Yep, the stairs are a bit dusty.\n\n...There's that judgement again...\nI really hope you're working on that.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Dust2]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs1]])
There is a dark-haired man sitting at the table. He seems to be about middle-aged, and is sitting in a chair - that I don't own and have never seen - that perfectly matches the table.\n\nI can't see his face because it's in his hands, and the convulsive movement of his shoulders suggests that he is crying. Crying in that deep, deep way that is silent except for the occasional gasp and guffaw.\n\n...The table is still quite pretty.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Table1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Table3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
It's an unremarkable bathroom door.\n\n...I'm always very careful to keep it closed...\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bathroom2]]\n\n(And I'm in the [[hallway|Hallway1]])
Ah, dust.\n\nDown here it looks like the Bayeux tapestry. All of the little dusty patches arranged into a heroic serial telling of how they came to be there.\nThey aren't very interesting.\n\nDistorted little figures of me not wiping my shoes, or taking a freshly-collected pile of not-at-all fresh clothes downstairs to be washed... All depicted in that too-dramatic/too-expressive/too-declamatory medieval style.\n\nI'm certainly glad that I can re-live these moments.\nIt's riveting really, but not really.\n\nI should vacuum. \n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Dust1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Dust3]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs2]])
My TV is one of those boxy old CRT models.\n\nThe aspect ratio is obsolete, the picture resolution is shocking, and the vertical hold is starting to go.\n\nI'd get a new one, but <i>EH</i>\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|TV2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
Here the trophies are heads - there's a lot of those about about, isn't there?\n\nMy heads, in this particular instance.\n\nMy fat-cheeked, gap-toothed, pre-adolescent heads. All grimace-smiling uncertainly, in that forced, slightly pained way that people do when they're not sure when the photograph will be taken - or even if it's already been taken.\n\nMy eyes are darting around, quickly, uncertainly.\n\nI must have been older when I got that one for... a science project (the lettering is now carved into my forehead, I can read it if I lean forward and squint) - because my face is a bit more mature. Less cute chipmunk-cheeks and more ugly awkward adolescence.\n\nGood times.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Trophies1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Trophies3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
A dusty pile of dusty photographs, showing row after row of snarling, possibly rabid animals.\n\nSome have their teeth buried DEEP into their neighbour.\n\nA few sheep or bunnies or fluffy little dogs gaze at the camera in petrified stillness. A mute pleading in their big, liquid eyes.\n\n...Yep - that's school as I remember it.\n\nI appear to be a surprisingly large armadillo.\nThat likely means something.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|SchoolPictures2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
You know what dust is? \n\nYeah, there's some shoe-dirt and whatnot in there, but mostly - overwhelmingly - it's YOU.\n\nYour outer layer of skin is mostly dead. New layers of skin are constantly bubbling up from beneath to replace it, forcing it loose. \nYou go through a pound of skin every year, it's flaking - hopefully unnoticeably - off you all the time.\n\nDown here it seems to have remembered what it once was a lot better. It's all linked up into a thin sheet of tissue - it looks kinda like a very thin amoeba.\nAn amoeba sprouting a few coarse hairs in my colour, and with lumps and twitching irregularities as different cells meld together and try to reform the features that they once were. They're not very good at it - you can sometimes spot crude attempts at 3-5 different body parts in the same squelchy mass.\n\nOh, and it moves too.\n\nI think, like a bitter old lover, it resents me for trodding all over it all day, showing it that I've moved on and am doing just great without it.\nI think it wants to show me that it's decided it doesn't need me either - it's got it ALL figured out and it's doing FINE, thank you very much. \nI also think it would take over the house if it could.\n\n...Of course, also like some old lovers, it really wouldn't mind coming back.\nWhen I stand still near it for any length of time, it creeps over like a very large and flat snail and starts wrapping up my feet, crepe-style.\n\nI think it has good memories of our times together and would quite like to re-join me, if it could only work out how.\n\n...I REALLY need to vacuum...\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Dust2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[stairs|Stairs3]])
What does the dragon look like?\n\nGeneral Dragon Descriptors:\nVast.\nImplacable.\nReptilian.\nDragon-like\nPatient.\nOminous.\nNot A Very Good Thing.\n\n...Of course, it only looks like a dragon when seen from down in the lower layers of reality. \nHigher up it looks like an innocuous little letter sitting outside my door.\n\nWhat kind of letter is also a dragon? \nThis is the question that is vexing me this fine morning.\n\nI'm probably not [[explaining|Idealist]] this very well, am I?
T H E \nI D E A L I S T\nBy Ben Crispin\n\n\n'If there be a Universal Mind, then must it be [[sane|A Morning]]?' - Charles Fort\n\n<<set $InitialBedroom = "no">>\n\n<<set $InitialHallway = "no">>\n\n<<set $InitialOutside = "no">>\n\n<<set $InitialLetter = "no">>
It's a bed. You know what it looks like.\n\nI haven't bothered to make it - I don't get why that's a thing.\nWho sees a bed during the day?\nAnd do you really appreciate having tidiness to mess up at night, during the instant that it takes you to mess it up?\n\n...If so, that probably says something damning about you as a person...\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bed2]]...\n\nAnd I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]]
It's an old and beaten-up - but still quite pretty - wooden table that I found in a second-hand shop for a $30.\n\nGo me.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Table2]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
The stairs are not passable on this level.\nThere's just a steep drop.\n\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hall|Hallway2]])
A dusty pile of dusty photographs, showing row after row of grimacing fat kids.\n\n...Spread liberally among them are a few grimacing skeletons.\n \nI can look them up in the helpful-but-not-particularly-accurate list of children present and be reminded which of us haven't made it this far.\n\nOh! Sophie Hewett! - I think she's a new one since the last time I paid any attention to this picture. \nI wonder how it happened? \nI should stalk that friend of her's on facebook.\n\nThere are a few hints with a few of the skeletons - a rope here, a depressed skull fracture there...\n\nSophie has no such crib note, though.\n\nWell - 'Carpe Diem', I suppose.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|SchoolPictures1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Schoolpictures3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
The stairs.\n\nThey lead up to the [[hallway|Hallway1]].\nThey lead down to the [[living room|LivingRoom1]].\n\n...You likely understand how stairs work.\n\nThe steps themselves are a tad on the thin side and give off a vague sense of being dangerous. They are also a bit [[dusty|Dust1]] and feature an slight [[scrape|Scrape1]] along one part of the wall.\n\nAnd, in another of those vestigial 'homely' touches, there is a [[mirror|Mirror1]] high up on the wall above the stairwell. I don't like mirrors, but this one proved to be slightly too high for me to feel comfortable about trying to remove.\nYes, I'm a wuss.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Stairs2]]
I suppose you could call me an idealist - though they call us a few things.\n\nMad, mostly, I suppose.\n\n...Not that kind of idealist - a philosophical idealist. As in: a person who believes that all that exists - or seems to - is just an idea.\n\nThe sun is really the idea of a sun - or perhaps a bundle of sun-like ideas that look like a sun when seen from a certain angle. \nAtoms and electrons and whatnot are really just what dribbles out when one idea pokes other in the eye, because - oh yeah - you're just an idea too.\n\nWhose idea? I don't really care. \nI'm pretty sure I don't like him.\n\nIt's not what you'd call a popular view anymore.\nBut then most people can't see the world like I can. There's just a few of us who can. We discovered our abilities as children - 'Look Mummy! You're a mouse! And that man's head is flat!' \nNo-one listens to children. If we did we'd instituationalise them.\nWe quickly learned to keep quiet about what we could see. \nThat is, until the internet came along and we found each other.\n\nThe Internet's good like that. For us and sexual deviants. \nIt finally proves that you aren't alone.\n\nOur big site's called 'Down The Rabbit Hole' - you won't be able to find it, but it's all over the internet in certain levels of reality.\nProbably either Alice Liddel or Lewis Carroll was one of us - maybe they both were. We argue about that a lot.\n\nIt's probably not the most useful superpower - being able to glance into deeper layers of reality, see the same old ideas that make up the world from a different angle. Pick up on a different theme.\n...But I suppose it's useful sometimes - in a crowd, I can drop deeper and suddenly see that some of those innocuous people are wolves - now literally.\nSome are sheep, and some are oscilating tetrahedrons full of bees.\n\nYou'll notice I never said [[these visions|This Is Your Brain On Ideas]] made any kind of sense.
There are barely even stairs at all on this level - more a steep, vaguely stepped wall above and below my current position.\n\nA [[gouge|Scrape3]] is cut deep into the wall. There are occasional odd and disquieting sounds coming from it. A blinding [[spotlight|Mirror3]] of insane imagery is sitting above me. It's painful just to be near.\n\n...And a squiggly sheet of [[tissue|Dust3]] is slowly engulfing my feet.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Stairs2]], and would like to.
The stairs are much smaller and ridiculously steeper here.\nThe step I'm standing on is more-or-less the same, but the rest have contracted heavily.\nStairs have almost no legitimacy as places. They basically vanish.\n\nA frozen version of [[me|Scrape2]] inelegantly lugging unattractive furniture is perched precariously below. A blazing [[crazy-light|Mirror2]] is screwing with my eyes from above. \n...And little [[dusty|Dust2]] figures illustrate my exploits about the place.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Stairs1]]\n\n...And I can go [[LOWER|Stairs3]]\n\n(But moving around on these stairs is impossible)
It's an old bin.\n\nI should probably empty it.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bin2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
The bin isn't even visible under the pile of garbage heaped up over it.\n\n...And there are a lot of people jammed in amongst the wreckage.\nThey are doll-sized, but clearly real and alive. So many people - including the ones who I'd forgotten about until just now.\n\nThey're all staring at me with a kind of distant, sad resentment. Their faces look oddly grey in this light.\n\nI'm sitting near the top, and I'm glaring at me hardest of all.\nIt's hard to tell from this distance, but it almost looks like my lower lip is trembling.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bin2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
The bin is a lot more full down here.\n\nOddly enough, on this level, my school photos and trophies are already stuffed in there, even though analogues of them are still sitting over on the table.\nIt's hard to even identify everything crammed into or overflowing from the bin - it must be a pretty good chunk of the things that I own of roughly bin-able size.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bin1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bin3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
<<if $InitialLetter eq "no">>\nI should probably examine that letter a bit [[DEEPER|Door2]] before I take it into my house...\n\n<<else>>\nI pick the letter up off the doormat. \nIt looks very innocuous. \n\nAs I turn and walk back into the house, I vaguely notice that it has no stamp or postmark. Someone must have hand-delivered it.\n\nI make a cup of tea and sit down at my table and press my finger into the sealed top of the envelope.\n\n...And, just for an instant, I can see once again that river of bones which is a metaphor for the Dragon which is a metaphor for the letter...\n\nI open the envelope, take a sip of tea, and start to slide the paper inside free.\n\n\n\nWhat do you suppose the letter's a metaphor for?\n\n<<endif>>
Down here, the fleshy-thing-that-is-also-a-door is just SLIGHTLY loose from the rubbery-thing-that-is-also-a-wall.\n\nIt flaps slightly as the gap opens and disappears.\n\nThe gap is very thin. Maybe not paper-thin, but at least corrugated-cardboard-thin. But a few of the sounds still bleed through. \n\nI block my ears and try not to think. About anything.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bathroom2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of the [[hallway|Hallway3]])
The door is still closed firmly, and for that fact you should thank your Holy God on High.\n\nYou really, REALLY don't want to see that stuff from these levels.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bathroom2]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bathroom3]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hall|Hallway2]])
You can't look into mirrors in the lower layers of reality.\n\nIt's like audio feedback, only conceptual. The images of the images of the image evoked by your images, being changed by those images...\nSeriously, it hurts.\n\nYou can maybe get a vague sense before the fuzzy, frenetic pandemonium builds up and you need to look away. Think of staring into the sun as a child... You did that too, right?\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Mirror1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Mirror3]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs2]])
You really don't even want to try to get a look at that mirror, not all the way down here.\n\nIt blazes. Even out of the corner of my eye, I get instantaneous hypnagogic flashes of... I don't know? \n\nSkulls.\nHorses.\nSkulls on horses.\nHorses made of skulls.\nThe Teletubbies, for some reason.\nA... Something literally indescribable, but unpleasant.\nA Teletubbie (Teletubby?) riding an indescribable horseskull near a...\n\nYou get the idea.\nSome stoners say they try to force themselves to withstand the pain, to try to really see themselves totally, and full-on, in the full conceptual light of their own blinding conceptual light.\n\nI don't believe them. And if I did, I'd think they were mad.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Mirror2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[stairs|Stairs3]])\n
Polished Turds.\nDown here, all of my nasty little trophies are - quite literally - polished turds.\n\n<i>Carefully</i> polished, too - if you lean in you can see the loving way that someone has applied the wax to preserve all those little bubbles, the little cracks and creases and folds.\n\nThey did a good job too. I'm kind of impressed. \nAlso: nauseated.\n\nIt's nice to know that the universe shares my views of my lifetime's accomplishments.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Trophies2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
It's an old, rather comfortably overstuffed and beaten-up couch that I was given by a (once) friend.\n\nIt looks like it's been heavily used, and it has. It doesn't match anything else in the room, but is that really important?\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Couch2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
Is there anything sadder than an old plastic trophy that you won for... I don't even remember... spelling bee maybe?... in primary school?\n\nYears later, it's dusty and cheap and could define 'pathetic'.\nI really should get rid of them - I really, REALLY don't want to be one of those people who array their lifetime's detritus of awards somewhere public, presumably for general admiration.\n\n...I especially don't want to do that with these awful little things.\n\nMy mother could clearly not throw them away, because to her they were a chintzy little plastic receptacle of motherly pride that I'd once given her a reason to feel. A long time ago.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Trophies2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
The couch looks pretty much the same.\n...Or maybe the same as it would look after two months of being rained on in a dumpyard.\n\nThe lining looks a bit more mossy... A bit more haphazard and irregular and <i>organic</i>.\nAll the little feelers coming off it are twitching, as a matter of fact.\n\nThere is a very heavy outline in the shape of me, sagged deep into the couch. the feelers are thicker there, tentacles.\nThey wave around blindly, hungrily, like eyeless eels sniffing out their dinner. The bundles of tendrils are thickest around my softer regions, or major blood vessels.\n\nA few loose doritos or fragments of popcorn are also spread about on the surface of the couch. Thicker, forking feelers are wiggling softly as they lift and slowly absorb them. The point where the two meet is soft and slimy and veined with little growing shoots.\n\nMy back itches, suddenly.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Couch2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
Way down here, the scrape is much, much worse.\n\nIt looks like the entire wall was gouged by claws. I would seriously consider that it may have compromised the structural integrity of the building.\n\nThere is an odd distant pounding, and occasionally, a hiss and a bumping sound emerges from the other side of the gash in the plaster. Walking past, I've definitely caught a strange, luminous kind of movement out of the corner of my eye a few times.\n\nMaybe down here, the wall really resents me. \nOr I've just let all of my frustrations out on it. \nOr I've punched a hole into Hell.\n\n...These are all viable options, right?\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Scrape2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of the [[stairs|Stairs3]])
The scrape is still here, but now I am too - or rather the version of me that created it.\nI'm frozen down there, a solid snapshot of idiocy.\n\nThere's an embarrasingly goofy grimace on my sweat-beaded face. My eyes have just started to widen to indicate that I've heard the noise and am starting to think that maybe I shouldn't be letting it lean against the wall.\n\nMoron.\n\nI try to avert my gaze from the scrape generally - but especially at these levels.\nGod knows I have enough self-loathing issues already, and when I look in my stupid red face and squinty dim eyes, I start to feel that they are not only warranted but should really be more intense.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Scrape1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Scrape3]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs2]])
A section of paint has been scraped off the wall.\nEvery time I see it, I lie to myself that it's not that noticeable.\n\nI did it, of course.\n\nDragging some drawers up the stairs way back when I first moved in, I got careless/weak and let it rub along the wall harder than it turns out I should have for a little bit.\n\nWhoops.\nHopefully the landlord won't notice.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Scrape2]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs1]])
It's some classic work of Noir.\n\n...It's weird how we all have our individual privacies, isn't it? The social equivalent of that invisible bubble of Personal Space.\n\nFor some reason, I'm fine with you examining every detail of my bedroom in overlong and overdescribed detail, but I don't want to tell you what I'm reading right now.\n\nI don't even know why. I'm just like that. \nIt feels too private, like your eyeballs would be poking into the hidden depths of my soul if you knew where my imagination wanders occasionally off to.\n\nI'm like that with a lot of things.\n...A lot of people don't seem to understand this - at least not where OTHER people are concerned.\nThey think - I suppose, not unreasonably - that if you don't want them to know something then it must be embarrassing... dark... shameful...\n\nSomething that would make them recoil in horror as they finally glimpse a lightning-flash of the Real You.\n\nBut it's just a book...\nI even know how it ends.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Book2]])\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]])
A slightly dusty and anaemic-looking human head is propped up on my [[bedside table|Bedside Table2]]. \nNeeds a shave too.\n\nI'm really not sure who this balding middle-aged male head once belonged to. I've always kinda assumed that it's that of the book's author, for some probably not-very-scientific reason.\nThere's something hard-to-pin-down about the styling of the hair and even (?) of the features, maybe?... that reminds me of people in old photographs.\n\n...Which seems to be a plus for the 'Author Head' theory...\n\nThe man-head is goggling at me wildly. \n(Yes, it's very much an ALIVE head)\n\n...But not a My-Holy-God-In-Heaven-I'm-A-Disemblodied-Head-On-A-Bedside-Table-Holy-$#@%ing-$#@^ kind of goggling... Instead he looks like someone who is truly desperate to catch someone's eye. Like, in all those long years since his death, since he's been reduced from an author to a dusty head on a million dusty shelves, there's something that he's learned. Something of unimaginable importance. Something that he might burst if he can't tell just one person...\n\nBut he can't. Ever.\n\nHe's dead, you see. Just another head on a desk.\n\nHe can't say anything but what he's already said. That's what death means, I suppose: Not really Nothing, just nothing <i>new</i>. Ever again.\n\nRandom scattered sentences from the book slip haphazardly from those pale, listless lips. The voice is a strange whispery kind of croak. Like the sound of someone trying to tune an old tinny radio in the next room. In the next house.\n\nIt's the eyes that bug me, really.\nThey never, ever leave mine. They bulge and plead and seem to be trying to communicate in a separate way from that incoherent wordslurry desperately, ceaselessly rushing from his twitching mouth...\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[HIGHER|Book1]]...\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|Book3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]])
A bottle. \n\nNot especially dramatic.\n\n...Until you look closer and see that it's filled up with tiny little heads. Each with the same panicked expression of the head [[ABOVE|Book2]], I could dismiss that sense of ant-writhing as just an optical illusion if I wasn't close enough to see each one of those teensy little mouths flapping. Each tiny pair of eyes burning into mine.\n\nThe glass is very thick and cold.\n\nI briefly, irrationally really, consider how uncomfortable they all must be.\n...But then I'm cheered by its thickness, since I have the odd image - just for a second - of the teensy mouths gnawing through that glass and spilling out all chattering and bug-eyed.\n\nI feel like they'd gnaw through my flesh, all the way down to the bone, if they could. \nI feel like they'd hide there in their little burrows and try to rub their quivering jaws against my skeleton as I slept, hoping that the combined tappings and rustlings would reach my ears and brain and somehow infect my dreams with their single, singular message.\n\n\nYes - Most books are like this.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[HIGHER|Book2]]...\n\n(And I'm still in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]])
It's not a spider - it's just a chattering blob of chitinous nightmare.\n\nIt's still pretty much the same size, but - if you look at it - it suddenly becomes massive. And vague. And something from your very darkest, deepest fears.\n\nHunger and black chrome and spiky little hairs. You can see the craftiness in its so-very-many eyes. \nYou know it's building a snare for you even now.\nSomething you won't see or suspect until you, running free, blunder into it. ...And you won't be able to understand how you didn't smell the death that clings to the place. Maybe now you'll even be able to get a faint, distant familiar smell of a brother, or a sister, or your mother.\n\nAnd, as you struggle, you'll feel the writhing, continuous vibrations of its approach - it's drawn to your deathstruggle - by fighting it you only bring it closer, you only tell it where you are.\nAs if you're reeling it in with your fear and your struggle against fate, against inevitability, against it.\n\n...And if you listen or watch closely, you can hear the tinny squeals of hunger emanating from the sticky ball of web that it clutches. You can see the movement through the thin fabric of the web.\n\nOut of your family, it's consumed and digested and replicated, and made its own. A brood of hunger. Your children will smell your death on its children, when it's their turn. Their turn to sit and fight and feel, rather than see or hear, the casual approach of ravenous inevitability.\n\n...But, at the same time, it's barely even a real thing, just a free-floating concept of death. The shine and the spines and the burning red eyes are something that I'm bringing to it, not something that's there.\n\nWhat kind of concept do you think the mind of a Fly has of a spider? \nTo it, a spider is just another of the infinite shapes that Death takes when you meet it. Such a simple mind can't hold many concepts, or visualise anything at all, it only has room for the big things - no matter what they look like when you finally encounter them.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Spider1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Spider3]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hall|Hallway2]])
It's singing.\n\nIt's a spider, and it's singing and it's made of love.\nIt holds its crystalising and still-dreaming children so tightly and closely to itself. You can see in its eyes, its slow, careful care, that it would burn the world for them. Not from hate, only from love.\n\nIt's making a home for them. \nIt's finding food for them\n\nAnd its children love it too. Their love is hunger - for them there is no difference. \nSoon, they will pop free and swarm on their elderly mother. She'll offer, but she won't need to. They love her so much. They'll eat her quickly and frantically, slowly and reverently. They'll eat until it hurts, until to eat is to burn, but they'll keep on going. \nTheir love burns. They'll go on eating her, wanting the feeling of her inside them. The feeling of her last, departing warmth.\nThey'll carry her with them forever.\nThey'll be the same flesh.\nIn them she will live forever, in them and their children, and their children - an unbroken chain of love and hunger and flesh.\n\nThey want so very badly to give her that.\n\nThey love her so much. As much as she loves them.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Spider2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of the [[hallway|Hallway3]])
A little (well, I suppose not THAT little) black shape sits up at the join of the wall and ceiling.\n\nI don't typically notice these things (my policy is and always has been 'As long as it's not ON me...'), but this one is making some sort of small, barely-noticeable movement - again and again - that draws my eye.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Spider2]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hallway|Hallway1]])
The morning was crisp, the sky was bright, and - despite all my best intentions - there was a [[dragon|Through The Window]] sitting on my doorstep.
THE IDEALIST
There are very nearly no stairs at all on this level.\nYou'd need to abseil to get down there.\n\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hall|Hallway3]])
There is a faceless man in the corner, turned to face(?) the wall.\nI have no idea who he is. \n\nHe's been around my entire life though.\n\nI first noticed him shadowing my mother when I was about 8. It was always when she got that sad, introspective look on her face that she sometimes had.\nI tried asking her about him, once or twice, when I was still too young to know better. \nShe just mussed up my hair and invented a reason for me to leave the room.\n\nLater, I tried asking HIM about <i>her</i> a few times, but it turns out that blankness isn't just a mask. He just stared(?) at me dumbly.\n\nOver the years as I was growing up, he was always there somewhere.\nSometimes he was in the attic, standing among the boxes of old, forgotten dusty things. My mother seemed happiest then.\n\nOther times, he was always just around the corner from her, staring into the wallpaper.\n\nOnce I saw him with his arms wrapped tightly around her neck, being dragged bodily along the carpet by her as she vacuumed and pretended that she wasn't crying.\n\n...After I moved out, he turned up in my new house within a week. \n\nI've seen him in my sister's house too. And I noticed him the last time I was at my mother's - just peeking around the edge of the doorframe.\n\nSome things are like that. Baggage that doesn't seem to be yours, but which follows you. \nI suppose none of us really understands the complex circumstances of our own lives, or how far the ripples can travel.\n\nHaunted by people we don't know, for reasons that we can't guess at.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|LivingRoom1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|FacelessMan3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
The scientists have wondered for years about hallucinogens - LSD... DMT... Peyote...\n\nI'd call them by their cool street names if I knew them.\n('The Bounce', 'Green-Green', 'Mr. Jim'... Do any of these sound authenic to you? I could try harder)\n\nYou see, they're all so SIMPLE and they all work so differently on different little bits of the brain.\nSurely something that makes a hat-rack look like an avenging angel and a man look like a scurrying rabbit should be complex, right? That SEEMS pretty complex, to me at least.\nSo how can so many simple things acheive it in so many different ways?\n\nThe answer, of course, is that it's NOT really simple - your brain has to work so very, very hard to read the network of concepts, and themes, and resonances that make up the world, and keep it all looking the way that you know that it should. \nKeep your interpretation of that chaotic bramble thicket of ideas as steady and prosaic as a rock - A rock spinning around a sun somewhere in the dead centre of nowhere.\n\n...If you just give it the tiniest little POKE anywhere, and new angles on the world start to bleed in.\n\nBecause, you see, that hat-rack IS an avenging angel and that man IS a fleeing bunny - they're that as much as anything else that they are.\nYou're just seeing a different angle on what is always there... And what is always there tends to be creepy.\n\nI can see why so many of us just take our meds.\n\n...Take [[right now|Bedroom1]], for instance...
It's a lovely morning.\nIt's a quiet neighbourhood.\n\nThe letter is a tiny white rectangle. I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if wasn't - you know - sometimes a dragon.\n\nThat can draw the attention.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|OutsideWindow2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]])
There is a family sitting at the table.\n\nClosest to me, there is a dark-haired man in his early-to-mid thirties. He is smiling blissfully at the blonde-haired woman and the two little girls.\n\nThey are all sitting in perfectly table-matching chairs.\n...I wonder what happened to those?\n\nNone of them seem to be able to see the several [[turds|Trophies3]] on the table. Which is probably for the best.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Table2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
I can normally see things out the thing-that-was-a-window here, but now I can't.\n\n...Or maybe I can?\n\nAll I can see is the Dragon, but I think I can see everything else too.\nWhen I move my head or my eyes, for just a scattered flash I can make out details of the world - of chattering skeleton trees, and rolling cars, and my own bloated, bloody hands - but then all I can see is the Dragon.\n\nI see it IN them.\n\n\nIt's like I've been staring at that stupid faces/vase illusion my entire life, and now my mind has suddenly, belatedly noticed that everything just makes more sense if it's seen as the Dragon. Every piece of it exists in every piece of everything. \n\nIt only takes my mind an instant now to find the pattern and make the perceptual shift. \n\nAnd I see the Dragon. \n\nIt is the neighbourhood.\nIt is the thing-that-was-a-window.\nIt is the sun.\nIt is my hands.\nIt is my thoughts.\nIt is my thoughts of how it is my thoughts.\nIt is that thought too.\n\nIt's in everything, is everything. It always has been. And it's always been silently watching. \nSilently waiting.\n\n...And now it's a letter on my doorstep.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|OutsideWindow2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]]
The world looks different and distinctive from down here.\n\nThe sky is black and empty.\n\nThe horizon looks too far.\n\n...The more scientifically-minded people on that stupid website of ours have tried to test and explore and understand. As far as they can tell, this world really is flat. The sun is real, but the stars generally aren't. \nPeople have tried hard to get close enough to the edge to look over it.\n\nI think they really want to see turtles.\n\nBut the edge moves impossibly. Nothing in this angle of this world is constant, nothing quite makes sense.\nSometimes the world clearly IS round. And tiny.\nSometimes the sky is full of stars. Too many stars. And sometime those stars are laughing faces.\n\nThat's why I think trying to take the scientific approach to all this is dumb. \nHow do you comprehend and tidily categorise a world that FIGHTS BACK?\n\n\n...Oh, and the Dragon is out there, of course.\n\nMy front door is far enough away that I should easily be able to see past even the Dragon's vast bulk - and I can - but when I look at it, it fills my entire field of vision. \nIt blots out the sun.\nI can't even see the window glass that I'm seeing it through, because it fills and blots that out too.\n\nIt's looking straight at me, with THOSE eyes. When I look at them, they blot out the Dragon. \n\nWhen I first saw it, it was looking at me. I've seen no evidence that it's ever looked anywhere else.\n\nSome fearful and possibly-accurate part of me suspects that maybe it's ALWAYS been looking straight at me. Maybe before I was born, it was already staring at me wherever I was then. And wherever I've been or it's been before now, its eyes, its world-engulfing-dragon-engulfing eyes, have never once left me.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|OutsideWindow1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|OutsideWindow3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]])
A quaintly framed little watercolour.\n\nIt's one of those ones you can find stacks of for a dollar each in charity shops.\nSome of them were painted by an enthusiastic amateur, who ultimately decided that the result was just good enough to frame, others are reproductions of some mediocre but presumably(?) professional artist, churned out in unfathomable numbers by printing factories in India.\n\n...Either way, the effect is the same: it's a picture artistically pitched to match the wallpaper, assuming you have particularly drab wallpaper.\n\nIt's a picture that gives enough of an impression of a picture to liven up a bare and unfriendly wall, but isn't interesting enough to ever distract any of your attention.\n\nYou probably have pictures like this on your walls at home, your friends certainly do. You will have walked past them hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times - but if quizzed you wouldn't be able to describe them.\n\n...Maybe a still-life with a vaguely modernist fruitbowl, possibly containing some of the more modernist varieties of fruit? (A lot of yellow - why do still-life painters obsess on yellow?)\n...Maybe a rural landscape scene with either impressionistically or lazily rendered trees framing an impressionistic or lazy lake-and-mountain combo? (They buy brown and dark green in bulk... with perhaps the occasional tube of blue)\n...Maybe some Retro(?)-70s post-kitsch with a plump cheeked child being banally adorable and adorably banal (I cannot believe that anyone who has ever painted any of those pictures was ever a child - they clearly do not recall or comprehend the state in the slightest. I don't know what they are, but clearly they emerged fully-grown)\n\nThe point is it doesn't really matter - the result is chosen for its ability to be peripherally colourful as your eye slips off it.\n\nI'm not even going to tell you what this particular watercolour is. Seriously.\nEven by acknowledging that it's there, I've given you too strong an impression of it.\nJust imagine that someone bought a cheap frame and arbitrarily framed a section of wallpaper. \n\n...So why is this painting even here? It's one of a handful of decorative touches that someone once tried to bring to my house, that had the good luck to be unobtrusive enough to survive my eventual purges.\n\n\nIf you never see it, then it can't hold any painful associations - and thus, I suppose, does Aesthetic Banality Camouflage triumph.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Painting2]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hallway|Hallway1]])
Way down here, the painting is a photograph - or seems like one, anyway.\n...But otherwise looks kinda-sorta the same?\n\nHave you ever seen the photo-reference that an artist used to paint a famous picture? \nExample: Norman Rockwell was notorious for his reliance on staged photographs. He said he would be lucky to draw a stick figure without it.\nBut none of all those photographs looks like a Norman Rockwell painting - despite each one looking almost exactly like a particular Norman Rockwell painting.\n\nPhotoreference is odd in how similar and different it is from the things made from it.\n\n...The back of a head continuously pokes into the frame, blocking the rest of the picture.\nIt seems thoughtful and vaguely agitated in the way that it tilts and bobs.\n\nI think it's annoyed at the LITERALNESS of the picture. How disappointingly REAL it is.\nThe artist is trying to work out what needs to be chiseled away from that reality to bring it to line with the vague, ethereal vision in their head.\n\n...Isn't that what art is, really? Knowing what to slavishly imitate, what to heighten, and what to assidiously ignore?\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Painting2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of the [[hallway|Hallway3]])
It's impossible to look at this simple little image without a tear in your eye.\n\nIt's exactly the same as the drab thing [[ABOVE|Painting1]] - every last detail and feature is completely identical in every way...\nBut it's also completely different.\n\nI suppose when that 'artist' painted this, there was something they were trying to communicate. There was some image in their mind that meant enough to them for them to decide to try to realise it.\n\nAnd I suppose they did capture it, in the way that those perfect images in our minds are always captured.\nIt was splayed out and made real - all of it except the thing that made it worth capturing in the first place. That slipped away.\n\n...I wonder where all those things go?...\n\nBut here, you can see it - you can look at its husk and see behind the style and failings of the artist into their soul, and everything in a soul is beautiful - at least to the only person who ever gets to see it.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Painting1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Painting3]]\n\n(And I'm still in the [[hallway|Hallway2]])
<<if $InitialHallway eq "no">>\nThe hallway is even shorter here than it is [[ABOVE|Hallway1]]\n\nHallways tend to contract more and more the deeper you go. Some things do: hallways... corridors... parking lots... bus stations... Airports...\n\nI suppose what they have in common is that none of them really have any legitimacy as a place. No-one ever thinks of a hallway IN ITSELF, its existence is there for other things. A free-floating hallway makes no sense - it's the place you go so you can go somewhere else, somewhere that's not a hallway.\nSomewhere that's a PLACE.\n\nA hallway isn't a place, it's an interface.\n\nMy [[bedroom|Bedroom2]] is now very close to the [[bathroom|Bathroom2]] and the [[stairs|StairsExcuse2]].\n\n[[Something|Spider2]] that is all your nightmares conveniently condensed lies in wait near the ceiling. A [[picture|Painting2]] of indescribable beauty is hanging on what little wall there is.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Hallway1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Hallway3]]\n\n<<set $InitialHallway = "yes">>\n<<else>>\nHere, my [[bedroom|Bedroom2]] is very close to the [[bathroom|Bathroom2]] and the [[stairs|StairsExcuse2]].\n\n[[Something|Spider2]] that is all your nightmares conveniently condensed lies in wait near the ceiling. A [[picture|Painting2]] of indescribable beauty is hanging on what little wall there is.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Hallway1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Hallway3]]\n<<endif>>
In these depths, there's barely a hallway at all - just a tiny alcove separating the [[bedroom|Bedroom3]] from the [[stairs|StairExcuse3]].\n\nA [[photograph|Painting3]] is wedged inelegantly between them.\n\n[[Something|Spider3]] is singing sweetly from near the ceiling, and it mercifully almost-but-not-quite drowns out the sounds from the [[bathroom|Bathroom3]]\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Hallway2]], and would like to.
The Hallway.\n\nIt's just a short little thing. I live in one of those squished little two-storey places that try to redeem their lack of floor space by stacking the lack vertically.\n\nMy [[bedroom|Bedroom1]] door is at one end, the [[stairs|Stairs1]] are at the other. The [[bathroom|Bathroom]] door is awkwardly wedged in between. \n\nA [[spider|Spider1]] is sitting unobtrusively in a dingy corner near the ceiling.\n\nA rather unremarkable [[picture|Painting1]] is tacked to the wall opposite the bathroom.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Hallway2]]
It's an Angel, and it's beautiful.\n\nPeople typically think of angels as about 80% female, and that seems about right here.\n\nShe(?) looks like your mother looked to you when you were still crawling. \nHuge and warm and a burning avatar of love.\n\nI'm probably projecting a lot of this onto her(?), in reality the outline looks only vaguely human. Like radiant Light and cushion stuffing are trying to pass as a huge, motherly humanoid with huge, crumpled and not-as-clean-as-they-should-be wings.\n\nThe face is especially vague - like trying to make out something through shattered glass (and a spotlight) - but I get the sense of her infinite love, her endless benevolence.\n\nShe just wants to wrap you up safe in her wings. That's her version of flying.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bed1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bed3]]\n\nAnd I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]]
Down here the TV screen is mirrored - or <i>seems</i> to be.\n\nBut the house and the self that I can see reflected in it - aren't reflections.\n\nThe furniture there MATCHES, for starters. It's possibly even colour-coordinated too (I can't tell, because I'm not quite sure what that means) And maybe Feng Shui-ed (I think it has something to do with eggs?)\n\nThe light filling the room is that kind of sunlight that only exists in icecream and suntan lotion ads. The curtains are wide open, and wafting diaphanously in the breeze. There are tidy piles of the magazines that you know all the important people read (And never while they're taking a dump. Never.)\n\n...And I'm not sure who that person behind the couch is.\nThey scare me slightly. \nBut with those cheekbones and that fashionable way of being fashionable, I'm sure they'll be bonking with someone famous within the hour.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|TV2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
The old, bulging out TV screen looks more more like an aquarium here.\n\nThere are tiny to-ing and fro-ing crowds in the background, but most of the view is taken up by a single enormous male head.\nIt's one of those dreadful, effortlessly handsome faces - with hair and a chin and whatnot - that all people are supposed to aspire towards in some way: either to embody, or to have Crazy Wild Monkey Sex with. Possibly both.\n\nThe kind of face of the kind of person who owns the world and knows it. He can possibly even fill every minute with 60 seconds of run. He may even know what that means. The bastard.\n\nHe's paying tremendous attention to me, too. During every instant that his eyes aren't playing with delight over my vaguely musty little hovel (I should really open the curtains some time this year. You know, make a day of it), they're glued to me. \n\nHis laughter is deep and baritone and as insufferable as the rest of him. \n\nIt's backed up by a cosmic laugh track of primarily feminine and somehow 50s sounding laughter (you can somehow HEAR the poodle skirts) \nIt seems to ooze from the walls, the sky, and the very air itself.\n\nI'm glad they seem to be enjoying themselves so much.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|TV1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|TV3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])
They are clothes. \nI should really put them to be washed.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|clothes2]]\n\nAnd I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]]
You can still see a heavily stitched clothes-like outline, but now there are faces.\nSad faces. Many of them not human.\n\nThey come in so many forms: carved-up animals and exploited foreign workers.\nThey're wrapped around us every day.\nWe live our lives wrist-deep in human misery and boredom. It's just an unavoidable fact of industrialised society.\n\n...I'm not a Hippie - I'm just not a liar.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[HIGHER|clothes1]]\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|clothes3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]])
Cast off skins.\nAll of them mine. \n\n...I must have had some of these for a while - some of the skins are noticeably much younger.\n\nThey're grotesque, really.\nI can't imagine anyone likes seeing themselves as an empty translucent sack, eyelids twitching smasmodically over eyes that aren't there, lips twisting into the same sentences over and over again, aping your very favourite phrases of yesteryear.\n\nSometimes I squeeze into some of them to try to go back. So I can briefly pretend to myself to be who I was back then.\n\nIt IS grotesque, and not at all convincing. Even to me.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[HIGHER|clothes2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]])
Down here it's all gone. The sun, the houses.\n\nI'm standing on my doorstep, looking out into a too-brightly-starred chill winter night. My house is suspended high above what appears to be...\n\nThink of the Niagara Falls. \nBut there is a vast crowd rushing up it on foot. \nAnd I look closer at the white spray and foam, and I see that it is a river of bones. The rushing people - men, women, children - are forcing their way forwards, leaping from skull to skull, stomping on ribcages, fighting the current.\n\nEvery now and then I see a tiny figure trip or slip and vanish, arms flailing, beneath the torrent.\nThe others can barely spare the slightest glance at where they were.\n\n...But they do seem to be advancing, little-by-little, very slowly. They all seem to be making their way further up the vast river. \nI'm not sure how far upstream they end up going, but it must be to somewhere pretty distant, since their bones are bleached and clean when they finally come cascading back.\n\nAnd - suddenly - I see. In the spray of white bones, in the maggot-writhing of the tiny figures, in the hard coldness of the bright, infinitely distant winter stars - in all the movement, I can suddenly see the Dragon whose face is the sky.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Door2]]\n<<set $InitialLetter = "yes">>
The Dragon is here. It's looking right at me.\n\n...But also, nothing has changed.\n\nRemember that old story of the blind men and the elephant? They all grabbed at it, and each only felt a piece?\n\nWell, the WORLD is the pieces, and the Dragon is everything. \nI feel an odd sense of foolishness, like when you fail to see the too-obvious answer to the riddle. Yesterday - and upstairs when I was looking out the window - I thought those trees were trees, those houses were houses, those cars were cars, and those clouds were clouds. But now it is so clear that they are only the scales of the Dragon. It is the world and we are the oblivious fleas in its hide.\n\nThe Dragon puffs with a strange kind of satisfaction, as if somehow knowing that I've finally seen the truth. Its face is the sky.\n\n...And to think that we were trying to look over the edge of the world hoping to see turtles.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Door]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Door3]]\n\n
<<if $InitialOutside eq "no">>\nI open the front door. \nI'd be lying if I said my palms weren't a bit sticky on the doorknob.\n\nIt's a nice day out here. Quiet. Sunny.\nI can hear the neighbours' children.\n\nThe [[letter|Letter1]] is sitting there on the doormat. It looks like any other letter.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Door2]]\n\n(And my safe, quiet, and dark, [[living room|LivingRoom1]] is right behind me)\n<<set $InitialOutside = "yes">>\n<<else>>\nIt's a nice day out here. Quiet. Sunny.\nI can hear the neighbours' children.\n\nThe [[letter|Letter1]] is sitting there on the doormat. It looks like any other letter.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Door2]]\n\n(And my safe, quiet, and dark, [[living room|LivingRoom1]] is right behind me)\n<<endif>>
It's a mirror.\n\nDon't make me describe what I look like right now - that would be hacky as well as disappointing for us both.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Mirror2]]\n\n(And I'm still on the [[stairs|Stairs1]])
Ah, the picture - THAT picture.\n\nTwo people - both living and loving the cliche.\n\nEveryone has some variation on this picture. Perhaps, in the final analysis, all of humanity will turn out to have existed purely to crank out a trillion Pop-Art variations of this pose. \nThese two grinning morons. \nThis kinda night. \nThose kinda feelings.\nThat kinda story.\n\n\nI should get rid of this picture. \nI'm disappointed in myself that I haven't already.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|BedsidePicture2]]...\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]])
A skeleton, really - but certainly not a normal one.\n\nYou get the sense of the Grim Reaper, but a Giger-reimagined version.\nThe bleached hard cold bones are there - not quite right in number or position - but there, though sprouting from them like shoots from a too-long-at-the-back-of-the-pantry potato are long, twitchy chitinous black limbs.\n\nShiny, and a bit hairy.\n\nThe face - or skull, I should say - is immobile, it's these legs that express its personality. Its hunger.\nThey twitch with that spider-like mechanical suddenness and speed. They clack and click hungrily. There seems to be something mocking in it.\n\n...Like it knows that it can mock your inability to resist without decreasing it.\n\nHave I sufficiently emphasised how spider-like it is?\nI suppose you could say in some ways that the spider is the ultimate predator. It never hunts its prey. It knows it only has to wait, and its prey will find it.\nIt'll pilot itself right into that soft web, wrap itself up snugly, and ring the dinner bell. \nLions can only dream.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bed2]]...\n\nAnd I'm in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]]
It's just a piece of blank paper in a frame.\n\n...Or KIND OF blank...\n\nNORMALLY blank.\nIf I pick it up and look at it, I can see the words slithering across it - through it, just beneath the topmost skin of the paper.\n\nThey change as I turn it in my hands. They change as I watch. They change as I read them:\n\nTHIS WAS GOOD\nTHIS IS GONE\nTHIS WAS A LIE\nTHIS IS PROOF YOU CANNOT BE LOVED\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|BedsidePicture2]]...\n\n(And I'm still in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]])
It doesn't look that different, I suppose, than it does [[HIGHER|BedsidePicture1]]...\n\nThe people are still the same.\nThe pose is still the same. \nThe background is still the same.\n\n...Except it's all different.\nWe're bored. We're uncomfortable. We have that look on our faces - like a brother and sister get when their father gets too creative and poses them in some dreadful way meant to express familial love, but which really expresses familial discomfort.\n\nWe blink, and our eyes twitch around, bored and seemingly trying to think up a crafty excuse to leave... Or at least dash to the toilet for an extended period.\n\n\nWe're two people behind glass. \nThe moment has gone. \nThe feelings have gone. \nThe people we were are gone... but we're still trapped there, smothered behind cold glass, butterflies in a collection.\n\nA cruel satire on a moment that's as far gone as a moment can be gone.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[HIGHER|BedsidePicture1]]...\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|BedsidePicture3]]...\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]])
It's still a bedside table.\n\nIt still looks the way that you know it does.\n...I mean, it has a [[horrified human head|Book2]] on it, as well as a [[slightly alive (but still kinda dusty) picture|BedsidePicture2]] but otherwise, kinda dull, really.\n\nActually, somehow those things make it look even more dull.\n\n\n...And I can go [[Higher|Bedside Table1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bedside Table3]]\n\nAnd I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]]
Yep - still a bedside table.\n\nSome things are just what they are, no matter what crazy angle you look at them from. No matter how you strain to reinterpret them. \n\nI envy these things. And you should too.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bedside Table2]]...\n\nAnd I'm in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]]
It's a bedside table.\n\nNot new, not pretty, not a lot to say.\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bedside Table2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]])
<<if $InitialBedroom eq "no">>\nMy Bedroom. \nThis is uncomfortably intimate already, isn't it?\n\nI'm near the [[window|OutsideWindow1]], still feeling a bit jittery because of what I've just seen through it.\n\nThe room is really quite ordinary looking (excuse the mess)\nA [[bed|Bed1]], as is traditional, with a few pairs of not-too-new-looking [[sneakers|Sneakers1]] poking out beneath, a [[bedside table|Bedside Table1]] with a [[book|Book1]] and a [[slightly dusty picture|BedsidePicture1]].\n\nThere are also a few scattered [[clothes|clothes1]], focused vaguely around a chair.\n(...You're very judgemental, has anyone ever told you that...?)\n\nA door leads out into the [[hallway|Hallway1]]\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|Bedroom2]]\n<<set $InitialBedroom = "yes">>\n<<else>>\nMy Bedroom. \n\nThe morning sun is streaming in through the [[window|OutsideWindow1]]\n\nThere's a [[bed|Bed1]], as is traditional, with a few pairs of not-too-new-looking [[sneakers|Sneakers1]] poking out from beneath, a [[bedside table|Bedside Table1]] with a [[book|Book1]] and a [[slightly dusty picture|BedsidePicture1]].\n\nThere are also a few scattered [[clothes|clothes1]], focused vaguely around a chair.\n\nA door leads out into the [[hallway|Hallway1]]\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|Bedroom2]]\n<<endif>>
There's a twitchy, vaguely fleshy thing that's also a [[window|OutsideWindow2]], It's dark out there, but also morning.\n\nThere's an [[Angel of Light and Cotton|Bed2]] floating serenely above some oddly-marked [[shoes|Sneakers2]] of differing ages and degrees of wear. \nA [[bedside table|Bedside Table2]] sits there incongruously, an [[Old, panicked human head|Book2]] quivering on it, beside a [[dusty photograph|BedsidePicture2]], the people in which are moving just subtly enough to make you look again, more carefully.\n\n...And some Frankenstein-stitched sheathes are scattered about... Especially near a chair which is also mostly the lower half of a human torso.\n\nThere's also a larger squishy orifice leading [[elsewhere|Hallway2]]\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bedroom1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Bedroom3]]
Here we are - the depths.\n\nMy [[gasping faces|Sneakers3]] are arrayed, two-by-two, beneath the over-tangled and confidently-hungry [[skeleton|Bed3]]. When I look over near that [[hole-that-was-something-else|OutsideWindow3]], it is the Dragon, because then everything is the Dragon.\nA few of my old, discarded [[skins|clothes3]] are strewn around.\n\n...Oh, and a [[big old glass bottle|Book3]] and a [[blank piece of paper|BedsidePicture3]] are propped up on, or - possibly - just above that [[bedside table|Bedside Table3]]\n\nA spluttering [[rent|Hallway3]] in the wall leads elsewhere\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Bedroom2]], and would recommend doing so.
A few shoes, sneakers mostly/entirely - arranged rather haphazardly.\n\nVarying in age and degree of scuff.\n\n\n...And, of course, I can go [[DEEPER|Sneakers2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom1]])
Shoes, still approximately shoe-shaped.\n\n...But now skin, not that stiff fabric-stuff that sneakers are made from. My skin.\nMy face.\nMy face, looking like it had been pulled off and expertly, almost attractively, sewn into a shoe. A series of pairs of shoes.\n\nYes - the tongue is my tongue. Things are very literal like that sometimes. \n\nBut some of these my-faces are new and fresh and young. Some are old and grey and tired.\n\nThere are lines running all around all of them, spinning out a map of everywhere these shoes have taken me. Now these lines are wrinkles. Deep, unforgiving wrinkles.\n\nAll my petty wanderings over all those vanished days have left their trail, they've made me old.\n\n...They're breathing, did I mention that?\n\nJust a bit for most of them - except for that old, really scuffed up pair that I'd meant to throw out (vague sentiment aside... Do you get weirdly sentimental about your shoes too?) \nThat old, silver-haired pair - the tongue a horrible irregular pale brown, the eyes too-bright, too-wet sparks almost lost in deep elephant-skinned folds - that old pair is wheezing. \nHeavily, moistly. \nThe tongue twitches and tries to swallow.\n\nThat's a sound I'll be making one day.\n\nWhen all of my to-ings and fro-ings have left their lines on me, and worn me out.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Sneakers2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[room|Bedroom3]])
Still recognisable as shoes.\n\n...But now all those little creases and lines (the ones that aging not-leather gains from the constant warping movement of your feet) form the delicate lines of a map.\nIt's like someone's taken a pen and meticulously sketched a cartographic record of everywhere I've been over the lifespan of this shoe, and drawn a thick red line charting my course through the little patch of Earth that contains and defines my little life.\n\nOn one, I can even see 'YOU ARE HERE' - indicating my house.\n\nOne pair is pretty new, and still almost spotlessly, tidily blank.\n\n...Mapshoes - they don't just look cool, they're quite useful when you get lost.\nI get lost quite a bit.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Sneakers1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Sneakers3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[room|Bedroom2]])
My living room is perhaps a reflection of my life. I suppose most people's are.\n...Maybe that's why we call them that?\n\nThere's a few scattered chairs and a [[couch|Couch1]] set in front of a [[TV|TV1]]. There's a [[table|Table1]] up against the wall, on which is haphazardly arranged a pile of old-and-increasingly-dusty [[school photographs|SchoolPictures1]] and old plastic [[trophies|Trophies1]] that my mother steathily left there on her last visit.\n\nI should probably put them somewhere... But the [[bin|Bin1]] is SO far.\n\nAnd the [[front door|Door]] is right there next to the [[stairs|Stairs1]]\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|LivingRoom2]]
A rather unhealthy-looking [[couch|Couch3]] is set in front of a rather strange-looking [[TV|TV3]] screen.\n\nA smiling family are sitting at the [[table|Table3]] set against the wall, which also features some [[brownish things|Trophies3]] and a pile of [[photographs|Schoolpictures3]].\nA [[human-shaped hole in space|FacelessMan3]] waits over near a very badly-overflowing [[bin|Bin3]].\n\nThe stairs are an almost-vertical wall, and the front door appears to have melted/come alive. \n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|LivingRoom2]]
An oddly-lumpy [[couch|Couch2]] is set in front of an oddly aquarium-like [[TV|TV2]].\n\nA man sits at the [[table|Table2]] set against the wall, which also features a number of awkward-looking [[heads|Trophies2]] and a stack of [[pictures|SchoolPictures2]]. A [[bin|Bin2]] is overflowing quite badly in the other corner, where a [[faceless man|FacelessMan2]] stands staring at the wall.\n\nThe stairs are impassable down here, and the front door is slimier than I prefer to touch.\n\nThe sound of ghostly mocking laughter fills the air.\nIgnore it.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|LivingRoom1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|LivingRoom3]]
A pile of those old, vaguely embarrassing pictures that everyone has, showing your class lined up awkwardly in some unusually slicked-up hairstyle, frowning for the camera.\n\n...Why do people take school pictures? What are they for?\n\nI mean, OTHER than a photographer employment scheme.\n\n\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|SchoolPictures2]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom1]])
Ben Crispin
Way down here, there's still an outline of a man, but only the outline.\n\nAnd the outline is a hole. A hole in the world.\n\nI can walk around it and watch the silhouette turn, and look through the hole into...\nWell, it's my house, but it clearly isn't. Someone else lives here.\n\nThe furniture is a lot brighter, the atmosphere is about as different as you can imagine. I've never seen any people through there, though. Perhaps the scenario isn't REAL enough for people.\nBut I've seen an excessively-loved toy crocodile in a variety of different locations.\n\nI'm afraid to see if I can reach through and grab something. That seems like a bad idea... Also, just wrong.\nIt feels like it would be violating the sanctity of someone else's home - even if that home is also theoretically my house.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|FacelessMan2]]\n\n(And I'm in the depths of my [[living room|LivingRoom3]])
The couch looks pretty much the same here as it does [[ABOVE|Couch1]].\n\nStill shabby. Still comfy.\n\nExcept here, the sunken imprint in the region where I tend to veg out is quite a bit more pronounced. It outlines exact where and how I usually sit, in fact\n\nAs I watch, the sunken outline shifts and adjusts its posture slightly.\n\nThere's a slight depression next to it too, and the arm-outline moves towards it, before returning with a closed fist.\n...I think I'm eating doritos.\n\n\n...And I can go [[HIGHER|Couch1]]\n\n...And I can go [[DEEPER|Couch3]]\n\n(And I'm still in my [[living room|LivingRoom2]])