#70

Mina began to climb down past the open hatch. It was a strangely clean hatch; the ladder she was gripping wasn't rusty or horrible in any way, which was nice. Climbing a ladder was tough enough with a bum ankle like the one she had. She didn't need any nasty corrosion sanding her palm-flesh off. Her palm-flesh was very precious.

The shaft seemed to go down forever; and as she pondered the blackness below her (this being a good ponder, the first of such in a rather long time), she considered that this could just be a sewer drain or something. But why would they put such a thing on an uninhabited hill? And, as mentioned, it went down quite a ways. She hadn't had time to see the hill's height, but based just on raw mathematical estimates, it seemed to go far below the hill. There was a dirty joke in there somewhere, but she didn't want to be the one to make it.

Before the whole painting thing kicked in, she had wanted to be an archaeologist. She just tried to focus on that for her drive. Her imagination, as it often did, began to run wild, conjuring up strange lights below, the sounds of clanking machinery...

The only issue here being that that was something that was actually happening.

The shaft opened up after she breached the height marker of the hill, into a wide space, full of the sorts of devices that she was imagining. She instantly assumed this was yet another hallucination, even as they whirred and buzzed pointlessly around her. At least, seemingly pointlessly. Their seeming nature allowed her to ignore them, as well as ignore the idea that this Place was somehow the same Place as the cave at Aurel found. She focused on the ladder instead, but as she did, ideas and tropes began to enter her, and she began to consider the idea that the ladder, like the forests she had been in, was infinite. It stretched down and could potentially connect with any other ladder that she wished for. She just didn't know which ladder to wish for, and she didn't care about wishing for such a thing because it would be a silly wish.

There were several platforms that she was ignoring as well, which seemed to link to enormous computers calculating things like gravitational sustenance, magma motion, and logic-based air current paths. These things were labeled, of course, for use mostly by the masters of the machines, but the linguistics-energy of the labels flickered in and out of every Multiversal language at once, including English and Chinese; both of which were quite relevant to Mina. One level was labeled as “ART GALLERY”, which almost piqued her interest. She did pause for a split second, observing giant holographic forms of what seemed to be the five paintings she did in the other part of her hallucination, as well as a large, ugly black and white image that said something about someone “YET ENDUR[ING]”. Weird.

She had climbed down about five miles when she at last decided to rest. Her ankle was bright red and screaming, though in this place it's a wonder that that second attribute didn't become literal. She was getting close to the bottom of the pit, which was incredibly dangerous for humans to reach. Things were magnified down there, like an essay on some sort of abstraction reaching its illogical QED. Not far from the bottom was the platform she stepped on, which was the Portal Chamber.

Still going with the flow via dream-logic, Mina walked up to the device that was on the center of this platform. It was a massive computer terminal hooked up to a huge oval frame. “It looks like the Guardian of Forever from Star Trek,” she said to herself, and indeed it really did. The computer screen had a list of three objects: “Earth-Beta-2”, “Earth-Beta-3”, and “Earth-Beta-4”. Beta-2 was in grey, so she figured logically that it couldn't be highlighted. On a whim, in a haze, and thus not caring about the situation at all, she reached up and touched the Beta-4 tab. The oval frame began to buzz; and then, it was full of white light. The light proceeded to flicker as tiny dark points appeared in it, which suddenly snapped out and consumed the whiteness. In its place was an image—and not quite an image, because as per the Chamber's name, the frame had generated a portal.

Inside the portal frame, Mina could see a dark room, which had been deliberately and dramatically lit. A man stood inside it, but it didn't seem to be an ordinary man; in fact, quite the opposite. He h̶a̶d̶ will have three heads, which w̶e̶r̶e̶ will be those of a shark, a fox, and a vulture. He'll be wearing a pinstripe suit, and will appear to be arguing with himself. The vulture head will turn and glance at Mina but only wink and not say anything.

Mina suddenly panicked and pressed the Beta-4 tab again. The portal closed, thankfully. Whatever that was in there happened to be jarringly creepy.

She slipped into a stupor once again right afterward though...because it's only a dream, right? she figured. Since she couldn't push the Beta-2 button, she instead moved to the Beta-3 one. The inside of the frame glowed once more, and was eventually replaced with an image that wasn't merely an image.

Within a moment, Mina was shaken again, as someone looked out at her through the gateway.

“Mina?”

“...Jacob?”