Narrator 1: Darkness.

Narrator 2: Stillness.

Narrator 3: The storm… is over.

Narrator 2: In the caves beneath the Stationary Hill post office, everyone is slowly regaining their senses, returning to some normal awareness of things.

Narrator 1: There is hollow air whispering in the cave. Dimly, voices. Breathing in the dark.

Narrator 2: It’s a strange kind of collective awakening.

Narrator 1: How long has it been? Days? Weeks?

Narrator 2: They have no idea how much time has passed.

Narrator 1: Maybe mere seconds.

Narrator 2: It’s kind of like the first few bleary moments of sobriety after an insane bender or an incredibly bad trip.

Narrator 1: Saskia isn’t sure where her body begins or ends. She’s lying on rocks in the dark, her legs spread out, her head bent back over what feels like wooden beams or something made out of metal. It’s impossible to tell. She moves her hands. She feels pebbles underneath her back.

Narrator 2: As a starting place, she tries to wiggle her fingers and her toes, and the movement makes her so dizzy she almost throws up.

Narrator 1: She hears dim voices in the cave around her.

Narrator 2: People are starting to whisper to each other: “Is it over?” [Voices echoing with strange duplication.]

Narrator 1: (as an anonymous voice in the cave) “Hello?” [The voice has a strange double-echo.]

Narrator 2: (as another voice in the cave) “Are you ok?” [Double echo.]

Narrator 1: (a voice) “Is anyone there? I can’t hear anything. I can’t hear my… I can’t hear myself.” [Double echo.]

Narrator 2: People are taking stock of themselves and the state that they have been left in. They are groping through the darkness trying to reconnect with their friends and family and neighbors.

Narrator 1: The air still sizzles faintly with a strange life. The room is free of fold, though in the total darkness it is hard to tell. The strange humidity of the Fold, the odd warmth and wetness of the air, seems to have abated. Perhaps the Fold is gone altogether?

Narrator 2: Saskia’s dogs have become restless, roaming up and down the maintenance stairs but unable to get out unless someone opens the door for them. They come over to Saskia. She feels them nosing her face, urging her to get up, whining. Their noses feel too cold. Their whining is too loud.

Narrator 1: She tries to right herself gingerly in the dark, her head absolutely spinning, the darkness seeming to pulsate before her eyes.

Narrator 3: It’s like her sense of proprioception is entirely out of whack.

Narrator 1: Her sense of touch doesn’t make any sense. The depth and distance of the cave is incomprehensible in the dark. Voices seem to echo from multiple directions at once. [As a voice in the cave:] “Can we go up? Is it safe?”

Narrator 2: And slowly, painfully, as a group, what’s left of Stationary Hill begins to make its way above ground, supporting each other, stumbling over what remains of the people that didn’t make it in the darkness, the shattered fragments of the Postmaster crunching underfoot.

Narrator 1: In the dark, the damage that has been dealt to the inhabitants is invisible. Someone will need to return later with a lantern to see what they’ve truly lost.

Narrator 2: But they are here… for each other.

Narrator 1: Some of them.

Narrator 2: And together, helping each other, they make their way up the steep, narrow, rocky maintenance stairway and open the door to the surface.

[A door opens. A desolate wind blows.]

Narrator 2: Bright unlight blinds them. They blink like subterranean creatures crawling out of their cave.

Narrator 3: And the first of many incomprehensible sights greets their eyes.

Narrator 2: (Those of them that still have eyes.) They spill out of the narrow doorway. There is something, someone, kind of stuck to the doorway. An unfortunate soul who didn’t make it inside in time.

Narrator 1: Stuck to the outside of the door. What’s left of them. And the post office is… well, not much of a post office anymore. That’s not to say that it’s gone or that it’s been destroyed — oh, no, it’s here, all right. It just… isn’t… quite… the same as it once was.

Narrator 2: It is so BRIGHT. Saskia cannot STAND how bright it is. She holds her hands up to her eyes.

Narrator 3: And she’s at once aware of Emmet helping her, steadying her…

Narrator 2: Or IS it Emmet? Is it Patricia? She can’t tell. [As Emmet:] “Whoa, whoa, whoa, sit down, ma’am!” Emmet tells her. [Emmet’s voice echoes doubly.]

Narrator 1: (as Patricia) “Have a seat,” Patricia tells her as well. [Patricia’s voice echoes doubly.] She has a seat on a rock. She has a seat on a chair. That doesn’t make any sense. What?

Narrator 2: Around her, the people are exploring what’s left of the post office. It’s not really a building anymore: the walls have folded down. They’ve collapsed. It’s as though the whole building was changed into a cardboard box and then it was flattened.

Narrator 3: A template instead of a building.

Narrator 1: Walls fused with shelves, boxes half-embedded through each other.

Narrator 2: Someone goes and picks at one of the fallen walls and it bends like corrugated cardboard in their grip. Saskia gathers her strength, lifts her head, and looks across the group of people… and finds herself making eye contact with…

Narrator 1: Well, with many familiar faces. Emmet is here. He seems… hollower than before, somehow. There’s an odd glassiness to him that she can’t quite put her finger on.

Narrator 3: Widespread amongst the survivors are many inky black Fold scars that have appeared on various parts of their bodies. Biceps. Hands. Legs. Tongues. One survivor has five new eyes. Another has had their whole skeleton corkscrewed counterclockwise, but they feel better than they have in years; a tearror fixed what chiropractors could not. Another keeps complaining about the overpowering scent and flavor of bitter lemon assaulting her senses at every moment. [As the lemon-assaulted townsperson:] “Do you taste this? Is it just me?” [Her voice echoes doubly.]

Narrator 1: And scattered here and there across the terrain of the warped town of Stationary Hill are quite a few other bodies. Some alive. Some… very definitely dead, who have undergone distortions too terrible or incomprehensible to describe.

Narrator 2: Outside the post office, though the post office technically doesn’t have an outside OR an inside anymore, Ettie and Ellie are having a very bizarre argument.

[Echoing laughter.]

Narrator 2: Ettie is doubled over in the dust just screaming with laughter, a look of absolute mirth and delight on her face while her horrified sister, Ellie, is pleading with her: “Please stop! Stop it, Ettie! Ettie, why are you laughing?”

[Laughter continues, echoing doubly.]

Narrator 1: Saskia hears Ellie’s frightened cry from multiple directions at once. She clutches her head, bewildered and dizzy.

Narrator 2: There are so many transformations around her in the people that she knows. Some of them easy to see… some of them not so easy. But no one has come out of this unmarked. Or… almost no one. As her gaze drifts around the scene, taking in incomprehensible sight after incomprehensible sight, she feels totally desensitized to shock. There is simply too much new information to process at once. So what happens next… doesn’t make any immediate impression on her.

[A beat.]

Narrator 2: She finds herself staring into her own eyes.

[A moment.]

Narrator 2: She is seated there in an incongruously unscathed chair by the post office counter, looking dazed and nauseous, covered in reddish dust, Emmet keeping an eye on her… while at the same time, she is seated here on a pile of rocks next to where the mission door used to be, Patricia comfortingly patting her back. Both things are true.

Narrator 1: And very suddenly it comes together for her:

[A moment of realization.]

Narrator 1: There are two of her now. There are two Saskias.

Narrator 2: Patricia and Emmet also realize this at around the same time.

Narrator 1: (as Emmet) “Saskia…?” [Emmet’s voice echoes doubly.] Emmet’s eyes are going wide with dawning comprehension.

Narrator 2: And others start to notice. And of course there’s a lot going on. It’s… it’s not exactly the most interesting revelation, but it’s up there.

Narrator 3: Emmet does his best to make sense of the situation and, approaching the Saskia he is nearest, says: “Are you… ok? Are you… Saskia? Are you an evil twin? Did you get turned INTO Saskia? Are you someone else?” [Emmet’s voice echoes doubly.]

Narrator 2: (as one or more Saskias) “No, I… I… I…” [Saskia’s voice comes from two bodies at once.] Saskia can hear her voice coming out of both of her mouths. It’s very disorienting. She tries to close one of them. “It’s… it’s… it’s me, Emmet… I’m just… more… now. But it… there’s just one of me… I just, ugh… I’m… I’m so dizzy… I’m sorry.” [Saskia’s voice echoes doubly.]

Narrator 3: (as Patricia) “Well, understandably so, dear!” Patricia says.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Look, I’m… I’m all right. Just… you don’t need to worry about me right now. I’m sure there are other people who need help more than I do right now.”

Narrator 1: Saskia’s two dogs approach the two Saskias, completely unconcerned by this unusual predicament. The two dogs lick Saskia’s four hands.

Narrator 2: And, well… if the dogs aren’t concerned, the people of Stationary Hill reason they have nothing to be concerned about either. Dogs know what’s up.

Narrator 1: Well, they have plenty of other things to be concerned about today, Saskia (or Saskias) least among them. The town of Stationary Hill sprawls before them, barely recognizable.

Narrator 2: Still a hill, technically.

Narrator 3: So there’s that.

Narrator 2: So they don’t have to change the name.

Narrator 1: The survivors get to their feet, taking stock of each other, taking stock of the warped post office around them, and begin to set forth gingerly, dizzily, into what remains of their home. Immediately adjacent to the post office, the Trust’s former mission stands completely reconfigured.

Narrator 2: What looks like a shining crystal tree has sprouted into being where the bank machine used to be.

Narrator 3: Erupting from the bank machine.

Narrator 2: Its trunk and branches hollow echoes of what might have been pneumatic tubes before the tearror hit: twisted, fractalized, transformed and multiplied into something like branches.

Narrator 1: Warped amalgamations of thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of Valor and Caenum beads rain down gently from the crystalline canopy.

Narrator 2: The glass of the tree catching the light and casting rainbow prisms across the ground, its branches growing upwards and intertwining with the frame of the post office tower, lending a strange glittering organic form to its familiar landmark silhouette.

Narrator 1: With Emmet and Patricia supporting her various shoulders, Saskia carefully takes stock of herself.

Narrator 2: She feels fairly certain that she is still one person. She just has a more complicated body now.

Narrator 3: It’s like when you move into a big house: you’re not quite sure how you’re going to use all those rooms — all those limbs — but you figure it out.

Narrator 2: It could be worse, she reminds herself.

Narrator 1: She looks upon herself as her self looks upon her… warily. Her self seems to be… herself.

Narrator 2: She walks over to herself, tells Emmet and Patricia: “I’ll… take it from here.” [Both Saskias speak together.]

Narrator 1: And herselves give herselves a hand down the street.

Narrator 2: And she turns her attention back to her town — her home — taking it all in with her new strange four-eyed compound vision. It is a beautiful, clear, peaceful day.

Narrator 1: No tearror to be seen, though the aftermath of its presence… all too apparent.

Narrator 2: Difficult to tell exactly what time of day it is,

Narrator 1: or even how many days have passed,

Narrator 2: without the telltale benchmark of the moon as reference. And Saskia walks herself down Main Street.

Narrator 1: Things aren’t the way they used to be. Goe’s Garag, for example, looks completely incomprehensible: it is now an inside-out mishmash of walls, upended floor, tools turned into other tools, ceiling into floor, floor turned into rocks,

Narrator 3: vehicles the size of tools,

Narrator 1: And the sign of Goe’s Garag, already a famous local landmark of small-town eccentricity and typography gone very wrong, has been weirded further still, now, into ‘Goe’s GGGGGGGG…’ — an endlessly-repeating stream of what looks like the letter ‘G’, though maybe not quite after about the 30th instance of its presence upon the signage. The Fold had done incredibly strange things. Everywhere they look, incomprehensible transformations abound — some almost humorous, others absolutely terrifying.

Narrator 2: It’s kind of like if you were to feed a neural network an idea of what a town was supposed to be: an idea of what THIS town, Stationary Hill, is like… and it just ran with it. And it doesn’t really know what you’re talking about, but it’s trying its best.

Narrator 1: Stationary Hill reimagined…

Narrator 2: …through an alien mind.

Narrator 1: The neighborhood where our good ol’ buddy Fuze used to live just keeps repeating down the hillside over and over again, endless iterations of the same row house warping and convolving over the distance, receding down the hill to ground level, where it dissipates into an odd haze of boards and windows disembodied from their homes.

Narrator 2: Saskia becomes aware of the sound of running water and sees a little stream that didn’t used to be there meandering its way down next to the main street.

Narrator 1: The trickling water doesn’t quite occupy the creek-bed at times; it flows, bizarrely displaced by several feet, here and there babbling downstream in midair above the ground with total confidence as though it were totally normal for water to do that sort of thing.

Narrator 3: A couple of the side streets Saskia passes completely remade as if out porcelain.

Narrator 2: The changes are not all bad or destructive; many of the buildings which were under construction, which were only partially completed, have now been completed!

Narrator 1: Not always in a very helpful or even particularly habitable way.

Narrator 3: Among the populace of Stationary Hill trying to get their bearings, Saskias’ eyes alight on a third dog. A third hound.

Narrator 2: Several people notice, actually. There’s an old dog wandering around in the middle of the street.

Narrator 1: A bandana around his neck.

Narrator 3: Something that could be used as a blindfold… if necessary.

Narrator 1: He’s sort of an old dog. A sort of a hound, as you may recall. Saskia — Saskias — see him, and the recognition is slow but sincere.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Landlord? What are… what are you doing here?”

Narrator 1: The old dog regards her, coming forward.

Narrator 2: Saskia’s own foldhounds, Barty and Lloyd, go bounding up to him, sniffing excitedly.

Narrator 1: (Emmet) “You know this guy?” Emmet asks, as Landlord, approaching Saskia, licks at one of her four hands.

Narrator 2: Saskia takes a moment to decide which mouth to speak out of. “Well, yes, he… he was just this old dog that lived in the town when the first settlers got here and… we called him Landlord because it seemed like he owned the place.”

[Landlord woofs.]

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “I haven’t seen him in a long time. He wandered off into the desert one day and just never came back. I thought he died. Hey, boy.”

[Landlord woofs again.]

Narrator 3: And for just a moment, in this fractalline chaos, are two women and three dogs.

Narrator 2: You didn’t think we’d hurt Landlord, did you?

Narrator 3: We’re unreliable narrators, not monsters.

Narrator 2: To his mind, nothing is really wrong. He and the other two foldhounds are totally fine with all this chaos. Lots of new smells, but nothing to be concerned about.

Narrator 1: Accompanied by her hound companions and a gaggle of other survivors,

Narrator 2: Saskia turns toward the place that she is most curious to check on.

Narrator 1: Just down the hill and around the bend stands what remains of the Black Candle Cabaret.

Narrator 2: ‘What remains’ is a funny way of putting it because there’s actually a whole lot more of the cabaret than there was before. It’s been expanded.

Narrator 1: Several odd misshapen mismatched floors — beyond the previous complement of floors that the cabaret once had — appear to have been added to the structure.

Narrator 2: Other than the post office tower, it is now among the tallest structures in the town.

Narrator 1: It has been rearranged. It has been reconfigured. Its exterior now appears to have more than four walls. Why, it seems to have seven or eight. It is an odd geometric tangram of a building now.

Narrator 2: Saskia thinks ruefully to herself that… Moc Weepe would love this. He was always going on about how they needed to expand and build upward and turn the Black Candle into a chain.

Narrator 1: It has an extra porch now growing off one side of the building somewhat organically in a fairly meaningless way. Why, there isn’t even a stairway or a door to get onto it.

Narrator 3: ‘Smoking patio?’

Narrator 1: …she thinks to herself. With a little bit of work.

Narrator 2: Others are returning from their own explorations. At this point everyone has gotten the lay of the land but there’s an overwhelming sense of wanting to draw together for support, for direction, for a clue of what to do next.

Narrator 3: And no one wants to go back to the post office… so they gather here.

Narrator 2: They know eventually they’ll need to go back down with a light source and pick up the pieces. Literally and figuratively.

Narrator 1: But now here in the daylight they have new work ahead of them.

Narrator 2: There are fewer of them now than there were before the tearror, but those that are left are closer in a way they couldn’t have imagined before.

Narrator 1: Above, distantly overhead: the dim thunderous sound of ships orbiting at a distance — a ragtag collection of mining ships and cargo freighters from the Midst shipyard. Not a single Trust vessel among them. They are just visible now, coming down from the brightness, cautiously returning to the islet of Midst… presumably coming in for a landing. Coming back home. But the survivors here on the ground are not looking skyward.

Narrator 2: They all seem to be looking… to Saskia. To Saskias.

Narrator 1: They’re looking for meaning, and Saskia does her best to provide.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “The Trust was looking for those of you that are in Breach… and they will keep looking. You’re not safe. And if you stay here, you’re probably putting yourself in danger. The Trust will be back. This was just a momentary setback for them. Anyone who wants to leave can and should go. No judgments, no questions asked.”

Narrator 1: “What if we want to stay?” comes a voice from the crowd.

Narrator 3: “Yeah,” comes another. “What if we do?”

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Well… anyone who wants to stay… we have a lot to fix,”

Narrator 1: she says, gesturing around to the decimated town surrounding them.

Narrator 3: And to her amazement, deep concern, but mostly absolutely sincere, almost heartbreaking honor… Saskias’ fellow survivors stay right where they are beside her.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Roll up your sleeves, I suppose,”

Narrator 3: she says, looking at her brave, beautiful, foolish friends.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Let’s get to work.”