There was no gravity on the other side.

They were still inside a tree, a large cylinder of bark lit by ambient light that seemed to come from nowhere, but there was nothing outside the tree. It wasn’t emptiness, it wasn’t coldness, it wasn’t a vacuum, it was just nothing. Even without consciously using her extra-senses, she could tell—it was such a stark difference from her normal reality that it couldn’t be missed. Her stomach was utterly convinced that this tiny universe was all there was, all there would ever be, just three people floating in a room without even a force on them. She shivered.

The wall ahead of them—or ceiling, maybe, if she oriented the room so that the tree was upright, like it had been outside—had a round door in the center, but it was covered in a strange green goop.

“Zero-G, here we come,” Myra muttered. Experimentally, she gave herself a telekinetic push forward. An arm’s length away from the wall, she stopped herself, applying the equal and opposite push.

“Is this stuff safe to touch?”

“It will kill you instantly,” Roc said. He floated to Myra’s side and took from his bag some kind of long suction tube with a pump. He inserted one end of the tube into the goop and began operating the pump, an entirely awkward affair in Zero-G. He seemed practiced at it, though.

“What’s this do, exactly?”

“It extracts the badness,” he explained.

“Is there a r-reason we can’t just teleport to the end?” Shera asked.

“They did something to the space, strengthened the fabric. You can’t teleport at all. We don’t know how they did it.”

Maybe that was something to ask Iz.

Eventually, Roc declared he was done, though there was no indication how he could tell. He led the way, reaching through the goop (not dying, because the badness had been sucked out) and opening the door for them.

This was the first of three security layers the murk bogs had already figured out how to crack. There was a room where they had to avoid sharp vines growing out of the walls, a room that required a musical password that Roc played on a flute, and a room with owls. And finally—

“And this is where we need your help.”

The centerpiece of the room was a large, glass tube, about big enough to fit a person lying inside of it. From Myra’s current orientation, it was arranged on its side. It was fit in place by a couple of bracings that were attached to the walls. Also around the walls were massive aura crystals, pointed inwards at the tube device.

As she’d been told to expect, it was also engraved with runes, on both the inside and the outside of the surface (though this wasn’t technically correct, as she would realize in a moment). It was bottle-shaped, narrowing into a neck at one end.

The final notable feature was the pair of glowing rings. One ring acted as the bottle’s “cap,” while the other one was inside the bottle, near its “base,” except the base of the bottle seemed to curve inwards, creating an “inner neck” that was also capped by this glowing ring. The two rings were identical in size. It took a minute to understand what she was looking at.

A diagram of the Klein Bottle portal setup, as described above. [https://i.imgur.com/MNKl7lj.png]

Shera floated around to the other side of the device. “It’s a Klein bottle,” she said.

“Oh, huh. So it is.”

At first, Myra had thought the rings were mirrors since the bottle seemed to be reflected in them. But when she looked closely, the necks were actually continuing into the space. The rings were portals.

Myra had seen Klein bottles in museums and novelty shops, though always of the self-intersecting variety. It wasn’t possible to have a Klein bottle in normal 3D space without that kind of intersection, but they had punched a hole in the spatial fabric just to make it happen.

“No wonder they need so much aura,” Myra muttered. “Holy shit.”

“Is the whole tree in z-zero-G just for this?”

“What do you mean?” Myra asked. Roc, too, looked a little puzzled.

“Look how the portal has to be flipped,” Shera pointed out, “so that the neck comes out this end in the opposite direction. If this was in normal gravity, it would have to flip the direction of gravity at the boundary.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t actually need to be flipped, though,” Myra observed. “You’d just have to twist the neck around more, and it wouldn’t look as nice.”

“O-Oh. I guess you’re right.”

“Hey, is it safe to put your hand in this thing?” Myra asked.

Roc nodded, though he also warned, “Don’t touch the perimeter, it’ll burn you, it might even slice through you.”

With that in mind, Myra tried it out. The neck was almost as large as the portal itself, leaving just a little bit of space for her hand; the other side of the portal, however, was wide open, so that was the side she used. Her hand came out the other portal, on the ‘inside’ of the bottle (though there wasn’t really an ‘inside’). She made a thumbs-up, though she had to think hard about how to orient her arm the right way.

“So um,” Myra said, remembering they weren’t out on a museum date. “What are we supposed to…?” She looked around the room. “Like, what do we do?”

“We don’t know,” Roc said. “To be honest, when we got here the first time, we thought we’d reached the end, that this bottle was the object of the entire vault. We were thrilled—However, our clients said it didn’t make sense. Furthermore, we can sense plenty of more space behind this wall.” Like Myra, he was calling them walls even though they really should have been ceilings. “So this is almost certainly an aspect of the security.”

Myra scratched her head. “There’s no door, or lock, or—”

“There actually is something—it’s faint.”

The girls looked more closely at the wall-ceiling, which was made of a hard, slick metal. There was a very thin crack, almost impossible to see, drawing out a circle in the very center of the room.

“We think that’s the door.”

“It’d be a tight squeeze, but I guess it could fit a person,” Myra acknowledged. Well, it’d be a tight squeeze for Roc. “I guess this cylinder slides out?”

“We tried many tricks to remove it, but it doesn’t budge. It resists all attempts at telekinesis as well.”

“I th-think we should figure out what these runes do,” Shera said.

“Right…” She inspected the runes closely for the first time. “Er…” Myra floated around the bottle to look like she was doing something, but it was equally unclear from every angle. “I have no idea what I’m looking at. I don’t even know what script this is.”

Fortunately, this at least was a question that the murk bogs had already answered. Roc had brought the symbol guide for the script, which turned out to be a fairly obscure one.

In principle, it should have been a matter of interpreting the script through that symbol guide, but for some reason, it wasn’t that simple. Myra spent quite some time trying to read the script just as she normally would, but the meaning always seemed to slip away. It was like the ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ of runes. Something was deeply strange about this rune script.

“We’ve been baffled by it,” Roc assured her, as he could see her getting increasingly confused.

“I can see why. Who’s ‘we,’ by the way?”

“The murk bogs.”

Not what I meant…

Eventually, she decided to put that aside for a moment. There were more ways to understand a rune script than just reading it directly. She performed a few basic test-spells to confirm the runes were actually active and doing something. But what they were doing escaped her.

What runic functionality could possibly require such a strange topology? What could be worth the expenditure of setting up these portals just to host the rune script?

◆

When they were ready to call it quits for the day, they left the way they came. Through the thread of space back to the main universe (what a relief) and then teleporting back out to the safe house. The sun had long set. I lost track of the time again… “How long were we in there?”

“S-seven hours and thirty-eight minutes, and about…” She kind of trailed off with her sigfigs, a little uncharacteristic. She was probably tired.

Roc, for his part, hunched over, nearly making himself a right angle, face pointed straight at the ground.

“You okay? … Roc?”

He nodded, but he didn’t move from his position. Myra almost thought he was going to heave.

“Right well, uh, let’s get a move on,” Myra said. “The night trains are infrequent, so we don’t wanna miss the next one.”

They walked back to the train station, Roc walking with a full stride but not quite ever standing fully upright. They caught the train on time (maybe thanks to Shera’s good planning).

As they flew over the trees, Myra grew increasingly worried about Roc. Is he tired? Is he distressed we didn’t make more progress?

“Well, I, uh, think I got a good handle on what we’re dealing with,” Myra said. “I just need to take the time to really methodically pick through this script.”

“That’s good,” Roc said, not looking up. “We should start planning the next excursion. I need to catch up on my work, and I assume you need some time to make a plan of attack, so I would suggest going three days from now.”

“Three…?”

“I don’t believe I can justify going sooner. You can consider going without me, though I would highly advise you find at least one additional teammate.”

“I’ll have to think about it.” It certainly made sense that Roc had limited time to devote to the project.

Come to think of it, how did the group’s blacksmith end up in charge of this operation, anyway?

“Roc, do you mind if I ask how you ended up in charge of this mission?”

Roc didn’t say anything for a bit, then he eventually grunted, filling the space where the answer should be, but not yielding any information.

God, I keep thinking this group can’t get any weirder…

◆

Day 20

Luckily, there was some good news the next day—Nesr Wald was ordered to continue their teleportation lessons, this time instructing them in long-range teleportation.

Myra had always just kind of imagined that subverting a disruption field would be the harder of the two skills, but apparently, just because something was sketchy and dubiously legal, that didn’t make it difficult. Subverting a disruption field had been relatively easy compared to long-range teleportation, and there was a reason that Instructor Yam said he would wait until the fourth year before teaching the latter.

Specifically, the aura constructs needed to move a teleportation endpoint far away in a short amount of time were numerous. Many of them were fairly bespoke, too, so they were unlikely to be of use in other domains. Nesr Wald started by judging their competencies on a number of relevant tasks, tasks which got easier and easier as they botched one after another, Nesr Wald’s face darkening all the way. Myra was pretty sure that they were failing tasks Nesr Wald had intended as insults. Finally, after the round of humiliation concluded, the man decided on a direction for their training, and he assigned them some specialized aura manipulation exercises.

As he walked away, there was a loud gunshot which nearly gave both of them a heart attack. It seemed that in his need to blow off steam, he’d shot a training pistol—one of the safe ones that shot incorporeal bullets—through his own head as he was walking away.

◆

That night, Myra slumped over the desk in the rune shop, trying to hold her head high enough that she could actually see the notes in front of her. “God, I need somewhere I can actually think.”

Shera had a suggestion. “Th-there’s the bathhouse over on the eastern edge.”

“Okay, the bathhouse looks really nice, but c’mon… it’s, y’know…”

“It’s mostly empty around midnight,” Shera said. “The only people who go that late are th-the others that prefer peace and quiet. And it’s pretty large with lots of corners you can hide in.”

“Well…”

The fact was, for all Myra’s reservations of bathing in a common area, the suggestion was enticing. So she agreed.

Like Shera had suggested, the bathhouse interior was divided into alcoves by rock walls that were probably meant to imitate the feel of a cavern hot spring. There were places that looked like they were supposed to carry trees or plants, so it was disappointing those weren’t maintained, but the building also had an open ceiling, so it was no surprise Shera liked it in the middle of the night.

“You were right. This is what I needed,” she said, stretching out and enjoying the steaming water. “I’m now half-convinced this building is the reason the murk bogs took over the platform.”

Shera was seated opposite her in their private alcove. She was a bit less daring, wearing a towel, but an opaque layer of bubbles coated the top of the water, and Myra didn’t feel immodest.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Now, all I need is a spell to let me write in the water and this is the perfect place to do my thinking.” The Raine Empire used spells like that to draw borders and other kinds of signs, way out in the ocean.

“I th-think you free-form t-telek it,” Shera said. “It’s not that bad.”

Myra focused on all the ambient water aura around. She still remembered the time she’d had to partner with Shera while practicing the manipulation of water with non-water aura. That had been a disaster, and she still sucked at it.

Fueled by water aura—the normal, easy way—it was pretty easy to ‘etch’ letters into the surface of the water. It definitely took some concentration to get the shapes right, but then it didn’t take much effort to hold them still once they were made.

“It’s not quite chalkboard-ready, but it’s pretty fun.” She etched a series of heart symbols in a circle around Shera. Then, with a spell of mischief overtaking her, she drew another circle of runes. Suddenly, the hot water surrounding the girl had the viscosity of syrup.

“Eek!” the girl jolted as she was enveloped by the thick, rubbery sensation of hot water, and Myra laughed, dispelling the runes. “W-what was that?”

“Viscosity trick,” she said, taking only a second to stop laughing. “Sorry. I actually got kicked out of a party for that once.”

“Why?”

“When I was a kid—I was an older teen I guess, but this is kinda immature, so imagine me as a kid. My father brought me to some social function with some businessfolks. And there was like a lake party, mostly for the kids… Anyway my dad had this business partner with a kid my age, and she was an absolute prick, so I had this plan to use the noodle-floats to make some runes—”

Shera looked confused so Myra had to explain.

“Noodle-floats are like these styrofoam floaty things. They’re just pool toys. Anyway, my plan was to wait for her to dive in, and then while she’s at the bottom of the pool, turn the whole section of the lake into syrup-water to freak her out.” Shera winced. “Look, you need to understand how much of a dick this girl was… Anyway, it didn’t work. Noodle-floats make for a very bad runic medium. They all exploded in flames and spewed burnt styrofoam all over the lake.”

“Mm, you really do like r-runes, huh?”

“Yeah… honestly, this was part of my life where I really self-identified as ‘the rune girl,’ so I was always eager to thrust them everywhere, show off my thing, even if it didn’t make sense…”

“Oh, it’s like me but with astronomy.”

“Nah, c’mon, there’s nothing embarrassing you can do with astronomy,” Myra said.

This seemed to brighten the other girl up a bit.

“So, have you m-made any progress?” she finally asked, reminding Myra that their relaxing time was strictly utilitarian by bringing the topic back to the heist. Theoretically, the two of them should have been working on the runes together, but practically, the whole thing was just much farther up Myra’s lane, and it had been left to her for most of the night.

Myra exhaled. “Sorta. So… First of all, the thing is deliberately obfuscated, I’m sure of that. Do you know much about ambiguous grammars?”

She shook her head.

“So like, if we take a normal sentence, I don’t know…” She thought for a second. “Take ‘I ate the cookie by the monkey-lamp.’ Does it mean the cookie was by the monkey-lamp? Or does it mean I was standing by the monkey-lamp? There’s multiple ways to read the sentence.”

“I know wh-what an ambiguous sentence is.”

“Right, sorry. Anyway, in normal language you just infer from context. But a rune script doesn’t do that. It takes on both meanings at once—Well, some mages have tried to build ‘semantics-sensitive rune scripts,’ where ambiguous parses would be disambiguated in context by some complicated rules, but those are uniformly a disaster. Just overcomplicated messes all around. It’s almost always better to just avoid ambiguity in the first place.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“I knew you’d get it.” Myra nodded to the girl. “Anyway, in principle you could intentionally use the ambiguity because you want both effects. This is rarely done outside a handful of well-understood tricks—like, to take the earlier example, maybe the cookie is by the monkey-lamp, and you’re going to stand next to the monkey-lamp while you eat it. Then, ‘I ate the cookie by the monkey-lamp’ is a reasonable way to optimize that in a rune script. So there’s things like that, but like… this rune script is…”

“Pathological?”

“Yeah. It’s pathological. It has so many ambiguities stacked on each other, so there’s an exponential blow-up in the number of interpretations. It’s more like a magazine puzzle than anything else… Anyway, so many of the interpretations are semantically garbage, but I think many of them are canceling each other out somehow, which is why the damn thing isn’t blowing up in flames from ill-formed trash. The trouble is in figuring out what it is doing; that is, what’s not getting canceled out, so I’m trying to get systematic about understanding the whole algebraic structure of the damn thing…”

◆

The ideal approach to this kind of thing would be to build a replica and experiment on it.

But this was geometrically impossible: a Klein bottle couldn’t be embedded in 3D space, not without the portal setup. Sure, there was always the self-intersecting Klein bottle you’d see in toy shops, but that self-intersection would completely fuck up the runes. The rune script in question was topologically impossible.

She even started making calls in her desperation to make some progress. She called her topology professor, Professor Suzuki, and even the runes professor, Professor Alzergodin, whom she still didn’t like very much. It was obvious that getting help from either of them would probably require a loop where she stayed in school. She called some of the people she knew at Precision Isomorphic’s lab, who quoted their exorbitant consulting fee.

They also went back to run some more tests on the rune scripts, though at Roc’s suggestion, they took someone else along. Myra picked Obyl, who didn’t mind tagging along but ultimately wasn’t much help with the specifics. They didn’t stay long either. Myra only had a few ideas and neither of them panned out.

◆

Day 22

For obvious reasons, Myra was taking the training more seriously than Shera. This was balanced out somewhat by Shera being naturally better at it, but not significantly, so Myra ended up progressing to the next stage first. Nesr Wald had a smug look about him as he delivered the news, making Myra a little uneasy, but it was otherwise encouraging: Myra would start doing what might be called ‘mid-range’ teleportation.

Well, really it was like ‘low-mid-range’ teleportation. Maybe ‘low-low-very-low-mid-range.’

Anyway, she was supposed to teleport halfway across the platform. Not very far in the grand scheme of things, but still farther than she had before.

She did all the steps as she’d been instructed. An expert would do it in seconds; she took her time. As she was getting ready to move, something made her hair stand on end. What was it?

…

Shit!

I’m not supposed to leave Shera alone with this guy!

“Hey, er, maybe one of you should head over to the destination? In case I get hurt.”

Nesr Wald pursed his dry lips. “We’re going to be here working on Shera’s metric aura alignment. There’s plenty of people where you’re going if you get hurt.” The old teacher already didn’t seem like the type to think much of someone who worried about getting hurt. (He had only begrudgingly put up safeties to prevent her from accidentally teleporting off the edge of the platform.)

“But, I’d feel better if, uh—”

“How about this? You can walk to the center and then teleport back here.”

“Oh, I guess that’s—” Wait, no, that doesn’t help at all!

Shera was twitching. “Myra, it’s f-f-fine. Just go.”

“I—”

“I need to work on my metric aura alignment.”

Shera definitely didn’t need to work on her metric aura alignment. She was obviously telling Myra not to worry about her and get the practice she needed.

God, this is like that ‘wolf, goat, cabbage’ puzzle.

Though not entirely proud of it, between Shera’s strained blessing and Nesr Wald’s impatient glare, she ended up doing as he suggested, walking to the center of the platform and then teleporting back. When she did so, there was nothing untoward going on, just Shera practicing her metric aura alignment.

“Go again,” Nesr Wald instructed.

She did it a few more times.

One reason teleportation was difficult to practice was the nausea. Teleportation nausea was a lot worse if you were inexperienced in whatever you doing, and Myra was definitely that, and it wasn’t long before she started to feel woozy. In Myra’s case, it took about eight attempts.

One more, she thought to herself. Then I’ll need to stop, I think. But nausea, Myra forgot, wasn’t linear. Not the least because it skews your judgment and disrupts your focus.

Myra botched the final attempt badly. She missed her destination by over half the teleportation length, and she was immediately overwhelmed by nausea. Her vision went dark, her head went numb, and she quickly flopped to the ground to rest by a tree.

It took a few minutes of deep breathing before it really passed.

She stood up (slowly), tested that she could properly walk, and then gingerly walked back to meet with—

Oh.

Nesr Wald was standing over her, one hand on her shoulder, another on her arm. Shera had her eyes closed and was practicing her metric aura alignment, but she looked profoundly uncomfortable.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“She’s practicing her metric—”

“No, what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m helping her keep a steady hand so she can practice.”

Myra physically yanked Shera away from the grubby creep. “I’m done for the day, I can’t do any more. Come on.”

◆

Day 23

“Y’know…” Shera said.

They really hadn’t talked about what had happened the previous day, except the sorta perfunctory are-you-okays. Somehow, Shera’s hesitant lead-in gave Myra the impression she was finally going to.

“Nobody ever really finds me attractive at the university.”

“Oh.” That wasn’t quite the direction she’d expected.

She bit at her nails. “Y-y’know, it’s always cr-creeps. Why can’t it be…”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighed a deep sigh and sunk down until her nose was barely above the water.

“You ever gone on a date?”

She shook her head.

“Anyone you like? Maybe we could use the—actually, no, we shouldn’t use the time loop, that’s kinda…”

“Y-yeah.”

“I mean like. I told you about… Ben…”

“Y-yeah.”

Myra coughed. Idiot. She tried to ask a more normal question. “What’s your type? Is there anyone you like?”

Shera didn’t move, but she narrowed her eyes, looking at her from the corner.

“Oh, c’mon, you don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, but we should have some girl talk.”

She raised up a bit. “I dunno. Friendly, smart, c-confident…” She seemed embarrassed at the generic adjectives. “It’s hard to describe…”

“Nah, like, who do you think is hot?”

“Oh.”

“Do you like guys, girls, both? Neither?”

“Umm… guys, I gu-guess… and…”

“And?”

“Well, s-sometimes I would fantasize about…” She paused for a long time. “Z-zirphilia.”

“Oh god, yeah, Zirphilia is so hot.”

Shera turned bright red and looked away from her. Myra giggled and floated to her side. “Have you ever thought about asking her out?”

“I dunno. I mean we used to be friends—or still are, maybe, but I dunno, I always felt like she was k-kinda taking pity on me ’c-cause I didn’t have any other f-friends…”

“Oh.”

Myra suspected that was probably Shera’s imagination, but she didn’t want to presume anything.

“Do you have an ideal date?”

She didn’t answer for a bit.

“I mean, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want—”

“No!” she shook her head. “I’ve never had a chance to have this kinda talk before… I like talking about it, I’m just thinking.” She thought. “My ideal date’s like… going out to a museum or something, then getting dinner, and then she, or he, shows me some cool enchantment. Then they ask, ‘hey, do you wanna come back to my place for tea?’ or some other transparent excuse, and we make out and then… y’know.”

“Hehe.”

“And then he’ll l-look me in the eye and tell me I’m beautiful and I’ll sing him a song to sleep.”

“Wait, you sing?!” Myra asked incredulously.

“N-no! I just mean, it’s a fantasy. Oh, I guess you asked my ideal date, and that’s not really th-the same thing as a fantasy, sorry—”

Myra elbowed her to stop being silly and pedantic.

“And then I guess I wouldn’t fall asleep, so I don’t really know what I’d do after that…”

It was hard not to feel for her, she was obviously insecure about her appearance and her voice.

And her appearance was fine. It was definitely odd, but it was easy to imagine someone enjoying her striped hair or her heterochromia. It had certainly grown on Myra.

Her voice, though…

“Shera have you ever, like, seen a voice therapist or anything?”

Her eyes, which despite her embarrassment had been slowly lighting up the whole conversation, plummeted into darkness.

“W-what?” she cried, and Myra knew then she had fucked up. “W-w-what do you mean? W-what’s wrong with m-m-my v-v-v-v-voice?”

“Um—I just mean, like, you know—”

“W-why would you a-a-ask that, n-now of all t-times? J-just after I—”

“Sorry, I was just, wondering.”

“Yeah, I g-g-” She stopped, then took several deep breaths. “I. Get. It.” She enunciated each syllable near-perfectly, though each with an enormous degree of conscious effort, more than Myra had ever seen her use before, the weight of which slammed down like an anvil three times.

“I think I-I’m done for the night.” And from someone who never needed to be done from the night, that was a damning thing to hear.

◆

As she went to sleep that night, her head sunk face-down as far into her pillow as humanly possible, it was impossible to think about the runic topologies. She was close to a breakthrough, she was pretty sure, but every time she looked at the patterns in her mind’s eye, every synapse in her brain violently asserted that she was being selfish, and that the only thing she was allowed to do was stew in the guilt of her foolish tongue.

So much for the Good Shera Loop.

Fuck me!

I haven’t deserved the help she’s given me at all.

After all, the only thing Myra had done this loop was drag Shera here to this fuckweird place. And then Shera had had to take a bunch of shit so Myra could focus on teleportation training that might actually help in future loops, and she barely even complained about it! Tomorrow she would probably act like nothing happened because Shera was all rational and knew that it was more important for Myra to be happy…

And indeed, this loop would be over soon at which point she’d forget it all, but—

She just couldn’t let it be this way. She’d been such an idiot with Shera the last few loops, and now she’d blown it again—

Myra pushed the runic algebra out of her brain with a finality. She aligned every neuron in her brain towards one goal: She would get the Good Shera Loop.

◆

“Shera!” She hurriedly jogged to the other girl early in the morning.

“Hey, M-Myra. Did you sleep well?” As Myra had suspected, she was acting like nothing had happened. But Myra had decided: she wouldn’t have it.

“I’ve made up my mind!” Myra announced. “First, we’re not gonna train with Nesr Wald for the rest of the loop. He’s already taught us a bunch, and I can train on my own for the last few days.”

“Oh. Okay.” She looked a little relieved.

“And!” Myra took off her murk bogs standard-issue tank top and threw it on the ground.

Myra had come to an insight. There was no reason Shera had to suffer the attention of weird creeps because Myra could act as her lightning rod. Myra didn’t mind going around in her sports bra, at least not that much, and this way she would be sexier and attract more of the stares. Shera would be safe from creeps.

“Wh-what?” Shera seemed to short-circuit. “W-what’s that for?”

“It’s for you, Shera,” she explained. The girl’s face turned bright red. She made some noises, but no words came out. “Look, I know you probably think it’s not rational, but I don’t want any complaints about it. I’ll be your lightning rod, and that’s final.” She took the other girl’s elbow in hers. “Come on, let’s go to breakfast.”

◆

Day 25

Shera seemed to be in a much better mood as a result of Myra’s sacrifice, which lightened Myra’s mind and allowed her to focus on the rune problem again. And thus, she finally cracked the complex web of runic ambiguities. Afterward, she wouldn’t be able to say exactly how she had figured it out. Once she looked at the right way, she couldn’t un-see it, and then all vestigial thoughts melted away. The problem didn’t even seem hard anymore.

Unfortunately, the answer she came to wasn’t an answer that thrilled her.

“So. I finally figured out what it does,” Myra said with a trace of dejectedness that the sentence didn’t seem to imply.

“Yeah?” Shera asked.

“It, uh…” She sighed. “It creates the portals.”

Shera’s jaw went slack. “Er—”

“Yeah, this whole time I just assumed the portals were maintained by the same subsystem that severed the rest of the space and held it in place.” She flopped to the ground, back against a tree, and sighed. “But no, the portals are created by the bottle itself. Just two portals—What a fucking waste of time. I mean, the device is clever and self-referential, you have these superimposed interpretations on top of each other, and those are forcing the two discs of space to impose on each other in the same way, but—” She sighed again. “All these runes, and they don’t do anything other than create these portals we already knew were there. What a, just, fucking waste of time.”

“No it wasn’t,” Shera said.

“We’re no closer to—”

“Yes we are!” she blurted out. “I mean, we should have realized this sooner. But I th-think the misdirection was intentional.” She was nodding to herself, then nodding faster. “Y-yeah, this is what we needed. I feel stupid. Remember how the bottle is held in place by those large braces connected to the walls?”

“Yeah…?”

“Why were those necessary? Think about it. It shouldn’t have been possible to move the Klein bottle, anyway. Because the portal flips the orientation, if you try to move one part one way, it will push another part the other way.”

“That’s true…” Myra said, not seeing where she was going. “So the braces seem redundant. So what?”

She shook her head. “N-n-no! They’re not redundant! Because the Klein bottles aren’t pinned to those two portals! The portals are pinned to the bottle! If you move the bottle, you move the portals!”

◆

From Shera’s insight, they worked out what to do pretty quickly, and with only three days left of the loop, they returned for the third time to the vault, again with Roc. Roc brought some large tools to unscrew the braces. There was probably an “intended” way to unlatch them, which they never found, but they were still able to take the thing apart safely and reversibly. Sure enough, it was possible to move the Klein bottle around, and the portals followed.

They rotated it so the ‘outside’ portal was towards the wall, aligned with the circular crack. The crack and the portal were exactly the same size—another thing they should have noticed to begin with. Thus, the perimeter of the ringed portal slotted right into the cracks. They pushed the bottle into the wall, and the cylindrical section of the wall appeared on the inside of the bottle. This cylinder also had its own runes on it.

A diagram of the Klein bottle used to remove the cylinder from the wall, as described above. [https://i.imgur.com/rbvsRE0.png]

“God, this is the real puzzle, isn’t it? Look how the runes line up with the bottle—”

They rotated the bottle following Myra’s direction until the runes lined up like she envisioned. Then there was a pop and a click, and the cylinder moved out of the wall—though since it was reflected by the portal, it looked like it was moving towards it. Anyway, they extracted the bottle, pulled out the cylinder, and opened the door to the next area.

“Victory! We’re in! We’re in!” Myra raised her hands in a ‘V’ and tried to do a zero-G dance, which was a little different than a normal dance. Then they pushed themselves through the doorway to the next room.

The next room had a wall-ceiling that was tiled in gargoyles. There must have been a thousand of them.

“Oh. Another obstacle.”