The swamp remains hot. The bugs remain annoying. The humidity remains oppressive.
It is late afternoon, just after a torrential downpour. Your vehicles are driving through knee-deep water, and anyone walking is wading through the same. Everything counts as difficult ground.
A Haunting Melody
You have been traversing the swamp for days, heading generally in the correct direction, and avoiding or overcoming most of the challenges the unforgiving landscape has thrown your way. All in all, the 32nd has made fantastically good time through a difficult area.
As the afternoon drives on, you come across more and more buildings jutting out from the swamp, but whether they are remnants of pre-Rifts architecture or more recent structures, you cannot tell without closer examination. Whatever their origins, the buildings are currently in terrible disrepair, with trees, vines, and other vegetation growing on, around, and through them, and thick, muddy water lapping gently against their walls.
Anyone who makes a notice roll (only a simple success required) hears the faint sounds of a nursery rhyme as you pass one particular brick building, set back from the path you've generally been traveling by a couple hundred feet. The building sits on a rise, so very little of it is actually affected by the water, and it is mostly taken over by vegetation.
Your path towards the jungle castle leads you away from the building, but...
What's Back Here?
Any who venture up the path to the building and around back will find the remains of a perfectly ordinary playground, inhabited by around 20 children of varying races and ages, ranging from toddlers to as old as ten or eleven. The children almost universally wear tattered clothing, and several of them are singing the haunting melody you heard.
If you approach to within 50 feet or so, the children will take notice of you and pause in their playing, but will not move towards you.
Anyone who makes a notice roll will see that two of the children, both Psi-Stalkers (one boy of around six, and one girl of perhaps four), are wearing clothes in much better repair than the others. Their movements are also significantly slower than those of the other children, as if they are more tired than their companions. These two take no notice of you whatsoever, and keep playing, stumbling occasionally.
Because you amassed all of the success tokens on your way through the swamp, you each get the equivalent of a prep round, here. Narrate your characters' responses and any preparatory actions they take for whatever comes next.
After your prep round, you can choose to go closer to the playground, thus entering into a tactical, round-by-round scenario, or you can choose to mind your own business and keep going towards the castle.