The moment he saw his future self, Ridley felt the urge to experiment. Something small, he thought, just a change of location within the group. If he walked over from standing on the left to standing on the right, stood next to someone different, what would happen? It couldn't hurt to find out.
Yes it could. Ridley quashed the impulse aggressively, all too aware of what had happened last time he'd done something just to see what would happen. He didn't need to trap everyone in a time paradox, or create temporal doppelgangers, or erase the group from the timeline or any other bullshit consequence for screwing around with the time-space continuum.
Ridley was so focused on not following his own worst impulses that he didn't notice Mhynt slicing her arm open until it had already happened. The blood was shockingly red against the green of her skin. Her future self hadn't been -
had she been? For a horrible dizzying moment Ridley wasn't sure, and then he remembered. Of course her future self had been injured.
Had Mhynt worried they were about to be attacked, and inflicted the injury on herself to ensure they wouldn't be? That took a certain degree of resolve. Ridley wasn't sure whether or not he admired it.
"I do not think this dungeon manipulates time at all," she stated. "Or, it cannot manipulate our time. I think it's showing us illusions and altering our memories to comply with them. It can predict our future, and then force us to think it is correct if we do not reason it out. By that same logic... it can also modify how we see our past."
...or she'd been performing an experiment. Ridley was grateful, both for the experiment and that it wasn't him who'd risked fucking the group over this time.
"See, now you're getting into philosophy," he said. "If we all remember something happening, and our memories all agree on the point, and the physical evidence matches up, then what's the difference between that
actually happening and memory alteration to make us
think it happened."
He added, "Who's to say the stone actually means anything? Maybe it's entirely unimportant, and we only notice it in the first place because the vision primed us to watch out for cool rocks. If you think this dungeon is messing with our heads in some way, then maybe this entire situation is just trying to... establish a baseline, for whether we're more inclined to follow visions or diverge from them, so it knows what to do later if it wants to push us in a certain direction."