Dear Diary,

I read through my diary entries for the first cycle today. It was… strange.

I was so happy and excited back then.

I mean, I’m not not happy now, but I don’t… I feel like I was writing faster, because it was all so exciting. I get the sense I’m calmer now.

Like, if someone asked Cycle 1 me how I wanted to spend the evening, I’d want to experiment with something or run off and explore a little bit more. Now, I just want to relax in my room with Avi. I want to spend time with the guy I love, because I don’t know how much I’ll get to see him next cycle.

I feel more… grown-up than the Nikki who wrote the first entries here. Which is a very weird thing to think.

A part of me wants to rebel against being an adult, and go back to being super excited about everything. Just to show that nothing can change me.

But that would be… fake. Which would be worse, somehow.

I don’t know, I feel like I’ve focused a lot on how much Avi’s changed, but I never realized that I’ve changed, too.

The important things haven’t changed. I still love Avi, and velociraptors, and cooking, and my friends. I still want everyone to be happy, and I still hate drama. I’m just… calmer about it. A little.

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I’m not super calm. I don’t think I’ll ever be as calm as… I don’t know, Fire? Fire is pretty calm. Well, it’s a type of calm. Avi is calm, too, but a different type of calm. And Y is yet another type of calm.

There are lots of different types of calm. I’m not sure which one I’m becoming.

Anyways. This is day two of hanging out and doing nothing much. Aya suspects the Director gave us this time because she thought we were going to throw a party whether she allowed it or not.

No one prepared a party, but we might end up doing something fun tomorrow. Mostly everyone’s been visiting the friends they made in other groups.

I’d like to think that the Director has given up trying to control us, and will let us do whatever we want. But she doesn’t seem like the type of person who gives in so easily. I’m not worried or anything, though.

Fire said there’s probably a minimum amount of time we can spend on a cycle. That if we go too fast, it doesn’t count or something. And since we jumped a bunch of cycles, we have to spend at least three days here. That idea makes the most sense to me.

I mean, the Admins are doing something. They don’t spend all their time watching us. Whatever they’re doing must take some time, and that probably needs more than a few hours per cycle.

I wonder if they’ll end the dungeon before 30 cycles are over if they finish before then. The last dungeon was supposed to go to 100 cycles, and only got to 60. I assume it’s because they finished whatever they were doing with us there.

I wonder how everyone is doing in our old dungeon. I miss that place.

I hope I get to see it again before we go to wherever we’re going next…

If I ever read this, I’ll know if I did or not.

…Hi future me!!

And,

Goodnight, Dungeon!

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