They were back in the cavernous temple. It was pitch dark again, but Dina recognized the way the air felt. She shivered and tried to pull the sense that this was all an absurd game of some sort back over herself like a warm blanket. Unfortunately reality's alarm clock had no snooze button and wasn't letting her go back to dreaming that everything was just fine. The woman let go of Dina's arm and cleared her throat in a way that spoke volumes. It said 'now really, children, look at the mess you've made. You should be ashamed. Clean that all up right now or there'll be no desert for you.' The cavern quickly, almost guiltily, came to life with a muted roar as sconces on the walls and giant iron braziers of coal standing on pedestals burst into flame. The flickering light made the stone figures frozen in battle seem to breathe. But before Dina could cringe behind the woman she felt something hard pressed across her chest and looked down to see a shovel being, well, shoved at her. And another one in the woman's spare hand. Dina burst into laughter that echoed manically in the enclosed space. "You're joking! This is your big solution? We're going to poke at concrete with shovels!" "It's plan A. And you were as clever as you seem to think you are, you would be praying that it will work instead of laughing." The cold look in the woman's eyes whithered Dina's laughter away until it was a sheepish little thing. She took the shovel and followed the woman to the center of the cavern. "Don't you have, I don't know, some kind of magic to clean it away?" "We don't dare poke at this with magic. It's too sensitive, too charged. It would be a disaster." Dina shook her head at the sight. It wasn't pretty. She and Kyle had just basically slathered the cement all over the raised dias as well as they could and as quickly as possible. Neither of them had enjoyed being in that place at night with nothing but flashlights and camping lanterns. And the silence. The silence had been a terror all its own. Dina had never wanted to be here again. Both Dina and the woman hacked at the cement with their shovels for a long while, poking here and there hopefully, thinking that maybe there would still be a wet spot somewhere. No such luck (Which made Dina shake her head, to think that she would have called being able to let a demon free 'luck'). "UGH!" The woman threw her shovel down with a clatter and a disgusted look. "Just had to spring for the really quick set stuff, didn't you? How did you even afford this much concrete?" "I just... did." "What, you have a job?" "No, I, I found it. The money I mean." Dina suddenly looked away to investigate a patch of cement over in the other direction to hide her face turning red. "You stole it?" "I said I found it!" "Like where?" "Well, um, around my house." "Oh so you stole from your parents. That makes it ever so much better!" Dina rounded on her defensively. "WELL EXCUSE ME, I THOUGHT MAYBE I WAS SAVING THE WORLD OR SOMETHING!" The woman tossed her arms up in the air. "I wasn't supposed to have to deal with you! Your friends I know- Trisha, Mark, Darren, Elizabeth, Jason, and Kyle- poor Kyle! Do you have any idea how much you've derailed his life? Many people's lives! They had parts to play! Your five friends were supposed to find this place with Kyle, not you!" "What was I supposed to do then!?" "You weren't supposed to be there at all! You have no part in any of this, you shouldn't even know any of these people!" "Well then why was I there!?" "I don't know!" There was a flicker of fear in that admission. The woman began to wring her hands unconsciously and Dina looked away, shaken. "So I... I wasn't supposed to be... and it's your job to.... Oh. Oooh. Wow. I'm, um. I'm going to have gotten you fired or something, aren't I." The woman ignored the question, sat heavily on the dirty floor and mumbled through a hand pressed to her face. It sounded like she was trying to regain her composure. "Alright. Alright. So maybe we need a jackhammer." "Sure. Okay. But how are we going to power one out here? Do those run on batteries or really long extension chords to plug in somewhere?" "Either way I can think of something. I can reach the very realms of the pure elements. I'll call forth a creature of thunder itself if I have to and ask them to power it." "....Riight. Well, make sure your summoned pikachu is of the right wattage, we don't want to fry the hardware or anything," Dina muttered dryly and began to wander away, down the the stairs into the rest of the room. She needed space. She needed air. She needed to feel like the ground wasn't swaying under her. She needed normalcy. Dina looked down at her hands, one still holding the shovel. Her fingernails were painted light green, with glitter. 'Peridot' the bottle had been labeled. When had she painted those? Three days ago? Everything had been so nice and normal and sane, in the good old three days ago. Dina kept wandering dumbstruck through the room, ignoring the woman as she continued talking to herself- "Oh who am I kidding. Even if we could dig it up, the time has passed. Even if the cement melted away this very moment and I dragged him here and made him pull the sword out the entire prophecy is already shot, the powers unclaimed...." She stood with a sigh and dusted herself off. "Well girl, I hope you have a bomb shelter or something, because this world's about to become one giant bad neighborhood. I was wrong to try and bring you into this. There's nothing you can do." Dina didn't answer. She was busy staring slack jawed at what she had found on the furthest wall. "What... what is this giant door for?" The woman hardly glanced over. The far wall was too distant for her to see in this gloom anyway. "Door? Oh, in the back wall? Giant stone affair? Horrible glyphs and carvings all over it, makes you feel like you should go blind or drop dead just from looking at it?" Dina swallowed hard. "Yeah. That sounds right." "That would be the Dragon's Gate. Remember the last part of the passage of disasters- 'And then The Destroyer will come to prepare the way'. That's his own personal extradimensional gate point." "'Prepare the way' for what?" "Well who knows now. It was supposed to serve its master in readying the apocalypse, but-" the woman tapped a toe on the concrete- "don't ask me how it's going to do that now. Its master is going to be rather less demanding than was expected. Probably it will just run amok on its own until it can't find anything else to kill or burn down. But regardless, that's enough from you." She appeared next to Dina suddenly and put a hand on her shoulder, making the girl jump and drop her shovel. The woman smiled just a tiny bit. Good. She deserved to be scared out of her mind and then some. "I'll send you home." "I thought you said I had to help fix things!" "I did, because I wanted you to suffer a little for what you've done. But there isn't anything you can do after all, so you'll be suffering for it plenty without any help from me." She smiled. "Makes me kind of glad that I don't live around here." "But- no. No. I can't just be a random bystander while-" "Then I'll make you a checklist of disasters so you can be an educated bystander, but that's all you can be. If you had a part to play in this I would see it on you. Meanwhile I have to find the people who might actually belong in this mess... the heroes are ruined, but maybe I can find some of the fringe characters...." She smirked. "And here people always wonder why prophecies are often so vague. Because if they weren't they'd fall apart like we tissue paper. But you, you're done. Off you go." "But-" Dina had to close her eyes against the sudden vertigo. She reached out to grab anything she could to keep from falling over and felt cold metal against her palm. The sick feeling passed quickly, leaving her blinking and looking around in confusion. She was sitting on the park bench again with one hand white knuckle clenched around the metal arm rest. Her crumpled papers were still scattered on the ground near her feet and a clipboard with one paper on it sat next to her on the seat. She grabbed it up and stared- 'The world will begin to show signs of the curse as disasters come upon the earth. There will be swarming plagues of insects, and strange diseases will afflict not only mankind but all creatures. The land itself will fall into confusion until the curse causes the realms to cross, giving beings from the other worlds entry to the earth. Then the Destroyer will come to prepare the way.' And underneath in neat, crisply handwritten pen: Things should happen in order, and soon. With no off switch I give the earth a year, tops. Hope for your own sake that I can find some way to change the course of this. That was all. There was a black speck where the woman had probably put her pen down to add 'it was not nice knowing you' or something like that and had opted not to. But for all useful purposes, that was all. It was a rough couple of weeks for Dina. For the first few days she wasn't sure if maybe she hallucinated the entire thing and flirted with complete denial. She became a complete news junkie from any source she could get- television, in the papers, over the radio, on the internet- and took pages of notes on what went on in the world. By week two she was uncertain and tentatively confused. But maybe she was imagining things? By week three she was confident in her confusion. Something was going wrong. Even for a broken attempt at the end of the world, something was going wrong. Things weren't following the little checklist. Not her problem though, right? She couldn't do anything about it. Destiny had picked her up, given her a good looking over, and had thrown her back onto the shelf. Too bad she didn't really think that way. She would have avoided this whole mess if she did. As it was she was in for some Serious Research, caps and all. ~End Page Three~