Age of Ruin — Sunlight Zone
Sunlight Zone — A Transaction
At Undine’s reception, the Hero presses the question left hanging in the duckmarine: is Kathool here? Song restricts information but insists its sleeping influence is repelled by the base’s defenses. Mostyma’s patience is thinner; he suggests removing their present obstacle. The Hero intervenes before that threat becomes an answer.
Ganx calls Kathool a former Chaos Beast whose ties to Chaos have been cut, while warning that proximity alone can harm the mind. Song begins to question how she knows this. Tara brings the discussion back to Aria and the other Champions: her sister sent them here, and she wants to believe Victoria meant to heal them.
Recognizing the Queen’s sister changes Song’s tone. She describes a Crown-funded refuge where experts advance medicine and defenses against Evil, then admits that its money and equipment cannot make it completely safe. The Hero offers help. Song refuses the language of favors: this is a transaction, with obedience to her instructions exchanged for access to the Champions below.
Ganx declines the orientation. Head Researcher Dr. Noelle has personally summoned her to the Medical Wing, and Song will have Indradeep check her credentials and escort her. Ganx promises useful information if the others keep quiet, then briefly drops the teasing: someone they may know is unwell, and she wants to exchange medical advice. Her departure leaves the missing elves and singing rocks for the garden tour.
Song calls Sunlight a newly built upper floor for invited experts, families and supplies. Natural light reaches it, and artificial gardens offer food, fresh air and a place to recover from confinement. Mi says Song fought to have them built; Aria strained herself after treatment to strengthen their plants. The care is real to the people describing it, even as the base’s protection is already under question.
Sunlight Zone — The Work of Staying Safe
Detergent Shortage begins the ten main tasks after Faces in the Foam. Eight Stale Seawater are cleared while the visitors are fitted for uniforms, safety equipment and card keys. Song recognizes the same Blighted Water found at Ashray, slipping through cracks despite the engineers. She suspects hostility to land dwellers entering their territory, noting that the attacks preceded the creatures’ green discoloration.
Ghost in the Machine takes eight Jelly Bells from Spectral Jellyfish that interfere with the technology. Song initially calls the screens’ strange messages ghost-induced hallucinations. On completion, she explains that the displays monitor psychic protection rather than the barrier hiding their location. She gives sixty to one hundred percent as a safe working range, while the base remains under constant threat from Kathool.
The words “Help Me” persist after the ghosts are cleared. Efficient Division moves the shaken Tara to the lounge, mops six more Water Elementals and introduces Indradeep and Iseul. Song wants them making a calming treat and explaining the base, rather than fighting intruders on their breaks. Mostyma meanwhile starts pulling a screen from the wall.
Indradeep’s field is physiatry: treating and rehabilitating injuries. With only a few years of experience, he came chiefly to help a severely injured partner. He says the Twilight Zone studies conditions beyond current medicine and magic; ordinary patients are excluded for security, but the Champions are an exception. Even Song’s days of work could not completely heal the Nature Champion.
His interest in the Hero’s experience of Chaos sits alongside a question about redemption. He says Swordhaven would let someone so useful switch allegiance for a fee, while ordinary Imperial minions must undertake dangerous work at Undine to earn amnesty. That is his account of unequal terms, not an allegiance change the Hero makes here.
Iseul consults on combat and weapons, with project details kept confidential from Evil. The Mana Crisis convinced many recruits that they must become strong enough to protect their loved ones. That purpose extends into an absolute assurance: with Good intentions, everything one does will be good. The consultant separates Medical and Defense into lower wings, identifies Mostyma’s armband with Medical, and notes that Song works across both divisions.
Tech Illiterate clears six more jellyfish and examines three screens while Mostyma imposes improvements on the architecture. Song admits he finds defects the staff needed months to see, but digital security manuals require the Head Researcher’s permission. Plugging Leaks clears six Stinging Tentacles and six Grainy Water as he seals the remaining openings. His commanding manner irritates her, yet the work makes the gardens reachable.
Sunlight Zone — Aquella’s Other Entry
Shared History sends the Hero along both garden paths and to another page near the dark rocks. Song denies that it was there when the obelisks were examined. The new writing recalls Aquella’s return from Bloodtusk Ravine, where meeting the Hero and Samba earned a scolding from elders afraid of drawing surface attention.
Aquella resents their isolation. The elders learned of Alteon’s death months late and, she suspects, missed the Rebellion until it was over. Samba’s delight in Bloodtusk’s dances made Aquella wish she could share stories of her own home: an ocean both tranquil and destructive, with ancestral songs carried in the currents and in their souls.
Her account connects those songs to stone. Ancient magic in her birthplace preserves voices from when Lady Neso turned to Water Elves to soothe her rage. The lullabies calm the elders, and Aquella begins to feel guilty for resenting people who worried about her and allowed the journey. But a comfort powerful enough to quell an Avatar also troubles her: perhaps it makes them complacent and prevents them from growing.
She imagines singing at the Solar Festival and parting the sea as the Oracle predicts she will as Champion of Water. That awakening remains a wish. What she actually remembers with joy is dancing with Samba and the Hero. She plans to share the dances with the Oracle and the children who could not travel, bringing part of the festival home where a water-balloon contest would be redundant.
The page turns the rocks’ lullaby into a connection with a hidden people, while leaving its arrival unexplained. It also places Aquella’s earlier impatience beside the fear in the trapped elves’ account. Neither the new entry nor its resemblance to the singing stones yet identifies the intruders or establishes where the captives can be reached.
Sunlight Zone — Sanity Check
In the gardens, Mi greets the Hero warmly; Fa asks whether they have orphaned anyone else since Astravia. Tara offers sympathy for starting again far from home, but Mostyma’s question about that past meets resistance. Fa has just finished work and wants sleep rather than interrogation, though Mi knows her habit of gaming through the night.
Their work gives Undine a personal cost. Fa helped build Sunlight and swims outside to maintain it so Song need not work without rest. She recalls Re asking her to find a new sky, and children whose hugs remind her of Re. Mi works with mental health through music rather than as a doctor, combining songs with conversation to ease confinement. They remember people who survived Astravia and the Mana Crisis only to die in the base’s previous incidents.
Mi hears singing from rock clusters projecting through every floor. Fa says the builders could not build over them. The Hero recalls the drowsiness of a lullaby and names the page’s author as Aquella. Mostyma joins the recent page to the recurring stones and suggests the elves are here. Song rejects an accusation of captivity, but admits that only the Head Researcher may enter the lowest observation floor. Fa warns her against trusting someone merely because they were kind.
Before a call can settle the dispute, an alarm cuts through the gardens. Fa reports Sparagmos at forty percent and falling. The public-address system directs personnel to panic rooms and warns them not to trust their eyes or ears. Song explains that psychic protection is failing: hallucinations intensify while the sea life frenzies, and a reboot would leave everyone exposed for a time.
Mi and Fa intend to help people reach safety rather than hide immediately. Mi remembers the deaths the week before. The Hero promises to accompany them with Tara, while Mostyma remains confident in his nearly perfect repairs and blames any deaths on the staff’s intelligence. Song has no time for his arrogance; she sends the Hero after her family with a threat for so much as a bruise.
Her account of Sparagmos joins old and new systems: a pre-existing defense enhanced with Skyguard and Astravian science to guard the mind. The magical barrier and cloaking technology hide the base itself. Those protections serve different purposes, and this emergency shows why stronger walls alone cannot settle the psychic threat.
Sunlight Zone — Shallow Nightmares
Song first warns against swinging blindly at apparent monsters: some might be people distorted by hallucination. Reports from the two paths instead suggest intruding creatures seen through memories of old nightmares. Flat Scares dispels ten Astravian Illusions and checks on Fa, whose account distinguishes Song’s guilt and fear of failing her family from the soldiers’ images themselves.
Fishy Bully targets ten Infernal Illusions and rescues visitors unfamiliar with the emergency drills. The captured native task requires five Visitor Rescued, while the cached account lists three. These are not true Infernals: Song identifies them as images of the Mockeries used to bully Tara. Their missing eyes and blunt use of painful memories make her doubt the subtlety she expected from Kathool.
Faint Howls brings the Hero to Mi and dispels ten Seraphic Illusions dressed like Song’s mother. She wonders whose memories they are drawn from and notices Mostyma’s agitation. His work shows familiarity with wiring and basic coding, making her speculate that a teacher—and perhaps the Seraphic Paladins—belongs somewhere in his past. The passage raises that connection without answering it.
The repairs reduce intrusions enough to ease Sparagmos’s strain and make the hallucinations recede. That reveals a larger danger: an altered Elemental forcing its way toward the Twilight Zone. Down the Digestive Tract defeats Marine Snow before it reaches the Champions. Song reports protection restored to sixty percent, no breached panic rooms and zero casualties in this incident, a contrast with the earlier losses rather than a claim that the base is now permanently safe.
The Hero emerges physically unhurt but mentally strained. Tara boasts that these waking nightmares were less effective than Infamy’s bullying, says she is no longer a Princess because the title causes trouble, and tries to keep working. Soon she is asleep against Fa’s back. Fa insists that if there is no time to rest, they must make it; the habit reminds her of Regulus, the real Re.
Song’s responsibility has become inseparable from her family. She acknowledges what she did in Astravia and doubts it can be forgiven, while insisting that Fa and Mi had little part in it. Fa remembers making her sleep after a nineteen-hour surgery and taking on heavy work to spare her. Mi, now comfortable performing for the researchers, invites everyone to the lounge and thanks the Hero for how much their life has changed.
Sunlight Zone — The Head Researcher
A screen brings the call Song was expecting. She introduces Adreanna Noelle, Doctor and Court Mage of Swordhaven, appointed by Victoria as Undine’s Head Researcher. Song apologizes for breaking protocol by admitting the visitors. Noelle makes it their secret and asks how an act meant and done well could be wrong, then praises Song as the force holding the base together.
Mostyma is in the cabins, using the opened communications channels. Noelle observes that his papers are flawless but his name is absent from Victoria’s invitation list. She makes an exception for the supposed medical specialist’s forging and metalwork. His fixes and the Hero’s fighting eased the strain enough that Sparagmos did not need the dangerous reboot Song had feared.
He asks about the screens calling for help, begging for release and demanding an end to their misery. One display addresses Victoria and Tara by name. Noelle calls the messages remnants of Kathool’s periodically rising influence and insists they are not real. The warning remains unresolved: the display’s words and her explanation are both present, but no speaker behind the plea is identified.
Noelle explains Song’s bargain with Greenguard: Astravian technology in return for amnesty for her family and other refugees. Asked how much Victoria knows, Song says all of it, including what she has done. Noelle credits that technology with making Undine sustainable and livable, and delights in the duckmarines. Her account connects the refuge’s genuine improvements to the Crown’s deliberate acceptance of its staff’s pasts.
Access to the Champions is promised again, followed by a deeper meeting with Noelle and a look at Kathool. She also denies seeing trapped Water Elves. The Hero notes that this answers a conversation she has apparently been hearing. Travel remains suspended until a post-breach roll call confirms everyone’s identity and health. For now, Noelle recommends rest and warm oat milk, and credits the Nature Champion with growing crops between treatments.
Song wants to reach the Champions after restrictions lift, but warns that the safe intervals between incidents are shrinking. The native account sends the Hero to find Mi in Twilight while she checks how Sparagmos is holding up. It leaves the next descent pending, with her duty to protect her family pulling against the need to examine what sustains that protection.
Sunlight Zone — The Name Recalled
In Swordhaven, Marigold pleads for an immediate audience with Victoria. Richard says the Queen is occupied with diplomats from the Sandsea, Yokai and Skye, offering only to try for a private meeting the next day. He reminds Lady Reignolds that her father’s sins still make the nobles and servants hostile to her name.
Celestia and Warlic find her after Richard departs. Their question concerns grain from her farms reaching Ashray: is the village hungry, and does it need more aid? Her alarm exceeds that question. She begs for their help, fearing danger to Greenguard and wanting to know why the Queen recalled a banished woman.
Marigold’s father served the tyrant Dethrix Drakath the First as a Court Mage. She names his returned colleague as Magus Adreanna Noelle, one of six Court Mages who facilitated the Champion of Chaos’s birth. This is Marigold’s warning about the researcher the Hero has just met, not a newly observed account of that birth.
The closing images turn from vast, shadowed organic forms to Noelle’s pale face. Her words are brief: closer and closer, and forgiveness will lead her home. The promised meeting now carries a history the visitors below have not heard, and a private purpose that her welcome did not explain.
The repeatable Suckers for Supper returns to the cost of keeping Undine alive. Song refuses rest, names the evolved Seafoam creature Marine Snow and requests one Marine Sample, ten Infernal Samples and ten Seraphic Samples. Her examination finds a higher concentration of dissolved organic matter matching the Kathool sample the staff harvested. She says Dr. Noelle pushed for that operation and many lives were lost, even though the volunteers hoped to protect Lore from another Mana Crisis. The reward is a variable stack of Sun Zone Chits; her determination is to prevent more losses.