Wednesday, May 16, 1990

This morning when I woke up, the weather had taken an abrupt turn for the worse, and I can't help thinking it has something to do with that switch I pressed last night.

Dark grey clouds blanketed the entire sky, and a faint fog was hanging over Yoshi's Island. It was still thin enough that I could see through it, but the same wasn't true for the wall of fog a few miles offshore. It stretched from the waves all the way up to the clouds and seemed to be encircling all of Dinosaur Land. The water itself seemed an angry greyish-blue now, crashing against the cliffs along the shore.

The fire next to me was still burning when I awoke, though, just as fiercely as the night before. I decided to take advantage of the high ground I had to get a look at the surrounding landscape and see if there was anything to be wary of that wasn't on the map of Dinosaur Land in the pamphlet the Princess received. The cloud of fog hanging over the lake in the center of Dinosaur Ladn made it difficult to see to the far side, but I could make out some details of Yoshi's Island and the two regions north of it: Donut Plains and the mountainous Vanilla Dome. Each of them featured a building that looked much more like a traditional Bowser-type castle than the building with the yellow button in it. The ones in Yoshi's Island and Donut Plains were both in the northeast corners of their respective areas, while the one in Vanilla Dome was located on a small island in the center of a river on the mountaintop. There were two other large buildings in Donut Plains – one in the northwest, one in the south – but I couldn't make out what they were.

After looking around for a few minutes, I decided there was nothing more I could do up here, and that it was time to head back down the mountain and see what lay down the path to the east of Yoshi's house.

If I passed through another time anomaly on the way back down the mountain, I couldn't tell because of the overcast sky. Once I reached the base of the mountain, I headed back towards the house. The fog clung to the grasslands, moistening all the blades of grass bordering the trail. I passed the sad ruins of the abandoned house and continued east along the edge of the forest. But about half an hour later, the path instead curved north into a small break in the trees. Which, as much as I didn't want to enter the woods, would take me in the direction of the castle I'd seen from the top of Kappa Mountain. And it looked like the forest stretched all the way to the island's eastern shore, so if I wanted to go north, sooner or later I'd have to venture into the woods. I figured it was better to, at the very least, be following a path than wandering aimlessly through the wilderness.

So down the path I went.

Wisps of fog wove their way through the trees as I continued, and even though the sun wasn't shining outside the forest, the temperature still dropped several degrees once I entered the woodland. Aside from the drifting fog, everything was still.

But not silent.

For the first several minutes after I entered the woods, I occasionally heard a faint…voice, though I would hardly call it a voice, somewhere not far away. It was like a chittering, ululating wail, echoing through the trees. My pace and my heartbeat both quickened. Usually I enjoyed spending time in the woods, surrounded by nature, but I just knew that this forest wasn't a place where I wanted to linger any longer than I absolutely had to. Let alone still be inside it when the sun went down tonight.

But before long, I stopped hearing that unnerving sound and instead ran into something more familiar: Koopa Troopas. And lots of them, roaming through the forest. Aside from them, there were also a couple more football-attired Koopas waiting for me, as well as a handful of giant moles that almost gave me heart attacks when they leapt out of the ground towards me.

Oh, and I stumbled across a couple more block-related oddities too. First, there were several outlines of blocks, is the only way I can really describe them, throughout the level – squares of air outlined in yellow dashed lines, like there should've been blocks there but weren't. And second, there was one "?" block towards the start of the level that I hit from beneath, expecting it to give me something like a coin or an item. And instead a rotten egg burst from it. It was giant and speckled with green dots. I dodged it, not sure if I should try to catch it or not, but in hindsight I'm glad I didn't. It splatted to the ground and exploded in a spray of eggshell fragments and thick, murky, yellow-grey yolk. The liquid steamed as it hit the ground and dissolved several blades of grass it splashed on. I took a step back, startled. An egg full of toxic sludge? That was an unexpected – and cheap – trick, even by Bowser's standards.

But without much more trouble, I reached the pair of posts marking the end of that level. And once I did, the path continued through the forest ahead of me. Fortunately, the forest didn't continue much farther. Before long, it thinned out and then ended completely. But at the exit to the forest, bordering the path, were a pair of mossy stone columns. Each was about three feet high, and on top of it was a small sculpture of some…thing. It looked like a cloud with a single bulbous eye in its front and several tentacle-like tendrils extending from it. A few words were written on the side of each column, but I couldn't decipher them any more than I could the ones back at the building on Kappa Mountain:

ZIHLFA RLP PMA MJ XLRJCWD

As I studied the statues, I kept coming back to that one eye they each had. There was something entrancing about it, like everything else was slowly fading away and that was all I could focus on.

But then that shrieking cry returned and snapped me out of my daze. I shot a glance behind me. I couldn't see anything through the trees and fog, but the noise was much closer than it had been before. I rushed forward, out of the trees.

The path continued north, into a collection of tall, thin hills hugging the island's eastern shore. But by that time, even through the cloudy sky, I could tell it was starting to get dark out. So I stopped for the night at the base of the hills and set up camp a short distance off the path, among a few bushes in the lower hills. I felt marginally safer now that I was out of the forest, but with no one else to keep watch overnight, and with the hairs on my arms still standing on end from that eerie howling, I wanted as much shelter as I could get for the night.