erratio

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Dark.

Light. Dark.

Light. Dark.

Light.

It's blinding at first. Your ears are ringing, your nose is burning, and your mouth is full of copper taste. You can't feel anything except the pins and needles all over your body.

An image briefly flashes through your mind's eye, vast and intricate, too quickly for you to really process it, and in its wake the painfully overwhelming sensations fade, replaced by shapes of gentle color, green and blue and brown. The air is sweet and fresh. The ground underneath you is soft and tickles with blades of grass. There is a whisper of wind and the rustling of tree branches above you.

As your vision resolves into proper focus, you see that you're lying in the shade beneath a lone tree, standing tall on the top of a hill in the middle of a grassy field. The pain is already fading from memory, not forgotten but safely isolated from undesired recollection by the succor of this pleasant resting place. You just lie there for a long while, staring into the gently waving leaves overhead, but eventually you can feel restlessness build in your muscles, and then a desire to get up and move. In that moment, two things happen simultaneously: you realize that your body is not obeying you; and your body undergoes a brief spasm which, while neither intense nor painful, is still rather discomfiting as it rolls through each an every muscle in your body, including the weird internal ones you don't tend to think about.

Fortunately, after that's over, your body appears to be under your control. Maybe even more so than feels intuitively normal? The muscles' presence is not as disconcertingly obvious as when they spasmed, but seemingly all the muscles in your body are at your command. You think you could even tell your heart to stop beating, if you ever wanted to, though it fortunately requires no conscious effort to continue beating. Somehow, you're able to shove that experience down beneath the same waterline as the pain that accompanied your initial awakening. You'll probably have to come back and process that later, but for now, you stand up, feeling the grass under the soles of your feet as you get a good stretch. You're barefoot right now, but the ground is comfortable under your feet, soft and springy without being muddy. You're lightly dressed, a shirt and shorts hanging from you comfortably, rippling as a breeze blows across the...park-space you appear to be in. At least, that's the vibe you get. The grass is short and even, there aren't any weeds or animals, there's just the one tree. The only thing that's off is that rather than having a park center, a playground, or even just some sidewalks, it's just grass. Endless manicured grass, all the way to the horizon.

A part of you can't help but wonder who mows all of this, but mostly you are starting to freak out. How did you get here? How are you going to get out of here?!

Fortunately these thoughts only have a brief moment to start to spiral before it's halted by another rather surprising event. An angel, or at least someone who looks a lot like one, appears overhead, gliding out from a sort of fold in the sky that you hadn't been able to notice before, not without seeing something emerge from behind it first. Even afterwards, it's hard to identify it, to distinguish it from the rest of the sky. The angel descends towards you. As they get closer, you can make out more of their details: they're a woman it seems like, with enormous snow-white wings, dark skin and hair, and wearing a light blue dress.

"Hey there! You're new right?" The presumed angel asks, once she's within earshot of you. You're not really sure how to respond, and they land next to you with a look of concern on their face. They wait for a moment longer, but when you fail to say anything, they speak again. "Yeah, you're new. Or if you're not, you need some help anyway. You can call me Jaso. Follow me?"

They hold out their hand, and you grab it, gently, without really thinking. Jaso leads you away, initially just down from the little hill that you woke up on, but then you're...moving in a direction you didn't see, away from the endless green grass and through...you're not exactly sure what. You think you might be moving through the fourth dimension? It feels a bit like what you remember visualizations of what 4D stuff would be like, but actually moving through it is really something else. Eventually, after a few minutes of this confusing trek, you manage to ask, "Where are we going?"

"To get you some help," Jaso replies. "I guess that might not really answer your question, but you probably don't have the context to understand exactly what it is. It's not quite like anything back in the Ashes. You might call it an orientation hall, or maybe a tutorial zone or a prologue depending on how you look at it. A clinic wouldn't be far either. I...don't work there, exactly, but I'm associated with them, among many other things. They do good work."

That one question seems to have used up your reserves of verbal strength, so you just nod along to Jaso's explanation. You continue traveling through the shifting multidimensional landscape for a little while longer. You close your eyes to avoid the strain of processing everything that's going on around you (or, trying to process it anyway), but that just makes you even more aware of the subtle feeling of bending and warping in your own body as Jaso leads you through twists and turns in all sorts of directions. It's stomach churning, but it stops soon enough, prompting you to open your eyes. You're walking on something that actually looks like a path, leading up to a building that does, in fact, look quite a bit like a clinic. It's only missing a big red plus (or any other obvious signage, for that matter).

There is still a bit more of a walk, maybe fifteen minutes, before the two of you actually pass through the front doors of the facility. "We've got a fresh one!" Jaso calls out, and there's a sort of fuzzy depth or distorted echo to their voice. It feels like you're missing part of what they said, even though there aren't any gaps in what you heard as far as you can tell.

Jaso's words summon a receptionist from behind the desk in the front room of the clinic, who rushes up to you and supports you with an arm under your shoulder. "Thanks Jazz. I'll take it from here." There's a similar sort of multifacetedness to their speech, with the same frustrating feeling of missing something, before they turn to you, speaking more clearly. "My name's Meluluc, or Luke for short. Jaso brought you here, to this branch of the Refuge, after finding you looking a bit lost in a world-fragment near the inner radius." They give you an assessing look for a moment, during which you can see they have a masculine face, with a strong jaw and some stubble, with tan, almost amber skin and hazel eyes. "That probably doesn't mean a lot to you right now, but maybe a bit. I can give you the rundown in one of our sitting rooms while Lady finishes lunch."

As Luke begins to gently lead you away deeper into 'the Refuge', Jaso gives you some parting words. "I'll be around, but Luke, Lady, and the rest of the Refuge crew have things well in hand. But...if you want to chat, or find yourself interested in my kind of work, just give me a shout?" You nod to them, not really sure how else you could respond, and the possibly-angel heads back out the front doors, wings twisting through the fourth dimension to avoid getting caught on anything, before taking off and disappearing into another fold in the sky.

The path from the front room to the sitting room is short but surprisingly twisty, six turns from the initial hallway Luke leads you down. Left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right, before finally through a door and into a warmly lit little office with a couch, two lounge chairs, a desk with its own chair, and a window with closed blinds. The decor kind of reminds you of a therapist's office, honestly, which gives you some mixed feelings. Still, once you sit down on the couch, you can feel yourself starting to relax. You built up a lot of tension over the last, like, half an hour-ish, starting with your aborted panic attack back in that weird infinity-park, and even though the walk here wasn't especially rushed, the overwhelming sensory onslaught that accompanied the first leg sort of pushed the tension under the same water that was holding down the pain and worry and...something else.

The couch underneath you is nicely soft, without feeling like it's going to engulf you. The room is a nice, even temperature, and there's just enough of a breeze for the air to not feel stagnant. The lighting isn't dim, but it's gentle enough that when you close your eyes, you don't see anything but darkness. You're comfortable, you think. "Let me know when you're ready to talk?" Luke asks the non-question as he takes a seat in one of the lounge chairs. "And, I can get you some water, if you're thirsty."

Your throat is a bit dry, and now that your senses are turned inwards you feel a bit achy just in general. You nod to Luke as you sprawl out onto the couch, and he turns around to press a finger into the surface of the desk, activating some kind of touch-screen, taps it a couple times and then flicks it, before a cubby in the wall opens up revealing a pack of six aluminum cans simply labeled 'Water', held together with an aluminum yoke rather than a plastic one. He pops one free of the yoke and hands it to you, setting the rest on the desk as the cubby closes back up with a pleasant whoosh. You take the can and pry it open with the tab. It's a surprisingly involved act, now that you're calm enough to pay attention and can feel every little muscle that's involved. It's not uncomfortable, though. It's nice to be able to feel all your bits and pieces working. You sip, and the water is cool and crisp and tastes like spring water, no metallic or plastic taste. You can feel it go all the way down your throat, and not just because you can feel the muscular action of your swallow. You're empty, in a way that you can only just barely remember feeling before, and you are suddenly very grateful that 'Lady' is apparently already preparing some food. You quaff the rest of the can quickly, too quickly to really savor it, but there's five more cans to savor and you are dead fucking thirsty.

So...do you feel safe enough to start processing the stuff you've been packing away? Probably. This is better than most of the places you've crashed and burned in before, at least.

Where have you crashed and burned before? And why? What happened? Where were you before you woke up...

A feeling of vertigo washes over you when you try and peer into what suddenly seems like a deep, dark abyss of memory. Your memories of just a few minutes ago are much closer to the surface, so you decide to focus on that for now.

The blinding bright, the deafening ring, the numb and burn of your first few seconds of awareness...it's all surprisingly shallow. Recalling it now, it feels almost illusory. More than your other memories, even. Meaningless. You discard it for now. Maybe it will turn out to be important, but you're not going to wallow in it. Instead you move on to your memory of gaining control over your body. It was...a bit disturbing, as you review it, especially since you have some bad memories about getting sick whenever you felt your insides move, but now it's unobtrusive enough to not be a bother, and having the option to introspect on it is nice. You aren't in a rush to test it, but you get the feeling that if you ever do get sick, or get hurt, you'll have a much easier time figuring out what's wrong than you used to. The panic at realizing that you were in some kind of fucked up, maybe-inescapable-without-help park-world...that still feels justified. As does your worry about how you got there.

You refocus on the present and look to Luke, who is watching you patiently, sipping his own can of water. "I think—" you begin to say, only to realize now that your voice is...maybe not unrecognizable, but not what you expected it to be? You aren't even really sure what you were expecting. You sound normal, you guess, but, not like yourself, somehow. Not even really unfamiliar, but just not what you expected your own voice to be like. Kind of like listening to a recording of yourself instead. Without really thinking about it, you flex the muscles in your jaw and throat, and bring a hand up to your chin. Then you notice you don't have any facial hair, which gives the same sort of two-faced mixed feelings that the room's decor gave. That in turn makes you realize that you haven't felt your hair at all since you woke up, prompting your other hand to shoot up to the top of your head, only to find it shaved to the skin, with new hair only just barely beginning to poke out of your scalp. That definitely feels wrong, and you can tell that normally you might be on the verge of crying about it, but right now...you just don't want to do that. You want to know what the fuck is going on, so instead of crying and sobbing and curling up, you continue to breath steadily, sit up straight, and speak again. "I think I'm ready to talk."

Luke nods as he swallows a mouthful of water. "So, let's start with where, and how, you woke up. Jazz gave me an idea of what place you were in, it probably looked like an endless field of fresh-cut grass, right?"

He pauses, so you answer, "Yeah. There was a little hill with a tree on it, too, which I was laying under when I woke up."

"Right," he says with another nod, "I know the type of place. It's one of a few different sorts of places that new folks tend to wash up in, so to speak. But what was waking up there like?"

You chuckle at that. "It was pretty rough. Bad, at first, with really intense..." You take a second to recall the right word before continuing, "stimuli. That only lasted a second, though. After that it wasn't as bad, but I was still sort of paralyzed for a bit, until I had a full-body shiver, and now I actually have more control over my body than I think I used to. Anyway, after that I stood up, realized I wasn't anywhere I recognized or that even really seemed possible, and was just about to freak out when Jaso showed up. Then we walked here and met you."

Luke continues nodding and takes another sip of water as you explain, then replies, "Alright. With that all in mind, I think I can give some additional context about where you woke up and how you ended up there?" His questioning tone and pause lead you to quickly nod, and he continues, "Like I mentioned earlier, that place was a 'world-fragment', which is a sort of incomplete reality." He gestures vaguely with his free hand at the word 'incomplete'. "It seemed endless, but if you'd tried to walk away without using the Wayside— that's how Jazz brought you out— you probably wouldn't have been able to get very far from where you woke up. Maybe not more than a few paces past the base of that hill, even, given how homogenous the fragment was. These sorts of fragments naturally occur in the 'inner radius', which is a part of the broader cosmos, on the border between the Annulus and the Abyss." He pauses to take a sip of water. "The Annulus is a collection of worlds, complete ones, including the one we're in right now, while the Abyss is a sort of soup of dissolved world-atoms. Fragments like the one you woke up in happen when annular worlds begin to break down when exposed to the Abyss, or when world-atoms from the Abyss begin to crystallize together due to perturbations in—"

"Sorry," you interrupt, "but this is a lot to take in at once. There are...multiple worlds? I remember what planets are, but I don't remember there being other worlds that you can just walk to, or anything like what going through the Wayside was like, at least not anything real. Also, Jaso mentioned something called 'the Ashes'?" Those questions only touch the surface of a deeper question, that is resisting your efforts to put it into words. "Could I have some more water?"

"Sure." He pops another can out of the yoke and hands it to you, and you crack it open and sip from it at a significantly more sedate pace. "And, the Ashes is another name for a third place, distinct from both the Abyss and the Annulus, though it's a bit of a derogatory one. The more proper name is the Adamant." He makes another vague gesture with his hand. "There's some reason why they all start with 'A' in English, but I forget exactly why. Maybe the Speaker or the Spinster just like it. The Adamant is..." he pauses for a long while, seemingly chewing on how to phrase something. "It's not exactly like how you remember anymore, probably, but it's almost certainly more similar than the Abyss or the Annulus. It's the same world, in a fundamental sense, but a lot of time has passed. Like, seriously deep time. Quintillions of years at least, going from the dialect of English you seem to be comfortable with." He gets a thoughtful look. "Your memories might actually be from around the same time as the earliest records of the Tetrad." He waves a hand dismissively. "That's mostly just a historical curiosity, though. If you're up for it we can talk about it later but it's not especially relevant to helping you get situated in the here and now. Anyway, people call it the Ashes because it's burnt out, and has been for a long time. The only part of it that's still really inhabitable is the domain of the Hierogamists, who keep it that way through continuous divine intervention." He tilts his head to the side and back. "Bit of a weird place if you're used to the Annulus, and it's kind of a pain in the ass to get there since it's smack dab in the middle of the Abyss, but especially for folks like you with lots of memories of the old days, I can see the appeal."

"That is...helpful to know," you admit, "but I'm still at a loss for where all of this came from, other than the Adamant I guess. And who are the Speaker, Spinster, and Hierogamists?" As you ask this, what you actually want to know starts to really dawn on you. If the world you remember is ashes, then what are you? What are all the people you remember? But you don't know if you want to use those words yet.

"Right, getting to that. The Tetrad— that being the Speaker, Spinster, and Hierogamists together as a set of four— are..." Luke makes yet another vague, circular gesture with his free hand as he prevaricates, "well, I guess in English the most reasonable word for them is gods? But mostly they're just four very powerful and important people. The most powerful and most important, by some measures. They're the ones who've made the cosmos into what it is today, more or less. Specifically, the Speaker and Spinster are responsible for the Annulus, while the Hierogamists are responsible for the Adamant, or at least for preserving it into the modern era. The Speaker, well, speaks new worlds into being, while the Spinster connects them to the Wayside. They're both also social leaders and culture-makers and teachers and lots of other things, really. They're both nice people, but I only know them as acquaintances and not close friends, so unless you wanted to get into the public historical record there isn't that much deeper I can get. I know even less about the Hierogamists, honestly, but they're both much more private people anyway, or at least that's the impression I've gotten. They're married, I know that, and they work together to keep the Adamant running the way it used to. I don't really know how they do it? All the reports say that there isn't really any action they take that causes it, it's seemingly just a passive effect of their existence, though their public statements on it mentions that it requires active focus to maintain, and maybe is even a constant strain that they help each other with?" He shrugs.

You nod to that. You can certainly sympathize with not understanding how any of this works, at least. It's interesting that even just being acquainted with gods is so unexceptional that he just glides right past it. Maybe you'll have a chance to meet one of them? Maybe if you can, you can ask them about the people you knew...that might not be a bad way of asking Luke either, actually. "Do you know if any of the gods, or anyone at all really, might be in touch with other people from my era? If there are any." You resist the urge to ask specifically about people you knew, since you don't imagine he himself knows anyone from then.

He grimaces, just a little, and takes another sip of water. "That's a reasonable question. I know the Spinster runs a sort of club for people from the pre-ascension era, but..." He really thinks about how to say what he wants to say, which both makes you feel a bit of dread, but also gives you time to steel yourself. "It's been countless eons since the time your memories likely correspond to, and the people you remember, even if they still exist, might not be anything like how they used to be. But, more than that...there's no guarantee that they will remember you. I admit I don't know for certain, I haven't run any of the diagnostics since you only just got here, but it's pretty likely that...you were made along with the world-fragment you woke up in. It's fairly rare, but the same world-atoms that go into defining the features of a world-fragment can also define its occupants. In this case, that likely means you. It's technically possible that most or even all of your memories come from the same person, but it's vanishingly unlikely."

You let out a long sigh, then drink some more of your own water, considering the idea. It isn't comfortable, but it's honestly not the worst thing? The idea that everyone you knew might have been dead ages and ages ago was way, way worse. That is, until a disturbing thought occurs to you. What is your name? You don't know your name. You don't have a name.

"Hey, is it alright if I touch your shoulder?" Luke appears to have noticed your sudden stillness, as your attention was drawn inwards by this suddenly obvious void in your memories. You can't find the will to speak, so instead your nod limply. It's hard to hold onto the present moment, but his hand on your shoulder is an anchor preventing you from imploding entirely. "It's alright to feel bad about it. Our identities are important to us, they're a crucial, core part of how we relate to the world. Missing that hurts, in a deep way, and it's confusing, and it makes it hard to trust what we think and what we feel. But, you exist, here and now. You are you. It's okay to not know who that is, but that person does exist. You exist. You're not nothing, and your memories aren't nothing either. They're still a part of you, they still mean something. Your story is yours, to find and to tell. I'm here, the Refuge is here to help you."

You hear what he's saying, even if it's mostly washing over you. You're looking into that dark depth in your mind, now. You can't avoid it any longer, and everything you see...It's hardly anything at all. Shadows and shapes, the outline of a life, put together from dust. A thousand million pieces, so small that they don't mean anything on their own, molded together into the silhouette of a life history. You don't have a name. You don't know any names. You don't even really know anyone, you just have this feeling of knowing people. If you try, you can almost picture their faces, but they shift and change. You're imagining them more than you're remembering them, combining features that you know someone had, once, but you can't actually remember any whole person, with all their bits and pieces fitting together naturally. Except for one, maybe.

But, that's not quite true. You remember two people with crystal clarity: Jaso and Luke. With sudden desperation, you turn to look at Luke's face. His eyes are mostly green, with just a bit of yellow-brown to them. His right eye— his left eye, on your right, has a radial sliver of gold at around the two o'clock position, while his right eye, on your left, has more of a golden web interlacing the green on the whole his-left-your-right side of the eye. His skin is also a yellow-brown color, though darker and redder than the gold of his eyes, and lightly freckled along the bridge of his nose and cheekbones. The only wrinkles are creases of worry on his forehead. His lips are red-brown, though a hint of gloss tells they might be painted, and are pulled into a tight line as he matches your gaze. His stubble is black, but his head-hair, short and tightly curled, is a dark and coppery red. There's something more to his face, but you can't see it, only the incompleteness of what you can see.

"You've already started living this life, right? Might as well give it a shot," Luke offers, giving you a smile that, while genuine, does not overcome his persistent worry. Still, you nod, and give him a smile back. You think you make it look genuine, you can control every muscle in your body after all, but a part of you suspects that Luke can tell that it's still only surface level. You're not imploding, not for now at least, but you certainly aren't in a smiling mood.

Then, there was a ding, a circle of light lit up on the desk, and a feminine voice said, "Lunch is ready! Would you like me to deliver it here, or serve it in the cafeteria?"

Luke looks to you inquisitively, and after a moment of consideration, you reply with a question. "I think I'd like to get up and walk, to stretch my legs a bit, so how about the cafeteria?"

"Sounds good to me!" Luke smiles again.

"Excellent! I'll see you both there," the voice, presumably Lady's, answers, before the circle of light dims.

"Lady's cooking is delicious, so I think it'll do you some good. Come on, I'll show you the way."


And thus your life went on (or perhaps began). The lunch you had that day was delicious, just like Luke said, but it was special too, as the inaugural meal of your stay at the Refuge. Lady took on the form of an almost painfully stereotypical 'lunch lady', an image that evoked clearer memories in you than almost anything else you'd experienced up to that point. You'd later learn that this is something of a talent of Lady's, being able to intuit the sorts of shapes and faces that are most resonant with deeper and broader archetypes, a skill which she puts to good use in helping the occupants of the Refuge feel anchored, and thus to find their footing after whatever crisis brought them to the Refuge.

Relatedly, you learn that the association between physical forms and individual people isn't as strong in the Annulus as it is in the Adamant, or as it was in the world of your memories, but that the Refuge's caretakers are trained and its campuses are built with sensitivity towards shape-consistency, along with many other concerns that the Annulus can sometimes overlook, such as the issues with navigating through higher-dimensional and non-euclidean spaces or understanding non-linear speech, both of which you experienced during your first day. The campus you've been staying at in particular is even built to carefully avoid implying the radically different ontology of the Annulus in comparison to the Adamant, such as by providing its amenities with incredibly advanced technology rather than what, in other parts of the Annulus, might simply be features of the underlying substrate of the world, baked in as alterations to the nature of local reality. You're still learning to come to grips with it all, honestly. It's slow going, and you don't know if it's ever going to come as naturally to you as it does Luke or Lady or Jazz, but you are making any amount of progress.

Today, though, is a day for a different sort of progress. Today, you are going to confirm your new (or perhaps first) name!

You've been trying out a few different ones over the last couple months, or at least whatever passes for months here in the Annulus. You've considered a couple based on what you can remember of the past, though neither really sat well with you, feeling like they were calling out to someone else, someone who isn't you. You've considered one based on where Jazz found you, but you don't actually feel especially attached to that space, and it may not even exist anymore anyway. You've considered naming yourself after Jazz, since she found you, or Luke, who may be the closest thing to a parental figure you have in this new life, but you weren't able to think of anything that felt right to say that wasn't too close to either of their own names. You've taken some suggestions from both of them, as well as Lady and some of the other people staying at the Refuge, and while most of them have been near (or not-so-near) misses, one suggestion that Luke gave you did resonate.

He suggested that you pick a name based on any hobbies you've picked up since coming here, and over the last week you've been working on finding one that fits. Reading and writing both felt too broad, and picking a name directly from a story you've read had the same problem as picking one from your memories. Jogging around the campus on the other hand felt too narrow, like it didn't have enough room to really express yourself with. Gardening has felt just about right, though! And in particular, just last week you managed to produce a crop of downright edible tomatoes (which Lady proceeded to make into something delicious despite your distinctly absent green thumb). Thus, you arrived at Tomato, or Tom for short (both of which also just feels nice to say). Some of the other Refuge's tenants chuckled a bit at it, but it was all good-natured and you could feel it. The fact that at least a dozen other people staying on the campus had similar names certainly helped you feel assured of that, though it does make you wonder just how many people Luke has given that same bit of advice to.

You're honestly still curious where most of those names came from. You've gotten the stories from Marshal, Brix, and Tallow (though those three were all pretty obvious to start with, given what you see them all doing in their sections of the campus all the time), but the stories for names like Shivers and Three-Two-One continue to elude you, since they're not nearly as obvious and their users have yet to reveal their secret to you. You don't press it, though, as much as you want to know. They definitely already know you want to know, so they'll tell you in their own time, if they want to share it at all.

Regardless of other people's names, today is a special day for you, since now that you've tried it out, you're confident that Tomato is what you want! For now, at least. Luke has assured you many times that changing your name again later on is perfectly normal, even expected in annular culture, which did help you feel more confident in picking this, since you know it's not something you'll necessarily have to regret for what may turn out to be an eternity. Lady's cooking up a special dinner for you tonight and pretty much everyone living on campus is invited (not that you expect all of them to come, you're not that close with most of them), plus Jazz and a secret surprise guest that you're both excited and nervous about meeting. Luke offered to tell you who it is yesterday afternoon, and you were tempted, but you held fast. You're ready for it, and more importantly you trust him and the rest of the Refuge crew to not invite someone who it'd be bad for you to meet.

The campus is weirdly quiet. It has been since the early afternoon. It's not abandoned, you've seen Luke around being a busy-body like always, Marshal doing his katas in the courtyard, as well as Tekta, Ekta, Cash, Elfie, and Mjoll chatting over a card game in one of the rec rooms. They all seemed pretty excited, and the cardsters in particular all got real quiet when you walked through to head to the garden, which made you suspect it has to do with the surprise guest. You're honestly pretty excited yourself, since you don't think the five of them would've been gossiping about it unless it's someone really outstanding. It was a bit of a struggle to contain yourself all afternoon, but you managed, first by tending to the harvest and then retreating to your room to do some more research on travel between the Annulus and the Adamant. You're still only just starting to put together a plan for your journey, traversing the Abyss is not a trivial task, not even for the Tetrad, but you were mollified to know that, as long as you're willing to take it slow, it can be done reliably even for people without special connections or abilities.

Finally, right now, it's dinner time. You can smell it from your room, and are headed to the cafeteria even before Lady actually rings the dinner-bell. It's a heavenly aroma, even more than normal. She must have really gone all out, which you suppose only makes sense. Dinners where everyone, or even just most of the campus's inhabitants show up at once are very rare, never mind that it's a special occasion and there's a special guest.

You can't speculate as to what exactly she's cooked up, since it's impossible to pin down just from the aroma. It honestly reminds you most of a common theme in a lot of the bits of memory you woke up with. Special spots on the corners of streets that had just the right combination of restaurants nearby, where the scents from all the kitchens mixed into a single experience that couldn't really be captured by food from any one place. Whatever Lady's cooked up has some of that sort of ephemeral, impossible essence.

You're shocked out of your culinary reverie as you enter the cafeteria and finally see just who this guest is.

There's nothing physically exceptional about the man. He's a little taller than you, and chubbier. His face is round and smiling, with a big, white wizard-beard. He's wearing a red baseball cap with a white pony-tail stuck through the back, a many-pocketed vest over a hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. He looks like any older man on a vacation, almost as archetypal as Lady's get-ups, and non-specifically familiar in the same way.

No, what shocks you is his...aura is the closest word you can think of. The world flows around him, like water around a stone. It makes him seem immaculate, untouchable, as though he exists in the infinite distance, despite also clearly being present inside the campus's large-but-definitely-not-infinite cafeteria.

Then he speaks. "It's good to see you again, Tom."

Everything about him speaks. There's his voice, of course, which is clear and resonant and deep, but it was also the flex of his eyelids, the wrinkle of the skin around his eyes, the subtle change in angle at the corners of his smile, his broader posture, and even seemingly incidental things like the way the light is bent by his...wake in reality, creating innumerable tiny reflections and reiterations of the cafeteria and its occupants, or how the gentle breeze generated by the cafeteria's vents is altered by his presence. Everything about him says this same thing, says that it's good to see you. See you again, in particular.

He raises a hand to the back of his head, the motion sending ripples through the fabric of reality briefly, producing more shimmering mirror-mirages as the holistic message being sent by his everything shifts to include a thin note of embarrassment before changing direction entirely as he continues. "This is the first time you've seen me, but I've seen you once before, a long, long time ago. Way back on Old Earth, before I ascended, I was working on a project of sorts, and along with much of my earliest conceptions the Annulus's design, I also thought of you!"

The images that shine through the roil of his aura change, depicting various mundane scenes around what could plausibly be a much younger version of the old man standing in front of you, none of which seem out of place from your scattered pre-awakening memories

"I wasn't the Speaker, then, so I had no reason to believe that anything I made at that point would make itself real. After the Ascension, I was very careful to not imply your existence, since I knew that your first moments were rather uncomfortable, though that unfortunately also meant that I couldn't be as watchful as I would've liked. It took these past couple months for news of you to reach me, but as soon as I knew I spoke with the committee chair of the Refuge and Luke to arrange this meeting. It's just good luck that the timing wound up such that this was the day you were going to celebrate picking a name, since it means I don't need to fabricate a pretense to give you a gift!"

The visions shown through his aura depict all the scenes he describes, and more, elaborations and extensions of the scenes to go along with the more subtle messages carried by his expression and posture. You notice in one image that the younger version of the Speaker appears to, briefly, look directly at you, 'through the screen' of his future-self's aura. The visions all disappear as the motion of him bringing his hand out from behind his head, now with a textured metal plate gripped in it, and are replaced with new images of something entirely different. It looks a little bit like what you imagine the inside of a space station looks like, but not a real one like the ISS or something, a sci-fi one. He holds the plate out to you, which lets you see the text 'Mission Charter :: AKΣYIRPEMYLI NIYUOMAMEÞ : IYŊGAD MAƔN–ΣODO' embossed on it, along with a large rough patch metal and a bas-relief of a three-masted ship sailing over rough water. You take it absently, your mind occupied with the enormous meaning of the gesture and the gift, as well as processing everything else he just said.

"I can tell this is a bit momentous for the ostensible scale of this occasion, and I'm taking up a lot of everyone's mental bandwidth, so I believe it's my time to leave. Thank you all for allowing me to make this appearance, and I hope that you all have a wonderful name-choosing celebration!" The Speaker brings his hands together in front of his chest, bows to you, then to Luke, then to Lady, his aura returning to its reflective mirror-roil as he does. Then he just strolls out of the cafeteria, disappearing out the door and down the hall. You rush to follow after him without thinking, but as you step out, you find he's disappeared completely. The Wayside is flattened on campus except for emergencies, to prevent potential threats from stalking or harassing the occupants, but you suppose the Speaker himself might have ways around that. Plausibly he just made one, here and now. You're a little sad that your meeting with one of the Tetrad got cut that short, especially since you just keep thinking of more questions you wish you could ask the longer you think about what he said, but you didn't even know he was here until you stepped into the room a minute ago, so you suppose it's not an enormous loss.

You glance down at the 'mission charter'. You're still not great with any of the new languages, ones you don't remember, but this is at least written in a script that's similar enough to the Latin alphabet that you can recognize 'AKΣYIRPEMYLI'. You don't have any idea how the word is pronounced, but you know they're a kind of...ontological construct, you guess? A kind of durable, mobile mini-world. A lot of their uses have just been totally opaque to you, but you do know that they're one of the ways that people use to travel across the Abyss. That, plus the picture of a ship, makes you pretty sure what sort of mission this is a charter for, and that makes you very excited.

You turn back around into the cafeteria with a smile, and with your attention no longer dominated by the presence of a god, you can now actually notice just how big the turnout was for your special dinner. Everyone living here is present, plus a good number of the people who just come by for therapy or counseling. The cafeteria is probably about as full as you've ever seen it, maybe over a hundred people. It's honestly almost as stupendous as the Speaker showing up, or maybe even more so, since these people haven't apparently been waiting for you to show up for a miniature eternity due to some kind of prophetic vision, they just have gotten to know you and think it's worth being here.

You're not much one to cry, and you do still have perfect control of your body, but it feels appropriate, so you let out a couple tears, just enough to wet your eyes and to give you a reason to wipe them as an expression of your feelings. "Thank you all so much for being here, everyone." You take a big breath, which in turn reminds you just how delicious the veritable buffet Lady's put out smells. "Now, let's eat!"


Time gets hard to track outside the Refuge branch campus. Your upcoming trek to the Adamant demands you leave it, so you've been practicing navigating the Wayside with Jazz and some of their friends' help. You've also been learning a bunch of languages, which necessarily also involves acclimating yourself to non-linear speech, and thus to non-linearity in general. You've also been researching akshyirpemylis, and in particular the Niyuomameth, including its previous voyages, public information on its current crew, as well as news regarding its upcoming mission. Frankly, you've been doing a lot of stuff. It feels like you've been at this for ages, but according to the calendar on campus it hasn't even been a year since you picked Tomato as your name.

It's been an absolutely exhausting whirlwind of parallel activity, but you're also starting to understand why most people don't like hanging out in places like the particular branch of the Refuge that you were staying at. If you're used to being able to just do everything at once, without needing to worry about what comes first except for things that are actually contingent on the outcomes of other things, then having to fold all of that down into one timeline can be a massive chore. You don't think you really want to live like this all the time though. You're completely drained by the time you come back to rest at the Refuge, in a particularly weird and kind of unpleasant way that sleeping or relaxing doesn't really help with, that just diffuses slowly over time regardless of what you're doing (or not doing). You suspect that you might just not have the spiritual fortitude for it, not long-term at least.

Still, your efforts have been as successful as they've been draining. You've learned more languages in the past not-quite-a-year than you think might have even existed back on Earth, and can reliably navigate to the Niyuomameth's docking-berth and back to the campus (a considerably longer walk than the one from the fragment you woke up in) all on your own. You definitely still prefer going with Jazz or Pinch or Ginny or anyone else, really, both because it's nice to have company and also because getting lost in the Wayside, even just a little bit, is still very stressful, despite the fact that you are now equipped with the tools to get un-lost, eventually.

You've also managed to get in contact with some of the other passengers-to-be on the Niyuomameth, which has been...interesting. You're the only one from the Refuge on this trip, and the only one who has anything even like a direct connection to the Adamant. In particular, you're the only one who is used to linear time and euclidean space, to persistence of form, and to a bunch of other stuff that annular society mostly doesn't have to deal with. Consequently, you've become unexpectedly popular, for a certain definition of popular, as the other passengers-to-be visit with you as often as you allow to learn and practice. A couple have even committed to staying on the campus until the Niyuomameth departs. Neither has a name that can properly fit into linear speech, but you've helped them both come up with nicknames that they're comfortable with, as well as helping Agathor (one of the two who are staying with you) figure out a body-plan that remains reasonably functional in adamant conditions that isn't totally dysmorphic. Lahom (the other one staying with you) has been designing humanoid physiologies from first principles as a hobby for a long while, it's part of why they're interested in visiting the Adamant, but Agathor struggles to even narrow things down to the single physical form they inhabit while on campus, let alone one that can actually sustain enough of their mind to meaningfully experience the Adamant.

You and Agathor end up doing a lot of research together regarding the most recent technological developments in the Adamant, and after that turns out to be pretty much completely unparseable to either of you, steadily crawling backwards through the records for something that you can understand and that might serve as a basis for a satisfactory adamant body for Agathor. It takes long enough that you actually head out of the campus so that you can just check every relevant time-period at once. You manage to find a bunch of pretty serious sci-fi stuff from around a millennium post-ascension, but Agathor finds something way better, apparently, from 'just' a few quadrillion years ago. All of the info on the designs is in a language (or possibly languages?) that you don't know, but even when Agathor translates it as best they're able, it almost entirely goes over your head. The only thing you really absorb is that it's some kind of really powerful spacetime-warping stuff that'll let Agathor create a bubble of semi-isolated spacetime and an 'interface' between their bubble and the outside spacetime that'll automatically handle the interactions between the inside and outside, and which Agathor can then use to construct a bespoke simulation of the relevant parts of the Annulus, enough that they won't have to be constantly suffering whenever they leave port. There's still a lot of concessions they need to make, since there are still limits to what this tech can do, so you end up rubber-ducking for Agathor as they work through variations on the specifics, all of which just sort of washes over you without really penetrating. Still, they seem thankful, and you have some memories of how useful just having someone be socially present can be, so you accept the thanks with some grace.

Agathor's issue may have been one of the last things holding up the mission in general, since according to the calendar on campus the boarding and loading calls go out literally the same day. That sort of one thing immediately following another is really common in the Annulus, or at least it's been common to your experience of it so far. You suppose it's a natural consequence of how time works. Fortunately, the promptness of the boarding call isn't any trouble, since you hardly need to pack anything. Everyone traveling on the Niyuomameth was given a pretty generous sub-space budget, and you used yours to replicate your room, including your modest collection of personal effects, as well some of the campus's amenities that aren't strictly part of your room, like the library, one of the game rooms, and your garden plot, plus something that's foreign to the campus entirely, a sort of big, multilayered mingling space, where you can continue your informal tutoring of the other passengers on proto-Adamant lifestyles.

As subjectively long an experience it is, traversing the Wayside from the campus to the Niyuomameth's berth in Iynggad Maghn apparently didn't take you very long, since you, Agathor, and Lahom are the first ones to show up aside from the crew. That state of affairs doesn't last long, though, as there's only a scant moment before an absolute deluge of people, in all the infinite variety of the Annulus, arrive and begin pouring through the berth-world and into the Niyuomameth's internal sub-spaces. The three of you are quick to follow, departing for your own sub-spaces. Once you're on your own, it's all that you can do to navigate to your replica bedroom, fall face-first into your bed, and immediately fall asleep.


The Niyuomameth's journey across the Abyss is long. It's not especially difficult, not for you or any of the other passengers at least. Your research indicates that the job of the crew is quite labor intensive, though in a way that has resisted all your attempts to translate into plain, linear English. It's a physical labor, but also an intellectual and spiritual one, and more than that besides, strain along dimensions of perception and experience that remain alien to you, having not absorbed them even with your almost-a-year of immersion in the Annulus. Maybe that's part of why you still find doing lots of things at once with non-linear time so exhausting? Regardless, the crew's arduous work spares you enough effort to continue your own tasks. Your time aboard the Niyuomameth is split between mingling with your fellow passengers, sharing your research and the fragmentary memories of Old Earth, the Speaker's fabled homeland, or else sleeping away the seemingly endless days as you rest and recuperate from the exertion of entertaining your fellow travelers. You don't remember being especially introverted, at least not more than circumstances demanded in the early 21st century, but you imagine that this is what it would feel like to be the most introverted person in the world, forced to host a terribly interesting party. You can't refuse the call of engaging with everyone, but it leaves you more and more tired every time. You only truly become worried, though, when you begin to notice how much time appears to be passing on the calendar of your facsimile-bedroom. It's hasn't just been days, months, years, or even decades, but several centuries since you left port in Iynggad Maghn, and that worry became both much more intense and much more confused when you checked the calendar again after your next social excursion only to find that the calendar not only didn't read that centuries had past, but that it was before you had even left, before you even woke up on that world-fragment. You're far too tired to do anything much about the temporal discrepancy when you first notice it, instead immediately collapsing into bed as has become inevitable, but after getting up and checking that, at least while in your sub-space time continues to flow forward at the rate you expect, you manage to build the courage needed to head back out and ask your fellow passengers if they know what's going on. None of them really do, not on their own at least, since none of them are familiar enough with all the nuances of linear time and how it's maintained ontologically, but after putting your collective heads together you're able to figure out what exactly is up. You, and the Niyuomameth as a whole, have entered the Abyssal Plain, the great basin of chaos which makes up the bulk of the Abyss, which is too far away from the Annulus's inner radius and the Adamant's archonic foothills to be caught in the causal flow of either regime. The calendar on your room, meanwhile, is imbued with a sort of inherent entanglement with the temporal regime of the Refuge campus that it was copied from, carefully preserved by the Niyuomameth's ontoremediation suite, which leads it to incorrectly associate the calendar date with whatever glimmer of ontological resonance from the Annulus which the Niyuomameth has most recently encountered.

"Does that mean we're traveling forwards and backwards in time with respect to the Annulus?" You ask Lahom one day while resting in your room.

"I don't think so," Lahom begins a reply, having chosen to luxuriate with you in an elephantine form only barely conforming to both the 'humanoid' and 'physically sustainable' descriptors, occupying a significant fraction of the space in your room. "At least not any more than normal. The past isn't separate from the future in the Annulus, like I've mentioned before. So it's not that we're not in the present, just a part of the present that's close to the past."

"Fair enough," you say, though you still don't really get it, "but then what about the future? Have we really been out here for hundreds of years?"

"Maybe?" Lahom shrugs their enormous shoulders, "I don't really know how to tell. Even different narrow-time campuses have different calendars, there's only so much bending and twisting they can do to keep things synchronized without making things more inconvenient for their tenants. Maybe hundreds of years have passed for your room, but just as likely we got a glimpse of another part of the same campus where time had just been flowing faster. Or hell, maybe it's a part where time has been flowing slower and it's been more than a few centuries. We can't really know until we get back inside the Annulus."

"Fair enough..." That does make sense, a bit at least, but it still doesn't really assuage your worries. "Do you know what that means for how things will be when we get back?"

One of the nice things about Lahom is that you can actually recognize their facial expression without having to consciously look them up in your mental dictionary, since they strongly favor fairly naturalistic humanoid forms, and honestly seem as though they have less control over their movements and posture than you do. In this case, you watch them quickly flicker through several faces before managing to school their expression with evident effort and replying, "I don't entirely know, this is my first trip too you know. But the feeling I get as someone natively non-linear is that even if it's been a long time I can just catch up when we get back? I don't know how much that applies to stuff on narrow-time campuses. Did you ask any of the staff at your branch?"

"Yeah, I asked a counselor, as well as a rescue team friend of mine. Neither of them had much experience with the Adamant. The counselor said that they have a special course for teaching people who have relatives or alters coming from the Adamant how to help them integrate, but it doesn't cover anything specific about time differences, and the friend said that it varies a lot, enough that they haven't been able to draw any sort of non-spurious pattern to it, other than that they haven't seen any large-scale closed time-loops, yet at least."

Lahom nods sympathetically and shrugs as gently as they can to avoid overly disturbing the furniture in your room. "I guess we'll find out how things turn out this time together."

You give them as big a hug as you can muster, as appropriate for their current form. "Thanks Lahom. I'm glad I know you."

Their smile practically stretches from the floor to the ceiling as they reciprocate the hug as best they can in the given space. "I'm glad I know you too, You."

You chuckle. "I'm starting to rethink that nickname honestly. It was funny for a while but I suspect that once I meet someone who only speaks English it's going to be real awkward. You can call me Tomato, or Tom."


Your unease settles slowly, but it does settle. Knowing now that the apparent calendar date in your room isn't especially indicative of how much time will have passed when you get back, you learn to tune it out, and in doing so seem to become unstuck in time yourself. You really don't know how long it's been by the time the Niyuomameth docks into its berth at Shodo, or even what an answer to that question would really mean. You just know it feels like it's been forever, that the journey has left you with a heavy pall of tiredness, and that you're thankful it's over for now.

Disembarking in Shodo allows you to appreciate how much of a transformation the Niyuomameth has undergone as it climbed up the Adamant's entad gradient. In the Annulus, it was hard to describe an akshyirpemyli as having a physical form at all, rather than just being a carefully engineered set of interconnected micro-realities built to survive the rigors of the Abyssal Plain. Here at the Outer Gates of the Adamant, the Niyuomameth was much more literally a vessel, even if it was a mind-bogglingly massive one, continents of gleaming mithril and orichalc spanning as far as your eyes can see, a shimmering and shifting plutonic landscape from which the Niyuomameth's remaining passengers and cargo are being unloaded before distribution to countless smaller vessels to be delivered deeper into the Adamant. You've been told that the Spinster's work connects the realities of the Annulus to the Adamant just as much as it connects them to each other, which allows for the translation process which generated the Niyuomameth's current appearance, but the stolid and unremitting nature of the Adamant means that it is impractical to try and use the same vessel for both the adamantine and abyssal legs of the journey.

This step is unfortunately where you part ways with Agathor and Lahom, since your destination is just inside the Outer Gates, while your friends both have missions to take them much further into the Adamant's expanse, pursuing their respective hobbies/areas of research. You, meanwhile, have a date with the archives at the Inner Shodo Library. After a year of effort, you've found just one real, consistent character from your memories, someone you could actually identify, neither a nebulous cloud of attributes nor fictitious conglomeration of traits. You remember them going by many names, appearing in many different environments, but always the same face, a stunning and clear constant in your terribly dark and foggy memories. You couldn't confirm much more than the general existence of people with a similar appearance going just from records available in the Annulus, just the fact that there would be more information on them here, and that they are involved in some obscure broader phenomenon and area of active research, and possibly are as close to a 'state secret' as you get in the modern world. You had to know more, and you think that the Speaker agrees, given that he gave you a ticket right here.

Traveling through Outer Shodo is very similar to navigating the Wayside back in the Annulus, practically, but the texture of the space is completely different. In the Annulus, when you step through the Wayside, you can feel the everything-ness of the space itself, manifesting itself in the sheer quantity of possibilities simultaneously extinguished and created by every step, almost like walking through a bush, if every variation of which branches you touched and how far you pushed them was its own path. It is an incredibly intentional act, something that honestly stretches the limits of your attentional capacity even with the benefits of non-linear time helping you. Outer Shodo is interconnected, though naturally with much less multiplicity since it has many fewer places to connect with, but you can feel that its space is smooth except for at the joints, sort of, rather than completely dense with branch-points. More like navigating through a (very well-signposted) maze, with big wide corridors and obvious junctions, rather than forcing your way through a solid hedge. It's less vibrantly alive in some way, but it's also so much easier on your poor, 3D-adapted brain that you think you prefer it. Regardless, this does mean that it takes you a bit longer to actually walk to the Outer Gate than would have been necessary to traverse in the Annulus, but also that it is much less of a headache. Plus, remarkably enough, there isn't even much of a queue at the Gate. The wait is longer for parties carrying significant volumes of cargo, but for light travelers like yourself, there's just a brief walk through an arcade of scanners and selective force-fields (none of which you feel so much as a tickle from), and then you're in Inner Shodo.

Now, as you walk through the streets of the inner city, you are struck by the sheer feeling of familiarity. It doesn't feel a thing like any city from your old memories, it's still far too three- dimensional, too filled with fantastical science that as yet remains beyond your understanding, but the feeling of the path you're following to get from the Outer Gate to the Inner Shodo Library nonetheless calls something to mind. As you walk, you review the feeling thoroughly, and as the Library comes into eyeshot, its sphere of influence expanding to encompass your entire field of view as you approach the horizon of its domain, you realize that it's actually remarkably similar to the feeling of navigating from the Refuge campus's front door to any of its various rooms, a long sequence of consecutive left then right, left then right, left then right turns until you arrive at your destination. The sensation of the sheer synchronicity overwhelms you, just briefly, but also lingers for a long time thereafter, making you wonder just why there is such a connection. You're still focused on the mysterious figure in your memories, but maybe you'll be able to find some time to research what relationship there might be between the architectures of Shodo and the Refuge later as well.

As you enter the Library proper, the first thing that hits you is the air. It's cool and dry, and carries the scent of old books, even though you're pretty sure that the library doesn't store any of the actual physical artifacts in publicly accessible areas. Maybe it's some sort of perfume, to help build a particular atmosphere? Regardless, the actual form of the library appears at first blush to essentially be a single, enormous wall-screen, but upon closer inspection is in fact a field of enormously distorted space, which rather than merely depicting the various usage rooms of the Library actually contains them. There is still a hard plane of force preventing your from walking into the wall of rooms in its current 'zoomed-out' state, but as you begin to look closer, you realize that the wall, while hard, is also sort of porous, full of little holes, and after another moment of looking it becomes clear that the holds lead to rooms that are currently free to be entered. They all seem perfectly generic initially, but you know from your research that they're highly reactive, so it's not terribly surprising to see the decor of the room you select from the wall to begin changing as you approach its aperture (the rest of the Library shrinking behind you in a similar way to how the rest of Shodo did when you first entered the Library), transforming to conform to your desires. Specifically, the room becomes obscured from the room-wall to conform to your desire for privacy, before becoming another (sparser and less complete, but also more focused and less distraction-strewn) replica of your room. You sit down in the copy of your comfy chair and speak to the Library, "Early 21st Century English," to prime it for further voice commands in your most comfortable language, before launching into the the list of queries you've been working on since you first decided on coming here.


You spend a long time in the Library, trying your best to discover anything about this mysteriously common face in your memories. At first, you try and just find any records of people who look like the face, but this very rapidly hits the brick wall of there being a nigh-infinite ocean of people who look so similar that they could all easily be a match, except for the fact that absolutely none of them were around in the time-periods you've identified as being the sources of your fragmented pre-awakening memory. It's technically possible that there may have been a match that simply went unrecorded, but there's no indication of any redactions for privacy reasons and you'd be surprised if anyone who actually existed went completely undocumented. You expand your search from there to information regarding any of the extant people who match the description who might have been traveling through the abyssal grade nearest to the Inner Radius, which in turn reveals a gruesome new fact: over the past couple years, people matching the face in your memories have had a nearly order of magnitude greater chance of suffering a catastrophic failure of an abyssal vessel they're traveling on. They've been suffering consistently worse outcomes in the case of catastrophic failure too, with a successful rescue rate of less than a ten thousandth the average for such scenarios. This then prompts you to turn your search towards broader statistical histories for abyssal travel, the mechanics of abyssal dissolution and recombination near the Inner Radius, and testimonies from other 'recombinant persons' like yourself. The last volley finally hits pay-dirt, though it's still not exactly what you're expecting. There haven't been any testimonies that speak about the same face you remember...but there are a bevy of testimonies describing a similar phenomenon with different faces, stretching far back into the records. Following a hunch you perform a similar search for catastrophe rates involving people matching the descriptions in the testimonies, and sure enough, whenever a large number of people with a similar appearance suffer an irrecoverable catastrophe in a short enough period of time, there's a brief burst of testimonies afterwards which refer to a figure that conforms to the appearance of the lost people.

That, in turn, prompts you to begin searching for any research into this phenomenon. It takes you a while to figure out what sort of terminology the researchers decided on (not helped by the fact that the topic was independently re-discovered several times and several competing terminologies developed in parallel, which haven't been entirely integrated with one another even in the present), but once you do, that opens up even more information. Most starkly, even though the probability of catastrophe for any given abyssal journey has been slowly but steadily decreasing since the first successful voyage, the number of incidents of this type has been increasing over time as well. Populations are still growing in both the Adamant and the Annulus, so once the technology became reasonably safe, the frequency of voyages ballooned rapidly, and is only continuing to grow, and thus the frequency of these sorts of incidents increased (even as the odds of any single person contributing to the statistic decreased). The fact that there haven't been any testimonies yet of the same face you remember is slightly exceptional, but only slightly. There have been other cases of people of similar appearances disappearing with much longer delays before the first testimonies emerge, or which aren't followed by any testimonies. It might be something to keep an eye out for, if you can successfully request a regular information delivery to your place at the Refuge, or visit the Adamant again in the future. As you explore the topic, you also discover a controversy in the field that persists to this day: why do these absent figures appear in the memories of recombinant persons? Or rather, why are these figures absent? If enough of the essential information of the lost people is being dissolved and then recombined from the abyssal medium to consistently manifest in the memories of millions of recombinants, then why isn't there enough to form recombinants who are themselves similar in appearance to the lost, or who have any other similarity with them? Or if there is enough essential information present, then what's preventing it from reforming those distinctly absent people, and how does that phenomenon persist in the harshness of the abyss, without leaking out enormous quantities of its own essential information (and in turn partially recombining into world-fragments along the inner radius)?

These open questions leave you unsatisfied, even though you've ultimately answered the much smaller question that you came here with. You continue searching for a while longer, trying to see if there's anything especially new discoveries that might shine some further light, but the best you can find are crackpot theories about a God of Destruction or God of the Destroyed, or both, in parallel to the Speaker, Spinster, and Hierogamists. Eventually, you give up on trying to dig up an answer, at least for now. You devote some additional time to researching architecture, following your curiosity regarding the similarity between the Refuge campus and the paths of Inner Shodo, which turns up a result quite quickly, even if it's something of an anticlimax. Both the campus and the layout of Inner Shodo were designed by the same collective, who have a long track record of using a particular sort of tree-structure with particular sets of angles between corridors when designing for (relatively) flat spacetimes, which naturally result in any path that connects the central 'root' location of the design to any other part of the path-structure to involve a sequence of alternating left and right turns. You do manage to find out that one of most prominent members of the collective (who unfortunately doesn't have any aliases that can really be translated into English or even, like, reasonably human-producible sounds) is actually also a recombinant, and specifically one of the people whose testimonies you read earlier. You're not sure if that connection is spurious or real, but it's neat even if it doesn't turn out to be important.

After that, your energy for intensive research is thoroughly spent, as are the topics you're especially interested in researching, at least that require access to the Inner Shodo Library, so you retire to the accommodations at a local hostel that were arranged as part of the Niyuomameth's mission charter. You could hypothetically do something similar to what you did with your room on the Niyuomameth or in the Library, sculpting the space you've rented into a replica of what has become your home, or into anything else, but unlike either of those, the hostel's space has some character of its own which you'd rather experience. The atmosphere is warm, the gentle aroma of diluted spices permeating the space. The place is quiet, but not silent, with just enough anonymous noises of habitation to make you feel comfortably unalone. The bed is soft, but not too soft, and smells freshly cleaned, even if it was just a little chaotic when you arrived. You're not totally sure if that was real or just tastefully rough dressing by the housekeeper, though. The exhaustion from the day's work (or, however long it's been, you haven't really bothered to keep track), as well as lingering weariness from the voyage, leads you to quickly drop your things, lay down in bed, and fall immediately to sleep. Over the days that follow, you do various touristy things around Inner Shodo, and even visit some other major locations in the Adamant, mostly various historical preservations on Old Earth of places from your memories. Soon enough, the time comes for the Niyuomameth to return to the Annulus, and while your papers would allow you to stay indefinitely if you choose to, or to take a later vessel operated by the same collective, you decide to head back to the Refuge to decompress and maybe ask for some advice. You don't think there's really much you can do about this, you've reached the end of the road with regards to your curiosity, aside from maybe pursuing a career in science so that you can contribute to the ongoing research. As you step back onto the Niyuomameth, you wonder how much time will have passed since you first left the campus.

You will never find out. Not this you, at least.

( Author's Note )