You might have a broken rib and a tendency to undervalue your own suffering.

You ponder the nature of the waterway you just traveled.

You ... do not believe that grabbing a barrel and surfing it was the intended way to navigate that maintenance tunnel. Thinking about it from a dumbass lost in a dungeon perspective, it made perfect sense. Thinking about it from a game design perspective, you were probably meant to flip a switch that drains the maintenance tunnel, or unlock some crazy movement power that lets you swim, or... something. Something else.

Even for your brain, riding a barrel was both out-of-the-box and goofy as fuck. You honestly don't know if you'd have had the chutzpah to go for it if Cici hadn't been here; like, it wasn't even the most tactically sound decision, she just confirmed how fun it sounded and she was right. Like, who gives a shit? You have over a week of dungeon time left, you've been taking this very seriously and making a lot of progress. Be a little ballsy. Surf a fucking barrel. You don't regret this decision.

...You do worry about Cici a little, though.

Was this the final goal of the waterway? Did it continue on past this point, or was this always the hole you were destined to fall through? Assuming you're right about how the waterway's supposed to work, then by design you'd only (normally) be able to take advantage of it later in the game ("game")... after you've likely cleared this part of the castle and are fucking sick of dealing with it, and after all the monsters here have long stopped being any sort of challenge. The waterways may act as a sort of shortcut for advanced players. Plenty of more open, complex games have both fast travel mechanics and a map that sort of wraps around on itself in different ways to facilitate better pacing.

You're betting a lot on both your semi-intelligent game design dungeon theory, AND on a series of total guesses about what the deal with the maintenance tunnel is. ...But fuck you, brain, it makes sense. The waterway likely continues on throughout the prison, passing by drainage locales all over the place, spiraling downward from the top floor. Cici can fly, so she probably made it farther than you did--which means if you continue downward yourself, you should be able to find her.

Not only are you very near to the stairs--

not only do you remember exactly where you left the taped knife--

you (most importantly) know where all the torches are.

You grab one from the wall, and head north--first checking the locked door you had to come through the last time you were in this zone, the one placed right in front of a giant hole in the floor. Even though you unlocked it a couple of nights ago, it is locked again. That confirms that locks re-lock when the dungeon resets.

You continue, into the corner room.

"OP strats!," you yell as you hurl your torch at a right-to-know, and miss. Noticing you, the creature turns and begins to wander your direction.

You duck back into the hall, grab another torch, burst back into the corner room and try a second time. "OP... strats!"

This time it's closer and you hit it dead on. The monster announces its catchphrase, then takes its leave through a crack in the ceiling. You grab another torch before taking the curve west, into the next hall.

As you make your way to the spot you remember fading at nights ago, another bony figure begins to emerge from one of the cells. "OP strats!," you again declare, as though it's the name of the attack--chucking a torch in a wide spiral toward the peeking entity. The flame skids across the monster's... uh, face, and it promptly ducks back into hiding. The phrase OP strats is beginning to lose all meaning.

You grab another torch, and walk into a familiar open cell.

There, upon the floor--precisely where you anticipated it would be--is a broken blade, wrapped in yellow police tape labelled DO NOT RESET.

You retrieve the taped knife.

This also confirms your theory that the knife--or more likely, whatever's wrapped in the tape at the time which is currently a knife--does not, in fact, reset. It stays wherever it was placed when the dungeon cycles. This can affect anything else the knife affects; when you first found it, it stayed embedded in a monster, keeping it pinned down even after reset.

In other words, locked doors don't have to re-lock; you could theoretically wedge the knife in a doorway, as an example, to prevent it from closing. You could maybe even open a door and tie the handle to something else with just the tape, forcing it to reset as completely open.

The tape has implications.

Slipping the knife into one of your belt loops, you head for the small office across the hall. It was locked the last time you were here, and you were out of keys--but now you have that key the mimic dropped.

You press it to the lock--

Ta-da. It opens, and the key fades. It works JUST like your house key.

You walk into the office. There's a desk, a full bookshelf...

and a treasure chest. Fuck. Come on.

You check the shelf first. The names of the books are strings of nonsensical symbols, but there does seem to be a pattern to them; some of the symbols are all round, some of them are all spikier, and some of them are more blocky.

You take down a round symboled book, and open it to a random page.

...huh.

They're... notes.

Hastily scrawled notes about the time you had to stay up late finishing your homework--not because you'd put it off (which was often the case), but because you were genuinely struggling to learn multiplication. For how good you were in most subjects, math was never really your forte; it's also a big part of why you make videos about games instead of making games. Programming sucks when you suck at math and remembering math-like things, like angles and distances and

on the next page, the notes continue... about how your difficulties drove your mom to take up smoking again, almost a decade after she'd originally quit. You know this, because you asked and she told you. You drove her to smoke again.

You turn to a different section of the book.

A description of the time your mom yelled at you about staying in all the time, never leaving the house because you're so obsessed with your computer... juxtaposed with the time she yelled at you for being gone too much and coming home too late (you'd been hanging out with Lora).

You close the book, and put it back on the shelf.

You take one of the spiky symboled books. Contained within are more furiously scrawled notes, this time about... your dad ranting about transgender people and bathrooms in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. You flip forward a handful of pages, and find an incredibly racist series of jokes you remember your dad telling his friends.

You close the book, and put it back on the shelf.

For completeness' sake, you try a square symboled book. ...Jokes your dad's friends told him. That one and only time the neighbors came over to check if you were okay (you had a black friend over at the time). That time a guy in his mid 30s asked you, when you were 16, if the carpets matched the drapes.

In the middle of a convenience store.

You close the book and put it back on the shelf.

Every note is vividly depicted in exactly the level of detail that you, personally, can recall. These are moments you lived, written exactly as you remember living them, as though transcribed while the moments passed.

Every time your mom, dad, or the town of Addersfield at large chipped away at you.

Every moment leading to your mental vision of the town looking like a medieval sewer from a game whose main marketing point was that it kills you, a hostile environment of the virtual transposed over the architecture of your real and most personal hostile environment growing up.

There's nothing on top of the desk.

You open one of the drawers; inside are loose pages, all full of notes themselves.

Ah. The stash.

That time you tried to date a guy, and your mom's response was "oh thank God"

and then she had an elaborate explanation for exactly why you and that guy broke up, which she would bring up frequently, for years, every single time getting the guy's name wrong but still swearing up and down to fuck that she understood your relationship with him better than you did

and her reasoning for the two of you breaking up was a bunch of stereotypical bad housewife bullshit, like how you don't cook and your hair is too messy and if you don't prove yourself you'll never land a husband, guys can just tell when a girl is wife material and you need to earn it

but the real reason you broke up with him was his spiritual connection to a particular camgirl, and while you honestly didn't care if he looked at porn (who doesn't look at porn?) the fact that he was having private voice conversations with and giving $80 a month to said camgirl sparked a series of arguments. You explained this to your mom at one point, in explicit and specific detail, but in failing to understand what a camgirl is she also somehow failed to remember the entire fucking conversation and continued to push the bad wife argument until the dAY YOU GOD DAMN LEFT TOWN.

Also in the desk: a bulleted list of the absolute most horrible epithets, slurs, and colloquialisms you learned from your dad and his tacky, shitty friends.

You shut the desk drawer, and check the one beneath. More notes, and your dimming torch is making it harder to read.

Does reading cost mana? That, too, is some bullshit.

This room sucks a fat one. Where are your good memories stored?

You kick the chest; it does not react. If it's a mimic, it's playing the long game.

Given the rest of the room, maybe that's exactly what's happening. Maybe this chest contains the worst memories of all, as the mimic hopes to hurt you emotionally. Maybe there's like, old school photographs and shit in there, arranged neatly in manila folders. A hilariously thorough and devious mimic. He'd have a speech prepared.

Alternatively, there's a chest in here to compensate you for having to experience Plaire's Sad Brain Museum. You double check; the chest is, in fact, locked. ...So it's not that, either.

It occurs to you that you may be able to pick the lock on the chest.

Well, you can't, currently, but it's a thing to keep in mind for later. Kate probably knows how to pick locks, and even if she doesn't, you can always look up tutorials online. You probably need hairpins, or... a lockpick kit. Or something.

You leave the small office and head west. The lights are beginning to dim, you feel mostly drained, and you remember that the far corner room is absolutely packed with barrels. You open the door and, with... a little more time and effort than you'd like to admit, you finally manage to use your taped knife to pry one of the barrels open.

You take your helmet off.

You take a deep breath.

You listen closely. The only "I have a right to know" you hear is very, very far off, and very muffled.

Hesitantly, you take a very tiny sip of yellow wine.

The moment you swallow it, you are immediately overcome by the effects. Your mana is once again completely filled, all the torches in the area brighten up to their original levels, and for several seconds it is difficult to do anything except grit your teeth and hold the edge of the barrel. It's... almost as bad as last time. Both the nauseous, confused feeling, and the sharp burning all throughout your body.

You think about this. You have time, and it's not like you're getting anything else done for a moment. What the fuck is this sensation, and why is it still so dramatic?

These aren't your veins burning, for starters. You can feel them distinctly, the energy stabbing its way through you in a tangled, pulsing network but these are not where arteries and shit go. You're not a doctor, but this doesn't feel right. It's not blood flow, it's... something else.

Last time you drank a bunch; this tiny sip shouldn't hit you nearly as bad, but it does.

Both drinks (the big gulp and the lil sip) fully restored your mana.

There's the possibility that the wine in this barrel is more potent than the wine upstairs, but you find this unlikely. The barrels look identical, the taste is the same, it's the same shade of gold. Nothing suggests that this wine should be inherently different--and in real life that wouldn't mean anything, but if this were some sort of super wine the dungeon system as you have come to know it hence far would definitely label it or make it stand out somehow. You feel confident about that.

...But that leaves a lot of questions, up to and including what the god damn relationship is between

a.) the amount that you drink

b.) the amount of MP you recover

c.) the amount of pain/dizziness/sickness you experience afterward

because you just drank the tiniest amount, regained ALL your mana and felt what is in your experience a below average, at best, amount of suffering for it. What the fuck are wine mechanics

also why is your hidden talent for never receiving answers without also finding twelve more questions now extending to the fucking BARRELS, is nothing god damn sacred?

The worst of your mana sickness passes more quickly than last time, but a lesser version of it sort of lingers for a while.

Taking out your red pen (which has black ink), you draw a salamander with a 7 in it (like you did on the blood notes), and an arrow pointing toward the stairs, on the side of the open barrel. That way, if Cici passes through here she'll know which direction you went.

You draw another seven salamander and arrow combination on the two doors surrounding the stairs, both pointing inward to further clarify your route.

You take a moment to evaluate.

You have the taped knife, you have a torch, you have your armor, your ring, and your helmet and all your pocket stuff except for the house key...

you glance back down the hall, toward the corner room you just left.

You have a grudge against barrels.

Hmm.

There should be a way you can just... check what your mana is. Right? Everything else is so gamified, and there's clearly mechanics involved with... total mana and mana recovery and shit. The next time you find a safe room (like another heart room, maybe?) where you know you won't be ambushed by monsters, you may try meditating or... opening a status menu with your mind. Maybe that's a thing.

...Alternatively.

Your house key has special functionality in the dream. Your cell phone behaves differently, as well, though you're not yet sure if it does anything.

It wouldn't be insane to think your ID card has changed, as well. You haven't really examined it while inside the dungeon, and it may just... you don't know, give you your stats.

You take your ID card out of your pocket.

. . .

Though it possesses the same size, weight, and consistency that it does in the real world, your ID card has in fact been altered by the dream. It does not, however, provide you any meaningful stats except

That.

So there's that. You know that now.

You are the Fool. The Fool is you.

Cici is the Sun, Kate is the Devil,

you are the Fool.

With that little boost of confidence, you're ready to attack the next leg of your journey

You head down the stairs into basement level 2, or B2.

As you descend into the dark, you are greeted by almost chest high water and...

...pumps?

Chains pull up and down on enormous... mechanisms, pumping sludge out of the room and into God-knows-where.

You are already not particularly fond of this floor. Just a general vibe you're getting.