Narrator X: (Hambing) “Hah!” [Ongoing grunts of effort.] Inside the sun, armed with his trusty spear, Hambing hacks through a jungle of insane tearror weirdness. 

Narrator S: Now that he’s no longer martini-glass-size, this task is less of a problem for him. But there’s still the fact that every bush and every tree, every growing stalk and writhing vine, flower, and branch, is totally distinct from the last. Makes it hard to get into a flow. 

X: Close behind Hambing, the others follow. Rawfield is in step with Merlin. 

S: (Rawfield) “There’s another door over this way. You think you’ve got enough juice to lift this one too?” 

Narrator M: (Merlin) “If it’s similar to the first one I opened, yes, I think so.” 

X: (Hambing) “Yeah, it looked, uh, about the same. It’s not far.”

(Guy) “I’ve tried for a long time to open it. No luck. I think it may be a way out at last.” 

S: Guy himself is hobbling along weakly, supported by Rawfield and Micky. He’s smaller than Steve, pale gray-lavender skin, sorta shriveled, frail, and emaciated in comparison. 

M: His limbs are scarred. His… neck? His pendulum-thing sports a bandage made from a ripped strip of Rawfield’s coat. 

S: Where Steve smells pleasantly of fresh-baked cookies, Guy smells of old stale cookies, sort of dry and faint. 

X: It is immediately clear that Guy is very unwell. Sure, he and Steve are totally bizarre lifeforms, but in contrast with one another, Steve is like an Adonis.

S: The picture of health, vim, and vigor.

M: Guy is… Well, he looks ultra-underfed for one thing, and probably has a few years on Steve, too, in addition to his emaciated, injured state. 

S: Merlin is walking in step with Rawfield, his bocular eyes flitting from veiny blossom to jagged tree trunk.

X: While they bushwhack, they are doing that West Wing thing where they walk and talk. 

M: (Merlin) “Ripley, I don’t want to shock you, but it turns out that this – this whole place – may actually be an entirely different cosmos from our own. There’s a theory that there may in fact be many cosmoses.” 

S: (Rawfield) “Yeah, that’s what Guy thinks too.” 

M: (Merlin) “How are you… how are you doing with that?” 

S: Ripley shrugs. (Rawfield) “Y’know, I haven’t really had the luxury to dwell on it. Too busy trying to stay alive. Seems the same as any other cosmos in that respect.” 

X: She kinda side-eyes Merlin. 

S: (Rawfield) “How are YOU doing with that?” 

M: (Merlin) “About as well as you’d expect.” 

S: (Rawfield) “Hmm.” 

M: Rawfield gives him a rough pat. 

S: (Rawfield) “Tell me about this other chamber you appeared in.”

M: (Merlin) “Categorically, the neighboring cavern was full of inorganic objects. I suppose there’s some kind of sorting algorithm at play here? I must have been deemed non-living matter. It felt pretty desolate compared to this jung–”

[Abrupt Sentinel sound.]

X: Overhead, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of the Sentinel, soaring over the jungle canopy like a huge black dragon kite.

S: It dives down, landing somewhere nearby. The jungle quakes and rustles.

M: Rawfield, Hambing, Micky, Guy, immediately and synchronously fall into a well-practiced crouch, going as quiet and still as prey animals. 

S: Merlin, Tzila, and Felix follow their lead. 

M: (Merlin) “What’s it doing here?” 

X: Rawfield raises a silencing hand, placing it on Merlin’s face – even though obviously his voice is like emitting from somewhere on his torso here. 

S: (Rawfield) “Quiet. Watch.” 

X: Through gaps in the mismatched foliage, they catch a glimpse of whiskery legs dramatically underlit by the infernal glow of a pool of lava. 

S: For the newcomers, this is the closest they have ever been to the Sentinel without fighting for their lives. 

M: Merlin sees part of a broad, dark… flank? side? It is void-dark, a light-drinking shade of black that he recognizes at once, now that he finally has the opportunity to observe it: bedrock. 

[Deep trilling sounds from the Sentinel.]

X: Rough and segmented like a lobster tail, but also amorphous, cracking and reforming like the barely-set top layer of an underbaked cake. 

S: And the batter underneath? Squirming, twitching tearror, unmistakably. 

X: The Sentinel seems unaware of them, or at least unconcerned with them. It’s very hard to tell exactly what it’s doing, obscured as it is by dense layers of bizarre alien jungle undergrowth. 

S: But they watch as its rippling appendages investigate the trunk of a bulbous orange plant, almost like a caress, before burrowing down into the red soil and ripping the plant out by its roots.

M: The Sentinel shakes off a bunch of spiky little burr-like worms, manually plucking off the stubborn few that remain before it lays the uprooted dewormed plant aside atop a wilted, rotting pile of other uprooted plants– 

S: all different, except for a certain bulbous silhouette that they all kind of share. 

M: Merlin’s eyes would widen if they could. The Sentinel looks like it’s… sorting things? 

X: Like a monstrous gardener harvesting its grotesque crop, the Sentinel picks over all the nearby flora and fauna, selecting a variety of plump ovoid-shaped things to add to its heap. 

S: The crew stay huddled, motionless, trapped in hiding as long as the Sentinel remains nearby.

X: After encountering the Sentinel in exclusively life-threatening maximum-speed situations, it is disturbingly surreal to see it in this mode: industrious, obsessive, meticulous. 

S: It barely moves its huge body while its countless appendages rove over everything within reach. 

M: It peels a strip of rubbery bark away from a nearby shrub and appears to deliberate for several seconds before placing it purposefully aside. A new pile? A pile for… rubbery things? Merlin can only speculate. 

S: Tzila, ever the naturalist, is peering through the foliage with deep fascination – mixed, of course, with horror. She reflexively reaches for where she normally keeps her sketchbook stowed, only to remember that she doesn’t have it on her. 

X: Rawfield is sitting cross-legged, eyes half-closed, taking deep measured breaths, while beside her Guy squats in a similarly meditative way, the flickering of his brain-bag reduced to practically nothing. 

S: After what feels like forever, but is probably only minutes, there’s a sudden shift in the Sentinel’s energy. 

X: And it suddenly seizes the bulbous orange tree – by far the largest item in the pile – and plunges it into the nearby pool of lava. 

M: There is a sudden wave of heat and a brightening of the lava, and the entire jungle flares as though lit by a growing sunrise.

S: The ground trembles and the Sentinel launches up into the air in a maelstrom of swimming black limbs, and flashes away over the jungle canopy, vanishing.

X: The jungle light brightens, brightens… and then dims, dims. And soon all is as it was before. The susurrus of strange wildlife resumes. 

M: (Merlin) “A sunular flare,” Merlin murmurs. “Of course.” 

S: With the Sentinel’s absence, there is a collective release of held breath. Rawfield stands, stretches, and helps the frail Guy to his feet. (Rawfield) “Sentinel won’t be gone for long. Let’s get to that door.”

X: She brushes herself off, and with haste starts moving back into the jungle, beckoning. The others follow. 

M: (Merlin) “What in the world was that about?” 

S: (Rawfield) “Sentinel doing Sentinel stuff.”

X: Rawfield’s still moving.

(Hambing) “It seems like the Sentinel collects tearror things from around the cosmos and drops ‘em in here. Sometimes other things seem to get taken too, if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like us.” 

S: Tzila pushes her glasses up the sweaty bridge of her nose. 

X: (Tzila) “And I guess those flare-ups happen when it’s, like, burning stuff? Like we just saw?”

(Hambing) “Seems like it. Funny thing is, it’s almost like a self-defeating cycle. It incinerates stuff, which seems to make the sun go all turbo-mode, which probably just causes more tearrors than usual around the cosmos, which makes even more work for the Sentinel in the long run.” 

S: Felix tuts. (Felix) “It’s always the system, man.”

M: Merlin holds up a hand. (Merlin) “I don’t mean to be difficult, but how do you KNOW we’re inside the sun? I’ll admit, the heat and the lava is all very thematic, but it doesn’t prove anything.” 

S: Guy speaks up now, his voice a hoarse wheeze, his withered pedipalps fluttering weakly. 

X: (Guy) “It is the sun. When I was taken by the Sentinel, I remained fully conscious of my body’s movements as the sunbeam ripped me here.”

M: (Merlin) “Oh my. You must have been alone here for quite some time before Rawfield, Micky, and Hambing joined you. Steve told us about you. He thought you were dead.”

X: (Guy) [laughs weakly] “Yes, so I heard.”

S: (Rawfield) “Without Guy here, we might not have made it.” 

X: Rawfield does not look back as she speaks, moving ahead, forging through the jungle. 

S: (Rawfield) “He has a knack for identifying what’s edible in this forest, what’s potable. Eating anything in here is kind of like spinning a roulette wheel. Nine times out of ten, it just makes you sick.”

X: Everybody looks for an uncomfortable moment at Guy, who is clearly suffering from some kind of advanced malnutrition here. 

S: (Rawfield) “But it’s better than starving. My Delta survival training barely even applies here. I was fucked up for days after my first couple of weird fruits.” 

X: (Hambing) “Yeahhh,” says Hambing. “It was pretty awful.”

M: Micky, too, looks a little green around the gills, recalling the travails of survival, the endless vomiting. Ugh. 

X: Rawfield readjusts her makeshift rucksack made of leaves and woven grasses. Micky, Hambing, and Guy are all carrying similar satchels. 

S: (Rawfield) “I don’t know what we’ll find outside this jungle,”

X: Rawfield says, 

S: (Rawfield) “but we’ve been stockpiling as much food and water as we can carry. Should be enough to keep us all alive for a little while – especially since you don’t eat anymore, Merlin.”

Tzila trots ahead a few paces to walk next to Guy. 

X: (Tzila) “Have you ever seen the Sentinel eat?” 

(Guy) “Never, no.”

(Tzila) “Do you know where it goes to sleep? If it sleeps?”

X: (Guy) “No idea. I don’t think it does.”

S: Tzila huffs in exasperation, stepping carefully around a patch of sticky moss. 

X: (Tzila) “So it’s like cleaning or maintaining this environment for some reason, but not to feed itself? Argh, its behavior doesn’t make any sense! All creatures have reasons for doing what they do, even if it’s not obvious at first, but this thing? I feel… like we’re, like we’re missing something.” 

S: She treks along behind Merlin, deep in thought. 

X: (Tzila) “It can transport itself and other things along beams of light in the blink of an eye. It can detect tearrors seemingly from anywhere, but it loses interest the second those tearrors are gone. And when we shot it, we saw that it has some kind of a fold inside of it, but now that we’ve seen it up close, it just, it looks like its skin is made of bedrock or something?” 

M: Merlin is listening intently. Tzila has his gears turning now, too. 

S: Literally. 

M: (Merlin) “Perhaps it’s not a creature at all?” 

X: Tzila, staring at the back of Merlin’s metal head: (Tzila) “You know, I don’t think it is. I’ve been trying and trying to understand it as an animal, when it’s acting a hell of a lot more like–” 

S: Merlin turns his head 180 degrees to look at her.

M: (Merlin) “A machine.” 

X: (Hambing) “We’ve never seen it do anything other than work. That’s pretty machine-like? When it’s not out there collecting stuff, it’s here – rummaging around, sorting stuff, burning stuff.”

S: Felix looks unimpressed, big surprise. (Felix) “And yet this place is still a mess. The sun seems understaffed, if you ask me.”

X: (Hambing) “And a good thing too. If the Sentinel wasn’t so busy, it might have more time for us. Luckily, we don’t seem to interest it any more than any of this other stuff… unless we make a commotion. So, we play it safe.” 

M: (Merlin) “And what happens if it gets you?” 

X: Rawfield shrugs. 

S: (Rawfield) “Did you see how it incinerated that plant?” 

X: Tzila gulps. (Tzila) “Yeah, like shoveling coal into a furnace.” 

(Guy) “The sun is dying. The sun must be fed. [wheeze] Don’t let the Sentinel find you.”

M: (Merlin) “Come to think of it, Steve mentioned another individual. Barbara? Where…” 

S: Guy’s weak head-liquid concentrates grimly on Merlin. 

X: (Guy) “The solar flare caused by her incineration lasted for hours. Like I said, don’t let it catch you.”

S: At the top of a twisting uphill jungle slope, deep in underbrush, there is, like Rawfield said, another door. 

M: This one is encrusted in vines, deeply overgrown, but unmistakably similar to the first door Merlin encountered. 

X: (Guy) “Can you open it?” 

S: Guy asks, eyeball slewing hopefully. 

X: (Guy) “Please, please, tell me you can.”

M: (Merlin) “Of course, I will try,” Merlin says, winding up his bocular servos. “Please retreat to a safe–” 

X: But then the rainforest darkens into a sudden twilight. 

S: The ambient temperature drops rapidly. It’s still not anywhere near cold, but it’s as though the power has been cut. 

M: The rivulets of lava dripping from the cave ceiling abruptly slow and start to fade to that dark orangey-brown.

S: (Micky) “Sunbeam!” 

X: Micky yells. 

S: (Micky) “Sentinel’s beaming away. Go, go!”

M: (Merlin) “O-oh, is that what’s happening? How fascinating–”

S: (Rawfield) “NOW, Merlin! While it’s gone!” 

X: Rawfield yells. 

M: And Merlin heaves the door. Dark red stone flakes and breaks around the point of movement. Clearly, none of these doors have been opened in a very long time, and the structure of the sun has started to settle in around them.

S: With a tearing of ivies and a horrific grinding of stone, the door begins to open, and Guy shudders with emotion. 

X: (Guy) “Yes!” 

S: he wheezes. 

X: (Guy) “Oh my stars, yes! Hurry!” 

S: And without wasting a moment, Guy gelatinously squeezes through the aperture. 

M: (Merlin) “Quick, everyone!” Merlin grunts. “Go!” 

X: The others dart through, and Merlin effortfully twists himself around to the other side of the aperture as the jungle begins to re-illuminate, temperature rising again as the sunbeaming ceases, and a huge mushroomy mass of tearror-soaked fungus materializes above the jungle – the latest of the Sentinel’s acquisitions – and plummets into the trees with a crash, 

S: as, with a screech of smoking dynamos, Merlin drops the heavy slab of the door shut. 

X: Micky catches him, narrowly avoiding burning herself on Merlin’s scalding-hot arm motors. 

S: (Micky) “Ough! Go, Super-Merlin! Holy shit!”

M: Here on the far side of the door, an empty rectangular corridor leads forth into dim lava-lit darkness. 

X: There are no jungle trees. 

S: There are no piles of inanimate – or animate – objects. 

M: Just veins of slow molten rock eerily glowing in the walls of a minimalist dark stone passageway. 

X: (Guy) “Yes, yes, yes,” 

S: Guy is panting weakly.

X: (Guy) “Merlin, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!”

S: And he slumps to the floor. 

X: (Guy) “Oh, I thought that chamber would be my tomb. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

M: (Merlin) “You’re… welcome. You’re welcome.” 

S: Rawfield crouches beside Guy, taking one of his limp appendages in her hands. (Rawfield) “We’re gonna get you out of here, Guy. We’re gonna make it. You’re gonna make it.” 

M: Guy’s feeble brain fluids peer at Ripley waveringly.

X: (Guy) “You are very kind, Ripley Doctor. No matter how this ends, you have already helped me more than you can ever know.”

S: He struggles to his feet. 

X: (Guy) “I am sure you can all see that I am not well. Life on the sun has not agreed with me. Your doctor has been making a valiant attempt to treat me, for which I am very grateful.” Rawfield assesses him, examining him with keen medical attentions. 

S: (Rawfield) “His anatomy is pretty different from ours, but by treating him almost as if he were like a living Foldlight, we’ve been managing. I wish Ephraim were still with us. He might actually know better what to do.” 

M: Rawfield is putting up a stern professional front, but it’s clear that her patient is not doing as well as she would prefer. Solitary confinement in a lava prison and a diet of tearror-generated nonsense jungle food would take its toll on most people after a while. 

X: The corridor is long and quiet. It has the same volcanic subterranean feeling, that same dark red sunstone. 

S: Gone are the chaotic piles of unsorted tearror nonsense. Instead, as they walk, vast diverging hallways – all with that subtle downward curve of the floor, like walking on the outside of a bowl – branch around them, bathed in glowing red-orange light from rivers and flowing falls of sun-stuff. 

M: Open doorways yawn, revealing barren cubic rooms. Short featureless hallways go nowhere, or connect cavernous rooms and access points. 

X: A recursive pattern of strange stone cube chambers, all devoid of furniture, features, decor. No sign of life. 

S: Not so much as a fascinating skeleton for them to study. 

M: Lousy no-skeletons cosmos. 

X: The group walks in eerie silence, gazing at the incomprehensible geometric style and form of the passages, reminiscent in some ways of the dark geometric city at the edges of the cosmos. 

S: It is clearly of the same culture, crafted for beings and bodies of natures unknown. 

X: Or for no beings and no bodies. It is still wildly unclear. 

S: Sorta a spooky interdimensional version of the backrooms, dark ruby-red and lit with dramatic veins of lava. These empty hallways spill off into mysterious expanses, but are they worth exploring?

M: Merlin makes that kazoo noise again. (Merlin) “What even IS this place? What is it FOR? This area doesn’t look like it has anything to do with managing tearrors!” 

X: Rawfield is still walking, stalking forward down the dim corridors. 

S: (Rawfield) “Stay focused. We should keep looking for a way up. Let’s go.” 

X: (Guy) “This sun is nothing like the one where Steve and Barbara and I come from.” 

S: Rawfield takes a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. (Rawfield) “Ah, so, yes. About Steve…” 

M: (Merlin) “What about him?” 

S: (Rawfield) “I got Sentinel’d before I had the chance to meet him, but Micky and Hambing filled me in. Sounds like he’s been real helpful. Thing is…” 

X: (Guy) “He hasn’t been honest with you.”

M: Merlin darts his gaze at Guy. (Merlin) “Wh-what? What do you mean? Is he dangerous? He’s out there right now with the Biological Man, Cleo, Dot – all the children, basically – and Everett!” 

S: (Rawfield) “He’s… I don’t know.” 

X: Rawfield shakes her head. 

S: (Rawfield) “I almost said something to them over the teletheric, but they might be safer if we play dumb for now. If Steve’s been friendly to you all this time, he’s probably not going to act different unless he feels cornered.”

X: (Guy) “Steve knows I’m alive now, and he knows I know the truth. In our cosmos, Steve was… well, some called him a prophet.”

M: (Merlin) “He said he was a cosmologist!” 

X: (Guy) “Can’t a person be both?”

M: (Merlin) “So when Steve said that you were his student, what he really meant was–” 

X: (Guy) “Students, disciples – call it what you will. We believed in him. And how could we not? His ideas were so new, his vision of reality so glorious, his charisma so intoxicating. And then of course, there is his looks. I mean, you’ve all seen him. He’s almost too beautiful to be real!” 

S: Whatever snide remark Felix is about to make is swiftly curtailed by Tzila’s elbow to his stomach. [Felix grunts] 

M: Guy chuckles weakly.

X: (Guy) “Ah, yes. Because of his many gifts, he was gaining followers by the hundreds. Barbara and I were among the most loyal. We believed in him as though in a god, and that is probably why we survived the crossing.” [coughing and wheezing]

S: A glob of some translucent fluid disgorges from the bottom of Guy’s headsack, and he twitches a pedipalp, flinging it into a nearby canal of lava where it sizzles like a fried egg. 

X: (Guy) “Excuse me, I may have overestimated my walking and talking stamina. I’ll keep this brief. The others’ belief in Steve must have been less complete, and because they had doubt, they were destroyed. Or perhaps they ended up elsewhere. We’ll never know.” 

S: Micky is listening to all of this solemnly. (Micky) “Makes me wonder if Mother Artifice had some similar power. Did he… believe us here?” 

X: Guy shrugs weakly. (Guy) “I cannot say. I did not know your Artifice. Steve knew that there were other cosmoses, but even he knew nothing of the particulars. He knew nothing of THIS realm, its laws, its Sentinel. We were as clueless as infants when we arrived, drifting in the void. Barbara tried to fly, to take stock of this place, but flying requires a bright focus, of course, and she was taken immediately.”

M: (Merlin) [sputtering] “You– You– You can fly?!”

X: (Guy) “Yes, and how I miss it. We survived together for a short while, Steve and I, inside a bubble of fold that we were fortunate enough to be engulfed by, but we were powerless to leave it. We had no more command over our circumstances than the meager organisms upon which we subsisted. All we knew was that we were no longer the apex life forms of our environment. And after some time, Steve asked me to… to think. To start out dim and slowly grow brighter. He said he had a plan to take us to another cosmos. I was afraid, of course, but I trusted him. He had already proven the impossible to be true once, and it was only my belief in him that saved me, so I did as he asked… and then…”

M: Guy starts hacking and wheezing up a storm. 

S: Apparently, monologuing and walking is proving to be a little much for him. 

X: Rawfield pats his back gently. 

S: (Rawfield) “That’s enough, Guy. Take a break. How about some of those calming thought exercises you taught me?” 

M: And after a moment he seems to mellow out and normalize, just a bit. 

X: To the others, Rawfield says, 

S: (Rawfield) “Long story short, Steve tricked him. He just wanted to see exactly how much mental activity was safe before it would attract the Sentinel. He used Guy like a test subject.” 

X: Her expression is grim. 

S: (Rawfield) “Which begs the question: how is he planning to use all of us?” 

X: A somber silence for a moment, as they traverse the dark halls. 

M: (Merlin) “I suppose it would be a bad idea to confront him until we’re all back together again.” 

X: (Tzila) “Could you speak to the Biological Man privately?” 

S: Tzila asks.

M: (Merlin) “There’s no way to ensure that Steve isn’t listening without tipping him off. I don’t love the idea of letting him run amok on our ship, but maybe it is the safest if we don’t reveal what we know – at least until we have the upper hand.”

S: (Micky) “Now you know how helpless we’ve been feeling,” 

X: Micky says. 

S: (Micky) “We knew all this about him, but we didn’t have any way to tell you. We just had to hope that you were all okay, and trust your judgment.” 

X: She takes a long self-soothing breath. 

S: (Micky) “I’ve been telling myself: Steve needs us. So for the time being, he really has no reason to sabotage things.”

X: (Guy) “As far as he knows, I may even still be loyal to him. I was, for a long time, even after the Sentinel took me. It took much solitary self-reflection, trapped within that jungle, for me to accept that Steve only ever saw me as a tool for his ego.”

S: (Rawfield) “Whatever Steve knows or doesn’t know, we can’t do much until we get out of here, so… let’s just see if we can keep going up.” 

X: Rawfield turns down a dark pathway. 

S: (Rawfield) “Here. This looks like a way.” 

M: Indeed – there’s another ascent right here, an upwardly-sloping ramp leading toward yet another one of those doors. Merlin is starting to get a little nervous. How many layers does this damn onion-sun have? This… sunion. 

S: Definitely not a Funyun. 

M: Is he going to run out of boc power before they can make any meaningful progress? 

X: Well, there is only one way to find out, and it involves opening this door. 

S: Merlin opens the door – this one unencumbered with jungle, much easier to lift.

M: And as he does, bright, brilliant sunlight floods in along with a fresh wave of heat, and as they step through and their eyes adjust to the sudden change, a spectacular vista greets their eyes.

[A dramatic choral swell.]

S: A vast, radiant chamber, far larger than any other they’ve seen, like an enormous enclosed plaza with a smooth floor of polished sunstone that arcs gently down in every direction like a huge blood-red marble, curving away out of sight with no walls, no obstructions whatsoever to divide the space. 

M: Elegant lava-filled pillars of hollow glass rise up from the floor at irregular intervals to support the ceiling, from which an overwhelming honey-amber-rose light radiates. 

X: And oh, the ceiling.

(Hambing) “Whaaat the fuuuck…”

M: (Merlin) “Oh. My. Word.” 

S: Overhead, like a blazing sunset sky, an immense glassy ceiling fills their vision: the outermost layer of the onion.

X: Filling the hollow ceiling like water in an overhead aquarium display, lava swirls and flows, arcing over their heads, disappearing over the curvature of the huge room in every direction.

M: Micky gasps. 

S: (Micky) “Look!” 

M: She points up at a gap in the flowing lava, like a momentary break in the clouds. 

X: Through it, a glimpse of a dark expanse, floating blob belt fold bubbles lit by sunlight – and suspended distantly within one of them, a sharp, gleaming, iridescent chevron of dark mica. 

S: (Micky) “It’s the Ship, you guys. We really ARE in the sun.” 

X: And Micky watches that ship with yearning, until the view is swallowed up by the orangey-red brightness once again. 

M: Rawfield shields her eyes from the glaring ceiling. 

S: (Rawfield) “Guess it was too much to hope for that we’d find a convenient hatch leading back outside.” 

X: Here and there, other brief gaps in the lava cover permit momentary glimpses of the dark cosmos beyond, always fleeting. 

S: Everyone’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling, and the ceiling itself gradually demands more and more of their attention.

M: The entire glass expanse is intricately textured, embossed with gleaming representations of strange streets, cubic Escher buildings, weird boulevards. 

X: Where the glassy pillars intersect with the ceiling, lava flows either upwards or downwards, circulating to and from the glass city ceiling like blood, flowing through the pillars of the room like architectural, geological veins.

S: Micky is boggling. (Micky) “Am I crazy, or is this a scale model of the entire city surrounding this cosmos?” 

X: Merlin, Tzila, and Felix, who have all spent considerable time collectively trying to map that very city, immediately see the uncanny resemblance. 

S: (Felix) “What the hell?”

X: Felix gapes, eyes wide. 

M: Tzila trots away a short distance, craning her neck. She shouts and points. 

X: (Tzila) “Hey, look, that’s, that’s – that’s where our camp was! I recognize that weird geodesic dome thingy! You’re totally right, Micky. And the locations of the pits, they… correspond with the pillars…” 

S: Micky’s gaze sweeps over the glowing glass columns, observing how the lava flows upward in some of them and downward in others.

S: (Felix) “Suck holes and blow holes!”

X: Felix proclaims.

(Hambing) “Wow, there’s so many! Hang on, suck holes and blow holes? Is that what you’re calling them?”

M: (Merlin) “No!” 

S: Rawfield gives them all a sideways glance. (Rawfield) “Okay. Interesting. But why? Why is this here? What is the point of all this shit in the sun?” 

X: Guy has taken an exhausted seat on the floor, bobbling his head-stalk weakly. (Guy) “All this time I thought the sun was just a prison. But the things we have now seen… they seem to indicate a much grander purpose.” 

S: What DOES it all mean? Merlin has sort of seized up, eyes blinking on and off as he gazes around. 

M: Merlin’s head ratchets around. He ponders the orb. (Merlin) “No one could have believed…”

S: Felix sighs huffily. (Felix) “What, Merlin? Spit it out.” 

M: (Merlin) “As a perspective within a machine, believe me when I say: we are inside of a machine.” He gazes upward, bathed in golden light, and for the first time in far too long he feels that old familiar feeling of puzzle pieces clicking into place. Of epiphany. Of understanding. Of certainty. 

Merlin clasps his hands. (Merlin) “It’s all connected! Everything in this place has been engineered. This entire cosmos is a giant Foldlight, and the sun is the glowing filament at its core.”