Jake here, I've decided to keep this log of our trip into the cave, maybe I'm going a little overboard, maybe this journey will only take a day, but Rover's journaling of our jouney so far has proven to be helpful, so hopefully this log will be as well! Our newly excavated cave here seems very vast inside, the cave in blocked the entrance, but after walking a few hundred meters, the cave looks open and stable. I believe that our volunteers are continuing to remove rubble around the entrance and just inside the cave mouth, maybe they can also find some sort of use for it even! As we are going deeper into the cave, it seems that this place has a number of strange and interesting properties! Even as we have walked very far into the cave so far, the air still feels fairly fresh here, and even in the low light we have seen some interesting rock and crystal formations. Even with our excitement of discovering what this cave has in store for us, we have been doing our best to look at our surroundings and log anything significgant! I have been trying to sketch out some of the stuff we have seen, but I am not the best artist, hopefully the diagrams prove useful. That's all for now, we are setting up camp for the night after a long day's march! Hopefully I can get some sleep even with all the excitemeny! Tomorrow we will delve deeper into this cave.

Another day of marching through the cave, it seems that this cave is quite extensive, there have been a lot of twists and turns, but luckily there haven't been any branches off the main cave, so far the going has been easy, but its hard to tell how close to ground level we are, the cave has been twisting and turning, with the path we're on going up and down. We could have probably kept better track of elevation as we went, but its a little late for that, and anyway we have been far more preoccupied with logging the oddities of this cave! Today on our journey we have started to see odd plants growing, completely strange since we are underground, and these aren't your typical  cave species such as mushrooms. I'm not sure how these plants are flourishing without light, but I'm no botanist! At least I can try to draw some diagrams of these odd plants, I think Stella also trimmed some samples from some, so that will be nice to bring back with us for someone who knows more about plants. After a long march yesterday, the plants are a nice comfort even if they are strange. We have decided to set up camp for the night in a small grove of strange trees, we've picked some of the fruit and we are going to see if its edible!

As we keep travelling through this cave everything seems to blending together a bit. Even with the strange plants the cave goes on and on, so when we came across a larger chamber with a pool of water, we decided to take a rest and examine the pond for a little while, this chamber was nice, but we had the feeling it wasn't the end of the cave. The water was clear and normal, but the fish were unlike any I had seen before, with vibrant colors and types I had never seen before! Our rest was very productive, with documenting the surroundings and the pond, we also were able to spot some interesting lizards in the chamber, though we didn't get as good a look at them as we did the fish. Furthur exploration of the chamber revealed another exit, and we were off once again into the cave through the tunnel. We proceeded onwards until it was time to camp for the night again. I'm glad that I decided to write this log, since this journey is taking longer than we expected when we started out. I have the feeling it will be well worth it though! Tomorrow is another day!

Our foray into the cave continues! As we keep going deeper into this cave its amazing to see the flora and fauna, and how large this cave is on the inside. We keep on walking and walking and walking, and this tunnel is just as wide as ever. It's like another whole world down here, I'm sure the reasearchers at the university and the adventurer's guild will be excited to come explore this cave furthur once we've gotten done with this initial expedition! So far it seems like there's nothing particularly dangerous down here, but I hope I don't have to eat those words later on as we go furthur. All the reptiles we have seen scuttling around have been strange, but have mostly steered clear of us, and we haven't seen anything larger than a gecko so far. The only thing we have had some concerns over is this strange mist that has appeared along the floor of the cave. We stopped for a few minutes to make sure it wasn't dangerous, one of our arcane fauna companions recognized it as magical right away, and after a few minutes of sniffing and examining and analyzing, they declared that the mist was harmless, and in fact it was a more concentrated version of the stray magic that we had been following! A nice confirmation that we were on the right trail, but even with that exciting development we still need to rest for the night, so I'll end this log here!

All of our marching and exploration has paid off! None of us knew what to expect when we started down into this cave, but our perserverence through this, and even through all of what we have gone through before we tracked down the magic to this cave, has been well worth it. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, I should start from the beginning! This morning started out like the other mornings in this cave, we set out among the strange flora and fauna, at this point pretty used to that, we had even grown accustomed to the strange purple mist, even as it was getting thicker in the air. We continued on through the tunnel until we reached another large chamber. Like the previous chamber, this one was also filled with the interesting plants, and also had a large pool. Unlike the previous chamber, this pool was different, it had a purple hue like the mist we were seeing. We carefully made our way into the chamber, though perhaps not as carefully as we should have, with all our excitement we didn't notice that there was something else in this chamber with us! A large figure emerged from the swirling mists, taking us by surprise. Even with being startled, we were carful, not wanting to lash out if we didn't know what we were facing.

It was a good thing we didn't attack it, the figure approached us, looking scary, but it soon stumbled as it neared us. As it got close, we could tell it was a puppillar, a large one at that, but something was wrong. Despite the unknown, we approached in order to help the puppillar out, however we could! We set up a camp around the puppillar, and Stella began brewing some medicines that they had brought with them. After a few moments of uncociousness, the huge puppillar began to stir, it was a bit confused at first, but after giving us a few minutes to explain what we were doing in its domain, the huge puppillar calmed down quite a bit.  We were able to have a conversation with the puppillar, and learned that it was the guardian of this place, it told us it didn't have a name, so we simply started calling it The Guardian. 

The Guardian told us that it was an ancient being, one whose responsibility was to watch over this place, and it referred to the glowing pool we had observed as a "vein of magic". We gathered around as it told us more about the magic of our world, that there were other such places like this on the planet, all where the magic that dwells in the core of our planet peeks up to where we all live, and that was how magic influences us on the surface of the planet! It's quite interesting to hear, especially after chasing down magic for so long this year. Rover is in a tizzy, taking a bunch of his own notes on everything our new friend The Guardian has been telling us.

After hearing all this, we were able to take some time to explain everything that had been happening with magic, and our whole journey up to digging our way into this cave. The Guardian listened intently and was quiet for a little while, we waited patiently, giving it some time, since it seemed to be quite weak, As an aside, I think we were all pretty concerned for our new friend, but at least in my thought process, we wanted to give it some space, since we didn't know that much about its condition yet. After some time, The Guardian nodded and told us that it had not been feeling well for some time, and that timeline lined up with our problems with magic, it was quiet again for a moment, but then admitted that it wasnt aware that the cave had been blocked. It told us it had a strong connection to the magic here, and if the magic of this place was blocked, that would explain why it was feeling so poorly! How interesting! This of course kept Rover going in his flurry of writing down notes, and he had a ton of questions, but we were able to calm him down to ask them at a later time, The Guardian's health was priority now.

After our long conversation, we shared a nice meal and talked about what to do next. The Guardian said that it would probably start to feel better soon now that the tunnel was clear, but Stella said they would stay behind for a bit to make sure, while the rest of us came out to report to everyone else what we had discovered, and to test to see if the flow of magic remedied our issues. It would seem that our long journey was finally reaching its conclusion! For now, I'll need to end this log, as we are packing up for the trek back out of this place, which we've started to refer to as Arcane Cave. This will change a lot for us, hopefully in a good way!