Chapter 65: The First Temple

Today's the day! Marcy was due to arrive any moment. I woke up to the most wonderful smell, something I'd never expected here in Amphibia… chocolate chip pancakes. Dad would make them once a month, from scratch. I've been craving them ever since coming to Amphibia, but I've never actually seen chocolate.

Well, it turns out that life finds a way. I give you the Chocopede, a bug that through some miracle of science, tastes exactly like chocolate. They even come in "milk", "dark" and "white" varieties!

[drawing of Chocopede]

No almonds or crunchies, though.

And maybe Hop Pop's chocopede pancakes aren't quite dad's, but they were amazing. There's definitely an extra ingredient that I wasn't quite sure I could place. Could it be love?

…no, I could already taste that. It was something else.

And then when he looked up to me, with the most desperate, pathetic expression I'd ever seen, asking me if everything was all right, I realized what it was.

Guilt. The extra ingredient… was guilt. Or maybe tears? They were a bit salty… not in a bad way… but after that, it became kind of hard to finish them.

But I didn't have time to think too much about it… because that's when Marcy arrived…. And in style! She was riding on a giant sparrow named… Joe Sparrow (I guess she wasn't feeling very creative that day). Check this thing out!

[drawing of Joe Sparrow with stick figure of Marcy for scale]

Caught this big boi putting the moves on my girl Bessie, which would raise an alarm, except it looked like she wasn't exactly saying no. So, um… should I ship this. Journal? And… can snails and sparrows make babies? Would you call them snarrows? That actually sounds kind of cute.

Marcy must have spent the entire time since we left studying the box, because the moment she got there, she was instantly able to figure out how to get the gems out of the box. Supposedly how this works is that each of the gems represents a virtue, and each of the temples tests that particular virtue. Like I said, total video-game stuff. I think Ballad of Zorda: The Temporal Mandolin had this exact plot structure. And Zorda: The Breeze Rouser, actually… and Zorda: Empress of Midnight… wow, now that I think about it, that series kinda repeats itself a lot, doesn't it?

We all flew to the Amygdala Forest, which was kind of a bad name since there weren't really any trees. The whole thing is one huge grove of mushrooms and other fungi, especially these things called Brain Mushrooms, which look just as gross as you'd expect.

Eventually, we came to the temple… a suspiciously small temple. A suspiciously stinky temple… yeah, it turns out it was just the outhouse. Well, I guess nature calls for everyone, even adenturers.

The real temple was behind us, and a lot more impressive. It was like something out of South America, y'know, big, vaguely pyramid-like, with carvings all over the place.

According to Marcy, this first temple is the Temple of Wit, which means it's basically going to be puzzle central. Which means that Marcy's probably our go-to here. I mean, I'm not overselling her, but I've seen her solve the Whattheheckohedron in less than a minute. When she goes into that hyperfocus mode of hers, there's nothing she can't do… except notice anything going on around her. Which, granted, can be a big problem.

The entrance chamber was as big and impressive as you'd expect, with these glowing runes that lit up as we entered. Marcy interpreted them for us and told us that there would be three trials, and since there didn't seem to be a way to move forward, the first had to be somewhere in this room. After a search, I found this puzzle-cube-thingy, but the moment I picked it up, I was trapped in this big bubble dealie. I had no idea what to do with it, so I instinctively threw it to Marcy (you'd think it would bounce off the inside of the bubble, but no), and the bubble released me and formed around her. She started messing around with it, and it became pretty obvious why the puzzle suspended you in a bubble; anything you did to the cube also happened to the room itself. Rotate a side, the whole side of the room rotated. Slide a piece up, a section of the floor shoots upward. Pretty cool… unless you happen to be standing in the room while all this is going on. Honestly, if the four of us hadn't gotten used to being in danger constantly, there's a very good chance we'd all be a sticky mess on the temple walls right now.

And I don't think Marcy was even aware of what was happening to us. That's the downside of hyperfocus… you lose sight of what's going on around you. So, when she finally solved the puzzle, she didn't even stop to check on us, she just charged right on ahead to the next room.

Which was apparently the disco? Okay, not really, but there was this whole floor full of tiles lit up in pink, blue and green. It looked a little too simple… until Marcy tossed a couple of pebbles. The first landed on a pink tile, erupted into a huge jet of fire. Okay, so, makes sense, pink is kinda red, and red is a warning color, so just avoid the red ones, right? Nope. Stepping on the blue tiles causes this big spiked column to come down and smash you into jelly. Fun!

According to the clue in the room, the only safe spots were the green tiles… of which there were only two. Two little islands of safety in a big sea of death.

Marcy immediately jumped onto the first one, but nothing happened. It was pretty obvious that the goal here was to have someone on both tiles at the same time – pretty standard video game puzzle, kinda like that room in Zorda: Cordan's Costume. Hop Pop immediately volunteered to be the second, and… I don't know… something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the way he'd been so overly eager to please all day. By this point it was starting to verge on a martyr act, and being ready to throw his life away for me when he needed to be around for his grandkids… well, that just kind of brought back all the negative feelings I'd been trying to suppress all this time. It all came bubbling back up and I said some… well, petty things, and then I shoved my way past him and flung myself onto the other green tile.

And got very close to being mashed and roasted.

But, just barely, I managed to get myself all the way onto the tile and not die, which triggered something and opened the door to the final trial.

Which the builders, in their infinite wisdom put at the top of a staircase that took a full hour to climb! Not that I really noticed, since I spent the entire hour unloading all that pent-up resentment on HP. It was like, once the valve was turned, it couldn't be shut off and I couldn't stop myself. I just wanted to be past all this, but it seemed like no matter what I wanted, my feelings wouldn't go away.

We probably would have just kept going on like that, but at last, we came to the final room, which held a Flipwart board on a raised platform in the middle, with a life-sized version of the board in front.

Flipwart, Marcy explained, is basically Amphibia's answer to chess. I was never really a big chess player – big shock, I know – but I got the basic idea; you have a bunch of different pieces that all move different ways and you have to capture the other player's king except in this case the king is a big fat toad. Back home, Marcy was the president of the chess club, and she'd been able to figure out Flipwart pretty easily, to the point that she'd been able to beat King Andrias, who's supposed to be the best player in the world (but then I'm guessing not a lot of players would even have the courage to try beating the king, no matter how nice he is).

So, it was pretty clear what the challenge was… beat the temple at Flipwart. Or at least we thought it was clear. There was one complication: if Marcy lost, she could never set foot in the temple again, but Marcy was pretty sure she could win.

But no, that would have been too easy, and since the other trials also had a deadly twist, naturally this one did too. Marcy placed her first piece on the board, Polly vanished and reappeared on the giant board as a Castle Guard (I asked Marcy what the pieces were called later). Sprig and HP soon followed, as a Pawn and Cleric respectively. I realized it was just like that scene in the first Cynthia Coven movie where she's forced to play Witch Backgammon with her friends as the pieces. Marcy assured me that she could win without "sacrificing" (I do not like that word) their pieces, but knowing how hyperfocused and overconfident she gets, I was really starting to worry. And it got even worse when she put down her last piece and I didn't wind up on the board… until the temple decided to make me its Heron Knight. What the heck, temple?

Any hopes that I could help Marcy by sabotaging my own side were dashed when I suddenly found my wrists magically cuffed together. The game began, and as if to rub it in further, the temple kept sending my piece after Hop Pop. And what's worse, it was cheating on top of that. Marcy had that wart, but it ignored her attack and kept playing. Over and over, it forced me to attack him, and the worst thing about it was the look of betrayal on his face. Was it the same look he'd seen on mine? The way he accused me of wanting this. I told him, no, that wasn't what I wanted, that hurting him was the last thing I wanted to do, but he replied that I already was, as sure as if I'd been smacking him in the face with a lance. Only now I wasn't just doing it metaphorically. That's when I realized that trying to ignore my feelings and move past everything wasn't helping. I needed to be honest with myself and everyone. I needed to acknowledge that I needed time to work this through. And I didn't know how long it would take.

And I guess that's all that was needed. Not just for me, but for Marcy, who had to finally admit to herself that she'd been so focused on trying to win a game that was completely rigged against her that she didn't realize that we were all in real danger. She tried to throw the game, but the temple wouldn't acknowledge it until she actually ran out onto the big board (which triggered some kind of laser defense system) and destroyed her own wart.

Well, we'd basically blown it, and Marcy was taking it harder than anyone. Losing wasn't something she was used to, especially not being forced to lose on purpose… not to mention she could never get a second try. And it didn't help that the temple made us do a walk of shame out of there… a shame that kept going and led to… you guessed it, the outhouse. This temple was kind of a jerk!

…well, not exactly. See, it turned out that it wasn't just an outhouse (though it was that, too… the stink was a dead giveaway), it was the charger for the stone. The temple hadn't just been testing Marcy's intelligence, but also her humility. She had passed the final trial when she admitted to herself she couldn't win. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some kind of secret test-of-character twist for all of these temples.

Oh, frog, I just realized that one of them is probably designed to test me. I am screwed.

Well… at least we managed to charge the green gem, and as a bonus, it turns out the gem points to the next temple's location, so it won't be as much trouble to find it.

And at least HP and I are beginning to work through our baggage, for real this time. It's probably going to be awkward for a while, but we can work through it. We just need time.

Speaking of time, we're gonna take a bit of a break before the next temple. I want to get us home as soon as possible, sure, but this quest is turning out to be both physically and emotionally exhausting.

But guess what! Marcy's gonna be staying with us in Wartwood! I can't wait to show her everything this town has to offer… which granted isn't much, but I still love it, and I'm sure she'll grow to love it too. And hey, everyone in town loves me now, so I'm sure they'll warm right up to her!

A.N.:

Matt: Good eye, went back and fixed it.

Gloyd: The show was probably lost in the confusion between the heron attack and the tower's destruction, and the magpie beetles probably stole it from the wreckage.

Jose: Again, this whole thing could have been avoided with a little honesty.

Ashley: Anne's problem is that she tried to force herself to move forward without addressing her feelings, instead of being honest with herself and Hop Pop. Pcking up on a theme here?

Next: New Wartwood