Through the door in the study room was a brief hall that looked like it had once been a museum of sorts. The room was about ten feet by twenty, and glass display cases ran along the walls. The cases stood open now, and had been emptied, but Kaldalis wondered what once was on display here. Rare books? Artifacts? He moved towards the nearest case for a closer look.

A closer examination showed that the cases hadn’t been broken into. At least, not by force. The little latches that had once held it closed didn’t have locks on them, and had been opened instead of broken. There were little stands lined up in the case, and every one was marked with a little label marked in that otterscratch language. Perhaps once he got the scroll to the researchers, he might be taught how to translate it, and he could return and figure out what had been here.

The displays were varied; some of them were little angled platforms, like they were holding books or texts. Others were little cushions. They were all plain white and unadorned, giving no idea of what could have been-

Except that one.

About halfway up the right side of the room was a little cushion with a visible indent on the middle. But in addition to the little otterscratch label, there was a sheet of papyrus laid out in the case. Readable language or no, Kaldalis could recognize math when he saw it. A complex equation was written out at the top of the sheet, with a sine graph right below it. He couldn’t read anything on the page, but he knew enough math that this might be his rosetta stone for this language. Or, at least, their mathematical syntax.

What caught his eye the most was the illustration at the bottom of the sheet. It was a little ball with rings drawn onto it. While he couldn’t decipher anything special about it, he reached into his inventory and produced the little charm that he was holding on to for Balrim.

The charm was a little wooden sphere with metal rings set into it, and as he looked back and forth between it and the illustration, he saw that it was the same.

“This is where these charms came from,” Kaldalis said. “The enhydra raided this city for its little shiny prize.” He paused, tentatively picking up the illustration, and then holding it up to compare the charm and the illustration more closely. “But what does it mean? Haldir said that enhydra always have charms to drop. Do they just steal them from wherever and this is a coincidence? Or are there vast underground cities all over the world?”

It seemed too intentional to be coincidence. He wasn’t going to say that Monsoon would never ignore the implications of game mechanics in worldbuilding - especially since the Fimir in Colossus could be Clerics despite the race’s long-standing feud with organized religion - but this was too early in the story’s lifespan for them to have stopped giving a shit about consistency.

Kaldalis tucked the sheet of papyrus away for later. He didn’t get another quest for it, but he just wanted to keep it. The formula on the sheet might be valuable later, even if he didn’t know what it was for.

At the far end of the room was another doorway, though this one was sealed with a door of thick greyish wood, rather than standing open like the entryway behind him. For a moment, he considered that there might be more display cases like these, but the solid wood door might have shielded them from enhydra raiders. What if there was a mountain of charms just waiting for him?

He tried the door, but it didn’t open under a simple shove. There wasn’t a visible latch or knob, and so Kaldalis set his shoulder against it and pushed. The door wiggled a little in the frame, moving by about an inch under his first shove. He backed up a few steps and then lunged, shoving hard. The door moved another inch, and there was a cracking sound from the other side of the door. He reared back and struck again, letting out a shout as he forced the door open another couple of inches. Something on the other side was breaking, and as the door opened barely a crack, he saw the door was barred by a plank of that greyish wood that the door had been built from.

He was making progress, and his instincts told him to smash through, since it was already working, but instead he stopped and decided to work smart, not hard. The narrow gap was wide enough for the blade of his glaive to slip through, and he hooked it under the plank, trying to lift it up out of its seating. It took a bit more force than he expected - the wood was heavier than it looked - but eventually he wiggled the bar out, and heard it clunk loudly to the floor. The door caught on the bar that was in the way of its opening, but since it was no longer anchored to the wall, it scraped across the stone, the arc of the door sweeping it out of the way.

Inside the room, Kaldalis didn’t find a mountain of free gear. But what he did find was almost more interesting. Here, enshrined in this library, was another set of those same stone tablets that he’d seen outside, with very similar panels of art depicting a superhuman feat.

“Nice to see that some civilized societies have a proper appreciation for the noble craft of storytelling via sequential artwork,” Kaldalis said immediately, pandering to his audience. “Fine work like Superotter issue one belongs here, certainly.”

But these tablets weren’t just stored here. They were carved right out of the stone of the building, sprouting from the floor and walls. This wasn’t a piece of existing work enshrined here, this was a shrine built around this work.

And it was indeed a shrine. The room was entirely enclosed, with just the one door. Kaldalis found here the first sign of life in the building. There was a skeleton collapsed in a heap in front of the stone tablets. It wasn’t really a surprise, since the door had been barred from the inside, but it was a shock to finally see one in this abandoned city. The skeleton matched his expected stature of the inhabitants here, maybe four feet tall at most, with a skull that was a fusion of a proportionally-sized human skull with a brief animal muzzle. The bones were scattered across the floor, tangled in a thin sheet, and Kaldalis’s mind worked upwards from that, and he imagined the creature kneeling before these tablets, wrapped in its colorful toga. The cloth had been faded by time, now dull grayish greenish hues that he imagined as bright blues and greens back in their prime.

“Let me begin my three-part apology,” Kaldalis said, lowering his voice to reflect that he was talking to a corpse in a library, “by explaining to you that ‘superotter issue one’ was a reference to a great hero in my world who is always treated with utmost reverence by my people. No disrespect was intended, I promise. Second, I also mean no disrespect by my trespassing here, nor do I intend to be stealing anything. If any of your people exist in the modern era, I will do everything in my power to repatriate any relic that this expedition might-”

Kaldalis’s eyes flicked up to the tablet, and he saw that the story on these stones was not worn down. It was fresh and clean as if it had been carved just minutes before. It was so surprising that he was stunned to silence. He almost reached out to touch the delicate carvings outlining every detail. Visible captions and speech bubbles were still legible, having not been worn smooth. It made sense, after all. With all the less time-resistant substances surviving, like wood and bone, it was only logical that a tablet’s carvings would survive untouched by time entirely. The humanoid figure depicted wasn’t just a rough shape. They were intricately carved, with every fold of their toga and every whisker rendered in meticulous detail.

Despite his western upbringing, Kaldalis found his eyes drawn to the right, following from right to left instead of left to right. It showed an otter person standing in a room much like this one, pouring over the tablets there. Somehow, he knew that it wasn’t this exact room. She was in a different room, looking at tablets depicting the canonization of a different Lataxinan.

She? Canonization? Lataxinan?

Kaldalis felt his eyes almost bug out of his head when he realized that he wasn’t just looking at the pictures and interpreting the art as best he could. He understood the captions.

He could read this one.