Sunday, May 20, 1990

I spent last night a short distance away from the edge of the woods, remembering the eerie sounds I'd heard in the trees back on Yoshi's Island. And even though I hadn't been in this particular forest yet, I wasn't getting my hopes up that this one would be any more welcoming than the last.

So this morning, I got going for the day and headed into the woods. Fortunately, this forest wasn't as deep or dense as the one on Yoshi's Island, and it wasn't long before I came to the end of the path.

At the doors of another structure like the one atop Kappa Mountain.

In fact, its shape was exactly the same, only the bricks comprising its exterior were green instead of yellow. And just like last time, there was no door into the structure at first, but after circling it and returning to the front, a door had materialized there. Carved into it was another inscription, this one no clearer than the last:

ZYI KEKVR WJOKGL, IKIHEAZ RW XUK KVIRY, ZR QRSFVC BL KLI LUJLMF, ZYI FRTVZSYKEX HVTFWEHXJ ALB XFWI HV KS HRLVRH GNVMV UUDIPNTU EKNOEWX GNV HEEQEIWF LISQ OKPSRQ. XVEH GNVMV AGDIW, JUIXLL UEI, EAJ IIQRSSIV. NTU GSAYZHIE EFYV PULVWR UW EGGOFR ZRXP GEEKWYPYE, WSV VL PSY UGMI VRGTLIQ ZYMW FGTVIQ VCEGR, ZYI JVXJX PBIB LEF GCVINJP JEYRVR.

I opened the door into the building, and two rows of green torches flared to life down the hall inside. But aside from the color of the flames, it looked the same as the interior of the building on Yoshi's Island. And as expected, eventually I started to see words appearing on the walls. But this time, each individual stone had three words written on it: two regular ones, and between them, a single letter with a dot after it.

And that was when I realized they were names.

I recalled my earlier thought about the first building: Either way, this place was starting to feel more like a tomb than a castle.

Maybe that's because it was. A mass grave.

Most of the names I scanned over as I walked were completely unfamiliar, but one of them made me pause.

"THERAPODA Y. MUNCHAKOOPAS."

"Munchakoopas"? Koopa…that couldn't just be a coincidence. Bowser's last name was Koopa, so was this a giant crypt for a bunch of deceased Koopas? Had more Koopas been interred in the building on Yoshi's Island? And if so, why? How long had Bowser been here, and what had he been doing, that hundreds of Koopas had been buried in these buildings?

Which made me question again whether pressing the switch on Kappa Mountain had been a good decision or not, yet still not reach a definitive conclusion about it.

And again, like last time, at the end of the hall, I reached a circular chamber with a switch in it. This one was colored green. Given the thoughts I'd just been having about the previous switch, I was hesitant to jump on this one. But after looking around the chamber for another way out and not finding one, I sucked it up and accepted that the only way out now was to jump on the button. After I did, just like before, a doorway opened in the far wall, leading back outside. I passed through the exit, back into the woods.

Behind me, the building sank into the ground, leaving a huge green bonfire blazing. And then a deep boom rang out to the east, the exact same sound I'd heard after leaving the first building back in Yoshi's Island. And even though I was in the middle of the woods, I didn't need to see the ocean to know that a green light had briefly flared underwater to the east, just like the yellow glow from last time.

Meanwhile, no new path appeared leading away from the building; instead, the same path I'd walked down to reach the building re-illuminated. So did this just lead right back to the underground level? If so, where the heck was I supposed to go from there, since the fake "exit" had only led me back to the teleport-key-thing that led me to the palace?

As it turned out, the path led back to the approximate location of the underground area, then cut a right-angle turn to the north. So I was now heading in the same direction I'd originally thought I was supposed to be going.

As I walked, the weather took a gradual turn for the worse. The clouds darkened. Thunder started to rumble, accompanied by occasional flashes of lightning. And as one of the lightning bolts lit the clouds, it partially illuminated something…else, too. Like several gigantic leaves of seaweed waving through the clouds, or humongous spider legs, but not quite moving like either. But when a residual flash came a few seconds later, the monstrous, undulating shapes were gone.

If they'd been real, and not just a hallucination of my frenzied brain, they had to have been hundreds of feet tall. Maybe even more.

A strangely heated wind blew off the water, but the grass, wet and matted down, was unmoved by it. The path, also damp, cut through the grass and curved around the northwest shore of the lake. Speaking of the lake, the fog over it was seeming disturbed, billowing up in strange patterns like there were suddenly updrafts blowing off the water's surface. I wondered if that had anything to do with the warm air coming in off the ocean.

But my thoughts soon switched gears, because as I headed further down the path, I could tell exactly where it was headed: the mansion in the middle of the plains. Tendrils of mist seemed to swirl around it, but I could still make it out more clearly than before. It was definitely a mansion, and at one point it might have been ornate and impressive. Now its wooden walls were weathered and rotten-looking, its windows shattered, and its front door hanging loose off its hinges. A black, wrought-iron fence stood several yards out from the structure. Overgrown, unkempt hedges grew against the manor's walls, and green and brown vines trailed over its walls. A tower in the mansion's southeast corner had caved in, leaving a gaping, jagged hole in its faded purple roof, with the top of the tower just barely sticking out.

I walked down the slick, moss-covered flagstones that formed the end of the path and led to the front door. The fenceposts were topped with small metal gargoyles, staring at me with dozens of vacant eyes. And as I approached the front door, I realized that I couldn't see anything inside it, even with the door partly open. It was completely dark, like something about the house was absorbing any light coming in from the outside.

But since the path led right to the front door, I figured I'd have to enter it to proceed.

So I took a deep breath, braced myself, and strode across the threshold.