Kahli had made up her mind - she was never going to sleep again. Okay, well, maybe that wasn't the whole truth. She would certainly be going to sleep again, sure - it was required, after all, by her tauman biology - but she needed to make sure she slept on her terms. This whole business of sleeping, and not waking up where she expected, was just getting out of hand. And now, she had to go into these awful ruins in order to figure out just what in the hell was going on!

Okay, well, maybe Kahli was excited by the idea of going into the ruins, and was thrilled by the prospect of going into them. Hadn't she been enjoying the idea of going into the ruins before she went to sleep?

Of course she had. She'd been dreaming about going into the ruins. She'd been dreaming up what laid within them. They beckoned to her.

But, something seemed a little off to her. Specifically, the thing that seemed off was that it was all too easy.

And most everything up to this point had been terribly difficult. It had required her to use her mind to get out of sticky situations. But here, she was just supposed to go into a cool ruin that she wanted to explore?

Kahli was feeling suspicious. So, this tamaven had woken her up, from what was apparently an untenable slumber. She'd, what, been completely asleep for the whole night, and then a good part of the morning, while G'athoong had meaninglessly crashed into the woods and wiped out all those tamaven homes?

Okay, so, it made sense. It made enough sense, at least... Just enough sense to be plausible. And just enough to make Kahli want to go into those ruins. But, and it was a big but, there was a serious issue. The ruins were large and thronging, that much is certain - but were they big enough to house a dragon?

Kahli walked through the wooded pathway towards the ruins and looked up at the huge entrance. She was not certain. It was a large entrance, but it was also quite narrow. On closer inspection, yes, Kahli was almost certain that the only way a water dragon could get through the entrance and into those ruins was if said water dragon was bisected lengthwise, which... just seemed incredibly unlikely, at the very least.

It would've been different if Kahli had come up with the idea to go in the ruins herself. But she didn't - the tamaven had woken her up and told her to go in there, essentially. It was, on second and indeed on third thought, incredibly suspect. Kahli wasn't sure if she believed what that curmudgeon of a tamaven had been telling her. And sure, it was generally in peoples' best interests to listen to tamavens and treat them with respect, but had that tamaven treated her with any respect? It had woken her up, fussed at her for something she had no control over, and then lectured her about insurance! Kahli wasn't sure if it had meant to be a diversion, but she almost started wondering if it had been just that. After all, had she really taken a lot of time to look at her surroundings?

Well, okay, she'd taken some cursory glances. Namely, what she noted was woods - and lots of them, all over the place. The vast overwgrowth made it hard to see much of anything. Which only made her even more suspicious.

Kahli looked down to the writhing mass of tentacles in her purse.

"What do you think, Froufrou? Do you think that any of this is suspicious? By the pincers of Theseosus, I wish you could talk to me - even thought speak to me - it would make this so much easier. All that said, what do you think? I just feel like that tamaven had to be feeding us a line. After all, who just wakes somebody up and tells them to go into a semiabandoned ruin without some sort of ulterior motive? And how about the fact that the vast majority of these woods are totally overgrown to the point that I can barely see any pathway to, well, anywhere but the ruins? It's like I'm being pushed to go in there, and I don't like it one bit. Well, okay, maybe that's not entirely all the truth. In all honesty, I'd love to go into those ruins. It's just that I find this all hard to believe. One second I'm musing over how cool and mysterious the ruins look, next I'm nearly forced into going into them? And what about the fact that there's no way a dragon could fit into the gate to those ruins, Froufrou? And why didn't anybody wake me up?"

Froufrou squelched in confusion. It was clear from the tone of her squelching that she hadn't really been paying all that much attention to all the goings on that Kahli was experiencing, so Kahli was getting what amounted to a shrug from her, for better or worse.

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"Ugh. Well, thanks for what input you could give, anyways, Froufrou," said Kahli. As much as she wanted to check out those ruins, she figured that, considering all her misgivings, the first thing she ought to do is walk back down the path to the small clearing she'd woken up in and confirm whether the tamaven's story was truthful or not. After all, it wasn't like it was obvious what was going on here - as far as she could tell, though, she'd been essentially pushed in one direction from the second she'd woken up. And with how insane Nomachiato had been recently, Kahli wasn't about to take that for granted. She needed to be certain of what was really going on.

So Kahli retraced her steps, trying not to focus on the fact that the footprints of her left foot were so much larger than that of her right - why was she still so terribly insecure, she asked herself - and soon came upon the clearing. There was a big tree with a thick trunk, which had been shading her when she'd been rudely awakened. This, in and of itself, was suspicious. Hadn't all the trees, according to the tamaven, been knocked over?

Kahli looked around for the tamaven. Where was he, now? She didn't see any sign.

And so, she continued her investigation. Soon enough, she did come upon a patch of trees that were smashed to bits. This was a little more convincing to see. In fact, the more she saw, it looked like almost half of this section of the forest had been leveled. If anything, this seemed even worse than what the tamaven had described. Had G'athoong really done this? Kahli hadn't gotten the impression that G'athoong was into creating natural disasters, which is honestly what this gave the impression of as she inspected the tree stumps. Yes, they almost seemed ground down, like they'd been eaten. Or, perhaps, like they'd been pecked.

Kahli was getting seriously suspicious now. There were no scales anywhere, either - how would that make any sense? If G'athoong had really crashed down here, wouldn't there be dragon scales or something littered all over the place?

Something wasn't adding up.

"Something stinks, Froufrou," said Kahli. "And it's not you."

Froufrou squelched.

"Okay, let me rephrase. Something stinks other than you."

Froufrou was satisfied with that.

Kahli looked around further, walking up to a high hill to get a better vantage point. What she saw, off in a far distance, made her gasp in disgust - and then in fear. Kahli quickly hid in a nearby bush and peaked through it.

There was a whole hord of tamavens, marching in step as they adjusted threads and wires around the scaly form of G'athoong. She was pinned down, unable to move even a talon! What's worse was, she was in a completely clear patch of land, devoid of any tree trunks or stumps or anything. That is to say, it was not only almost dreadfully for certain that G'athoong had not destroyed the forest, but indeed it was also dreadfully for certain that the tamavens were acting in bad faith.

"Wow, Froufrou," said Kahli. "I'm starting to think that that tamaven might not have had our best interests in mind. It doesn't look like G'athoong destroyed any of their homes at all! And to think, I'd completely bought into the lie. That's sickening. What are they planning to do to her? Are they going to kill her or something?" Kahli felt sick to her stomach. She hated being lied to. It felt... wrong. She was the one with the [Tale Teller] [skill]!

It was only now that Kahli realized with full clarity that having a [skill] that improved her lying ability did not protect her from falling for other peoples' lies and trickery. She felt embarrassed for even entertaining the idea of going into the ruins - who was to know what was would've really been waiting for her had she ventured forth into the ruins alone?

That was the other thing - if this is what the tamavens were doing with G'athoong, what were they doing with Sahdi and Unit 5a23? And why had they decided to spare her, only to try and trick her into something that, if all this was any indication, could've easily been her doom?

And of course, there was one other thing that nagged in the back of Kahli's mind. She hadn't reached a [checkpoint] in time when she decided not to go into the ruins. Did that mean that, for whatever reason, this was an inconsequential choice? Or, did it mean that no timelines diverged from this moment? Did it mean that Kahli would never have fallen for the trick, and subsequently that she was a good bit more clever than she gave herself credit for?

There was another, darker thought somewhere in Kahli's psyche that she felt a flicker of. A part of her that wondered if maybe, she'd never really had the free will of choosing - it was something that had been slowly growing as she used her [Seismic Sense] more and more, the concern of seeing time twist in so many different ways.

But no, that was ridiculous. Kahli had just let the jellyfish get into her head with its negativity. Boy, was Kahli glad that thing was defeated.

And then, she heard it. The slow flap, flap, flapping of two sinister wings. And there the tamaven was, lowering to face her.

Hello, hello, hello. Looks like someone's a little too clever for their own brains, huh? thought spoke the tamaven.

"What does that even mean?" asked Kahli with frustration and aggravation in her voice.

It means what I want it to mean. Just like you're going to do what I want you to do, or that dragon is going to be sleeping with the fishes.

"G'athoong's a water dragon, of course she sleeps with fishes," said Kahli matter-of-factly.

That's not what I meant, and you know it! The bird flapped its wings with malice. Now shut your trap and listen up, you meddling little tauman!