[This work is inspired by the images, gameplay, and story of Atlus's Etrian Odyssey, as well as its sequels.]

Another day of bird watching. You are in your favorite spot: cradled between a mesh of tree branches about midway up an adult oak, as if lying in someone's arms. The sunlight is warm and the breeze is tepid, and the way that the leaves on the trees are rustling reminds you of a lullaby. You've brought a comfortable padding to lay on and enough food and water to last the entire day. It's amazingly hard not to fall asleep, but reminding yourself of how high up you are seems to be doing the trick.

Maurice has given up trying to direct you towards more productive ways of spending your free time. This morning, for instance, he only chuckled and shook his head.

"You'll never find anything out there, you know? All you'll get for your trouble is a nice view. You should spend more time helping your family…"

Of course you should. But you aren't, and you've made that choice. This is a matter of a personal passion.

Which reminds you of the journal that Maurice gave to you last night. Since the birds are stubbornly refusing to make any appearances, and since you therefore have some free time and a beautiful reading environment, you decide to go deeper into the journal. A drop of guilt runs through you like ice water, followed swiftly by a hot chaser of pleasure, at the thought that you are directly disobeying the author's wishes by not traveling to Etria first. Perhaps you need more convincing.

Lapin 13, Ethereal Academy, Year 1212, Birthday Reflections/Shigo

For nearly fifteen years now I have studied at the Academy. You might say that the best years of my life have been spent here among the dusty tomes and rusty machinery of the Ethereal. You might say that the Academy raised me, has shaped me into the man I've become. I might say those things too. But the Academy has shaped me into a man who it will soon become dissatisfied with, just as I have become dissatisfied with it. And so my home is a broken one, my family dysfunctional in the extreme. This is fine with me. Nothing good can come of being tethered down to an institution, and no leash is long enough to justify living as any organization's dog.

What have I learned here at the Academy? A good question, and one deserving of a qualifier: intention. I have learned as many things unintentionally as I have intentionally here at the Academy.

The Reclamation continues to ravage the wilderness around us. I don't know if the rest of this planet is infected to the degree that the area around the Academy is, but if so then the entire human race is in danger. The land is becoming infertile, the water is drying up…People can't grow enough food to eat or to support livestock, and are becoming restless. Some days, judging by the messages we get here at the Academy, a general collapse of government seems imminent. People are scared, and rightly so. I'm scared too.

The most terrifying lands are known as "the Reclaimed". The soil turns the color of pitch and cracks underfoot. It smells foul, like rotting pig flesh, in the rain it hisses at the slightest contact. Vegetation withers and lies flatly dead on the ground or else becomes ravenous, sharp, and bloodthirsty. There's a fern near Tremonde, called by the locals "Yvette" after an infamous murderer, which has become seemingly intelligent and will skewer with its blade-like fronds any man, woman, or child who approaches it too closely. That's how horrifying this whole thing is: people are characterizing the land as a murderer. We are at war with a soil that no longer wants us here.

Whole cities have been attacked by the Reclaimed vegetation. Black trees burrowed into the ground near the Lemerry forest and, two weeks later, struck out of the cobbled streets of Maxima like breaching whales. Not long after, the trees had completely taken over the city. They had grown into the storefronts; spread their branches through every home, barracks, and place of government. When a taskforce arrived from the Academy, the walls were covered in thorny vines. Out of the vines were sprouting white flowers with brilliant crimson veins, like bloodshot eyes. I'll never forget the look of those thousands of eyes, crawling all over me, analyzing my every breath. We didn't find a single living thing inside the city. Whoever hadn't left during the initial breakthrough of the trees had simply vanished.

Everywhere cities are being Reclaimed and dragged into the wild-wastes. From every corner of this nation, the people are crying to the Academy for help…and all we send are taskforces, coroners to bring samples back to what may as well be called a morgue instead of an Academy. It makes me sick to my stomach, the way some of my colleagues talk. Some people, would you believe it, are actually excited by the Reclamation. Some people are so desperate for something new to study that they seem to have forgotten that the lives of innocent citizens are on the line. I hope to the gods that I never become so consumed, so lost, as they are.

I've been studying myths lately, trying to find something, anything, to point me in the direction of some kind of help. It's not much, and my professors often tell me that I'm wasting valuable time, but I feel like something this catastrophic must have some root in mythology. If I can find something mythical about this calamity, maybe I can find some mythical cure as well. Once I've found a mythical cure, it'll just be a matter of separating reality from metaphor before, hopefully, some good can be done.

I find scraps here and there, but have found nothing conclusive yet. Most intriguing is Professor Darnton's story of the "World-Nut" and the "Great Tree of Life". Why intriguing, you ask? I've heard the story countless times before and, while it always struck a personal chord, I had never considered it relevant to the Reclamation. Let me explain.

Two weeks ago I was sent on a taskforce to the Reclaimed city of Shigo. I was joined by Bellatrix, Mordred Conning, Seras Limberpool, and Professor Alexei Vertrus. Bellatrix was her usual self. That is, she was a complete ass leading up to and during the investigation. Even before we left, she felt the need to take me aside and ask me not to do anything irrational. "Irrational"? I couldn't understand her. She's never had the same respect that I do for the mythology, so perhaps she was trying to curb my "irrational" fascinations. I wasn't about to let her get in the way of my personal projects, though. Not everyone at the Academy has a morbid obsession with the Reclamation but the people in power do, and the people in power have still more people within their power who are obligated to follow orders. I still haven't figured out whose power Bellatrix is under. Part of the problem is that she's never seemed like the type to be under anyone's influence – she has always been a mover, or one of the unmoved.

We arrived at the city to find that the Reclamation had reached Stage 3, the point just before the walls would be envined. I'd spent a very personal summer in Shigo once, a year ago, and so this experience was particularly painful for me. There was a bakery near the broken, open gates to the city proper.

"I took a barmaid on a date there last summer. Just last summer she'd been telling me all about her plans to travel to Armoroad and across the sea, and now look," I said.

"How did you convince a barmaid to spend more than five seconds with you, let alone to go on a date with you?" Bellatrix asked, perhaps teasingly. There was a hint of a smile on her face. The others found this amusing. Or perhaps they were laughing simply out of a desire to be polite to Bellatrix. I can't imagine why any normal human being would tease like she did. Hotly, I turned on them.

"Have some respect. She's probably dead now, you know?"

This seemed to touch Bellatrix.

"I'm sorry…" she said, looking at me with eyes full of pity.

"It's nothing personal," I lied quite openly. "It's just a matter of respect. I don't appreciate you making jokes at the expense of the dead. This is an entire city's loss of life we're witnessing, and not a single body in sight."

Bellatrix was quiet then. I can't explain it, but she seemed somehow "satisfied" with my answer. There's no other word for it. It was as if I'd given a professor the correct answer to a question during one of my pre-alchemy lessons. It was that look of hers, as if she wanted to pat me on the head. It was infuriating.

But enough about Bellatrix.

We toured the city before, at last, in the mayor's manor, we found a single body. It had been nearly ripped to shreds by some kind of force, and the face was distorted and warped like a piece of melted and clumsily reshaped iron. Mordred was quick to become infirm from the smell alone.

Professor Vertrus and I searched the body, and besides scraps of cloth and the remnants of some kind of armor we didn't find much at first. An investigation of the body revealed that it was covered in pins which, to me, did not look like splinters of wood. I noticed that parts of the cloth were also singed. I told the group that I didn't believe mere trees had killed the man. Professor Vertrus and Seras disagreed with me almost immediately, believing the pins to be thorns and the singed cloth to be evidence of the use of some kind of natural acid. Bellatrix, after investigating the body, supported my hypothesis. In fact, she identified the pins as quills, typical of smaller, spiny creatures like hedgehogs. They were larger than a normal hedgehog's quills, but they were quills all the same. We collected some samples so that they could be identified later, and it was then that I made my great discovery. A note, written on a scrap of parchment, was pinned to the man's chest under his shirt, in a concealed pocket. It read:

…is next. Sources in Etria indicate that the incomplete Project is having adverse effects. Evacuate the city, get to somewhere safe, send…

Interesting, right? "Adverse effects"? "Incomplete Project"? I know where Etria is, and I plan on digging around the international journals and old books in the library to learn more about it. I also recall the Academy receiving a large sheaf of paperwork from Etria, advertising the "Yggdrasil Labyrinth" – a massive underground forest which, while not malignant, seems to be exhibiting qualities similar to Reclaimed lands. The Academy found it interesting, and irresponsible, that Etria would advertise the area as an "adventurer's paradise" instead of sealing it off and possibly preventing their town from being destroyed. I myself found the idea of a benign section of Reclaimed land to be very intriguing. There could be something to learn from studying the Labyrinth. But the Academy decided that since Etria is so far away and since the Labyrinth is passive and benign, there was no reason to make any form of inquiry beyond a shrug of the shoulders and a bit of waterhole gossip.

The Academy is looking for new ways to conduct investigations into the Reclamation these days. Perhaps, with a little luck, I will be able to convince the upper administration, The Council of Seven, to lend me a taskforce to investigate Etria further. I pocketed the note without, I assumed at the time, anyone noticing.

Investigation is certainly warranted. Professor Vertrus is still analyzing the samples we took from Shigo, but I'm positive that those quills came from an animal and that that cloth was burned. That means that these trees, if they're coming to life like "Yvette", are somehow also able to bring animals under their control. And they're somehow able to use the elements as a weapon – Alchemy – without the use of an Ex Nihilo Device.

"The earth revenges upon us," some of my more poetic colleagues say. My experiences in Shigo and in other cities have caused me to wonder…is that so? Does the earth revenge itself upon us? The trees and the vegetation, the very children of the soil, have seemingly come alive. And now they may be able to control the lesser beasts of the earth. Have the people of the cities vanished into the earth, to become her slaves? Or were they murdered, as it appeared in Shigo, by the servants of the earth?

Professor Darnton has told me two legends that intrigue me based on my investigations of Shigo and other Reclaimed cities – the legend of the "World-Nut", and the legend of "The Great Tree of Life". The legend of the World-Nut claims that one day, a great corruption will spread across the earth, caused by human hands. The earth will rebel and strike back at the humans. At the moment when it seems most likely that humanity will be extinguished and when it seems certain that the earth will wither, die, and fall away like rotten pieces of a walnut's shell, the earth will crack open to reveal "a divine truth, which will envelop all living things". I have no idea what this could mean, but the situation that the legend describes seems similar, in some ways, to the Reclamation.

The legend of The Great Tree of Life is more obscure. According to the legend, there is a great tree, Yggdrasil, somewhere outside of this world. Upon its branches sit nine separate worlds – whole universes contained like the water within a drop of dew or the flesh within a piece of fruit – and ours is one of them. A branch of Yggdrasil is said to exist somewhere in our world, maintaining the natural world with its super-magical energy. It is said that if the branch of Yggdrasil were ever to become corrupted, or if its burden of world-purification were ever to become too strenuous, it would be clipped by what I prefer to refer to as the "Eternal Gardner". When a branch dies or otherwise endangers the survival of the plant, it must be clipped, goes the reasoning. If a branch of Yggdrasil were clipped, then the world sitting on it would die.

Now, the Great Tree of Life Yggdrasil reminds me of the note I found and of Etria's Yggdrasil Labyrinth. A "Project" is having "adverse effects". This note must have been delivered from afar – its language suggests that the person it was delivered to was being ordered to evacuate his city, as opposed to the sender's city. Therefore the adverse effects have a wide-range. I must conclude that the adverse effects are the Reclamation. As one who has investigated many Reclaimed cities, I can safely say that, yes, the effects are wide-spread. Now what could this mysterious "Project" be? Perhaps the myth of the Great Tree of Life is speaking about some source of power. I do not necessarily believe that there is a tree like Yggdrasil…but I do believe that it is possible that there is some source of alchemical and biological energy which may have become corrupted, and which may be disrupting life on this continent. Perhaps it is an incomplete alchemical experiment? I will have to research this.

Lapin 14, Ethereal Academy

They still aren't done analyzing the samples. I took the Ex Nihilo Device (the "E.N.D." as we call it) out for a spin to make sure I wasn't getting rusty. My aim is still perfect, but my formulas seem to be a little weak. I'll have to make some adjustments and do some more studying this weekend.

Bellatrix was also in the courtyard practicing with her E.N.D. They're big, purple and orange gauntlets that extend up to the elbows. They come with receptors installed in the arms, used to input formulas, and they have a converter installed in each palm which renders a formula (input through the receptors) into an elemental energy (which exits through the converter). The common combat formulas are electricity, fire, poison, and ice – they require few ingredients and you can run an E.N.D. for a full day, if you need to, with a single formula conversion – assuming regular, and not overly strenuous or frequent, use of the Device. It is also true that "the fresher the formula, the stronger the output", so there are reasons to reuse formulas over the course of a single day.

[A sketch of, presumably, Noir wearing his E.N.D. gauntlets is on the opposite page. Written hastily below the sketch is "Some alchemists have taken to naming their gauntlets in a show of extreme vanity." Next to the left-hand gauntlet is printed, in stylized script "The Left One" and next to the right-hand gauntlet is likewise printed "The Right One".]

Combat formulas are not the only ones that alchemists can perform. There are a variety of other formulas which are useful for more constructive purposes. More and more are being invented every day.

Bellatrix is a fire specialist, while I prefer to study electricity. At any rate, she always looks ridiculous in her titanic gauntlets. More so because she has kept her "training wheels" - large, serrated, brass blades which extend from the outside edges of the gauntlets to ease the physical strain that the conversion process has on the body. She must have noticed me eyeing her at the firing range, chuckling to myself, because she approached me.

"I know what you found yesterday, and I think that it's very irresponsible of you not to report it to the Seven," she said. There were several other students practicing with us, so I was naturally quick to quiet her. It was rude of me, but being caught so off guard by her I could not help but nearly clamp a gauntleted hand over her mouth. She was not in the slightest disturbed by this, however, so perhaps she understood that she had committed a faux pas.

"Quiet down, keep your mouth shut! Do you want the entire Academy to hear that I'm keeping secrets from the upper administration?" I hissed. Impudent as ever, Bellatrix nodded.

"I've half a mind to tell everyone this instant. In order to make a good plan, you have to acquire the proper intel. We file reports on everything we find in the Reclaimed cities so that we can take action later. And besides, secrets are dangerous here at the Academy – you could be in possession of something more dangerous than the Reclamation."

"I doubt that the Academy would ever act on a scrap of paper. Dangerous information? There's no such thing to me," I scoffed and began to remove my gauntlets. In the sunlight, lying on the small counter before my target-practice booth, I was reminded of how infrequently I polish the damned things. They're absolutely covered in scratches.

[A note is written in the margins: "Clean 'em up! Buy some polish from town tomorrow…who are you kidding, you won't go to town tomorrow…"]

"There is such a thing for the rest of us. We have an administration for a reason, Ardell. I know that Shigo was a sensitive place for you…"

I could not hold back. My temper, I fear, often gets the best of me in the moment. Someday it will cost me more than just a casual friendship.

"Don't presume. You know nothing about how sensitive Shigo was for me," I snapped.

…I've left most of this information out until now, but it was a sensitive investigation. It was not, as Bellatrix may have believed, a simple affair with a barmaid that had made me so tender towards the city. Walking through that desolate town, seeing the bloodstains on the walls and feeling the eyes of countless red-veined flowers upon me…all I could think about were the merchants, the children who used to play in the fountain, the town drunk who used to sing, unfailingly each night, from the roof of The Hunter's Respite to "the moon, my love, my sweet, my – hic – dear Luna dear."

Bellatrix will never understand how eerie it is to see familiar ghosts in a familiar town outlined in blood. She spends all of her time here at the Academy, devoted to her studies. Admirable, but that combined with her unpersonable personality often gives me cause to wonder if she even has a home, or family, or friends outside of the Academy.

Bellatrix left me alone after I snapped at her. I must have conveyed some of my dislike for her through my very pores, because she did not approach me for the rest of the day. We're two sides of the same coin, destined to never see eye to eye, and I'm comfortable with it staying that way.

Lapin 15, Ethereal Academy

[There are notes here, just above the date: "Etria – small town north of Agajio. 'Yggdrasil Labyrinth' source of most income. Boom town. 'Labyrinth'?" and some coordinates, which you must assume correspond to a specific map.]

Have discovered more interesting things about Etria. Far away, through the Duchy of Grularde and the Principalities of Etrune and Acea, almost all the way to High Lagaard (but not quite that far), is a true natural forest. Within this forest is the town of Etria. The Academy has received no reports of malignant Reclamation activity from so far away, and this could indicate one of, or both of, two things:

1. The Academy is not considered an authority in Etria, and so there would be no precedent for reporting local troubles.

Although Etria sent a message regarding their "Labyrinth", this was not a call for help and it was not sent exclusively to the Academy. It may as well be considered an advertisement to a macabre adventurer's carnival.

2. Etria has already been Reclaimed, and so there is no one left to report any troubles.

If the Labyrinth had ceased to be passive and contained and had instead become malignant, it is likely that the destruction of Etria would be swift, bloody, and silent.

Vertrus has finally finished with the samples from Shigo. The quills are, as Bellatrix and I believed, not thorns from a plant. Just as Bellatrix suggested, their composition and structure seem to match smaller (about five times smaller) quill samples taken from a native monster known as the hedgehog. Hedgehogs are golden in appearance and covered in stiff quills with the strength to match bone. They aren't seen much since the Reclamation began, but they used to be a menace to farmers. "Delightful little manslayers" is how Vertrus called this new, larger brood. With a smile. Few professors are as callous as Vertrus; he is one of the sadistic, and sadly influential, few at the Academy who are completely upsetting the direction of the Academy's response to the Reclamation.

I have been researching myths regarding Etria, it's Yggdrasil Labyrinth, and a "Project" that took place there. I've found a few, very small, passages about a powerful circle of alchemists who were performing experiments on some rare natural materials native to the surrounding forest…but these passages are mostly without citations. That's what happens when you go back far enough into the misty myths. But…it's possible that these experiments involving alchemy and natural materials may be the alchemical-biological "Project" that I am searching for. Buried deep within the Yggdrasil Labyrinth could be the corrupted branch of the Tree of Life that I have been so desperately searching for – mythologically speaking.