I let out a blistering honk as my eyes sprung open.

My body felt beaten and bruised, as if someone or something had dragged me over a pile of boulders while I was out cold. It was disorienting, blinking out of consciousness and flashing right back into it after your body had gone through the ringer. I decided it must be what people that go through surgery feel like. Then I remembered that those war crazed chickens had mixed my perfect biological duck essence with subpar human goo and cooked me into existence using a space Easy Bake over, and I felt a little stupid. I knew exactly what “surgery” was like.

All that self-pity ended when a tug at my webbed feet pulled my head over a small hump and sent the back of my skull cracking down onto a rock, knocking me back into reality as I sprang to my feet. “What the duck?!”

Weevul stared up at me like a pre-teen caught with mom’s expensive lotion, a Sears magazine flipped open to the lingerie section, and a pile of wadded tissues. “Sorry, friend. Robot chicken said Weevul need to get you to Dirt Temple and, um, you heavy. Had to yank you off. Tug job is hard when working alone, ya?”

“Yeah. I guess you could say that,” I said, more amused by the choice of words than disturbed. “Though I think you do it better when you take matters into your own hand, so to speak. Where’s Dumbass?”

He pointed to my chest. “Go in there. ”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes. “Probably watching Firefly for the hundredth time. And Bawkman?”

Weevul shook his carapace. “Went back to Winchester bar. Said he be in touch and had to see man about dog. Or maybe was see dog about man? Either way, Weevul think robot chicken had to, um, you know… ”

“No, I don’t.” I furrowed my brow until my downy eyebrows were nearly touching. “Had to what?”

The Curculian raised all his clawed hands in a shrug. “Poop, ya? Curculian have similar phrase in language. When have make droppings, say go to see bioutwofous about a flockeet. Entire hive mind know what Curculian go to do, but pretend not to. Is respect thing. Understand?”

“Yes, I get it. And great. That was just great. Thanks for that… lesson in the six million forms of Curculian crapping etiquette and protocol.”

The short bug beamed like the sun. “You very welcome.”

“Now, where are we?”

“Temple. Why you no listen? Weevul said already. We at Dirt Temple.”

“Because, pal, a real dumbass has tainted my mind, and I can’t get the image of a million of you all squeezing out little bug pellets with your backs turned to each other out of my head.” I pinched my nose as I fought my way through the brain fog, then I sighed. “Which temple?”

“No squeeze out. Throw up. And say already. We at Dirt Temple! Why you no listen?! Nevermind. You look and see for self. Then you know Weevul not lie.”

“Now I’m confused.“ I raised an eyebrow. “Do you want me to see the poop or the temple?”

“Oh, man!” Weevul slapped the side of his head with a half dozen arms. “Weevul hope not all Earthlings are like this. Not poop! The Temple! Always the Temple!”

“That’s coming at it a little low, pal, but aaaaallrighty then! Obsess much?” I said in my best Ace Ventura impression. “And not sure when I turned into the bad guy around here, but duck it. Let’s get a look at this damn temple.”

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"This what Weevul been saying!"

With a side-to-side motion of my head that served more to work out the kinks than anything, I took in my surroundings. To my left, the craggy crevasse of a tunnel we had come from more than explained my achy breaky body. Getting dragged over boulders will do that to a fella. And to my right I found the temple in question, and dogdamn what a setting for a temple it was.

A giant arch framed the end of the tunnel as if it were the unhinged jaw of a giant serpent, and beyond the mouth and its jagged stalactite fangs sat a massive cavern not unlike the one that held Detroit Rock City. It was lit by an even higher concentration of that bioluminescent lichen, casting its eerie glow onto the sand below for as far as the eyes could see. And from the center of the Dune-ish landscape rose a massive pyramid.

I could only see two of the faces from my vantage point, and the sharpness by which the angles sloped away gave me the impression it only had three sides instead of the four my multimedia library held to be the truest form.

The stone that made up the right face was darker than black, and the green from above reflected off its glassy luster. I knew from five of seven books and one ill-fated tv show about a game of musical thrones that I was looking at dragon glass—okay, so it wasn’t really dragon glass. Sue me for trying to spice things up a bit, eh?

Yeah, it was obsidian. Good old-fashioned volcanic glass. Sharp and strong at the same time. And while not technically dirt, it definitely fell into the right category, at least from a geological perspective. The other face was the polar opposite. Where one was black as the night, the other was blistering white limestone, honed so smooth it absorbed the light from above.

The design of the temple was interesting, a cross between the Great Pyramid of Giza and the stepped ones that struck fear into the hearts of Jaguar Paw and his tribesmen in Mel Gibson’s pre-breakdown disasterpiece, Apocalypto.

Like those Mayan temples, multiple stairways ran up to a flat platform at the top. Though where the stairs of those structures would have been in the center of each stepped face, the pyramid in front of me had sides as smooth and sloped as their North African counterparts. Instead, the steps were the dividers between each triangle, flights converging at a point of mysterious purpose hundreds of feet into the air.

From the base of those stairs ran a set of pathways that connected with a larger, circular one that went around the entire complex like a halo. And from there ran a singular path, perhaps a mile long, carved into the rocky slope of the cavern and leading all the way up to my orange webbed feet.

Where Dumbass now stood, having graced us with its presence.

“Well,” it said. “We best get crack-a-lackin'. Princess Ganondorf ain’t going to find the Minor Sword to rescue herself.”

And then it skittered off down the path on its insectoid legs, whistling like a gang of misfits sharing detention in a John Hughes movie.

“It seem happy now,” Weevil observed. “Is good, ya?”

“I dunno, pal.” A heavy sigh escaped my bill as I tried to reconcile the reason behind the continuing Zelda related mix-ups. “I still haven’t figured out if that thing is a blessing or a curse. And despite how much it says it loves Earth things, it’s weird that it doesn’t seem to get everything right. Like its information is corrupted or something. And that scares me, because that’s where I got everything I know in my head. How can I trust anything it tells me, you know?”

Weevul slouched. “Not know. Weevul no have rotting chicken head to compare. Nor do Weevul want one, if Curculian is being honest.”

“I heard that!”

“Shut up, Dumbass. Nobody was talking to you.“ I bent down and put my hands on what amounted to the alien’s shoulders and gave them a rub. “That was what’s called a rhetorical question, pal. You’re not supposed to answer it. Even so, I ain’t gonna let that one bother me now. And neither should you.”

“It wasn’t. But... ya. That is good.”

“Yep. Not gonna let it bother Flap Merganser at all,” I lied as I pointed a feathered finger. “Now, if there was one thing I would let bother me? Well, it would be that sign right there.”

“Oh! Weevul love sign!” He skittered up to get a closer look at the words. “It just say Dirt Temple? Why bother? We went over this already. Weevul tell you Dirt Temple many times. Is head okay?”

“Yes. And, uh, no. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t know what I mean. Don’t ask so many damn questions!” I huffed. “What I mean is that those little letters bother me. The red ones you can barely read.”

He crept closer and narrowed his pod of eyes. When he spoke, it was slower than usual. “It say ‘Lifetime Clear Rate: 4.37%.’” He scraped a claw at his head. “Weevul no understand. Sound good. Mean beings clear before. Why this worry you? What this mean?”

I let out a chuckle at the insect’s child-like optimism. It was a character trait I very much wished that I had. “It means, pal, that we need to be on our A game.”