“Whoa there! Where’d you come from, little buddy?” Agwyn giggled as she caught the puffball.

“Yip!” The fish gremlin puffed and climbed up to Agwyn’s shoulders with its button paws before nudging her with its kitty snout. “Wu!”

It jumped down from Agwyn’s shoulder and scuttled out of the gangway. After a while, it noticed the two dhionne not following. So, it turned back, prodded Agwyn’s boots, and ran off again.

“Aww~,”

“Very intelligent.”

The two dhionne didn’t step out of the gangway.

“Wu.. wu?”

The puffball returned. It tried to bite into Agwyn’s clothes, but the alloy edges of her Exogear and the elastane form-fitting attire made them remarkably un-bite-able. The fish gremlin whimpered. It meowed, walking to Elrhain with dropping triangular ears and latched onto his lab coat, pulling.

But its button paws could not generate enough force to move the one hundred and eighty-seven centimetres high dhionne.

Agwyn couldn’t take it anymore and laughed out loud. She picked up the creature again, cooing with a lulling voice, “You, you cute little thing. You want us to fowwow you, don’t ’cha? So smart! Yet so suspwicious!”

“Why are you lisping again?”

“Ewwie is just jeawous he can’t talk to fish gwemlin. Isn’t that wight, Yip?”

“And now you have named the suspicious creature that obviously had something to do with us being stuck here.” Elrhain shook his head. He gave Agwyn a signal before carefully walking down the steps.

The puffball, well, Yip, as of a few seconds ago, perked up. But Agwyn held it in place. She lifted it upside down before shouting, “It’s smooth! My new ghostly pet has a smooth, genderless behind!”

Elrhain placed a single foot on the stony surface outside the gangway, feeling like an explorer setting foot on an unknown exoplanet for the first time.

The stone surface was similar to lunar rock, like the many asteroids in the Kuiper belt where bases and colonies have been built. He put pressure on his foot, then retracted it. He then climbed up the stairs and entered the dream corridor.

He returned after a full hour had passed. Yip was fast asleep in Agwyn’s arms, expanding and deflating like a balloon with every breath.

“I can go back to both our mindscapes, but the runic chains still lock the dream doors,” Elrhain said.

He had earlier noticed similar runic chains floating randomly around in the space outside when he was at the bottom of the gangway. But there weren’t only chains. Large glyphs floated in the air too, together with blue crystals that looked like Sagathan lamps dotting the ground. Alongside the glyphs and chains, the crystals created fence-like areas, partitioning one area from another.

These fences weren’t continuous but discrete. They were shattered in certain places, then popped out again haphazardly in other.

Agwyn handed him the sleeping Yip. She stretched then went inside the dream corridor. She also returned an hour later.

Yip had woken up by now and was pouting on the stair steps. Agwyn petted it thoroughly, suddenly missing Alleigh. But at Elrhain’s badgering, she tearfully left Yip behind and re-entered the corridor.

They tested every combination of going in and out. They kept a lookout for any and all changes to their mindscape, dream doors, and dream corridor. On one occasion, they even brought Yip inside. The fish gremlin was moody and didn’t want to cooperate, but it wasn’t hard to pick it up and turn it around. They then brought in the rocky soil and stone samples from outside but noticed no positive or negative changes.

They didn’t dare to bring Yip or the soil samples inside the core of their mindscape, the two dark chambers at both ends of the corridor just yet. But the preliminary evaluation was that it was safe.

Finally, after two more days, Agwyn and Elrhain stepped down from the gangway into this new ‘planet’.

“Oof, that was tiring.” Agwyn straightened her joints with a satisfying pop. How any physiological function worked in this mental world, they did not know.

Yip jumped up and down excitedly, thinking the two dhionne would finally follow it. Elrhain hated to be the one to pour cold water.

“Now for phase two. We stay outside the corridor in increasingly longer time frames and see what happens.”

“Wu…. Wuuuuuuu!” Yip cried.

“It’s lucky that we don’t need to eat or drink… or pee.” Agwyn covered her mouth and let out a yawn. Thankfully, unlike Yip, she wasn’t ‘smooth’ down there when she checked yesterday. But like Yip, they no longer needed to answer nature's call.

Agwyn moaned some more and soothed the fish-gremlin by means of tummy raspberries.

The fish gremlin lay on her arms lethargically. Like it, many might have found their cautious experiments to be over the top, both tedious and unnecessary. But compared to lying on their backs as toddlers, stuck in one room for years on end, this was nothing.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

And besides, no amount of caution was unnecessary when yanked off to unfamiliar places. Agwyn and Elrhain had done the same when they were first reincarnated to Uorys Diosca. Well, to the best extent their infant abilities let them. They really had no other choice back then but to let Cyra and Eluned have their way with them.

But this time, they had a choice. Their mental bodies being changed to their human, adult equivalents seemed to have also brought back parts of their ‘old-people sentimentalities.’ They were distrustful and needed to check the door-lock five times before leaving the house.

Elrhain and Agwyn camped out on the terra firma of this planet, then went back to check on their mindscape. First, they camped out for a day, then two, and gradually to a week and month.

The gangway was jutting out from a sizeable greyish mountain, as if a spacecraft had crashed onto this planetary hillock, or tholus, with only the gangway sticking out.

They noticed no significant changes other than more repairs. The runic chains were all-pervasive, healing, and imprisoning.

Time passed slowly, and Elrhain and Agwyn had all the time in the world to talk about fortune and woes. They hugged by a boulder, Agwyn sitting on Elrhain’s lap and Yip sleeping on hers until sleep took them away. They chatted about Cyra, Ysbail and Cati, Dofnald, and Miramarja. Their life as dhionne had given them more resilience to the passing of time, to mindlessly do the same thing every day without going insane. Sometimes a week would feel like a day, but an hour might feel like years.

They also investigated other factors.

They could cultivate, but manna was scarce here. Extremely so. Even Elrhain, with his low input cultivating for an hour drained the area dry, not to mention Agwyn. It took many more hours for manna to saturate the region again.

But unlike within the corridor, cultivating didn’t drain manna from the surrounding runic chains and glyphs.

Elrhain moved his curiosity to these glyphs next and threw Yip into one of them. The fish gremlin went right through like a ghost, immensely enjoying the experience. Elrhain didn’t dare touch them himself, but he tested by touching the chains inside the corridor again. Still very sparky. He then touched the chains on the gangway and got the same result.

Finally, after steeling his heart, he tapped one of the runic chain links directly outside the gangway yet still connected to it…. with a broken tube he had collected from a still wrecked part of the dream corridor.

It sparked, then flared.

It burst into particles of light as Elrhain hurriedly let go, then was swept away by the harsh lunar wind.

“Ellie!”

“I-It’s okay. I’m not hurt.” Elrhain said while grabbing his left palm with his right. Agwyn huffed at his lie. The flare had obviously scalded his hand!

She carefully blew on it, cursing inwardly that the first-aid function on her exogear was as dead as the gun.

Elrhain eyed the runic chains in the meantime, noting the changes. It was a dimmer now, but he could feel it syphoning manna from the air and funnelling it inside.

Hopefully, for the repairing process. But just as likely to lock their consciousness inside here and not let them return to their bodies.

The next day, Elrhain discovered another vital factor. When he brought his scalded arm near one of the blue crystals, the traumatized skin got mended. They started hurting if he brought his arm too close, so he didn’t dare touch the crystals directly. But the ambient light acted like an area-of-effect healing spell. His burn wound healed in hours.

After some more weeks, Elrhain and Agwyn decided there were no tests left to perform that they deemed essential.

Elrhain looked at Yip, the puffball rolling all over the place like a certain hedgehog while humming a “Wu wi wu” song.

“Okay, my shady buddy, you win. Lead the way.”

“Yip!” it cheered, the spark returning to its glossy eyes. Yip bounced, then ran off. This time, the two dhionne followed, albeit warily.

They didn’t have to walk far. In fact, they just rounded the tholus and arrived on the opposite side. About half a kilometre of walking with their hands touching the tholus wall.

“Well, that wasn’t far,” Agwyn muttered as she observed the area. It was like the side of the gangway. It had albedo features, with floating chains and glyphs everywhere. Blue crystals sprouted from the bedrock like luminescent mushrooms.

In the distance, tentatively the ‘North’ of this geographic area, was a landscape populated with big and small craters and dunes. There was a long fissure heading east to west in the distance where even Elrhain’s exceptional eyesight barely reached. About fifty kilometres out, assuming the curvature of this place was the same as Uorys diosca, and similar amounts of particles floated in the air. Likely, it was farther away, considering they were standing on a higher elevation. Also,

“Are those islands… hells, those islands are flying!” Agwyn exclaimed.

Indeed, not so far into every cardinal direction other than south floated large and small islands with satellite rings of boulders, stones, and asteroids. From their guess, the one closest to them was thirty meters across. But there was a big one farther west, likely kilometres.

The islands weren’t stationary, slowly orbiting… something as they glided the atmosphere.

There was an unending, flat wasteland on the other side of the tholus towards the south. That was the view they were greeted with when they stepped out of the gangway. But this side of the tholus was like a completely different region on a game map. As though this tholus marked the beginning of one area and the end of another.

He had noticed that in the south. These runic chains only extended out a few hundred meters. But to the north, east, and west of the tholus, they went much farther. They only stopped near the edge of the fissure to the north, while they couldn’t even see the end in the east and west.

Lines of runic chains entangled with glyphs and floating boulders also went up from the planetary surface to the floating islands like staircases, moving marginally as they did with the flight path of the airborne landmasses.

“Freaky,” Agwyn muttered out. There was a certain mystical quality about all this. The ground, the craters, the dunes. Everything was ever so slightly illuminated. The sky was always the starry night firmament, as though seen from an unknown planet in a strange galaxy. The stars were twinkling in every direction, with no sun to be seen. The very land permeated with many magical phenomena despite such low manna.

Elrhain realized they were aliens in this strange world. They didn’t belong here but were stuck nevertheless.

“Wu!” Yip, their abductor, let out a strange mraow. The little creature bounced on the ground in front of the tholus. When it reached the top of its bounced, it booped the wall with its nose.

Elrhain took a deep breath.

On the wall where Yip booped, inscriptions written in the unknown language of Loch Sagathan temple formed a strange pattern. A many-faced circle. A magic circle.

Smack dab in the middle, there was a… a cloud. A smudge in reality? A strange ectoplasmic object obscured the wall as if it was a blur on a photograph.

It cracked, sparked, and morphed into tens of different things, and Elrhain felt a vast gaze boring into his very being.

It looked at him, sieved through his memories, and savoured his very soul.

And then it was gone. Leaving behind a familiar object where the blur on the wall had been.

A security terminal. The same cobalt-black screen with biometric inputs Elrhain had used in every facility around the Gigantomachy.