As Vaile awoke on the twenty-fifth day of his undesired pseudo-imprisonment in that nameless city in the fog, he decided that he would take a day off from exploring so that he could compile a general overview of everything that he had experienced so far. It had taken him exactly twenty-four days to finish mapping out the entire city on paper, and he had found every damn nook and cranny, every hidden passage and place where the disparate looping sections connected to each other.

It had been a long and stress-inducing experience that nearly saw him outside and in danger during the night on more than one occasion, but he had finally finished his self-appointed task. He now had to set up these hundreds of pieces of paper to display a more detailed and useful map of everything, and therefore he finally had a reason to use something that the MMO had given its players but that was almost never used in the way that Vaile intended to use it.

With such a massive, expansive, and detailed game such as that, it was no real surprise that a small menu app was added not too long into the game’s life cycle that allowed Players to draw and doodle. Some of the more gifted Players even managed to earn not-so-small commissions for in-game artwork, flags, and coats of arms. And, perhaps as a joke, there was one more feature that was added on the ‘funniest day of the year’. It was but a simple toggle that could be switched on or off that allowed the person using the app to make non-Euclidean artwork.

It was a fairly useless option, but one that wasn’t removed after the fact. And now Vaile was using it to draw the streets and features of the city in the fog in the only way that made sense. When streets would begin to loop in such strange ways, it was easy to get lost, and when you could use one road to reach anywhere from one to two to ten other sections of another road despite running perfectly perpendicular to that other road, it made navigation a massive headache.

Using this feature that had always been seen as a joke was the only way to make the various maps come together in a way that made even the most minuscule amount of sense, and it would likely take more than a full day to finish drawing an artificial map that he could use in place of the normal one. And of course, after finishing the full city map, he would need to go back and add details in, otherwise, he would find it even harder than normal to navigate using his minimap.

However, he had eleven positions that he could stay in to avoid any hostility, and he had enough food and drink to keep him fed and watered for centuries even if he chose to stay put and not go outside during that time. It would be a labor and half, but he had the time needed for such an endeavor. Nothing could break in as long as he kept the doors shut and locked, and so he just needed to ignore everything else and focus on the task at hand.

…

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Two and a half days. That is how long it took him to finish the new map that he had just finished putting up in place of the traditional one. Since this place had the effect of making any maps formed by the usual method a waste of attention and effort, Vaile had placed the newer map up in his menu and HUD in its place. He didn’t destroy the old maps, however, as he didn’t yet know if he would need them again. Maybe once he escaped this place, he would be willing to destroy them, but then again someone else might need them.

But now that the exploration and mapping were done, there was only one other ‘district’ left for him to explore. That ‘district’ was wide and open, empty and covered in low fog, and extremely dangerous to any who dared to tread there on foot. To try and walk into that place and explore as he had done previously would almost certainly end in his quick, violent, and painful death, and so he would need to use another mode of transit to explore that place.

If you all guessed that this ‘district’ that I was referring to was actually the churning, foam and fog-covered body of water that the dock district bordered, then you guessed correctly. Go have a bit of candy to celebrate the fact that you are able to remember things and put two and two together so easily.

As that idiot all those days ago had shown, falling into the water was a near-certain death sentence. Of course, that man had someone reappeared back where he had been before while being both alive and fully clothed as if nothing had happened merely a short while after his apparent death. But, despite that, Vaile was not one to gamble that the death that he would experience would be even remotely the same as that man’s in terms of permanence.

With that in mind and daylight fading faster than he expected, Vaile used the ring that the Hound had left him so very many days ago and slipped between the acute angle that was between the nearby table and the floor and popped out from the acute angle that was the connection between a desk and the ship’s floorboards. He could never get used to that feeling, or to the sight of reality shifting so suddenly. If there was one thing that this place had in abundance, it was non-Euclidian stuff, from the roads to the paths between districts to the Hounds of Tindalos that literally used acute angles to travel between places.

In fact, he was fairly certain that once he managed to break whatever spell kept him trapped here, the whole place would become even more bizarre and, to being unused to the typical Lovecraftian settings and places, utterly unnatural. But he would need to cross that bridge when he came to it, for now, he had something more presently important to worry about. He patted down his outfit to get the weirdness off of it (using angles like that did tend to deposit lots of random dust and stuff on those that used them for travel) and took a seat in the captain’s cabin of his fuck-all massive ship.

With but a whim, the ship pulled up its anchors and the ropes that had bound it to the pier untied themselves and snaked backward up and onto the ship. From all around the water-covered bottom section of the outside of the ship, pulses of energy began to propel the ship out of its old position and towards the open waters. Once it had cleared most of everything else, the massive sails unfurled themselves and an enchanted artificial wind flooded them, pushing the huge warship out to sea.

The fully automated mindless and soulless deckhands and other crewmen got to work and the only ‘real’ person on board got to work making more paper maps. He had experienced an easier time on land, but now he would need to put over a decade of experience back to work. It was time to make a sea chart…. Or several…. Hundred.