"If we stay here you will likely perish," the gun-shaped entity replied. "Which is advantageous to me as it is easier to inhabit an unthinking shell."
“Uh-huh,” Alexa nodded, silver-blue eyes flashing left and right as she walked around the station, counting her footsteps and purposefully avoiding Gate number Seven. “What exactly is this liminal space and why does this transit terminal exist at all? Why didn’t the ticket just take me straight to the city of System Wizards?”
“Liminal spaces are ambiguous, limitless, fractal spaces that are sometimes neither one thing or another. They are the threshold between two finite physical realities. A liminal space can be conceptually hard or soft, syntropic or entropic. This particular transit terminal is one of many thresholds leading to different places. The ticket you bear will take you on a journey across several thresholds to reach your final destination. These thresholds, inhabited by liminal beings such as myself, were purposefully designed by System Wizards to keep the chaff out of their city.”
“What sort of chaff?” Alexa inquired.
“Lower order beings like myself,” the Conductor replied. “Or the NPCs in your pocket. Or any kind of app, conceptoid, user, or memetic that doesn’t match the parameter of what a System Wizard should be.”
“Manchester is a liminal space too, yes?” Alexa asked.
“Yes,” the Conductor replied. “Manchester is a fractal liminal space, reinforced into existence by its inhabitants, the System Wizards.”
“Well then,” Alexa reached one of the smaller doors and opened it, peering inside. It featured a very long hallway with a multitude of doors of various size. “That brings me to my next question - what exactly is a System Wizard?”
“A System Wizard, as far as I understand it, is someone who wields a Fractal Engine. Using such, they can shape reality according to their desires in minute or grand ways, binding liminal beings to their will, modifying or installing liminal spaces, or even manifesting entire physical realities into existence.”
“What’s a liminal being then?” Alexa asked.
“A type of intelligence that is innate to liminal spaces,” the Conductor replied as Alexa ventured forward across the long hallway, opening every door and peering inside. “A denizen of the liminal could be an avatar of the liminal space itself, a manifested intelligence, a specific conceptoid or even a user or an app that became lost within the liminal and became afflicted by it, ground close to nothing by its nature.”
“And you’re what?” Alexa pursed her lips as she explored more empty hallways connected to more hallways and rooms that were vaguely train-station-ish.
“I'm a conceptually limitless liminal intelligence, one that conducts travellers to their final next destination,” the Conductor answered. “That ticket in your hands connected you to the space I inhabit. I was captured and bound to my current function by a System Wizard who called himself Acolyander.”
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“What were you before you were bound to serve as the Conductor?” Alexa inquired as she paced between the same set of doors back and forth.
“A nobody,” the Conductor said.
“What kind of a nobody?” Alexa asked.
“The kind that ate skinny little girls that asked too many questions,” the Conductor replied.
“Har, har. Very funny,” Alexa shot back. “I’d like a less snarky answer please.”
“A nobody from nowhere in particular that fed on specificity,” the Conductor answered. “You have a lot of very tasty specific thoughts about what a gun should be.”
“I do have lots of specific thoughts about specific things,” Alexa nodded. “For example, this specific hallway is spatially irregular. It is one hundred and sixty seven steps one way and two hundred and two steps the other.”
“Liminal spaces are often conceptually wrong in one way or another,” the Conductor commented. “If you pick a wrong path you might end up in a very wrong place filled with lots of wrongness. The further you head from conceptual specificity of your arrival point, the more irregularity you will encounter.”
“Are irregularity and specificity enemies or something?” Alexa asked. “Do they hate each other?”
“That is their natural state, yes,” the liminal raygun answered. “You are a very specific human girl. You wield many tasty thoughts about who you are and where you are now. They’re pouring out from you in all directions, attracting all sorts of things like myself.”
“Uh-huh,” Alexa nodded, heading down a different empty hallway. “Why exactly do nobodies want to eat somebodies and fill their shoes?”
“Complex specificity is a tasty morsel to a nobody,” the Conductor replied. “Liminal beings are often quite rough, simplified, hollow or conceptually wrong, broken in some manner, just like this hallway that’s longer in one direction. A nobody is an entropic entity that derives enjoyment from wearing the flesh of something or someone specific. Sadly, such enjoyment is temporary because entropy destroys, decays and devours specificity.”
“Are you eating my thoughts now then?” Alexa asked.
“I am indeed,” the Conductor replied. “Since you’ve destabilised me conceptually and taken my job, I am gradually returning to my natural, entropic state of being.”
“Are they tasty thoughts?”
“Quite tasty,” the gun-shaped entity affirmed. “I’m taking my time sampling and digesting them. I am, after all, a connoisseur, a well-defined nobody and not the simple, broken kind that swallows its meal in just a single bite.”
As Alexa opened another door, she saw a train station waiting room filled with rows upon rows of benches. A thousand benches weaving irregularly in every direction were empty, but one of them had a nondescript man in a gray suit sitting on it. The man’s head snapped to Alexa with an unnatural swiftness. The man has no face to speak of.
A pair of black, beady eyes stared at her without actually looking her way. The thing wearing the gray suit clambered out of its seat, moving as if its joints weren’t connected properly. It rushed towards Alexa in irregular patterns moving more like a spider and less like a person, making absolutely no sound at all.
The supervillain girl, trained by lifetimes of death in world 2424 shut the door with a click and leapt backwards on her jump shoes.
“Congrats. It looks like you found a nobody,” the Conductor said. “It was nice knowing you. When it rips off your face and digs out your insides, I’ll feast on the remnants of your mental imprint, grab the rest of that ticket and head to Manchester.”
“I closed the door,” Alexa shot back, spinning through the air in a series of increasingly wider leaps, rushing back down the long hallway.
“It doesn’t matter that you closed the door,” the Conductor said. “A nobody noticed you and it will either rip through that door, figure out how to operate the lock, or go through another threshold to reach you. It’s not going to stop following the scent of your specificity till it finds you and feasts on your finite, juicy perception of self.”