After falling down through the sands with the lifeless body of the legendary sand dragon, the group begins to loot its corpse before trying to get a bearing on their surroundings. Kayde and Drakthar start to take similar things as last time, a few teeth, a couple claws, and some hide. Kali helps Drakthar out while Lunette studies parts of the dragon to see if they could make for useful components in any of her inventions.

Instead of taking parts of the dragon like the others, Xander is just sitting off to the side with a torch, watching as everyone else takes what they want from the lifeless heap.

“Why aren’t you harvesting like the others?” Gwendolyn asks him as she gets closer to him.

Xander grabs a hold of the necklace around his neck, pulling the tip of the very same dragon’s tooth forward as he responds, “I already got all I needed from it”. This causes Gwendolyn to smile and sit down next to him.

“It makes me remember when you gave this to me. You slipped it inside that journal. I was kind of surprised when I saw it… but that was a good memory because it was the moment I really knew you liked me,” Gwendolyn starts to reminisce.

“I was so nervous, I almost didn’t give it to you… honestly, it scared me when you just flipped past it,” Xander admits, thinking back to that anxiety-filled moment when he hid the necklace in The Scientist’s journal and gave it to Gwendolyn.

“I couldn’t just pull it out in front of everyone, a bunch of my men were there, they would have teased me over it...” Gwendolyn explains, noting that at the time the ones with her didn’t take her seriously as their leader.

“Hey Xander, I wanted to give you this once things settled down, but I don’t know that we are going to be out of here that quickly… so I’m going to give it to you now,” Gwendolyn mentions as she digs into her pocket, pulling out a silver locket.

She hands it over to Xander who looks down at it and asks, “What is it?” “Open it up,” she urges him. He flips it open and sees a picture of her inside.

“Thought it might be nice to have something when we aren’t together, you know like when you go out on missions. I got myself one too,” she holds up a second with his picture inside.

“Thank you. Where did you get them?” Xander asks her as he looks down at her picture.

“Lunette made them for me. She actually added some extra functionality to them. Press the little button on the side of it,” she eagerly tells him.

Xander fumbles around with it before finding the button she meant. He pushes it in and the picture inside flips around showing a different, more risqué photo of her. His face gets red as he slightly loses his grip on the locket.

“Make sure you are alone when you look at that one,” she smirks at his reaction.

“This is a little much don’t you think?” He whispers, looking around to make sure the others can’t hear them.

“Nope, I got one of you for myself,” she holds up her locket and flips it to a shirtless picture of him.

“When did you even get that?” He asks, not sure of when someone would have even been able to take that sort of picture of him.

“I have my ways… do you like it though?” She asks, not knowing what he thinks of the gift.

Xander responds by flipping it back to the more appropriate picture and telling her, “I love it… and I love you”. He leans in to kiss her. Just as they part they notice Kayde standing over them.

“So… you guys want to look around now or keep doing that?” He asks them.

Xander looks up and notices the rest of them are done harvesting.

“Well I’d prefer to keep doing this, but given the situation, I guess we can start figuring things out,” Xander responds, standing up before extending an arm to help Gwendolyn up as well.

They start to walk around with their torches held out to light the way. What surrounds them are buildings, but they aren’t like the ones in the desert or even the Sacrosanct Empire, they are even more advanced.

“It looks like a city,” Jorge comments as he gets a closer look at what’s around him.

“Maybe this was where the sand dragon was living,” Kayde notes as he notices some of the buildings’ roofs are caved in and the paint on the side of them has started to chip.

“There used to be a legend associated with the dragon. It said there was an ancient civilization that lived underground that worshiped it. No one ever thought they actually existed, it was just something that made the legend stick in peoples’ minds ya know,” Jorge recalls, thinking back on the stories he heard as a child.

“I heard the same stories, some of the older men in the brotherhood used to talk about it with my dad. They used to joke about coming across it when we would go down to some of the ruins we find across the desert. But like Jorge, I didn’t think it actually existed,” Gwendolyn corroborates Jorge’s story.

“Interesting… why don’t we go inside one of these and check it out? It could be interesting to see what’s inside,” Lunette tells them as she starts to walk ahead, telling them as more of a warning than a suggestion they would decide on.

They follow her inside the nearest one. Lunette finds a switch on the wall and flips it, but nothing happens.

“That’s weird…” she mumbles to herself as she compulsively keeps flipping the switch back and forth.

“Maybe it doesn’t work anymore,” Kali suggests, not seeing the switch change anything.

“Or… or maybe it doesn’t have power!” Lunette declares much to everyone else’s confusion.

“Oh come on guys, stuff doesn’t work without power, like energy, probably electrical given how things look in here… this place actually looks pretty advanced… all of the buildings around here… I bet there is a generator somewhere,” she begins to ramble as those around her listen.

She looks up and notices that everyone is lost, having no clue what she is talking about.

“Sorry, think of it like this. There is another switch somewhere, that if that switch is turned off then all the other switches don’t work… like a master switch, except it's called a generator. The specifics aren’t important, but if we find that generator and flip its switch we might be able to activate all the other ones down here,” Lunette tries to make it simple so their much smaller minds can handle it.

“So what does this switch look like? Is it just like this one?” Kayde asks, not sure what they are looking for or how to find it.

“No, it would be bigger, much bigger. More like a lever than a switch. And it would be next to a big humming metal box… probably…” Lunette explains, knowing the generator might not work anymore.

“How are we supposed to look for such a thing? Should we split up or…” Kali begins to ask, not seeing this as an easy task to find one metal box in a giant dark abandoned civilization.

She is interrupted by Kayde who has just realized something, “Guys, where is Fore?”

They look around before running outside. They only see Russ where Drakthar tied him up before they went into the house.

“Russ, have you seen Fore?” Kayde asks, his tone full of worry.

“Fore?” Russ is confused, not knowing the wolf by that name.

“The wolf, my friend,” Kayde clarifies remembering that Russ isn’t as bright as Fore.

“He ran off that way,” Russ tells them.

“Thanks,” Kayde calls out before rushing towards where Russ pointed him.

“Hold on,” Xander tries to stop Kayde as the others all follow behind him.

“We don’t know what is down here, we shouldn’t just run off like this,” Xander keeps telling him.

“Look, man, if Gwendolyn ran off randomly like this you would chase after her too, so either wait here or shut up and follow me,” Kayde screams back at him, having no intention of staying in one place while Fore is missing.

They run for about half a mile in one direction before they find him. Fore is sitting down looking back up at Kayde, a lever right next to a humming box behind Fore.

“No fucking way,” Kali comments as she sees it, unable to believe her eyes.

“Yup that’s it,” Lunette notes happily as she strolls over to the lever and pushes it. As she does a loud crashing sound occurs and everything around them is suddenly lit up. Street lights illuminate the city around them.

“Holy shit,” Kali comments as she sees it, a city being so advanced a foreign concept to someone who has lived in the desert and then the Marshlands as she has. They look up to see what is above them, and aside from the hole they came through there is a stone ceiling far above them, it looks sturdy, explaining why the city isn’t completely covered in sand.

“It looks circular, like a dome,” Xander mentions when looking at it.

“What lad?” Jorge asks, not sure what Xander means by that.

“No he’s right, this place must be circular,” Lunette agrees with him, knowing what he might be getting at.

“Okay, so the place is round… how is that helpful?” Jorge asks them.

“It’s not really that helpful, but we could at least walk the perimeter and maybe there is a path out of here,” Lunette notes, not able to think of a better plan.

“Let me grab Russ first before we check,” Drakthar tells the others, assuming this is the plan. They walk back over to where they came down, when they make it back Russ is not there and neither is the corpse of the legendary sand dragon.

“What? Where did it go?” Kayde asks as he runs towards the pile of sand it used to be resting in.

“No clue,” Jorge responds as he and everyone look around as well.

“Giant corpses don’t just disappear like this,” Kali points out the obvious.

“Guys, I know this is very weird but I think we need to forget about it for now… we should just walk the perimeter like we planned,” Xander tries to get them all focused on a common goal again before everyone starts running off with different plans.

The others agree, deciding to forget about Russ and the sand dragon’s corpse for now and figure it out later once they know what to do. They walk around the perimeter for what seems like days, but what is really half a day, only encountering a cold hard wall next to them. The unchanging atmosphere of the underground making it impossible for them to determine the difference between one day and the next.

“Those houses, we’ve passed them before. We’ve walked the entire circumference of this place, there is no way out,” Kayde states plainly, hope starting to leave his normally cheery voice.

“I think the way we came in is the only way in or out,” Kali notes solemnly, not sure how they are going to ever escape this place. While the others are talking about their situation Drakthar looks off into the distance, noticing a different sort of light than the ones illuminating the streets. It is orange or maybe slightly yellow and it's moving.

It is only when the lights get brighter when Drakthar realizes what the source of it is.

“Guys,” he interrupts the others.

They all look over at him and see him staring off towards the streets between the buildings as he utters the name of what they all now see, “Distortions”.