An excavation of the Fairy Woods, Trip One.

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Trip Log. Day 1, Entry 1.
After 3 days of travel, I have finally arrived at the entrance to the woods. I spent 30 ruppies in the nearby village of Sarasalla, though it seems to be a crude map at absolute best, and the magic is so thick in the air that it is practically sickening. The trees are so over grown that I can hardly see the light of day, even though it is roughly noon. At least the initial clearing looks to be about right in the map I found. I had chosen this place to go on a research expedition from a long standing rumor that there was a temple, long since abandoned, from the time of Queen Ambi where people would come to worship nature until some catastrophic disaster occurred and the whole area was condemned as cursed. If such a place actually exists, and it hasn't been reduced to rubble by the forces of nature, then it would be a prime candidate for researching my thesis on the reason that ancient places of worship have an absurd number of traps.

With the first entry in her travel journal written, and the ink dried, Naomi pulled out the crude map she had bought of the area. Of course, it was hardly big enough to cover the entire woods, but seemed to go a mile in down 3 trails, all of which led to various different clearings. Of course, now that she was actually in the woods, she started to doubt the fruits of this labor, since all the magic in the area would certainly lead to some false positives, or otherwise anomalous readings. But still she pressed on. She had already paid a few hundred ruppees for the ride out here, there were sure to be some valuable archeological findings if she could find an actual structure in this labyrinthine forest. Though the part of her mind that was telling her to go back was absolutely sure that she was being watched. She of course attributed that horrible feeling of being watched to the sickeningly sweat smell of the trees, and the chokingly thick magic in the air.

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The expedition had gone well, other then the sense of being watched and the headache from just being in the forest seeming to get even worse as she hiked along the path. She had been sketching out her own map as she went along, making sure to note down scales and the existence of side passages that had eluded the villager that had sold her the map he had. Of course, all had been going well when she was attacked by a strange blue Wulfos. She had had to deal with the normal creature before, and she found that these creatures were even simpler, as they disolved into blue fire as soon as they were dispatched.

Day 1, Entry 2.

The sense of overwhelming magic in the air grows yet thicker deeper into the forest. Presumably there is either an exceedingly powerful magical creature residing in the forest, or a powerful magical item. At roughly 2 Kilometers into the forest, apparitions constructed from magic yet resembling other monsters in less magically inclined biomes, although, as they are magical in nature they are rather susceptible to being hurt, and upon injury burst into a brilliant blue flame. The presence of magic has had a profound impact on the local fauna, they are presently in bloom dramatically out of season, and several of the species would bloom in staggered times. Furthermore, the magically infused plants seem to aide to the labyrinthine nature of this forest, seemingly closing off the path at times, only to turn around and the path be open again.

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It had been less then a few hours into this excavation, she was retracing her steps in accordance to her map to ensure that it would be valid, it wouldn't do to have a false map in her publishings. She had found a few minor buildings with a handful of old books in ancient Labrynian entombed within them, seemingly untouched by the ages. She would need to translate them when she got back home. She didn't actually know the majority of the ancient languages that she suspected were around, but she had come up with a rather time consuming method to learn them, or at least offer a translation that was fairly accurate by imitating what one of the hero's in her childhood stories had done with a veritable lexicon called The Book of Mudora. Of course, barring magical relics to aide in the process she had to trace the history of the language, the words, cross reference the symbols between dozens of books until she came to the closest modern day equivalence, which due to the differing grammar rules often was a confusing mess to read and had to be cleaned up.

She guessed that these books would all be almost a month of translating each, and let out a sigh as she went about her work. She was glad that the woods were reletively free of monsters the further out she had gone.

Of course, as she had noticed earlier, the forest seemed to change at various intersections depending on the method by which she went at it. That discovery alone was almost enough to make her want to rip up the map since it could only ever be accurate in one direction, and her only method of recourse was to find every one of these intersections, come at it from every possible way, several of which were suddenly overgrown when coming back through, and categorizing every possible permutation of possibilities and having a map that was more like a book in and of itself. The whole process would take weeks of trekking through an unmapped forest that caused migranes by proximity and magical guardians that seemingly wanted her dead for existing that would likely get stronger the closer she got to whatever was at the center of the forest.

In the end, she ended up not ripping up the map, but also not publishing it, while making note of the magic permeating the air seeming to illicit a reaction unheard of in flora to change and grow quickly to fill in pathways on any return trek, vowing to map the place more fully when she didn't need to be both here and keeping her array of reprints of texts throughout the ages from being robbed from her house. She started to head home with some decent preliminary research.

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I'm not going to lie, I can't think of much more to do in this dungeon without someone to play off of, so I'm going to just end it here.