What's So Great About Being A Trainer Anyways?

Chapter 16 - Why Does Everything Have To Be A Puzzle?

Tottering off the boat, he reached dry land. "Good riddance," he appeared to say under his breath, regaining his land legs. "What are all of you doing?! We have work to do!!!" A little bit frightened by his aggressiveness, we all stopped and headed towards the direction of the temple.

It was quite a bit of walking to get there, but those of us trainers could handle the workout. A few of the weaker ones of us hopped on the equipment transport trucks and got there before us, but they had to help set up camp, which I didn't particularly feel like doing. When we finally arrived at camp it was a little past noon and base camp was almost completely set up.

We had really taken over the temple it seemed. It was like a small city of tents. There were many a makeshift building as well, mainly constructed with poles, tarps, and ropes to keep them suspended upright. Some people were staring at screens and graphs, apparently keeping watch over the situation and area to keep us safe. Some were huddled under one of the tarps, and some were coming out from under said tarp with paper bags in hand.

"Looks like it's time for lunch! I can't wait to see what they're giving us!"

Flora and I shoved our ways through the crowd and managed to get a hold of one of the bagged meals. We sat down in a spot under a tree that we cleared away with our feet and opened up our bags.

"Just sandwiches and fruit?!" I cried. "Why must we go from excellent meals to this?!" I accepted my food with a little bit of sadness.

"They probably can't make the fancy stuff with the equipment that they brought; quit complaining. Want me to heat it up with a fire attack or something?"

I scolded her with my glare and a headshake. "You didn't learn from last time that you tried forcefully heating up a cold environment did you? And we're even under a snow covered tree right now!"

She laughed awkwardly. "Oh yeah... Oops."

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"Alright team," said Daron. "I have officially been granted access to the temple. Not even the guardian of the temple could give me any more detailed knowledge than she thinks that it extends several floors downwards, which we were already able to figure out thanks to seismic probing and such."

It looked like a majority of the group that came with us was actually staying at base camp, keeping watch over the ever present floor of data from all of their antennas and strange machines. There were several people I didn't know on the expedition team, but there was also Brandon and the two bickering knuckleheads.

"Our scans predict five floors, so our goal today is to make it past the first one, if there are traps, puzzles or the like. Else we'll just head straight to the bottom. Everyone ready?!"

There were several excited cheers from the more adventurous of us, then we were on our way in. The temple itself was made of dark gray stone, and had several columns at the entrance. We cautiously took our first steps inside, which supposedly no one had been allowed to do in centuries. Inside was the same dark gray stone, on the walls, ceiling, floor, everywhere. Parts of the structure were failing the test of time and were falling apart, but it appeared to be quite structurally sound still.

In the center of the floor there was a hexagon shape on the ground with crystals to five sides. On the sixth side was a stone tablet. Daron gave the order for the minions to scatter and investigate the floor, leaving the rest of us to check out the suspicious middle.

"It appears to be in Braille," said Daron, motioning towards a message on the tablet. "Can you read it for me Elron?"

"Yeah, one sec." I pulled off my gloves, exposing them to the freezing air, and thumbed through my notebook. I wanted to get this done as fast as possible, as to get my hands warm again, but I struggled with the interpretation. Instead of bumps on it, there were indentations, which I took as the placeholder for the bumps. Apparently I was wrong. "I'm just getting garbage. There must some trick to reading this."