We jogged rapidly across Monkey Island - I must have gotten my second wind. Or maybe it just took a lot of energy to tell a story Chum-style at the same time earlier. Either way, we made it back to the monkey head caverns in almost no time, just before another smokeless grumble from the volcano. We kept our eyes out in the jungle and on the upper paths for any clues or people, but found neither.

Next was a dive down the lava falls - after checking that my rope still held on to the stalagmite or maybe stalactite - and then we entered the monkey caves.

"It's like a museum of ancient simian art." Elaine marveled at the statues in various dramatic poses. "I think they've been here for centuries at least."

"I don't think I've seen any works by Simeon before," I admitted. "Was he pre-classical or proto-Caribbean?"

Elaine coughed gently. "I'll leave that up to the experts."

We didn't find anything new there, so we went on to the descending stairs.

"Why is there a carving of a top of a head above the doorway?" Elaine asked.

"There's a mark over all of them down here," I explained. "They're clues to open the last door puzzle."

"I see." Elaine frowned. "I know these quest riddles are often bizarre, but even so, it seems a bit odd."

"Tell me about it." We strolled inside. "I wouldn't have even known these were down here and had anything to do with the Secret if it hadn't been for LeChuck. He said he'd heard about it from the voodoo lady."

Elaine turned around at the foot of the stairs and looked up in surprise. "Really? Corina?"

I almost asked "who" again, but I remembered in time. "Yeah."

"I guess she would know." Elaine lingered over the three pirate monkeys. "Do you think their treasure chests have something to do with it? Like the Secret chest goes inside one, or switches out with one?"

"Maybe. We could try if we can get the chest back here later." I peered inside one out of habit. "Nope, it's empty."

Elaine shook her head fondly as we went on to the last statue level.

"Hmm." Elaine stood in front of the fallen wall. "So this storey doesn't connect in a circle?"

"It was like that when I got here," I was quick to clarify.

"I know. It looks like it collapsed ages ago."

"Wow, really?" I hadn't given that much thought to it earlier beyond how it could stop me from catching up to the Secret chest. I'd just assumed that the wall was yet another victim of LeChuck's destructive tendencies when he'd passed through before me. "It's amazing how you can tell that."

"I picked up a few things from my grandfather during his exploring phase," Elaine explained. "I think this is what was bothering me about the doorway markings. Everything here, even this collapse, seems much older than them. And this next exit - I think it may have been added later too." We'd reached the last stair when she said that.

"That… explains a lot, but also very little." So the last chamber with the doorway to the theme park-slash-Melee was added recently? By who, and why?

"Let's explore the rest to see if there's anything else to find," Elaine urged, already heading down the last flight.

Once again, everything was the same at the lowest level, down to Madison's captain hat cast aside forlornly. By this point, I was desperate enough to examine it with my double monocle and even try it on, but found out nothing except that it clashed with my T-shirt. I dropped the hat back on the ground.

"So you used the previous stair entrance markings to unlock this door?" Elaine stared upwards at the concentric circles, staying well away from the conspicuous throw switch.

"Yeah, along with some corrections from that stone tablet over there." I nodded towards the slab still bobbing along in the boiling lava. It had drifted away from the stone landing and seemed to be slowly sinking. "Three turns left, two right, or something."

"From here, it looks like fifteen," Elaine said, shielding her eyes from the angry red glare.

"No, I'm pretty sure it didn't have a fifteen…" I walked closer. "What?!"

I could clearly see the first word carved on the tablet was now "Fifteen".

"It changed!" I leaned out as far as I dared. "Wait - actually, I think this is the other side. It must have turned over." We tried to bring the tablet closer so we could read the rest, but neither of us could reach it. I dug frantically through my pockets; the longest things I had were the yardarm and Apple Bob's "helping hand." I tried the last one first, but it turned out I couldn't use the skeleton arm like that; it kept wiggling away from the searing heat. So I stuck out the yardarm, trying to hook onto the tablet corner still breaking the surface. That worked, so we reeled it in and got it onto the solid rock.

"Okay. If you read it to me, I'll copy what it says onto this." I smoothed out the scrap paper I'd found in the church and found a large blank space on the bottom of the sheet.

"Alright. Ready, sweetie?"

I poised my sturdy quill over the page. "Ready!"

As Elaine read aloud slowly, I wrote:

"Fifteen men on a

Dead man's chest,

Yo ho ho and

A bottle of rum."

"Catchy." I made the final dot. "Sounds kind of pirate-y."

"But what does it mean?" Elaine read the lines over again silently before musing out loud. "Again, this side's engraving looks older than the other's. But it doesn't seem to reference the Secret - except for mentioning a chest. And I'm not sure if it's even the same kind of chest in the poem."

"That's a good point." Some of the other words seemed familiar though. I re-read through the entire paper in front of me and thought hard. "I may have an idea. But I'd rather check something first. Why don't we head on over to Carla's?"

We left the stone tablet there - I may put a lot of things in my pockets, but I was no raider, or even a lost Ark - and stepped through the final door and into the creepy alley on Melee Island. The switches must have been on the fritz still, because most of the time it was in daylight, rather the darkness of the after-hours theme park. "Whatever Madison and those guys did must be wearing off."

We walked onto High Street, and looked around. "How unsettling," Elaine said, peering into the switching fish shop-slash-souvenir emporium.

"Isn't it?" I glanced around, afraid of getting jumped by Madison or her friends, but the street-sometimes-square was deserted. The Secret chest still stood on its pedestal, lid shut tight. "Let's hurry to Carla's."

We headed to the governor's mansion. The line outside was as long as ever, though I didn't see the lookout in it. We cut in line and slipped inside, where by a funny coincidence, the lookout was in the middle of his audience with Carla.

He cried out when we walked in. "Not again!"

"I'm really very sorry," Elaine told him. "I have urgent matters to discuss with the governor. It won't take a minute."

The lookout grumbled as she struck up a conversation with Carla. It sounded pretty technical - I heard words like "effective privateer leadership" and "plunder shelters" and "pillage relief fund" bouncing around - so I tuned it out and concentrated on the bookshelf beside them.

I slid The Endless Tale of the Voyage that Would Not End back into an empty space. Then I pulled out the book I was looking for.

"Can I borrow this?" I held it up between the two women for Carla to see.

"You've returned the other one," Carla confirmed, checking the shelves. "Sure, go ahead. Nice shirt, by the way."

"Thanks." As Carla returned to her previous discussion, I read the title to myself. "Ship-to-Ship Combat Strategies. By stupid Captain Madison. Ugh." I didn't really want to, but she'd sounded so smug earlier when I'd admitted I hadn't opened it. I had a feeling that it might be useful to have a better look.

There were naturally three places to check out in any book: the beginning, the middle, and the end. I decided to go through all three. I cracked the volume open, and examined the first page. "It's a dedication," I realized. "'To the bright future, which I will create.' Humble much?" I glanced below it. "It's autographed." In tight loopy handwriting was "Madison M-Splotch" in black. To be clear, the 'Splotch' was just a big ink splat, not "Splotch" all spelled out. "Hmm."

Next, I opened the book to a random page in the middle. "Hmmmm." It made my eyes try to cross. And I thought algebra was hard. There was no way I was going to be able to learn anything from that.

With relief, I turned to the end.

The last section was a list of appendixes… appendici… appendices. There were twenty-six of them. What was even more odd about them than their excessive quantity was that they weren't labeled by number, or even by the letters of the alphabet. They used those same weird graffiti or magical symbols I'd been seeing everywhere.

It looked like this:

Appendix あ

Appendix べ

Appendix し

Appendix で

Appendix え

Appendix ふ

Appendix ギ

Appendix は

Appendix 愛

Appendix ジ

Appendix ケ

Appendix れ

Appendix も

Appendix ん

Appendix お

Appendix ピ

Appendix く

Appendix ら

Appendix せ

Appendix っ

Appendix う

Appendix び

Appendix を

Appendix x

Appendix よ

Appendix ぞ

"Hmmmmmm…!" I counted them one more time, to be sure, lingering over the third to last one.

After poking the ship-in-the-bottle to watch it rock and reminisce about adventures past, present and future, I waited quietly next to the lookout. It wasn't long. As soon as I started thinking about what to talk to him about, Carla said to Elaine, "Those are all good points. I'll have to think it over."

Elaine waved back with a bright "Thank you, Carla!" and rejoined me. "Did you find what you're looking for?"

"I think so." I patted the book safely stowed away in my pocket. "Now we can put it all together."

"I think 'we' in this case will have to include LeChuck too," Elaine told me quietly. "You promised him. And he may have found something on his end."

"You're right." Though I didn't have to like it in this instance. She didn't seem too excited about the idea either. "I just don't know how much we can trust him."

"Not much, probably," she admitted. "Though if anyone could be as obsessed about the Secret as you, it would be him. Those new leaders may three-way tie for second." She laid her hand on my arm. "But whatever LeChuck might pull, we don't need to fear, as long as we're together. How many adventures have proved that now?"

"At least five I can think of off the top of my head," I said, encouraged already. "To LeShip, then."

"That's the spirit."

We left the mansion, with a few bittersweet remembrances of our starter home - "Though the perpetual queue is a new feature," Elaine pointed out - and walked back towards High Street.

I stopped in front of the chest pedestal. "Hang on a second," I said, reaching into my pockets. "I've got a feeling that this may save us time later."

I ran through everything I had and tried each out on both the chest and the pedestal - up to and including attempting to separate the two via paper cut. I finally succeeded by setting the pedestal on fire with my matches.

"It's a good thing we have cobblestone streets," I noted. Same for the stone church floors earlier, actually. "And that the pedestal was far enough away from the building to stop the fire from spreading."

"All the same, I hope you don't make a habit of that," Elaine said, watching from a short distance.

"I would say I won't, but somehow these situations keep happening to me." So saying, I hoisted up the chest, and we made our way to the alley's "Employees Only" door and back to Monkey Island.