Mr. Cool Under the Temple

The old temple grounds did not greet them with holiness. The party entered a barn-like outbuilding near the temple and heard a voice before they found its owner. The voice called itself Mr. Cool, which was exactly the kind of name that makes a room less trustworthy. He said the place was abandoned. He also warned them that the stairs led down toward an old thieves guild area full of traps. That warning mattered. Aleklot's Rest had been introduced as pilgrimage ground, then battlefield-looting site, then tourist town. Now the temple side of it revealed another layer: older criminal infrastructure hiding beneath the pilgrimage veneer. The town was not only selling history. It had built scams and underworld routes into the bones of the place. Mr. Cool eventually became a person with a name. Alan Ivers. Al Ivers. Counterfeit spell-scroll maker. Underworld vendor. A returning piece of Jericha's comic-criminal ecosystem, now tucked into Aleklot's Rest like the town had been waiting to reveal how fake its sanctity could become. Al was not impressed by the tourist mythology. He said Aleklot's Rest pretended the green dragon still mattered as a scam, selling overpriced junk to people who wanted sacredness they could buy. In that light, the temple outbuilding became the perfect first arrival point: not holy, not empty, not safe, but honest about the dishonesty underneath.