Narrator S: Devoured by a vortex of living darkness, the Foldlight detonates.

[A catastrophic shattering noise.]

Narrator M: A giant flash like a lightning strike, absolutely blinding, bright enough that even the polarized hull of the Ship can’t contain it. 

Narrator X: A single stark freeze-frame as bright as unlight illuminates a nightmare galaxy of warped corpses and half-digested mica shards and twisting sinews of detritus suspended in jelly outside the Ship, a colossal mummified body looming above, staring with dead eyes.

S: The implosion flashes throughout the Ship, searing through all its now-transparent floors and decks. The folks gathering for sandwiches on the dining deck above Control don’t have time to react before they are absolutely blinded by a staggering flash from below. 

M: A roiling dark mass, a tearror of overstimulated light-drunk fold, instantly engulfs the crew inside the control deck.

X: In a heartbeat, Shanamarian is spaghettified into a maelstrom of arms, 

S: Ephraim Amos dissolves into a pile of metal shavings, 

M: and Abel Bowie gets pockmarked with tiny holes punched clean through his body that rapidly grow larger and larger, merging together until he is more hole than man, and then he is nothing.

S: A gush of darkness lashes straight at Artifice and Everett in the closing elevator just as the doors seal shut, severing a gout of boiling jelly that Artifice barely has time to put himself in the way of, shielding Everett. 

X: Blistering dark matter hits him full in the face and chest, splatters Everett behind him, sloshing with Shanamarian’s skin and teeth.

M: All that remains of the Foldlight is a fizzling broken socket, ringed in jagged broken glass like a wicked crown. 

S: In place of the delicately-spun filaments, just a mess of bent, ripped, burning carbon fibers, smoking and sparking like trick candles. 

X: The entire Ship is plunged into instant darkness. All remaining red lamps go out. The only illumination now, strange strobings and flickerings of haunted light within the Fold outside, agitated and enlivened by the Foldlight’s implosive flash. 

S: And a jelly-like ooze sloshes within the control deck, tearrors spawning and dying within it as it digests the light it just devoured.

M: Muffled Christmas-tree-like flickerings illuminate like lightning deep in a storm cloud within it, offering brief but bare flashes of visibility, freeze-frames of incomprehensible horror. 

S: So, this is bad. The Ship was supposed to be impermeable. 

M: Surely there is a great scientific mystery to be unraveled here, if anyone will remain alive to unravel it.

X: The Ship continues to sink, to descend slowly according to the last command it was induced to perform prior to the Foldlight’s destruction, sliding past ever-thickening ooze that now trembles and throbs, vibrating with activity. 

S: Up in the atrium, where the greatest number of crew are penned in together, all hell breaks loose. It is dark, horrifically dark, but they all saw what just happened in the control deck below their feet, even if they don’t entirely understand it yet. 

M: Hambing drops his tiny grilled cheese sandwich and sproings to the elevator. (Hambing) “We have to help them!”  

S: But the elevator doesn’t door, it doesn’t respond. 

M: (Merlin) “It’s no use. Without the Foldlight…” Merlin’s face is grave as he gives voice to what all of them are beginning to comprehend. He does a quick mental assessment of the Ship’s most recent settings: The floors are still transparent. The Ship is still descending. All is as it was instructed to be before the Foldlight was broken, and it will persist that way, permanently, without a Foldlight to facilitate any modifications. 

S: The dark mica of the Ship is unresponsive, comatose, dormant, no longer capable of liquid crystal plasticity.

M: Just a rigid hunk of rock without a supernatural Foldlight to direct it. 

S: Everyone is stuck on whatever deck they’re on. 

X: Case in point, several decks above, Felix stomps around hysterically in a sealed inescapable bathroom. He’s still wearing the lacy cravat of Lord Cryptopher, completely unnoticed by all below.

M: Other than the occasional sickly lights disgorged by sluggish tearrors within and without the Ship, the only light source that remains is…Cleo. 

S: She stands there behind the kitchen counter of the dining deck with the Granddaughter, Quino, Voro, and Mikelord, all of them frozen in the middle of their various grilled cheese and dishwashing activities. 

X: Omelet is twining between Cleo’s legs, looking kinda like an electrocuted caterpillar with all his fur standing on end. 

S: Cleo is shivering with uncertainty and fear, holding a forgotten rosemary garnish in trembling fingers. Even covered as she is with her long sleeves and hood, pinkish and greenish light still pulses from every strand of her hair, every freckle on her skin, fluttering with the panicked rhythm of her heartbeat. She pulls at the drawstrings of her hood in dismay, cinching it as tight as possible around her face, and the hood illuminates like a bright tent in a dark forest.

X: Light that once looked soft now seems to stand out like a beacon, dimly shining through transparent floors, dimly illuminating… 

M: …the silhouette of Mother Artifice in the transparent elevator a couple decks below at Control level, black robes smoking and bubbling, as, in his arms, he holds the convulsing body of…

S: (Micky) “Everett!”

X: Micky is down the dining stairs in an instant, rushing to the back corner of the atrium. 

S: She hurls herself up against the solid glassy prism of the transparent elevator shaft, peering down to where Everett and Artifice are suspended in the elevator just one deck below her, just out of reach.

M: Mere feet away.

X: Sizzling black scars spatter Everett’s face and clothing, spreading fast, eating through her, seeping under her skin and into her veins. 

S: And Artifice rips off one of his gloves in the strobing nightmare darkness and clamps a bare hand to Everett’s face.

X: Upstairs, the Granddaughter’s eyes roll in their head, and they nearly faint.

S: Cleo catches them, holding them upright.

M: An eerie deadness, a pulse of silence, a fathomless emptiness yawns from Mother Artifice. A void. A vacancy. 

S: The whirling tearror inside Control notices, twitching, and in the dim light of Cleo’s bioluminescence, the helpless crew in the kitchen above see a calcifying opalescence spread through Everett’s fresh inky wounds, radiating from Artifice’s hand enclosing her face.

X: An eerie lightlessness, an absence of color, now overriding the dendritic inkiness of the scars. 

M: Everett, still unconscious, seems to relax, opalescent markings shimmering in the mad light of swirling tearrors. 

X: Artifice lays her gently on the floor of the elevator and puts his glove back on. He turns his horned head to look up through the clear decks of the Ship at Micky on the deck just above,

S: and he translates straight up through the walls and floor and emerges directly into the atrium. 

M: Merlin hurries down the stairs from the dining balcony, taking the steps two at a time. (Merlin) “Is she all right?”

X: Micky is on her hands and knees, staring down at Everett in the clear elevator below. 

S: (Micky) “Artifice, what are you doing? Bring Everett up here now!” 

X: (Mother Artifice) “I CANNOT. TRANSLATING WITHIN THE DARK MICA MATRIX REQUIRES AN ADVANCED CONTROL OF MIND AND BODY WHICH I AM UNABLE TO IMPOSE ON LIVING BEINGS OTHER THAN MYSELF. BUT DO NOT WORRY, MICKY, EVERETT IS STABLE FOR NOW.”

S: (Micky) “Well, we need to do something, and fast. We’re sitting ducks without the Foldlight.”

X: (Mother Artifice) “AGREED, AND YET IT IS MOST LIKELY THE FOLDLIGHT WHICH INDUCED SUCH FERVENT DESIRE INTO THE EXTERIOR FOLD THAT IT WAS ABLE TO BREACH OUR WALLS IN THE FIRST PLACE. OUR SALVATION AND OUR DESTRUCTION CONTAINED WITHIN THE SAME CONTRIVANCE. IRONIC. CUNNING STRATEGY WILL BE REQUIRED IF WE WISH TO EXIT THIS SCENARIO.”

M: (Merlin) “Poetic,”

X: Merlin says.

M: (Merlin) “With the Foldlight out, we have no means of changing the Ship’s circumstances. And with that fold in Control…”

X: They all peer down through the transparent floor of the atrium, where the control deck below roils with predatory darkness. 

S: No sign of Shanamarian, Ephraim, or Abel – beyond some metal shavings.

X: They are gone. Transmuted. Tearrorized.

M: A disembodied arm briefly surfaces in the muck, before sinking again. 

S: In a strange flash of eerie lightning outside, yet more crew trapped on clear decks even further below Control are briefly visible. 

X: Shug Ruggles, Kanneken, the naturalist, botanist, and others stare up wide-eyed from the science labs further below, freeze-framed in their attempts to escape.

S: Rawfield is pounding on the unresponsive lab elevator. 

M: Merlin catches a single instant of eye contact with her, 

S: both of them still wearing their puffy sleeves and gambesons from the LARP, 

M: Rawfield wearing an expression of intent military urgency on her face, clearly yelling something inaudible, before darkness falls again.

X: (Hambing) “Fuuuck,” Hambing whispers. 

M: Merlin’s pulse hammers with panic as he watches the gelatinous fold ooze over the priceless banks of punch-discs and delicate instruments in the control deck below. 

S: But these things do not emit any light, and the fold doesn’t seem interested. 

X: Instead, it extends gooey pseudopods that ferociously, desperately, investigate Control’s transparent ceiling,

S: the underside of the atrium floor above, 

X: seeming to pool particularly beneath the deck directly under people’s feet. 

M: Merlin frowns, his stomach twisting with a deep unease mixed with fascination. He steps aside, watching the dark puddle follow him and begin to squeeze laboriously through the crystalline structure of the floor, trying to seep into the atrium.

X: Quino Del Belsaban, on the dining deck above, sees this happening and does not like the look of it. (Quino) “Oh god, oh good heavens, oh dear.”

S: Voro is panicking, tearing off her apron. (Voro) “I never should have taken this job. I do cruises, collegiate dinners. Holy shit, get me out of here.”

X: Mikelord is trying to console her.

M: (Mikelord) “Don’t worry! Artifice can stop the tearror! Right, Artifice?”

X: (Mother Artifice) “NOT ITS FULL MASS, NO. IT IS FAR TOO EXTREME, AND TIME IS SHORT. THIS FOLD WILL BREACH THE ATRIUM SHORTLY. “

S: Cleo clutches her head. (Cleo) “But why is it even coming up here? My lights are fold-safe! I’m fold-safe!!”

M: (Merlin) “We thought the Foldlight was fold-safe, too.”

X: Artifice nods to Merlin. (Mother Artifice) “AT THIS DEPTH, IT APPEARS THAT FOLD-SAFE LIGHT MAY BE AN OBSOLETE CONCEPT. AS A STARVING ANIMAL MAY BE DRIVEN TO EAT THINGS IT NORMALLY WOULD NOT PREFER, SO TOO DOES THIS FOLD APPEAR TO RESPOND TO STIMULI THAT WOULD NORMALLY PROVOKE NO REACTION AT LESSER DEPTHS.” 

S: Cleo whimpers, huddling within the meaningless safety of the kitchen counter. (Cleo) “Fuck! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m gonna lead it right to all of us. My stupid, useless lights! Why can’t I DO anything?!”

M: Merlin is thinking a mile a minute. (Merlin) “We have to change the Ship’s circumstances in order to get away, but we can’t change the Ship’s circumstances without a Foldlight. We have the spare Foldlight, but it’s in Control with the fold that destroyed the original.”

S: His eyes snap to Mother Artifice. 

M: (Merlin) “Artifice. Without the elevators, you’re the only one of us who can move freely between decks. Could you go down into Control and activate the spare bulb?” 

X: (Mother Artifice) “NO. I BARELY WITHSTOOD THE SMALL QUANTITY THAT CONTACTED ME AND EVERETT IN THE ELEVATOR. THE FULL MASS WOULD CONSUME ME OR ANY LIVING BEING THAT ENTERS CONTROL.”

M: Merlin’s eyes go wide. (Merlin) “Any LIVING being, you say?”

X: First Merlin, and then, soon, everyone else, turns to the Bocular Man. 

M: (Bocular Man) “Hello.” Still politely holding a tray of grilled cheese for only-arms Shanamarian and metal-shavings Mr. Amos. 

S: They’re probably not hungry anymore. 

X: Artifice peers at the Bocular Man. (Mother Artifice) “INTERESTING.” 

M: (Merlin) “Could you take the Bocular Man down into Control?”

X: (Mother Artifice) “I COULD DELIVER HIM THERE, BUT I DARE NOT ENTER CONTROL WITH HIM.”

M: (Merlin) “If you can get him inside, I can direct him from here.”

S: Merlin rushes over to his upgraded teletheric contraption, dialing it in. 

M: (Merlin) “With instruction, the Bocular Man could activate the spare bulb.”

S: The transparent floor of the atrium is beginning to darken, blooming with swollen beads of sticky gel, crawling in the direction of the crew, growing more and more saturated. 

M: Merlin takes another step away from the beading ooze, glancing to the pulsating light of Cleo overhead on the kitchen balcony –

S: fearfully watching, biting her lip, tears prismatically hue-shifting as they course down her freckled, glowing cheeks. 

X: Micky is shaking her head. 

S: (Micky) “Wait, what’s stopping the fold from eating the spare as soon as we turn IT on, too?” 

X: The Granddaughter has been standing by, eerily quiet, but now they speak up. (Granddaughter) “If it is in Control with the spare, then nothing will stop it, but it won’t be down there much longer – it will be up here with us, instead.”

M: (Merlin) “Then we have no choice. We must activate the spare bulb as soon as Control is clear of the fold. It clearly wants to come up here, we just need to help it along. Quickly, Artifice! We have no time to lose.”

X: Mother Artifice places a hand on the Bocular Man’s head and, with no more trouble than pushing a stick into wet mud, floors the Bocular Man down through the floor.

M: (Bocular Man) “Hmmm?” 

S: His digitigrade legs dangle for a moment as they pass through the ceiling, then he drops and lands in Control, still bearing the tray of sandwiches. 

X: Black ooze ripples around his point of impact, but otherwise seems no more interested in him than in any of the other machinery in the room.

S: Merlin speaks into his teletheric device. 

M: (Merlin) “Drop the sandwiches, Bocular Man.” 

(Bocular Man) “Yes, Merlin.” 

(Merlin) “Now, disconnect the broken bulb.” 

(Bocular Man) “Yes, Merlin.”

S: The Bocular Man wades laboriously across the darkness-flooded control deck, 

M: striding through swirls of eerie light and spaghettified arms to grip the jagged glassy edges of the Foldlight’s broken husk.

X: Like cranking a ship’s wheel, he starts to unscrew the broken bulb from its armature socket. Sparks gout from the shattered remains, temporarily drawing the fold and its tearrors, but only momentarily.

S: Micky’s attention is split nervously between Everett, slumbering tenuously in the clear elevator bubble beneath her, and the dark matter soaking eerily, inexorably, up into the atrium floor. (Micky) “Fuck, how long until it’s in here?”

X: (Mother Artifice) “PERHAPS MERE MINUTES. I’M CURRENTLY REEVALUATING MY UNDERSTANDING OF DARK MICA’S IMPERMEABILITY TO THE FOLD.” 

S: (Micky) “Is there anything we can DO? I’ll be the bait. Anything to move this along!”

X: Cleo gulps, looking down. Her sleeves are pulled over her hands, glowing like lanterns. Shaking, she pulls back her hood, and a brighter surge of pink light spills forth. 

S: (Cleo) “No– I’ll be the bait. I already am!”

M: (Merlin) “Bait…” Merlin pauses in his teletheric instructions for the Bocular Man. “Wait, Cleo, I might have something that will attract the tearror.” And with sweaty palms, Merlin turns a dial on his teletheric box and begins to play back a certain recording.

[A familiar ringing tonality.]

S: The response is immediate and dramatic. 

X: The fold shivers, falling almost hypnotically still for a moment, and then, with single-minded intent, burrows feverishly up through the floor, vacating Control entirely and surging into the atrium. 

M: Merlin backpedals frantically, tripping on the edge of the rug onto the stairs.

S: Warping inky sludge flashes and sluices, lashing across the atrium straight for Merlin and his device. He scrambles backwards up the stairs, teletheric in hand. 

M: (Merlin) “Bocular Man, load the spare bulb!”

X: The last thing he hears is, 

M: (Bocular Man) “Can you repeat that, Merlin?”

X: before a wave of living darkness engulfs him completely.

[Silence.]

M: Merlin’s eyes open upon a void.

[A mysterious new soundscape.]

It feels new, yet familiar. A dark space with unknowable depths, if indeed it has them at all. Yet, within this…

(Merlin) “There is matter,” he says. He feels it wrapped around him, pouring over him like particles of air in a wind, like droplets of water in a river. He bends a hand, cupping it, and as the matter eddies and swirls across his palm, he feels the void reverberate, react to him, change because of his presence within it, but only as much as a single stone shapes the cosmos.

As if in concert with this realization, Merlin senses moreso than sees an arcing light streaking away from him, far above and distant like a comet. For a moment it hangs, a gossamer streak, until Merlin feels the void that envelops him spasm and start seeking the light – the wind, the river, the current suddenly surging toward it, rushing after it, swirling around him.

(Merlin) “There is intent,” he murmurs, and, in another arcing strobe, he sees a second pale gossamer streak arc out, like a tangent to the first, forking away through the void, and the void seeks it as well, surging like a burst dam. Merlin feels himself tumbled, tossed, pulled along with it, in it, like a piece of driftwood in the inky torrent. He reaches out, desperately trying to gain hold of something, anything, but only feeling the rushing dark, like sinewy threads; liquid, gaseous, and yet neither; insubstantial, yet indefatigable all the same, coursing all around; yet, at his touch he feels it twist and warp, the currents snapping away from his seeking grasp like a tendon over bone, juddering – and in the light of a third gout of gossamer, he realizes…

(Merlin) “There is connection.” And the void reaches the first light. Merlin feels it: a compressing, a collapsing, as the seeking dark consumes the light. Around him, even within himself, Merlin feels a desperate satisfaction ripple forth. As if fed by the notion, the matter changes, gaining texture, complexity, experience. It is not the same as it was before.

The void then reaches the second light. What he interpreted before as a simple consumption, a predation, he now sees is more complex – a symbiosis, an ouroboros of cause, effect, light, dark, inextricably intertwined. Merlin can’t help but be swept along in the accelerating tide, eyes desperately transfixed on the final light, the hanging comet, what the dark, the void, the Fold, seeks, what it yearns for, not as a predator hungers for prey, but as a mind seeks pattern in chaos. 

As he thinks this thought, he reaches for it: the infinitesimal bridge of electricity that arcs between neurons. He seizes it, and finds that he can pull himself along it. It feels like nothing, like the ease of traveling in a well-worn groove. Merlin is pulling, gliding, racing the void, through the void, in the void, of the void, and as the forking patterns of light spread before him, they are entwined in the grasp of the void, until Merlin loses all sense of what is him, or fold, or light, or thought.

S: (Cleo) “Merlin!”

X: Cleo vaults over the kitchen counter, running for the atrium stairs. She whips the hoodie off of her head, a nimbus of pink and green light blooming around her.

S: (Cleo) “Get off him, you goo!”

M: The darkness slithers off of Merlin’s body, drawn eagerly in Cleo’s direction. 

S: Her eyes widen with panic, and she starts to back up. 

X: Merlin is nonresponsive, splayed on the crystal staircase. 

M: The teletheric lies in his limp hand, emanating static. 

S: (Cleo) “Fuck!”

X: Cleo scrambles back to the kitchen island as Quino and the sous-chefs and Omelet all scatter for the other side of the balcony.

M: The Granddaughter remains, standing in grim silence, watching Cleo’s panicked approach.

S: Cleo dives back behind the counter. (Cleo) “Dot, what do I do, what do I do? Are we gonna die?” 

X: She looks into the Granddaughter’s dark eyes, and in that moment, the Granddaughter doesn’t really look like a mysterious acolyte of the Mothers.

S: There’s a glimpse of a scared, overwhelmed person, probably younger even than Cleo, and fundamentally unable to prevent the catastrophe that is about to consume all of them. 

X: Cleo sees that in this moment, and so do you, but no one else notices. 

S: Cleo grabs the Granddaughter’s hands, still wet from the sink. (Cleo) “You need to run, Dot!”

X: But Dot does not run. Instead they step between Cleo and the oncoming darkness, just as Artifice did for Everett, wrapping their arms around her.

S: With a sob, Cleo lets herself be pulled tight, and over Dot’s black-clad shoulder watches the slime spasm toward them, and her eyes slide up to the walls where even more darkness is beginning to bead like little pinpricks of black jelly squeezing through from the outside.

M: Micky lunges for the stairs and grabs the teletheric box. 

S: (Micky) “Fuck, it’s broken! What are we–”

[A resounding clank. Triumphant music.]

M: A glorious warm radiance shines suddenly from Control. The spare bulb is online. 

X: Quino Del Belsaban falls to his knees. (Quino) “Oh, thank god.” 

S: Below in Control, the Bocular Man pulls a lever. 

M: A punch card clanks into a press. 

X: (Hambing) “Oh shit, we gotta–” Hambing starts to yell, but the entire atrium instantaneously bricks solid with transparent dark mica spare mass.

[A freezing, solidifying sound.]

M: Cleo and Dot, still in their panicked embrace, find themselves suddenly entombed in a precisely Cleo-and-Dot-shaped pocket of space, hard, clear, crystal matter vacuum-molded around their contours. 

X: They can’t move. They can barely breathe. 

S: They can see other bubbles of empty space throughout the otherwise completely solid room, their vision warped and distorted, molded crystal cells containing every other person and object here.

X: Over Dot’s shoulder, Cleo stares wide-eyed at the writhing, struggling pocket of fold slime, halted mid-lunge within its own neighboring bubble, 

S: separated from her strobing hair by mere inches of crystal boundary. 

M: Visible in Control by the warm light of the spare bulb, the Bocular Man expertly loads a punch-disc labelled “Eject foreign matter” and pulls the lever.

X: The pocket of mass containing the tearror… blobulates–

S: Nice.

X: –out the side of the atrium, discharging the tearror into the void, as the Bocular Man swiftly and decisively operates more discs below in Control. 

S: The atrium un-bricks. Everyone gasps, their ribs expanding with breath. 

M: Gratefully so.

X: The Ship’s systems are back online. Micky hurls herself to the elevator, calling it up to the atrium, and dives to Everett’s side the moment it doors open–

S: (Micky) “Everett, baby, come on, open your eyes.”

X: –as below in Control the Bocular Man pulls another lever, and the Ship turns, turns, and with zero fucking hesitation departs this fucking place, zooming the fuck straight the fuck up, fuck this shit. 

S: Cleo and Dot tumble apart, unbalanced by the sudden momentum of the Ship’s rapid ascent. 

M: Plates clatter and smash on the floor. 

S: (Cleo) “I don’t understand… Merlin!” 

X: She goes running for the stairs.

M: Rawfield, Kanneken, the naturalist, all elevator in, finally untrapped from their labs below.

X: Rawfield lunges to Merlin’s side next to Artifice, feeling for his pulse. Merlin is breathing. 

S: (Rawfield) “He’s alive.”

X: (Mother Artifice) “MERLIN, RESPOND. MERLIN.”

S: Merlin’s eyelids flutter. 

M: (Merlin) “H-hmmm?”

X: (Hambing) “The Bocular Man did it, Merlin! Even without you guiding him! Merlin, can you hear me?” 

M: (Merlin) “I don’t have… a response… for that inquiry.” 

X: (Hambing) “Merlin…?” 

M: (Merlin) “I can do things… a person can.” 

[A contemplative bell melody.]

S: All eyes slowly track to the transparent floor of the atrium, looking through to the control deck visible below, to the Bocular Man standing beside the newly-installed spare Foldlight. 

M: He is examining his own mechanical hands in what could almost be described as a disbelieving fashion, and he slowly looks up at the crew on the deck above. 

S: Cleophee’s jaw drops. She waves tentatively to the Bocular Man. (Cleo) “Merlin…?”

M: And the Bocular Man waves back.