Reality shatters as
you your illusion fall
s to the ground. As you pick yourself up, you find yourself surrounded, by Saki, Mirai, and Lancer. Lancer looks especially concerned, and she extends her hand out to you. You take it, and Lancer pulls you
up down and onto your feet. You dust yourself off, and take a few moments to look around. Your vision tracks normally. "Are you all right, master?"
"Kazumi, what happened?" Saki asks. "You… Disappeared, for a second, and then you fell through a hole in the, uh… Saki
looks down shakes her head as she looks up. "The, uh, the ceiling; and now my vision's back to normal. So, I guess you must have done something while you were away."
"Wish you could have done something about the scenery," Mirai says, hands on her hips. "But at least our vision's back to normal."
"I, uh…" You aren't sure how to describe what just happened, but you'll try your best. "I passed through the barrier that was showing us those images,' you say; "And I
think I might have killed the familiar that was playing tricks on us. I stuck my black hole through its stomach, and then reality shattered, and I fell back here. Somehow."
Saki and Mirai look to each other, shrug, and then look back to you. "Well, at least you're okay," Saki says. The four of you look around, taking in the sights of the labyrinth more closely now that your vision is tracking normally. Saki places her hands on her hips, and asks "All right chief, where should we head to next? There's still a witch around here we've got to kill, right? So let's go find her."
"Let's see if we can get our bearings, first," you say. "For all of its… Upside-down-ness, the labyrinth seems like it's mimicking real-world locations near to where it opened up." Saki and Mirai nod their heads, and you continue, adding "Let's see if we can figure out where in the park we're supposed to be, and move out from there."
If that doesn't work, your next plan is to use your cowlick, and see if you can sense for the largest concentration of Grief in the area.
"Well, we haven't realty moved from… Uh, this spot, since we got here,' Mirai says. "So, wherever we are right now, that's probably wherever we should have been in the park if a hole in reality hadn't opened up for us to explore."
"Mirai's right," Saki says. "Neither of us really know the layout of the park here, so we've kind of got to assume that what we see is what we get." Saki pauses, quickly adding "That is, at least as far as basic things are concerned. Obviously I'm not counting all the stuff that's upside-down."
Now, it's your turn to nod your head. "All right, then it's kind of settled how we've got to proceed." You look to Lancer; she's in support of your idea. "Just give me a second here so I can-"
Concentrate
Concentrate
Concentrate
All right, there we go, Kazumi! "So… What's it saying?" Mirai asks, almost immediately after you feel your cowlick bouncing towards your target.
"Uh…." You reach up, feeling for which direction your hair is turning. "I think we're supposed to head over that way," you say, gesturing in a northeast direction. "If I had to guess, what we're looking for is probably going to be somewhere by the residential areas. Maybe even
inside one of the, uh… Houses." You aren't sure if they should still be called houses, or if their upside-down-ness would give the structures a different name altogether.
Or if being inside a labyrinth and clearly not being used for residential purposes would do that before anything else.
While you're thinking about going in the direction of the upside-down houses, you'd really like to know which of them is the one that corresponds to the house where Akemi's girlfriend lives. You know you're not going to meet her inside this labyrinth – but maybe you will? Who knows; today's already been full of enough surprises as it is – but you're still curious.
"So… Next question," Saki says, as she stares out in the direction which your cowlick is pointing. "What do we do about the Grief?" With her thumb, Saki gestures to the rain of Grief that continues to fall up from the upside-down lake floating in the labyrinth's sky.
Or is that actually the ground, and where you are is the upside-down sky you only think is the ground? "You saw what that did to Lancer's spear and Mirai's teddy bear. We'll need something to protect ourselves if we ever want to actually leave this stupid archway."
"I recall offering my assistance if you required it,' Lancer says. "All I ask in return is that one of you tell me what an 'umbrella' is, and what it looks like."
You do your best to describe what an umbrella is and looks like to Lancer; "It's got a pole that you hold it with, and a big, spiderweb-shaped covering that's usually made of plastic, or some other kind of waterproof material, that stretches over the top."
"Usually, commercial umbrellas are
just big enough to where they don't cover you from the rain all the way," Saki adds. "But obviously, that's not going to be good enough for us. We need something that'll be big enough to protect us from the Grief that'll be falling on our heads."
"Oh! And maybe make ours big enough so that me and Saki can fit under the same umbrella!" Mirai adds, cuddling up to Saki. "That'd be so~ romantic, wouldn't it?"
"Mirai, we're here to do a job, not be bad clichés in a romance manga." Mirai pouts as Saki is forced to rebuke her. "But if you really want to, I'll make sure we share an umbrella sometime once this is all over." She leans in, kissing Miria, and that's enough to wipe the pour from her face. "But for right now, we just need to focus, okay?"
With some additional explanations from you and Saki, as well as some attempts at mimicking an umbrella-shape with your arms – because you don't have cell reception inside the labyrinth, so you can't show Lancer a picture of what one looks like – Lancer manages to make four, fairly large umbrellas, one for each of you. "Hopefully these will suffice," Lancer says, as she hands each of you an umbrella, keeping the fourth for herself. "I made them as large as I could, given what I had to work with."
"What she had to work with," is obvious, since you can faintly make out little spear-points dotting the tips of each umbrella.
That's so cute~!
"All right," you say, now that that's out of the way, "Let's get moving. The longer we stay here, the more likely is it that something goes wrong."
Instead, something goes wrong the instant you step off of the archway's, uh, roof.
Suddenly, the intense feeling of vertigo is back, and it's as if your entire world has been turned upside-down. Mostly because it has. You aren't sure if you're walking on the ground and seeing everything upside-down, or if you're walking on the invisible boundary in the air and seeing everything from right-side-up. Fortunately, one small convenience of you the world now being upside-down, is that you're now facing the right direction for the rain of Grief, falling up from the lake in the middle of the sky, to hit the tops of your umbrellas and bounce right off.
"So, we're back to this now," Saki says with a sigh. "I kind of wish we'd seen the last of that after you…" Saki's voice trails off, and when she finds it again, she asks "Actually, could you explain again to us what you actually did to make things go right-side-up before?"
"I'm not really sure myself, actually," you reply. "I know I passed through the boundary where we were seeing our reflections, and I met a reflection of me that wasn't actually mimicking my movements. I guessed it must have been a familiar, since it was actually there and not actually repeating my movements back at me, so I attacked it with my black hole. When I stuffed my black hole into its chest, it opened up a hole and I could see the outside coming out the other end- Like, the actual outside outside, where we came from."
"Then reality kind of… Broke, and before I knew whether it was me or my duplicate that was falling, I'd fallen on my butt and was back with you, Mirai, and Lancer at the archway," you say. "I really wish I could explain it better. I'm still kind of confused myself, actually."
"No, it sounds like you did a pretty good job explaining it,' Mirai says. "I'm sure it would make more sense if we'd been there to see it ourselves, but at least I can imagine what you're describing."
Saki nods her head at Mirai's words, as does Lancer, who says "Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as though the same solution will be available to us this time, not unless we can turn around and find more duplicates of ourselves to defeat."
On a whim, the four of you all turn around, but find nothing. No duplicates of yourselves, either upside-down or right-side-up, can be seen. You're just yourselves, alone and possibly upside-down in a strange labyrinth. But still, you follow the lead of your cowlick, as you head northeast to try and find the source of whatever is causing this. Maybe it's a witch, maybe you'll just find a massive clump of dark magic, or something else equally as sinister.
"You know, this is kind of… Weird," Saki says as the four of you are wandering; "And not, like, in the way you're probably thinking of it. I know witch labyrinths are usually pretty weird, but have you ever noticed that they all follow… Kind of roughly the same pattern?"
"I know what you mean," Mirai says. "Usually, there's a couple hallways, or chambers, or whatevers, and there'll be familiars, or puzzles, or whatever, and we've got to get through those to get to the witch. But here… It's like the entire labyrinth is just one big sandbox that's mirroring a really messed-up version of reality, rather than being its own thing like every other labyrinth we've encountered has been." Saki and Mirai both turn to Lancer, and Mirai says "You've been awfully quiet, Lancer. You maybe got any theories as to what's going on?"
"I think you have put too much stock in the Otherworld making some semblance of 'sense' to you," Lancer replies. "The Otherworld, at least the Otherworld I am familiar with, if a fickle, capricious place, that cannot be afforded any amount of goodwill or made estimates of. In my time, we always had to expect the unexpectable when venturing into the Otherworld."
"Lancer, how are we supposed to expect something if it's unexpectable?" you ask. "You can't do that. You can expect the unexpected, but if something's unexpectable then by definition you can't expect it."
But maybe this is what Lancer meant, when you find yourself in front of one house in particular, and your cowlick is going absolutely wild. "Okay," you say as you bring your team to a stop just outside of that house. It's been hit by whatever in this labyrinth is causing things to be upside-down pretty hard, and it looks like it's been completely turned inside-out, more like a modern art piece than a place where people could actually live in real life. "Whatever we're looking for, it's in here."
"Are you sure?" Despite your cowlick's current behaviour, Saki still doesn't sound too sure. "It doesn't look any different from the other houses."
"I'm sure of it," you say. "This is the place."
[ ] Now, how do you get in?
[ ] And what do you do once you're inside?
