“…judgements of Imperial law are the final word on the crimes you have committed? I cannot allow –“

“Shhh. Shush. Shutup.” Karen presented an index finger to quiet the man across the bars from her. She’d been waiting for this moment for days, and his pointless bullshit wasn’t about to ruin it for her.

“How dare you?! Some worthless..” He continued. The only interesting part was how the words didn’t always match up with his mouth.

You’re back? Please tell me you’re back.

I don’t know, the dad of some guy I killed. That’s why I’m locked up.

We’re going? Where are we going? All I have is what’s on me. The elfcops still have my ring, I think. They wouldn’t give it back to me. Something about me fleeing.

She had only the clothes on her back, freshly mended, laundered, and returned.

“…insult to my family. They earned death, and so have you. Twenty six days. I’ll be –“

“He died and it’s your fault for being a shitty parent. Your son was a cunt and so are you.” That shut him up.

With that, a red and purple gate opened. Instantly recognizable as identical to the one she’d used to flee the chaos of earth, except Karen sized and localized within the asshole meeting area of her prison suite.

A finger was presented, uncaring of whether or not the dumbfounded elf would get the message, and she stepped through.

Karen vividly remembered her last trip through one of these; the loss of identity, the loss of sensation, loss of thought. It wasn’t really like that. There was a numbness, or a disassociation, but no complete disconnection. And most importantly, there was no unidentifiable entity asking for her destination. It was a moment of alien sensation, then she stepped foot somewhere else. She didn’t even eat shit this time, having the wherewithal to weather the effect.

Though the somewhat familiar effect was something she could take, the somewhere else was not so easily fucked with.

Looking around, she was in some kind of gigantic slot, like a nation sized toaster had been turned on its side. Off to her left was the only place with an open sky, a narrow slip of sky that was blue and clear and sunless. The other five directions were home to boring brown rock. They weren’t formations Karen recognized, many of which were massive columns that stretched from brown floor to brown ceiling. One of which was directly in front of her.

“What is this this? I was expecting… I don’t know, something different.”

“The Plane of Madness.” She repeated deadpan.

There wasn’t one. There actually wasn’t a light source or a shadow in any direction. Even the landscape, as far as she could see, was lit from all directions.

“Do we live here now? I hate it. I want to go back to prison.”

That was a lot to take in. Karen paused a moment before continuing. “What does it mean to stop here? I’m assuming we’re not just taking in the sights.”

Whenever she was ready was no time soon. The pillar she was close to was completely sheer. There were no hand or foot holds, let alone something she’d prefer like actual steps.

“You didn’t tell me what being ‘tiered up’ means, but it has to be more than opening gates and thinking I can superman my ass up a wall.” She eyed the brown face warily, somehow knowing he was going to have her do something she hated.

Walk on up. She’d seen stranger things but not so much that she’d have assumed she could walk up a cliff. Stepping up to its face, it butted up to the ground with what looked like a perfect ninety degree cut.

I walk up? Just put my feet down on it?

It was all the confirmation she needed. She planted a foot. As she shifted her weight, her perspective MC Eschered, her horizon changing from the short section of the slot to the long part of the slot. She was now standing on what looked like a bridge between sections of wall.

“Fuck me.” She stared off into the slot sky, wondering how easy it would be to accidentally fall off the wrong section of cliff and float forever into it.

And go she did. The pillar wasn’t hard to follow, it was fairly flat and maybe a dozen strides across, but the length went on for a distance that was hard to comprehend. Even after she had walked at a solid pace for long enough that the ground behind her faded into the distance, the view to the opposite side didn’t change one bit.

“The pool?”

In this place, the pool didn’t sound like anything she wanted to come up on, but she continued. There was no mistaking it when she came close. It was a puddle on the face of the bridge, looking like a large pothole that the city of crazytown had neglected to fill in. There were no mimosas. No sexy towel boys.

“Please tell me there isn’t anything in this puddle you want me to reach in and grab.”

Fuck that. The water was a spot of near total blackness, and for all she knew the pillar was a living thing and this was the waste escape hatch. She could almost hear her mother’s reactions to this kind of peer pressure. ‘If your friends asked you to would you jump off a bridge, would you? Stop hanging around with the spirits, they’re no good for you. What about that Jonna? She’s a good kid.’

A little test swirl of the liquid yielded nothing. Actually nothing, she could even feel it. Couldn’t move it, couldn’t touch it, couldn’t scoop it up. It was ghost water. It might as well not exist other than to look at herself in its still surface.

The show must go on, as they say, and it was far too late in the game to start questioning all the scary or impossible things the spirit was throwing her way. She took a little hop and disappeared into the darkness.

Her test swirl was pretty damned accurate, there was nothing there but total darkness. There was also no resistance as she fell, be it air or water. It felt like floating, and if she hadn’t sunk down into the ‘liquid’ she’d have thought she hadn’t moved at all. It went on long enough for a brief second of panic when she thought she might be stuck like this, but not so long where she had time to bellyache about it.

Soundlessly, she dipped out of the water and into a pocket of rock. The plane of madness had apparently turned off fall damage, because the moment her boot touched down her momentum stopped. Her knee didn’t even bend. It was disorienting enough that she almost fell on her own from anticipating an impact that didn’t come.

She looked up a moment, inspecting the pool that was now on the ceiling; looking as dark and reflective as it had from the other direction.

The almost always absent orb appeared, directing her toward a spot high up on the side.

Now a plane of madness veteran, she walked on up, like an Italian plumber hitting a small wedge between ground and wall.

What am I looking for? As she scanned over the rock, nothing really stood out. It was a craggy, boring chunk of brown.

The spirit wiggled.

It was a nondescript, ordinary nub of rock. She gripped it and yanked, easily pulling it away from its home on the wall. The inside was scooped out, by all appearances with some kind of stonemelon baller. Inside the ballerholes was the real party.

Oooohh.

A pair of softly glowing, seven-pointed stars.

One of your old bonds?

What happened to them?

Karen could no longer resist and scooped up one of the stars. The glow faded the moment her fingers touched, and her previous conversation was forgotten like it never happened.

Holy shit.

It was a storage earring. When she touched it and was able to see inside, it changed everything she thought she knew about magical storage.

It’s a fucking warehouse. There’s a cabin in here.

A silver knife with runes glowing down the side fell into her hand, then almost fell onto the floor. She grunted against the weight, gritting her teeth and pulling hard in order to inspect the glowing marks on the blade. Maybe they meant ‘Make this thing stupidly heavy?’

The knife was dismissed and replaced by a sourcestone. The single, tiny rock was humming with a kind of power she’d never seen, and the potency of it resonated in a way she could physically feel.

It’s beautiful. She couldn’t look away from the golden light in the stone. Something about it was so pure and cleansing that it was comfortable just to be near.

Ten thousand?! There were piles of them inside the star. Thousands and thousands. Apparently this mystery corpse was quite a wealthy one.

What was his name? They dead guy whose stuff I’m taking.

The spirit hesitated.

How did he die?

She did as she was told, grabbing the second – noting that whatever it did was not storage – and slotting the scooped stone back into the wall. It fit like a puzzle piece, sticking as seamlessly as before she’d pulled it out.

On the way? You aren’t going to poof us off through one of your fancy gates?

Ignoring her apprehension, and knowing there definitely wasn’t a convenient stone pocket to catch her on the other side, she displayed her trust in the spirit and took the plunge. The escape trip was the same as her entrance, dark and disorienting. She soon blasted out of the pool, zipping away from the bridge at high speed and off into open air.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”

An urge to empty her stomach was rising up, and it wasn’t just the feeling of falling toward the sky below her. Motion parallax and depth perception were very tenuous concepts here, with objects clearly far in the distance flying by like they were in reach and some things nearby moving like they might be the size of mountains. A glance behind showed the massive column she’d been crossing was out of view in only a few seconds, and one that had run perpendicular behind it had not even moved yet. She closed her eyes to shut out the view.

Oh, I hate this. I hate this. I hate this so much. The lack of wind resistance was not unique to falling through the ghost water. With her eyes closed it felt like she was floating, but not knowing what was around felt almost as bad as taking in the view.

That was a lot to take in. Knight? Queen? It was the first she was hearing of these. Is there a limit? You can go anywhere in any place? Everyone can do this? Anyone with a spirit, I mean.

Would have been nice.

That’s what you were doing, getting your magic gate power back? I could have used your advice when I was in jail, you know.

There was a strong urge to call him out for that comment, but she had a distinct feeling that was exactly the sort of thing he’d been talking about. The world had just gotten bigger once again and she was struggling with how to feel about that. One thing in particular rankled, and she wasn’t certain how to bring it up without feeling like she was digging for something.

You said you’d tell me about your bond that died.

He still had his ambitions though, and without moving from the diamond tier into the knight tier he’d never achieve them. It isn’t easy, as you can understand, and it requires a level of focus that doesn’t allow for any kind of distraction. His enemies had been waiting for him to make the attempt. The rest you can puzzle out.>

He doesn’t sound like the kind of man to have enemies.

But the jewelry you’re holding marks you as a follower of the Order of the Heptarch, which was led by a man who had been at the peak of the King level for millennia. They had enough enemies that he didn’t need to make any on his own.>

Why would a timid family man join a group like that if he was bonded with you? Seems to me like you could take the entire family anywhere they wanted to go and advance how they saw fit.

Maybe she was poking an old wound. How would she stand up against his old bonds? A thousand years sounded like a long time for a level that even now wasn’t feeling like an impossible goal. Something felt off though. How many bonds had he had?

A quick peep out into the strange landscape broke her train of thought. She’d woken up in jail and was currently falling into the sky in somewhere called the Plane of Madness. How much weirder could it get?

---

“What in all hell is THAT?” Karen screamed, interrupting her relaxing float. She continued without getting an answer. “Is it looking at us? Oh GOD, it’s looking at us.”

“It’s the size MOUNTAIN, how is that a SMALL Slor? Holy shit it’s coming over here.”

“How is it SO FAST? ARE WE INSIDE IT’S MOUTH HOW DID IT GET HERE SO FAST?”

Karen did, in fact, remember her next destination. As busy as she was with all the screaming and panicking at the gaping jaws and the burning flames visible down a cavernous throat, she forgot to let him know. That same busyness stopped her from noticing the Slor sized gate that was approaching her feet at ludicrous speed. It stopped being hard to notice when she slipped through it and her senses went dull.