At this time of night, the water did resemble crude oil. Could barely see my hand in front of my face. If any evil entity or cursed object lurked at the bottom, I had no way of telling.

I struggled to escape, but the dark mummy thing was too strong. It kept dragging me deeper.

I couldn't even tell which way was up anymore. Below me, eerie light shone from a cavernous mouth. Above: Another glowing cavern mouth. Dark figures floated in the murky haze.

I'd swallowed a lot of water. It got into my lungs. I still held a little air, but with the inhaled water, it just burned.

Although I could see very little in the dark, I could make out the shape of the mummy's armor, sword sheath, and the leering skull with rotten flesh still clinging to it.

Other horrible figures floated nearby. With the limited amount of light, I couldn't differentiate between these creatures and my friends, they all looked the same, and I was drowning. The cavern mouths provided only enough illumination for that, nothing more.

Grimy skeletal hands pulled me further into the depths...descending...into the glowing mouth.

I passed through, and blackness enveloped me.

After what seemed like an eternity, I felt someone pushing down on my chest, lips pressed to mine, and air went in.

My eyes popped open. A beautiful brown face staring at me in worriment. Never did that lush brown curly hair look so gorgeous to me.

Amo knelt at my other side...seemingly a little envious of Diana's lips (imagine CPR with a bird beak!)

I coughed, sputtered, turned to my side and vomited water.

I lay on dusty cracked soil. Nothing but wasteland for miles. Flakes of ash tumbled from the sky like snowflakes. Lightning flickered, illuminating a range of mountains. Thunder rumbled, but no rain. The place smelled like gunpowder and mildew.

I groaned and sat up. Embarrassing to be in my underwear like this, with everyone staring at me. "Where...are we?"

"Good question." Diana glanced up at Hank, currently dumping sludgy water out of his boots. "He pointed me toward a glowing thing, but I guess it was the wrong one."

Amo shook water off her feathers like a dog.

Lightning again flashed over mountain ranges in the distance. Other than the mountains, nothing much to look at but a cracked wasteland for miles in every direction. No sign of plant life, not a cactus or a bit of sagebrush to be had.

"Are we...dead?"

"It definitely looks like hell to me!" Somehow Eric had made it too. "Hank was using me as an anchor the whole time, on account of my chain mail. Damn near drowned myself when I stepped off the shallows and found the lake had no bottom." He shook his head. "I knew that Cordero guy was just another DM in disguise!"

"Can we...get back?"

He pointed to a hole in the ground. It reminded me strangely of an Eskimo's ice fishing hole, without the ice or igloo. "If you wanna try, be my guest."

A moment after he said this, a zombie hand reached out of the water. I shuddered.

Unable to return the way we came, we took inventory of our supplies:

Though worried about water damage, I still possessed the crossbow and darts.

Hank carried his magic knife, and the air bladders.

Diana had her magic staff and Cordero's sash around her waist.

Even Eric bore the small shield.

Amo...again, I wondered if water would ruin the effectiveness of her bow and bow string...Unsure of what use her pendant served either.

I rose to my feet. "Any idea where we need to go?"

Eric crossed his arms. "You mean, to get out of here, or to complete woolly Dungeon Master's quest? I don't have an answer for either."

A sudden harsh wind kicked up loose dirt from this wasteland, caking our bodies with ash, pelting us with dirt and grit.

"And just when I thought I'd cleaned all the filth from my body," Diana complained.

Amo shook her feathers, shaking ashen slurry every which way.

"Could you watch it when you're doing that?" Eric wiped soot off his clothes and face. "There's other people standing next to you, you know."

"Sorry, I..." Her pendant slowly glowed green. She held it up. "Wow, it's never done that before!"

I stared. "That's...generally a good and bad sign. I've seen other magical items that warn us when—"

A cloud of bat creatures swooped down from the air. Red-black, with features like a sting ray, grasping out with spider legs.

Woefully unprepared for such an onslaught. We'd left our best magical weapons on the shore.

Amo's pendant, as I understood things like this to be, would be limited in its function during battle, perhaps serving only to indicate the presence of evil or danger around us, and maybe protect the wearer.

We had been given no explanation about Diana's sash, either.

Eric's shield, also not entirely useful. It seemed dependent on...belief...in some form, and right now that belief seemed...minimal. He blocked the stingray-bat things with just the non-magical portion. "Damn, I wish I had brought my other shield! This is just a piece of junk!"

I glanced around the wasteland for some hero or magical entity that could rush in and save us, but, well...we were the heroes. I thought for certain we were dead meat.

I loaded and fired my darts at a couple of the flying stingray-spider things. My first shot missed, but I managed to strike one with my second. How? I don't know, maybe dumb luck, closeness of the bat-stingray, shooting games at a video arcade long ago, or a little archery practice with Hank...

Upon impact with the creature, the dart exploded, bringing down half a dozen stingray-bats surrounding it.

Eric whistled. "Sweet! Look at Green Arrow over here!" His shield glowed, its borders extending somewhat.

Amo had better aim than I, but...she just used regular arrows, and bat things bit and clawed at her face, so she had to fight them out of her way before she could get a bead on any of them. She did nail a couple, though.

Hank's knife proved surprisingly effective. Although not a very large blade, in close combat, the dagger sliced through the enemy like butter. Where I felled six, he felled a dozen.

Diana had been the most prepared out of all of us. She drew her magic baton, twirling it like a fan. A good score of the monsters dropped on the cracked ground.

We still had like a hundred attacking us. Eric held up his little shield, blocking what he could. "That devious sheep! I bet he just doesn't like humans! He was just sending us out here to die!"

"C'mon, guys!" Diana shouted. "We've fought worse stuff than this before! We can do this!"

Surprisingly, that word of encouragement actually helped. The radius of energy from Eric's shield expanded.

...Well, to buckler size.

The sash Diana wore...it glowed when the winged creatures came near. I thought for a moment it merely detected things like Amo's pendant, but then, as some of them flew within her arm's length, we got...sort of an X-ray view of the creatures.

The flying things...had...tabloid articles inside their bodies. Oddly specific things about us, and what we did in private. A few of them appeared to be about Amo and Cordero and the others...couldn't read much, due to them moving around so much, and us being busy, but the stuff I glimpsed made me mad.

"Diana! That sash! Something's wrong with it!"

"I know!" she grunted as she smacked one of the creatures aside. "Either that, or there's something wrong with these things!"

Hank hacked another flying creature to pieces. "So far it's not harming anything." He frowned when he caught a headline. "Physically, at least. Just ignore it and fight!"

"Solid plan!" I loaded my crossbow, firing more shots.

Hank sliced and diced. Diana twirled her javelin, ninja style. I probably would have found that...distracting, had I not been facing death at the time.

Whenever the creatures died, the...papers, or whatever it was they contained crumbled into dust so you couldn't read them. Having lived in a magical world so long, nothing could truly surprise me, I just accepted it as...one of those things. Guess we didn't really miss...what they said - they only served to make us angry and suspicious of each other.

It must have taken a good ten minutes or so to hack through them all, and it left us with cuts, bites and scratches. Nothing too deep or serious, but they would become a problem if we didn't get treated soon.

I brought out my hat, waving my fingers over its glowing interior.

"Presto," Diana blurted as I opened my mouth to conjure. "After all the time we've been together, it's always been you saying the magic words."

"We can't use each other's tools. We've tried."

"Mostly they didn't work because we're not practiced with them. You, for example, suck at archery and acrobatics. But the owls could use Hank's bow. Your hat is different. I don't know why we can't use it, but maybe we can collaborate on the magic words, so you don't goof up. I read that Aerosmith hired other people to write their song lyrics."

I stared. "Wait, how did you know about Aerosmith?"

"Magazine in a dentist's office." Diana shrugged and gave me a smile.

"Sounds like you got a weird dentist."

"I think a patient left it. Anyway, let's try it." She paused a moment in thought, cleared her throat, and gave this suggestion:

"We got attacked, with little protection

We need first aid to prevent infection

Give bandages to stop our bleeding, please

First aid supplies we are needing."

"Damn, that's good." I waved my fingers, repeating the poem, glancing at her to coach me when I forgot the wording for a line.

At first, nothing happened. I thought for certain I'd broken some unwritten rule and would receive zilch, but then out falls this industrial strength metal first aid kit with bandages, alcohol, plus a bunch of stuff we didn't exactly need, like calamine lotion, bug spray, Ipekak syrup, Tylenol and Milk of Magnesia.

Eric patched himself up with Band-Aids, Neosporin and gauze. "We should have done this a long time ago."

"I'm shocked it even worked! DM made it sound like we were specialists."

He scoffed. "Specialization is for insects."

I gaped at him. "Did you just quote Robert Heinlein?"

"Is that who said it? That quote has been rolling around in my brain for days, and I couldn't for the life of me place where I'd heard it."

"I never pictured you a science fiction reader."

Eric rolled his eyes. "I'm not. Had a bored moment in detention."

I made an `exploding' gesture next to my head. "You?...In detention?"

Diana smirked. "Probably for running his mouth."

"Actually, I got in a fight. It's not easy being the rich kid in a public school. It's partly why they put me in Private."

I made an even bigger `mind blown' gesture.

"Anyway, it makes sense we shouldn't specialize on just one weapon. What if one of us dies?"

We finished treating our wounds.

"You think we'll find our way out of here?" Amo asked.

I sighed. "Maybe. I mean, I'm pretty sure we'll find a way back to your home...sometime."

"I hope we get back soon. The celebration of tents just began yesterday. We were talking about going out and getting our feast tent set up."

All of a sudden, a glowing white goose...appeared before us. I'd almost say it teleported, but no, I noticed a slight whipping of its wings before it landed on the barren soil. The bird seemed to possess the incredible speed of the Flash comic book character.

I cautiously crept closer, waving in a friendly manner. "Hello there!"

I glanced at Amo's necklace. The brilliant glow caused me to jump and make a hasty retreat from the bird.

The goose looked me in the eyes, and seemed to speak directly into my mind. `Relax. I mean you no harm.'

"You'll have to excuse me. That necklace only glows when we're close to something dangerous."

`That is true. But it also glows in the presence of the one who fashioned it, the most dangerous creature of all...Do you trust me?'

I stammered. "Uh..."

"Is that thing talking to you?" Eric asked me.

"Yeah! Can't you hear it?"

He shook his head.

"Well I can hear it," Diana said.

Hank admitted he could hear it as well.

"Why wouldn't he talk?" Amo asked. "It is the Great Goose."

"More like the great bull. It's just a stupid bird."

`Eric cannot hear my voice. He lacks belief and trust.'

Hank stepped forward. "Excuse me...Great Goose...We...came here to destroy something of great evil. Do you know anything about that?"

Eric crossed his arms. "How do we know that isn't the great evil?"

The goose squawked and ruffled its feathers. `You are not yet fully prepared. Retrieve my armor from the clock tower to the west of here and await my instructions.'

"Uh...Mister Goose?" I raised my hand like I were in class. I know, I'm a dork, but sometimes magical creatures attack you for speaking out of turn. "We...don't have a compass."

`Amo has been carrying my compass this whole time. Turn it over and fold down the wings.'

The female owl frowned at the backside of her lion pendant, which also bore the likeness of a bird with its wings outstretched. It reminded me of the image from a quarter. "I always knew it wiggled, but I was afraid of breaking it."

She pushed the wings down, and the body clicked open, revealing a compass.

Looking satisfied, the Great Goose turned its back to us.

"Wait!" I cried. "Could you stay and help us out?"

`Follow my instructions, and you shall have all the help you need at the proper time.'

With that, the goose flapped its wings faster than a hummingbird and zoomed across the wasteland so quickly that it left a trail of flames and vanished like the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

Eric stared as the flames died out. "You think it was flying eighty five miles an hour?"