text: [Themes: sci-fi, mystery]
  
  You venture down the narrow passageway, which twists and turns until you can no longer see the bone-covered ledge anymore. With each turn through this small slot, snow flurries start to fill the air more and more. Wreaths made of some strange shrub lean on the ground against the rock walls on your right and left; the small leaves still attached to the twisted twigs have turned brown and brittle. They seem to be left behind as if they were ritual offerings.
  
  What is this place? The slot starts to widen again, and after one last turn you reach an enclosed space carved into the side of the mountain, open to the sky but with walls decorated with the colored handprints of what you presume to be Folvans.
  
  At the center of this chamber is a large spherical... well, you're not really sure what. It is clearly there, but you see no surface that could be touched. Through it you can see a snowy landscape, with a frozen lake surrounded by low mountains. The sphere looks more like a round lens, a three-dimensional window to another place; as you step around the sphere, the view through the lens turns with you. Wherever that place is, the weather is snowy there, and the snow blowing off the frozen lake is flying out of the sphere and into this hidden chamber. It is daytime in that other scene, and the light off the snow illuminates the chamber where you're standing.
  
  You scan the sphere with your WristComp, but the powerful minicomputer strapped to your left arm only detects the space beyond it, and not the sphere itself. It is as if you were standing in front of an open door.
  
  You are not a science officer, so you have no idea how to analyze what it is you're looking at. You are tempted to call Lieutenant Hun-Spruk over to assist you, but you know she and Dr. Wildon only have minutes to examine the bones for human remains before the teek-teeks return. On the other hand, you're very tempted to reach your hand into the sphere--because if snow from the other side can be blown in your face, then doesn't it make sense that objects on this side can pass in the opposite direction?
  
  > If you call your science officer to assist you, turn to page 44.
  You are way over your head here, in terms of comprehending what it is you're looking at, and understanding why it's here. So you return down the wreath-lined passageway, with the wintry breeze at your back. Hun-Spruk and Wildon are still scanning the scattered bones when you return to the ledge.
  
  "Any luck?" you ask.
  
  "Define 'luck'," Dr. Wildon says. He is standing on the right side of the ledge and is surrounded by scattered bone fragments, but he appears exasperated. "It wouldn't be lucky for Dr. Munro if we found her remains here."
  
  "But to answer your question," Hun-Spruk says from the opposite side of the ledge, "it appears these teek-teeks have been feasting on passafans down on the prairie. There are no human remains that we can find."
  
  "Passafans?" you ask.
  
  "Imagine a burrowing primate," she explains, "and you'd be close. They come up at night to eat prairie grass, because it's usually safer at night."
  
  "I guess the passafans didn't take these flying beasts into account," Dansmith says, sitting up on the side of the slope and enjoying a kingly view of the scientific proceedings below.
  
  "The teek-teeks aren't supposed to be this far north."
  
  "Well I just found a much bigger mystery than either passafans or teek-teeks," you say.
  
  "We wondered where you had wandered off to," Dansmith says, sliding back down to the ledge.
  
  You lead the way back down the narrow passageway into the side of the mountain, which you are now convinced was carved by someone and is not just a natural phenomenon; the walls above you are too perfectly vertical to be the result of erosion. Lieutenant Hun-Spruk, your planetary expert, marvels at the wreaths. "These are made of makaberry bushes," she says. "They grow way to the south, and shouldn't be here."
  
  "Like those teek-teeks?" Dr. Wildon says.
  
  "Yeah..." she starts to say.
  
  > Page 118
  "You haven't seen anything yet," you say. A moment later you arrive at the final chamber, and you give your teammates time to examine the sphere and reach the same conclusions you did. Even Hun-Spruk is stumped.
  
  "Nothing in Dr. Munro's writings suggested anything like this," she says. Like you, she is trying to scan the object with her WristComp; the fact that she isn't announcing any results suggests she is as confused by the readings--or rather, the absence of readings--as you were a few minutes ago. Perhaps your methodology wasn't so off after all.
  
  Dansmith is fascinated with the snow flurries drifting through the spherical portal. He strikes you as a bit of a contradiction right now: the grizzled "old" veteran of the group, in his upper thirties, with his signature military-grade buzzcut and graying sideburns, catching snowflakes in the palm of his hands. His delight is restrained, perhaps, but childish nonetheless.
  
  "But those are makaberry bushes I see growing around that frozen lake on the other side of the portal," Hun-Spruk continues. "I know some Folvan populations consume large amounts of makaberries, so perhaps this portal is used as a travel corridor to the southern hemisphere, where the berries are abundant at higher elevations."
  
  Dansmith turns from the incoming snow flurries to give her a look of disbelief, but the science officer doesn't see it. "Lieutenant, correct me if I misunderstood you," he says, "but you just suggested a bronze-age people possesses a technology that even humans haven't invented?"
  
  "The evidence is all around us," she says. "The sphere. The ritualistic handprints on the wall, the wreath offerings lined up in the passageway. Maybe the Folvans didn't invent this technology, but it looks to me like they absolutely do possess it."
  
  At that moment you hear a commotion back on the ledge. KWAAA-AA!
  
  "And let's not forget the teek-teeks, which also probably arrived here through this portal," Hun-Spruk adds.
  
  > Page 14
  "Those are all good points, Lieutenant," Dansmith says. "Now do you suppose this portal will work for us? Otherwise there is only one way out of this chamber, and it looks like that way is now blocked."
  
  Hun-Spruk seems hesitant to try the portal herself, so she picks up a rock and tosses it through. The rock sails through the sphere as if through an open window, and you see the small plume of snow when it lands on the other side.
  
  But before anybody can comment any further, you hear something scraping against the walls of the narrow passageway. The teek-teeks have caught your scent, and they are on their way! You have only two options.
  
  > If you stand your ground against the teek-teeks, turn to page 101.
  "Let's stand our ground," you say. "We have no idea where that frozen lake is. For all we know it's out of comm range with the ship."
  
  "Right," Dansmith says. "And I didn't bring a parka, either."
  
  Therefore you, Dansmith, and Quabiss set up a line at the entrance to the chamber, your plasguns drawn and set to the medium power setting, which you hope will have a stun effect on the teek-teeks. "Get them while they're still in the passageway," Dansmith says. "The beasts will be too big to maneuver in there."
  
  And he's right. They are coming at you single file, and while they can walk through the corridor easily enough they are unable to spread their leathery wings. As you open fire on the first teek-teek, it reels in panic, unable to either turn around or fly out of the path of your plasgun beams. In its frenzy to escape, makaberry wreaths are tossed in every direction. Finally it succumbs to your stun beams and falls to the ground.
  
  "That was one," you say, "but where did the other two go?"
  
  Just then you hear something scratching against the rock above the portal chamber. You look up, remembering the chamber has no ceiling. The two remaining teek-teeks are perched above you, crouched and ready to pounce.