When Hellboy shoulders his way through the old wooden door, light and color floods his senses. The massive white arch yawns overhead, surrounded by glittering crystal. It's all startlingly beautiful, but Hellboy's mind is other places.

There's no sign of the Professor.

"I need a drink," he mumbles to himself, rubbing tiredly at his forehead. He's dealt with ghosts before. Even ghosts of good, old friends. But that was just too damn much.

The sound of chatter and movement up ahead forces him to move on, and he takes the distraction gratefully.

Inside, the temple is massive and full of life. Hallways wind, maze-like, through a strange collage of architecture. And then there's the monks; praying, cooking, reading, talking amongst themselves... They must've packed up and passed through that portal centuries ago, moving on to live in this place just left of reality.

It's beautiful as it is strange, and Hellboy can't really blame them.

"Guess I found all the monks," he says to himself.

He stops and talks to a few, gets some pretty vague answers to his questions. They seem happy here, at least. That's a good thing. When he's initially been trying to figure out how they all disappeared, he'd been expecting something much, much worse.

One hallway leads him to a laboratory of sorts. The shelves are stacked with books and bottles, delicate instruments he couldn't even try to guess the purpose of. The place is teeming with monks pouring over books and bubbling liquids, weighing strange powders and scribbling on papers strewn across cluttered workbenches.

Hellboy takes the time to examine a shelf teeming with pickled specimens, squinting at the labels printed in a language he's never seen.