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Travel log of Dr. Alexandra Selkirk, April 2nd 2025.

I’ve never much liked the sea.

Even as a girl, when I saw the Pacific Ocean off the shores of California, I felt uncomfortable. Not because I feared drowning or a shark attack or anything such, mind you : I had been taking swimming lessons for a while at this point, and I knew shark only rarely injure humans, and never intentionally. No, I believe my issue with the sea is its sheer volume. It goes on seemingly forever, an unending expanse of blue-green water, in some places kilometers deep. And when you go swimming a few hundred meters out from the coast, it’s even worse. The surface is opaque enough you don’t know how far you are from the bottom, only that you can’t reach it without diving. You have no idea what could be lurking underneath you, hidden from view…

Perhaps this dislike of the sea is why the captain of the Albatross gets on my nerves so much. He talks about the sea with a sort of manic dedication I’ve never seen elsewhere. I believe the man would lose all will to live, were he somehow forced to live his life fully on land. Still, his feelings towards the sea are no business of mine, and it is only a few weeks that I have to bear his company while we make it to point Nemo and back.

Zagreus 01 is still set to crash on time, according to the reports Dr. Moore sent me. The reports are mostly unimportant, for now ; there has been no major change in speed or angle as the satellite prepares to re-enter the atmosphere. If we’re lucky, we’ll be close enough to watch it fall into the sea. I am honored to be given this opportunity, and I shall be pressing the captain to quicken or travel ; although he does not seem to need much convincing to showcase the speed of his ship.

To see with one’s own two eyes a satellite fall down to the earth from whence it came is quite rare indeed ; and Zagreus-01 is the very first of the Revival Project, a marvel of engineering, designed to preserve its precious components as much as possible. Long gone are the days of the Cold War and the Space Race, when the speed at which we could churn out new machines mattered more than their quality : now we at NASA can afford to take our time and calibrate our projects with the utmost precision.

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The captain asked me about the project, yesterday, a few hours after we left shore. He was hunched over the railing, staring at the glistening sea. “Why’s the satellite gotta fall, anyway ? Can’t it just stay floating in space ?”

“Satellites degrade over time, especially those closer to earth,” I replied, always willing to provide information regarding my work. “Eventually, they stop working. In order to avoid the damaged satellites clogging up earth’s orbit, and making future launches more difficult, we make sure they come back down to earth…”

“And you make ‘em crash in the middle o’ the sea,” he interrupted. “So they don’t hit somethin’ important on their way down.”

“...Yes.”

“And ‘cause buildin’ satellites is expensive as shit, you’re working on ones you can reuse after, so y’all can save money,” he kept going, seeming proud of his admittedly quite good reasoning. “That right ?”

“Quite so, in fact. Although you’re making it sound a lot easier than it is.” He shrugged. I continued. “While the basic concept is easy to think of, finding a way to protect the satellites during re-entry into the atmosphere was a significant challenge, and took our best scientists years of research.”

“For people sendin’ stuff into space, your lot’s quite down to earth,” the captain joked. “I mean, there’s gotta be more important stuff to do than that, with all that money government’s sending you.”

I sighed, and tried to contain my irritation. I’d heard such things for a while now, working where I do, and I could already guess where this was going. And sure enough :

“I mean, look at these Space X fellas. They’re actually doin’ important things, ain’t they ? Back to the moon, and then Mars, and all that.”

At this point, I decided to change the subject – I was not about to engage in such a debate with a sailor of all people. Why is it that the common man does not care for actual progress and important discoveries, but merely for what is impressive ? Every step of the way must be glamorized so the media and the government accept to support it. Even the moon landing was only ever a publicity thing, a meaningless goal important only because it was easily marketed. The first satellite was Russian, and so was the first man in space ; by all rights they should have won the space race.

And nowadays it is up to showmen to lead the march of science, not the people whose work allow that progress to even happen in the first place. How dreadful.

It is only ten days before we get to Point Nemo, now. I can barely wait.

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Travel log of Dr. Alexandra Selkirk, April 6th 2025.

To say that the days seem long, when sailing halfway across the Pacific, would be an understatement. The hours seem to stretch, the sun takes an eternity to disappear over the horizon, and I feel like a caged lion as I reread the same book for the third time. At least the engineers I’m supposed to manage, Mark and Tim, can busy themselves by fixing things around the ship ; but I’ve always focused more on theory.

I almost find myself wanting something to happen to the satellite, so that I have something to do. It’s not a serious thought, of course, just a boredom-fueled idea. In the meanwhile, I’ve been catching up on my endlessly growing “To-Read” list of books, and learning about Point Nemo.

It’s a fascinating place, once you get into it, although not one that eases my dislike of the sea in the slightest bit. When hearing about it, I thought it was named after the famous Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the reference would certainly be appropriate ; but it turns out it comes from the Latin word “nemo”, which means no one. It is the most remote place on earth, farther away from any sort of civilization than even the International Space Station is at times.

What’s more, it is located in a part of the South Pacific isolated by the currents. There’s little to no nutrients in the water, so no life, no fishes. Just water, four kilometers deep, as far as the eye can see and then some. I must admit, I find it... uncomfortable to think about too long. It’s the perfect place for us to dump our satellites, though. There isn’t anyone anywhere near, the local wildlife does not exist and thus cannot be endangered by our activities, and the lack of currents means they’re unlikely to get far away from the crash coordinates.

On an unrelated note, I’ve recently taken to crosswords. It find them quite the adequate challenge, even if some of the words they use are obscure – I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen the term “eldritch” used outside of one.

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Travel log of Dr. Alexandra Selkirk, April 11th 2025.

Zagreus-01 has re-entered the atmosphere this evening. We were far away enough to be sure it wouldn’t damage the ship, of course, but still close enough to see the blazing trail following it as the sudden friction caused it to catch fire. We even did a small party for the occasion, on the suggestion of one of the engineers – I forget which. It wasn’t anything stellar, but the food was slightly better than usual aboard the ship and the board games were entertaining enough.

We gathered on deck, in between two rounds of liar’s dice, to watch the satellite fall. It was an impressive sight, somewhat worsened by Mark breaking the silence to say :

“Pretty sure that counts as a shooting star. Gotta make a wish !”

At this moment, I cared about little else than the satellite. Whether or not the specially-built casing managed to protect the core components from melting due to the heat, whether or not the saltwater would damage anything important, in a word, whether or not the project would have good enough results to receive more funding. It seemed like I was the only one focused on this, though. I’m not sure if that says more about me or about them.

I left the party soon after, as much as I could do so in a rather small boat. I don’t care for the company of drunk people, most of the time, and now wasn’t an exception – especially with the importance this mission has to me. Dr. Moore, the project head, was quite clear about it when we left – if this mission is a success, I have very good chances to be promoted, and start leading my own projects.

I sat on a bench at the front of the ship, searching my pockets for a cigarette and a lighter. My heart was racing as I pictured all the ways something could go tremendously wrong, all the disasters I could find when inspecting the satellite tomorrow morning, even the most improbable ones. Suddenly, the gruff voice of the captain interrupted my spiraling.

“You need fire ?”

I nodded gratefully, lighting the cigarette I had in hand with his lighter. He then lit himself one as well, exhaling a few puffs of smoke before he started talking again.

“I come here often, at night. When the sun’s gone and the sky’s as dark as the sea. Nothin’ but water, far as eye can see. You feel like you’re the only thing in the entire world. Like you’re one with the ocean. It’s peaceful.”

“You like it ?” I probably could have reacted more tactfully, and without a shudder of disgust, but I did not.

“Yeah. I s’pose it’s kinda like floatin’ in space, isn’t it ? No need to know what’s goin’ on deep below or far in the sky, it’s just you and the whole wide world.” He paused. “Maybe not for everyone, though.”

“Probably not,” I replied. We smoked in silence for a few minutes, alone together with the sea, before he sighed heavily and got up.

“Well, it’s gettin’ late. I’m off to sleep.”

I left soon after him. I’ll need to be well-rested anyway, since it’s tomorrow we reach our goal.

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Probably the 13th of April 2025, written by Alexandra Selkirk

As I write these words, I fear to never be able to share them with anyone. I believe I am doomed, and I cannot think of any way I might escape this place. Still I write, if only to keep my thoughts in order and to reassure myself that I did not dream all of this.

I woke up very early in the morning yesterday, before sunrise, to the sound of screams. Still half asleep and wearing my pajamas, I rolled off of my bed and ran towards the main deck, before stopping dead in my tracks as I saw the scene. It was Mark who screamed. He must have gone out to take in the air and ease the hangover, before seeing the… thing.

I pride myself on my scientific knowledge and on my rationality. Yet there is no way I can explain rationally what I saw then, nor any of the following events. Its very existence is blatantly impossible, according to all known laws of physics… Although I suppose that only means the laws of physics are wrong. God. Everything I’ve learned since high school is wrong, it’s a lie, it can’t make sense in a world where such things exist. Even now I am wondering whether it is not more likely that I have gone mad, instead of everything I saw being real.

But I have put off talking about it for long enough. I will have enough time for my existential crisis later, and I should stick to the facts for now.

There are fluids, called ooblecks, that do not obey Newton’s laws of viscosity. They normally act like normal fluids, until a force acts on them, at which point they become solids. Think of if water became like concrete when you punched it. Now, imagine you filled a container with oobleck, and then the container somehow was able move on its own, so that the oobleck flows through it to fill the empty space. The thing I saw was just like that if there was no container, but if the oobleck still behaved like if there was. If that makes no sense, that’s because it is senseless. It is my feeble attempts to describe something neither the English language nor the current understanding of physics is able to describe. It might just be the inane ramblings of a deranged mind. I almost hope it is.

Perhaps it’d be easier to understand if I just… Described how it looked. It was a hulking, shambling antediluvian monstrosity, its outsides – for I cannot truly call it skin – halfway between that of a frog and a kitchen sponge. It had six limbs, among which two arms that split off at the wrist into two different clawed hands each, two legs bent like a gnarly tree, and two atrophied wings reminiscent in structure to that of a pterodactyl. I want to say they couldn’t possibly lift that thing off the ground, and as far as I know they can’t, but since everything else about that creature was already impossible, so who’s to say ?

It’s head… It did not really have a head. Between its four shoulders was a large, bloated neck, but it ended in a wriggling mass of feelers and tentacles unlike anything else I have seen upon this earth, save perhaps melted cheese strings. There was no eyes, nor any sensory organ that I could recognize as such, anywhere. The whole thing was a dirty blue-green in color, or something approaching ; and it was about the size of a large two-story house. It walked, or rather shifted in an uncanny fashion, across the water like a grotesque parody of Jesus, the fluid composing it flowing forward.

My jaw dropped in bafflement as I witnessed the oobleck-like thing approach the ship, my mind blanking as I faced the realization I – and by extension, the whole field of physics, to which can probably be added biology and mathematics – have no idea how the world really works. The only coherent thought that could form in my brain, at that moment, was a looping “what the fuck”. Perhaps it would have been more useful to notice that the creature and the ship were heading straight for each other.

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By that point, other people had heard the scream and subsequently arrived onto the deck, and most were gaping at the sight of the oobleck. The captain, though, reacted with a remarkable calm, and ran for the helm to try and steer the ship away from it. It was, unfortunately, too late, and it was as the boat started to turn away that it collided with one of the thing’s legs. The crash was loud. The metal and wood composing the ship were torn and splintered, as the strange goo-like texture of the oobleck’s body hardened under the pressure.

It was then that I unfroze, the pure shock of seeing such a thing morphing into fear of being either crushed under its heel or thrown into the sea. I heard the captain swearing somewhere in the distance, while I sprinted past a few crew members, scrambling to find a way I could somehow survive.

Of what happened precisely, I shall not speak. I shall not describe the way the engineers screamed as a hand bigger than them both descended on them with the weight of a thousand bricks ; nor the sight of wood pulp mixing with blood and bone as they were compressed together ; nor the dreadful, dreadful ear-popping screech that resounded from somewhere around the aberration’s chest ; nor the captain’s look as he pushed me off the boat, whispering that “a captain must go down with his ship” when I tried to pull him with me. All of that, I remember well enough already, each time I close my eyes.

I will only say that I was knocked out by a piece of the boat’s railing soon after falling in the water. Somehow, by what I can only assume was a twist of fate, I survived. I believe myself to have been insanely lucky not to drown, passed out and floating in the sea as I was.

When I woke up, I wasn’t in the sea anymore. I was in a large damp room, in which I am still in, similar in shape and size to some kind of conference hall. The walls, floor and ceiling are all tiled with pentagons made out of a stone I did not recognize – although that probably doesn’t mean much, as I am not well-versed in terms of stones. The corners of the place are… Weird. I want to say they were impossible, but it is becoming increasingly clear I need to re-evaluate what I consider as possible or not.

The corners look like there are at least two angles of different degrees overlapping with each other yet both visible at once, and behaving – at least in some parts – like a third one. The floor, as well as the ceiling is curved and bumpy, which is not really unbelievable as much as it is plain weird and inconvenient. There are doors, leading to hallways, which I assume lead to other rooms, although I have not explored them yet. The room is dimly lit, bright enough that I can easily but a lot darker than full daylight, without any visible source of light. Puddles of seawater gather at the lowest parts of the floor.

At one end of the room, there are pieces of the ship – part of the hull, broken planks and shard of broken glass, as well as – luckily – some of my personal belongings, including the very notebook and pen I am writing with. The other useful items I have been able to recover include some clothes, as well as torn fabric that used to be clothes, some cutlery, and a compass. I probably could salvage other things with enough effort.

I do not know what I will do. I do not know where I am, or how I even got here in the first place, or how much of my understanding of the world is actually wrong, or even something as simple as the date. Although writing this down helped, I still need time to process everything that just happened. God, it feels so unreal. I’m going to lie down for a bit, try and catch my breath, and then I’ll decide on a course of action.

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Some time later (I wish I knew how much), written by Lexi Selkirk.

Right. I don’t feel as overwhelmed now, thankfully. The whole situation is of course awful, but I believe the initial shock has passed. I’m… I’m still having trouble with what I saw. What I am still seeing. It would be one thing if it was just traumatizing – if it was a storm that had torn apart the ship. I can understand trauma, I know about post-traumatic stress, it’s something that makes sense. But the boat was crushed by a thing that should not exist made out of a matter that behaves nonsensically, and that aberration did not even stop on its way to god knows where to notice it had killed half a dozen people. I don’t think I even know how to respond to that shock, emotionally speaking.

At least I’m not doubting my sanity as much anymore. Or rather, I am still doubting my sanity, but it would not do me any good to deny what I am perceiving at the moment. I feel the moist stone beneath me, I see the impossible corners, and if it is all just a massive hallucination there isn’t anything I can do about it. Plus, the hunger I feel is very much real.

I’ve been thinking of what I should do. I find myself wishing that I had learned survival tactics back home ; they certainly would come in handy right now. I only barely recall something about “bare necessities”, which were, if I’m not misremembering, food, water, shelter and fire. There was an order to it, but I have long forgotten it.

Water sounds like it’d be easy – there’s water everywhere in here, in puddles on the floor, leaking from the walls, etc. But it’s all seawater, which means there’s salt in it, which means it won’t help with thirst. I might even get sick if I drink it. If I manage to get fire, though, I’ll be able to boil the seawater and then that’ll be good enough to drink.

For fire, I need both something flammable and a source of ignition. There are some plank of wood here, but not much ; I hope there’s other broken pieces of the ship near, so that I can try and find more fuel, as well as a lighter. Maybe some food as well, but I wouldn’t count on it. As for shelter, it seems to be a non-issue. This room I’m in doesn’t let in sunlight, but neither does it allow bad weather in, and I haven’t seen anything dangerous yet.

I believe my best call right now would be to explore the tunnels and hallways that lead out of the room, in hope of finding something edible – I think it’s a while since I’ve eaten anything, although it’s hard to say since I can’t measure time in here – and something with which I can start a fire. Learning more about this place I’m in would be useful as well. As long as I can ignore my gnawing anxiety proclaiming I’ll find a flesh-eating monster at every turn.

Well, as they say, no time like the present.

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Following notes written while exploring the tunnels.

This place is quite gloomy. Although there is enough ambient light to allow me to see, it is still dark, like a perpetual dusk. Since I woke up, the hallways have been filled with heavy fog, a mist that obscures my long-distance sight ; I keep a hand against the wall so as not to trip or get lost. The air is hot, in a way that weighs upon my shoulders and feels almost oppressive. Thank God I’m not claustrophobic.

The floor is still as uneven than in the main room. Uneven doesn’t feel quite like the best term, though. It’s more like the floor is perfectly flat, but whatever is beneath is bumpy. I wouldn’t say it is uneven in the same way I wouldn’t say the floor of my house is uneven because of the curvature of the earth. Point is, it’s a bit hard to navigate – it feels like walking up or down a stair but through a flat surface at once. The best thing I can compare it to is when you dream you’re falling, but awakening suddenly, and for a brief instant you have both the sensation of being pulled down by gravity and lying flat in your bed.

I’ve poked one of the weird angles with a plank, by pure curiosity. The plank appeared to… I don’t know, to clip into it, like in a video game with no collision physics. It lodged itself in the angle so firmly I wasn’t able to pull it out. I’ll be careful not to stick my foot in an angle like that, at least until I figure out more about what it is they do.

…

There have been a lot of branching pathways along the way. I’ve ended up unthreading my jacket, tying one end to the plank I still can’t get out of the angle, so I can be sure I can make my way back to the main room. I don’t know how much time it’d take to explore all of this – at least a few months, I think ? There could be even more tunnels I just haven’t seen yet.

It’s all the same, by the way. No change in the way the place is paved, the angles don’t get less freaky the farther I went, just endless damp hallways. The fog cleared after I walked for a while, but now it’s starting to come back again, so I’m guessing that’s just a thing that happens.

I was raised in Texas in a rather religious family, so I had to endure getting lectured about how Jesus loves you and how he’d make you go to hell for kissing another girl. One thing that stayed with me even now was the way my grandma described purgatory ; an endless, meandering maze-like place, to which there is no rhyme nor reason, where people not good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell would err for the whole of eternity. I find the similarities with this place I find myself in quite uncomfortable.

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I think the hallways are leading somewhere downwards.

I can feel weight on my eardrums, which is, first of all, quite uncomfortable, and secondly, a symptom of my body adjusting to a different atmospheric pressure. This is at once worrying, because it turns out apparently I’ve been moving deeper when I thought I was only moving horizontally, and reassuring, because at least that’s something to which I can apply my physics knowledge.

Bad news is, this may mean that I won’t be able to advance much farther without getting crushed by the pressure, and I still haven’t found any of the things I was searching for. I’m starting to get hungry, but I’m more concerned about water – if I get thirsty enough I might be tempted to drink the seawater, which would make me at best even thirstier and at worst sick. Maybe both. Probably both, knowing my luck.

I’m still going to keep going down the hallways, for now at least. As the saying goes, I’ve made my bed, now it’s time to lie in it.

…

For some reason I do not care to understand at this moment, some kind of force is pushing me towards the left wall. It has been getting progressively stronger as I went on through the tunnels, almost reminiscent of a magnet’s unwavering pull. The whole, taken together with the weird floor, overlapping angles, and all that, is overall quite dizzying, and I’ve needed to sit down and close my eyes a few times so as to ground myself. I am now crawling sideways on the wall, which is infuriatingly slow but also the only real way I can advance given the circumstances.

I have seen multiple… Tentacle like things, that I tentatively want to do describe as plants or algae, growing from the few cracks of the pavement. They are gently pulsing with cold light, fleshy in texture, slightly warm to the touch ; the first thing I thought of when seeing them was the one time I ate jellied octopus in a fancy restaurant. I tried tugging on one, to see if it would come out, but it seemed firmly rooted in the stone. By sawing off part of it with the kitchen knife I got from the ship’s remnants, I was able to get a sample.

Now, putting an unknown fleshy bit of something in my mouth does not sounds like a good idea, and usually I would agree. However, it was a useful experiment and allowed me to learn important details about this thing. Here is the full report of my observations ; It is edible, but far too bland for my taste. Surprisingly not chewy considering outwardly aspect. No symptoms of poisoning or other negative effects since eating it, so it’s not immediately harmful at least. I honestly could get used to it.

Knowing there’s something in this place I am able to eat is a big relief, honestly. It gives me hope that I might somehow survive in… wherever this is for longer than a few days. Although I still have no clue what I’ll do after.

I’m gonna eat some more of these algae things – God knows I need it. Then I’ll choose whether to turn back to the room I woke up in, or keep going farther down the hallways.

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I keep wanting to look at my phone, to check how much time has passed since I stopped moving. Of course, I don’t have my phone – it probably got lost along with most of the ship, and even if I found it again somehow there’s no way it survived the saltwater. It’s a pity. If I still had it… Well, if I still had it I’d be able to reach the outside world, but my point was that if I still had it, I’d have a way to measure time. It’s very disorientating to not know how long things take.

On another note, I have continued my observations regarding the tentacle plants. Firstly, after cutting away half of one for my impromptu meal, it started regenerating quickly – I was unable to figure out at which rate, for obvious reasons – until the only evidence it had ever been sliced in half was a thin band of scar tissue. Secondly, when I tried to grab for another of these tentacles for further experimentation, it tried to avoid my hand. This has various implications which I am not willing to address right now. It’s one thing to eat something with a survival instinct, it’s another entirely to only discover it has one after it’s already filling. your stomach.

They’re still rooted in the angles of the hallway, however, so I merely had to reach for their base to be able to cut off one of them without much trouble.

I have decided I shall keep exploring the tunnels for a while. I’ve already found some success with these tentacles things, but thirst is still a pressing issue, quite ironically. When the pressure becomes too much to bear, if I haven’t found my goal beforehand, I’ll turn back.

…

I’ve found it ! Fucking finally ! It felt like I spent an eternity pressed against the wall, crawling excruciatingly slowly forward. I’ve finally found what I was looking for !

I have briefly mentioned, when I first mentioned this place, that there was puddles of seawater almost everywhere. It is true in the tunnels as well as in the room I first woke up in. However, all those I saw before where at room temperature. Now, in the center of what seems to be an intersection between two hallways, I can see a puddle – or, more precisely, a cylindrical hole filled with water – that is boiling.

This is huge. Boiling water means I can cook, even if very simplistically ; furthermore, boiling water means water that is safe to drink. Well, not currently, but if I remove it from the hole, which must be the source of the heat, and wait for it to cool, it’ll be potable. There was a broken piece of the ship’s hull which would be perfect for the job.

A broken piece of the ship’s hull which is still in the main room, far, far away. Fuck. Better get going.

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There’s something else in the hallways.

I went back to the main room, took the metal part I was looking for, and started walking back to the boiling waterhole. I am now at an intersection between the hallway I’m following and another, not far from the place where I start getting pulled towards the wall, and I’m hearing something move in the distance.

Before now, this place was very much quiet. There was only the repetitive sound of water dripping from the ceiling, almost omnipresent. That and the noise of my feet moving water around as I occasionally step in it. But now there is something else.

The sound is hard to place. I’d describe it as a screech, something unlike anything a normal throat can produce. Something like a tornado blowing into a broken bagpipe-harmonica hybrid. It is awful.
The last time I heard this… The last time I heard this was when the ship was crushed. Oh, God. Oh, fucking God. There’s no way it is in here, is it ?! It wouldn’t fit. The tunnels are small enough than a taller than average person would have to bend down to avoid hitting their head against the ceiling, and that thing was building-sized.

I’m panicking, sitting in a puddle trying to make myself as small as possible. The screech has ended by now – it might’ve been a few seconds, it might’ve been a few minutes, it felt like an entire lifetime – but I know whatever made it is still lurking, somewhere in that labyrinth of a place. Fuck. I feel like I’m about to cry. What if I come across the… The oobleck ? Or another like it ? Dear god, why did I have to hear that ? Why couldn’t I stay unaware of what stalks these tunnels ?

…

In the end, I stayed rolled up into a ball, rubbing my eyes in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid crying, for quite a while. I still do not know how, but I managed to get back up, still in a daze, and glance at the other parts of the intersection. Nothing, neither the thing I was dreading to see nor anything else. I started on my path again – what else was there I could do ? I was as silent as I could, still afraid an aberration like the one which wrecked the ship would jump out of a corner.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, even though I was basically shaking the whole time. I have scooped a bunch of the boiling water into my improvised pot, and I am currently waiting for it to cool down so I can drink without burning myself.

I’ve calmed down a lot since I heard the screech, but I am still unsure how I’ll be able to sleep while knowing that there’s something roaming in here. I don’t know it’d be worse if it’s like the thing that crushed the boat or if it’s a whole new different horror. I thought, at first, that shelter was not a thing I needed to worry about much, but it seems I urgently need to find a place I’m safe in.

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It is much easier to think clearly and contemplate your options once you’re not actively dehydrating. The water is lukewarm, which gave me a bit of whiplash given that I don’t tend to drink lukewarm water of my own free will. Despite this, and despite the salt remaining in it, it felt good to finally be able to drink something safely. I don’t think it would taste any worse if I’d just scooped up some water from a random puddle, but it is certainly much safer that way.

Speaking of safety, I still haven’t heard anything since the screech. I do not doubt that it happened, though. I don’t think I’d be able to imagine something so horrible on my own. Regardless, I can’t just stand here frozen in fear forever. There’s go to be something I can do to make sure I’m safe, to make sure I can survive this place…

What even is the point ? Why am I trying ? This is useless. Even if I had a way to get out of this massive physics-bending labyrinth, I’d be stranded thousands of kilometers from any civilization, probably deep enough beneath the sea that I’d drown before getting to the surface. I’ll never be able to get back home, I’ll never be able to get back to my work. The rest of my pointless goddamned life is just gonna be spent in this damp hole eating bland tentacle things and drinking salty water, if I don’t die of a stroke because something shrieked at the wrong time.

It does feel like limbo. I wrote that in passing before, but I wasn’t really serious about it. I do mean it, now. I’ve never really been religious, even when my parents took me to church in my youth, but at this point I’m ready to accept just about anything that’d explain all of this. Maybe I did die when the boat sunk and I’m stuck in a personal purgatory until I manage to redeem myself, or something like that. I mean, it makes just as much sense – which is to say none at all – than an underwater maze that should not exist, where the angles are clipping with each other and I’ve got to crawl against the wall to move because I’m getting pulled to it somehow…

Wait. There’s a force pulling me leftwards. But is there still a force pulling me downwards ?

Holy hell…

For someone as smart as I am, I can be very stupid at times. It’s so simple. For some reason, gravity is pulling me – and me specifically, the water does not appear to be under the same effect – towards the left wall instead of the floor. Which means, logically, that I can stand up on the wall, which would then be the floor, and the floor would become the right side wall.

Holy fuck this looks wrong. I am getting vertigo from trying to readjust my perspective. But, at the same time, it’s also much easier to walk throughout the tunnel that way. That’s good to know. I wonder if it is because the hallways are spiraling in on themselves, like an helix, or if it’s just part of the same physical fuckery as the weird corners of this place ? Either way, a lot of the wrongness of the place seems tied to angles. Fascinating.

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It is very satisfying to finally understand something, even in the shallowest way, about this place. Sure, I might not know the theory behind why the tunnels interact with gravity in such an odd manner, but it gives me a newfound hope, even if momentarily. Hope that I can figure out the rules of this place. Hope that there are rules in the first place, in fact. But there are ! There must be. Why did I ever lose faith in that simple fact ? If the laws of physics turn out to be wrong, then I shall amend them ; it is not reason enough to throw the very concept of an orderly universe in the trash.

Yes, there definitely is a theorem that explains why gravity can switch directions in certain places, why things can act like fluids and solids at once. Localized naturally boiling water ? Why couldn’t it exist ? Whole fields of science might need to be remodeled, but they shall endure. And perhaps I might be the one to lay the groundwork for it.

I do wonder who created this maze, what its purpose is supposed to be. Certainly it isn’t a natural phenomenon ? The floor, however uneven and moist it may be, is tiled ; the rock looks like it is carved. But at the same time, who could’ve built such a thing ? I know of no civilization who could have created such a massive structure deep within the Pacific, let alone one with the means and know-how to defy our modern understanding of physics.

I suppose that is not a question I can answer yet. Not without venturing further into the hallways.

I have not forgotten about what roams within the tunnels, despite my best attempts to distract myself. I find myself fearful of moving from this place, even though the specific section of hallway I happen to be in right now is no safer than any other. It must have been a few hours now that I amuse myself with currently unanswerable problems to avoid taking a step into the unknown and confronting my fears.

I should, though. There’s no use rotting away in here. Still, my legs feel like they’re weighed down by concrete blocks each time I think about going out and exploring some more.

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I have finally decided myself to move from the hallway I’ve been waiting in for the past… I don’t know, let’s say the past hour or so. It felt like more, but I’ve never been great at keeping track of time on my own. It took quite a bit of time, I’ll say that much.

I’m trying to explore more of the tunnels, this time. I hope it’s not just random stone pathways piled up on top of each other infinitely, and that there’s something in there that’ll answer some of my questions, but I don’t want to expect to find something that I have no guarantee actually exists. In the meanwhile, I am wandering throughout the hallways with no particular goal, carving arrows in the floor with the decidedly useful knife I got from the ship’s remnants.

At each turn of the path, I carve an arrow pointing to where I come from. In some places, in which gravity shifts like it did earlier, although not always in the same direction, I’m noting the shift with another arrow. Hopefully this will prevent me from getting lost if I want to get back to somewhere I’ve been in. I previously used a thread of my jacket to be able to find my way back, but my jacket is not infinite, and the string might end up being damaged or get stuck in an angle.

I’m trying to be as quiet as possible while moving through the tunnels. I’m still afraid there’s something in there that’ll jump at me if I make too much noise. It may sound childish, when said just like that, but given what I’ve heard… And what I’ve seen, before getting in here… Better safe than sorry. I don’t step in the puddles ; the splash might give me away. Neither do I jump, or run, or do anything that makes the slightest bit of noise. This place is very echo-y, after all, and I can’t know how far I’ll be heard.

I have reached multiple dead ends since I’ve started exploring. A few were just that, hallway leading to a wall and nothing else ; in others, the tentacle algae had grown so much that they were blocking the path, like a grid made out of wriggling moist tendrils. At one point I almost stepped into boiling water, only stopping myself after I noticed the heat, and stumbled backwards, hitting my shoulders against a wall.

Fog has been appearing and then fading away quite regularly ever since I first woke up. It’s strange. It feels almost like a breath ? Like something to which I should pay more attention, honestly, but I don’t have much time for it right now. I’ll mull it over while I search for a room more interesting than these endless pathways – there was one where I woke up, there surely is at least one other.

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I have finally found something new, after what might have been hours of walking down narrow, foggy tunnels. Another room, and this one is big. Very big. Cathedral-sized big, in fact ; so big I can’t see the ceiling when there is fog within the room. It is truly impressive, and very surprising to stumble into without warning after days – it must be at least a few days since I woke up in here, I think – spent in two meters tall hallways.

The tiling is still the same, tired gray stone all over, although it appears to be carved more intricately in here ; there are triangles and pentagons and hexagons and squares, all fitting perfectly with each other. Less water, though ; the place is a bit dryer than the tunnels, although considering how damp they were, that’s not saying much. Each of my footsteps echo throughout the room like thunder, which still scares me each time – half because I don’t like noises that loud, half because I’m afraid whatever is in the tunnels doesn’t either.

There are statues in here. Ranging in size from four to forty meters tall, they look… Distinctly uncanny. They are made of the same materials as the rest of the room, but only judging them through that would be akin of saying the Eiffel tower was the same as any old metal rod. The statues are suspiciously well-preserved, with no chipping or damage that I can see ; they seem to have been carved directly into the stone.

I would not be able to say what they represented. It has some similarities to the oobleck, but I know it is not. It is deathly thin where the oobleck was massive, and has, somehow, even more tentacles. It’s just an impression, but it seems more determined too, more purposeful. It is quite disturbing, like the statue will leave its stage and take a step forward at any time.

The statues are roughly humanoid proportions. Their head is spherical, covered with eyes in a hypnotic pattern which seems to be different in each statue. Its mouth – if it even has one – is covered by tentacles… No, tendrils. Like if one excavated veins and arteries from a dead human body and used them as beard instead. Some of them attach themselves back to the thing’s shoulders or neck, while others are hanging with no particular end. There are two membranes on its back, far too primitive for me to call them wings, and more physically similar of fish fins.

Its limbs, ending in stumps are numerous, and so lifelike that they almost seem to be moving, in a squirming mess of joints and bends. Its back is curved forward, bringing its head on the same level as its shoulders, and its body is shriveled and withered, ribs visible. The picture, taken as a whole, is quite disturbing, especially when there are countless like that, of various sizes, all surrounding you.

But these statues have a certain implication. Someone carved this. Someone, probably someone high off their ass considering the finished product, decided to sit down and spent an important portion of their life to bring such a thing into this world. And that means that, in all likelihood, the same person or group was the one who dug the tunnels and created the rooms, and my previous question about the origin of such a place is answered !

But that only leaves more questions. A lot more, in fact. Who had the time and resources to create giant stone structures in the middle of the Pacific ? Why even do it ? And what is the squid thingy that they seem to be obsessed with ? Perhaps some kind of god ? Why does it look so alien, then ? And what does the ooblecks have to do with it, or the tentacle algae, or the overlapping angles ?

I’m sure if I was able to identify the specific type of rock this is carved in, or maybe the carving techniques, I’d be able to answer – or at least to start answering – some of these questions. Unfortunately, I am not specialized in rock-carving. All the help that my years of studies can bring me here is to confirm that this room was not used to launch rockets, as can be deduced by the fact that it has no openings big enough for one.

On another note, I like this room. It’s big enough for me to be able to see if something approaches, it’s dryer than the tunnels and thus a bit more comfortable, it’s got many exits, multiple of them leading into the hallways, and there’s even some algae in the corners I can use for food. I think it’s a good place to settle in. I’m going to sleep soon after writing these words ; it’s been a long time since last time I had the chance to rest.

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I don’t usually remember my dreams. I do have a few fleeting memories of dreaming that I’m falling forever or suchlike, but nothing more detailed. I’ve never cared much about dreams either, not since my kindergarten teacher tried to make me keep a dream diary, and even then I hated it. I remember having to make stuff up just so I had something to answer when she asked me about my dreams.

But I do remember the dream I had last night… Was it a night ? It does not matter. Point is, I have vivid memories of the events of that dream, and not only that, but the dream in itself was quite weird. I don’t know how relevant it is to the rest of these logs, but I don’t really care either, and writing it down in as much detail as I can is a good way to help process it.

The dream began with me laying on the bed of my cabin back in the boat, wrapped within the white sheets. For a few blissful moments, I thought that this was real life, that every impossible and horrible thing I’ve seen since the last time I woke up in this bed was just a wild nightmare produced by my subconscious. The feeling did not last, however, and the next thing to happen in my dream was the loud sound of wood and metal cracking. I rushed out of my room, already dressed thanks to the inconsistent logic of dreams, to find precisely what I was fearing ; the oobleck, tearing and clawing at the ship until it was nothing but torn up pieces, in a far more intentional and aggressive manner than what it really did in real life.

Then my dream shifted. The oobleck and me stayed in the same place, but the world outside slowly became more solid and hard until it was the carved stone hallways of the maze I’ve wandered in for the last few days. I did not stop and linger upon the architecture, though, as I was already running away from the thing with no clue nor care to where specifically I was doing. I sprinted, tripped, rolled and tumbled throughout the catacombs, hitting walls as I took sharp turns, and yet the creature was still behind me, walking slowly but somehow not losing any ground.

There was a door, on the wall in front of me. I ran for it, for what I perceived to be my only hope of survival, and miraculously reached it before dying. I locked it behind me, before examining the room I was in. It was… Well, it was my office at NASA, complete with the sci-fi books piled up on the desk and the pride stickers on the back of the laptop. It wasn’t me who was sitting at the desk, though, but Dr. Moore, my direct hierarchical superior. His face seemed blurry, like I couldn’t look at it directly. He was wearing the same clothes as the man who interviewed me when I applied to NASA, a connection that was reinforced by the next words he uttered.

“Ah. Well, hello. You want to work for us, is that right ?”

I could only nod.

“You understand we can’t let just anyone work here, Lexi. Tell me, what do you know ?”

I remember my dream self trying to talk about my credentials, my education, everything I had done. But he shook his head, and his tendrils – which had just appeared, although they had been there for the whole dream – swayed along.

“No, that’s not what I meant. What do you know ?”

I went on about the observable universe, about how I knew there was a desk between us, that we were surrounded by walls, a floor and a ceiling, that he was sitting in a chair, but with each word what I was trying to describe disappeared, and still he was shaking his head, looming over me, and asking over and over again “What do you really now ?”

Then I tried to talk about how the universe really worked, to tell him about every law of physics I knew, every formula I could recite, from gravity to thermodynamics to geometry. And finally he said something new, although I wish he hadn’t.

“Those are false,” he said, and by then there was only the two of us standing in an empty void. Not a void as in an emptiness, as in the void of space, but the void as in everything you can see behind your own head.

“Here,” he said again, pointing a finger at the sky, or rather the part of the void that was directly above his head, “is the only thing you can really know.”

And before I could do or say anything, a light brighter than any I have ever seen before, brighter than a nuclear bomb, than a thousand suns, brighter than all the stars in the night sky combined, overtook the whole scene, waking me up screaming.

Is this how dreams usually go ? Are they always so… internally inconsistent ? I know dreams are often the subconscious trying to process recent events, and the first part does make sense considering I’m still obviously traumatized by the ship’s destruction, but I have no clue what everything else was all about. I find it quite disturbing, to be entirely honest.

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That dream was hard to process. Even know, as I busy myself cutting tentacles and fetching boiling water so that I can have a meal, I find myself mulling it over in minute detail. It’s funny, I’ve never given much credence to dream analysis theories before, but now I can’t help but endlessly theorize about the meaning of that nightmare. I suppose it makes sense. Familiarity is something I’m desperately lacking right now, and despite the weirdness of that dream, dreams being weird is a familiar concept. It’s a good distraction to try and analyze it, however inaccurately I may be doing it.

The first half seems straightforward enough. The boat’s sinking was a terrifying event, and I am self-aware enough to understand that it has deeply impacted me. I mean, I had a painful reminder of that yesterday-ish, when I heard that screech ; even now I shudder to think of it, and I am reluctant to enter the tunnels in which a monster could lurk at any turn. It is not a shocking fact that I have flashbacks of it. No, what I find intriguing is the second part of the dream.

I was never really close with Dr. Moore, although he has taken a liking to me since we’d started working together on the Revival project together. He was a stern, bulky man, skin almost as white as his hair, and although he could be quite harsh, especially with new people, he’d give you no trouble if you worked neatly and properly. I did so, and thus we got along fine, better than he and the other astrophysicists working on the project, even ; but we were not friends.

No, I believe I saw him as more of a role than a person. Someone who actually had power, and respect ; who knew what there was to know about the world ; who could confirm or invalidate my calculations. He was more of an authority regarding astrophysics and spatial engineering than anyone else I knew, and I believe it as a symbol of this that he appeared in my dream. Knowledge, authority, and perhaps fairness as well ; he never tolerated people giving me shit because I was a woman working at NASA.

As for why he was asking me unanswerable metaphysical questions like a wrinkled parody of Socrates, or why he was warped, growing tendrils and other such features, that remains a mystery. Besides, I’m not sure the answer would matter if there even was one ; it’s probably just my mind creating a nonsensical narrative out of recent events, and nothing more. Still, it is curious, if nothing else.

I am now reminded of my work, of my colleagues and my few friends. I wonder how many are mourning me. I know I wasn’t very popular, but I do hope that some people are grieving me. Maybe Dr. Moore is even quieter than usual and wearing his darkest clothes, like he did when cancer took Xander away. Maybe they’re still trying to search for me. I know my family won’t be grieving, even if they are made aware of my demise at sea ; they already mourned years ago, when I left church and joined the “satanic gay communists” as they put it. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps more importantly, I hope the project was a success. It’s a waste that the ship was destroyed ; now the satellite is going to have to spend weeks more in the water, probably exposed to storm and wind, and there’s no telling if the protective shell can resist all of that, even if it survived re-entry into the atmosphere.

God, it’s probably saying something sad about me that I’m worrying more about the success of the mission I was on before the attack than about my colleagues’ reaction to my disappearance. It’s the life I chosen, though, and I will not complain about it ; I merely wish it could have lasted longer. I don’t think there is a way for me to get back to it, now that I am locked inside this damp tomb.

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Day three within the maze.

I’ve decided to start numbering these diary entries again. Obviously, it’s not based on the actual day-night cycle, so for practical purposes I’m defining “day” as the period of time between me waking up and me sleeping. This is not a metric that is going to be accurate or consistent in any way, shape or form, considering how erratic my sleep cycle is even when I have a way to keep track of how much time is passing, but it’ll still be useful.

I didn’t do much of anything yesterday. I’ve been gathering supplies and stockpiling them in my little corner of the statues room. I’ve got some drinkable water, the clothes and fabric I’ve managed to recover from the part of the ship I awoke next to, a few planks, and a large amount of tentacle algae, as well as the knife I used to sever them from the root. Not a lot, but I might be able to make myself something useful with it. Maybe a makeshift bed, with the planks and fabric. I’m sick of sleeping directly on the damp floor.

I’m trying to plan out some experiments to do. I mean, there’s little I can do here except to try and figure out how things work, and scientific experiments are the way to do so. One thing I definitely want to do is to dissect one of the tentacles, try and see what is inside, if there’s nerves or so on. I also want to try and do more things with the weird angles, maybe see how they interact with moving objects.

What was that ? I just heard something. Not something normal like water dripping on the floor, no. I think it was another screech, but faint. Muted enough by the thick stone walls that I can question whether or not I really heard anything… I probably didn’t. Yet I cannot shake the question that gnaws at my soul : “What if I did hear it right ?” Yes, what if ? I should do something, anything to protect myself, to prevent an unknown threat to destroy me. But I’ve no idea what.

There was no dream this night, not since yesterday night. Not really. There must’ve been one ; I remember some vague details – nothing clear enough to make sense, and there’s no feelings or sensations attached to them anyway, not like yesterday’s. Except for the light at the end, though. That remained the same, perhaps even brighter, illuminating everything so clearly. When I awoke in a sweat as the light had become too much to bear, I first thought I had gone blind, and tried to rub at my eyes in a desperate, half-asleep attempt to make them work again, before remembering that it was usual for this place to be dark and dim.

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Still day three, some time later – Eventually I’ll find a way to measure time. Today is not that day, unfortunately.

I’ve cut open one of the tentacles I’d previously gathered for sustenance. I’m not a biologist and the last time I did a dissection was in high school, and back then I had proper utensils and not just a kitchen knife, but those are all problems I have no way to solve. Thus, I can’t be sure if the results of this experiment are entirely accurate or if I messed up during the operation in a way that modified the thing.

Another possibility, of course, is that the tentacles are so far removed from anything I know about that to try and interpret their features through the lens of eukaryote biology is entirely useless. But if I’m just going to assume there’s nothing I can learn about things in here, then I might just roll over and wait for death.

The first thing of note is the “skin” of the tentacle. It a layer of flesh, for lack of a better word, perhaps half a centimeter thick, harder to cut through than the rest of the tentacle algae, but not by much. It covers the whole of the tentacle, and it is easy to detach it from the inside flesh. Upon close inspection, one can notice very small holes peppering the surface of this skin, similar to pores. Had I to guess, I would say it is the way the tentacles ingest nutrients to transform them into energy.

The inside is weird. Where one would expect organs, muscles, maybe even bones, there is only a spongy and slippery flesh-like substance somewhat reminiscent of spam – that one gross-looking army food made out of pork. It is possible for it to be one giant muscle and for the organs to be down at the root of the tentacle, I suppose, but then you’d need something like nerves to give commands to the tentacles, and I can find no such thing.

Some of this I knew already, through the rudimentary examination I did when I first started to eat these. A lot of it I only took time to check or write down now. Something that I have previously mentioned, but likely not emphasized enough, is how bland this thing tastes ; I have never chewed on a soggy clump of paper, but if I ever do, I imagine the taste would be similar.

I have mentioned the root of the tentacle more than once, but have not yet described it in detail ; that is because it is, as stated in the name, the part of the tentacle which is digging down within the angles, and thus hard to properly examine. Until now I have only cut down tentacles at about their halfway point, which – incidentally – has allowed me to see they can regenerate, but for the sake of this experiment I’ve attempted to uncover the roots.

Simply pulling at the tentacle did not work. Granted, I’m not a very strong woman, but it was also quite firmly attached to the corner. In fact, I tore off a part of the skin before I was able to pull the tentacle out of the wall. That was not unexpected, to be honest, as pretty much the same thing happened when I tried to poke at one the angles with a plank. It got stuck so bad I couldn’t get it out.

The second option was to try and sever the tentacle at the base. I took my knife and tried to slice cautiously, as close to the ground as I could without the blade scraping on the rough stone of the floor. I was about halfway through when I hit what must’ve been a quirk of the angle with the edge of my knife and then… I can’t describe it right. It sunk deeper into the angle, somehow, then took a sharp turn upwards, and then it started to bend and twist all over the place, sometimes clipping with the wall like one of those bad ragdoll physic effects in video games, pulling my hand along with it.

I tugged sharply at the knife in a desperate bid to get it out of the angle. It worked, but when it came out – and the recoil threw me against the opposite wall – the blade was more similar to that of a corkscrew than that of a knife, or more accurately to some kind of intricate abstract sculpture. Entirely unusable, at any rate – I’ll have to find a new one, I don’t know how. More importantly, as I was pushed away from the angle, my arm flew backwards and the now twisted blade burrowed into my shoulder.

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The first thing I felt was pain, obviously. Horrible, sharp, white hot pain, striking at me like a punch in the chest. I fell to my knees, clutching my shoulder with one hand and barely preventing myself from collapsing on the floor with the other. The second feeling, that came only seconds after, was annoyance and frustration. My knife, the only one I could find, was now ruined ; not only that, but that arm was going to take a good amount of time to heal, and there’s no way at all I could have foreseen that. Perhaps I might’ve avoided it, if I didn’t care about learning as much as I can about this place, but then I wouldn’t be me, would I ?

Ugh. Anyway. After a few minutes of suffering, I carefully removed the knife from my shoulder, trying my best – and failing – not to scream as I twisted it away. Bits of flesh fell out as the edge of the blade emerged from my skin, and blood profusely oozed out of my shoulder. I’ve never been good with blood, and the sight almost made me puke.

The first order of business, from what I remembered of that one first aid course I took when I was twenty, was to find a way to sterilize the wound. I certainly don’t trust that knife to be clean, even if I knew for sure no dreadful bacteria was lying in that angle. Unfortunately, as I am working with the little I am given, there was only one way I could clean that wound.

I crawled towards the hole of boiling water excruciatingly slowly. Heat sterilizes things, after all. The journey was much the same as it ever was, save perhaps my occasional grunting in suffering. I, for once, did not worry much about the ooblecks roaming these tunnels, more focused on trying to find a way to cauterize my shoulder.

Finally I was able to pour a container of the boiling water upon my back, which is not a good idea and should not be done unless you’re trying to manipulate an unconventionally-shaped container with only one harm with which you’re attempting to reach places you normally shouldn’t. I am not ashamed to admit I screamed. Well, at least the wound was cleaned.

The next thing I did was to rip away a piece of my clothing – which is becoming more and more ragged by the day – to use it as an impromptu bandage, in order to stop more blood from leaking out. It should work, but I suppose only time I can tell. After this operation, I laid down on the floor for a work, trying to dull my pain with time. It worked moderately well, and I’m up and running again – although I’d better not try and use my right arm for a while.

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Day four in this fucking hell.

It’s the same over and over again. Go to sleep fearing something stumbles onto my camp during the night, dream up some weird nightmare, wake up feeling like I’ve just been staring into the sun for the last few hours, eat those tasteless tentacles algae as fog rises and disappears rhythmically, try and figure out something to do to distract me from the fact that I’m gonna die down here and nobody will know. If I’m lucky I’ll bleed to death right here and now instead of being devoured by some eldritch bullshit.

I hate this. I hate all of this. I hate myself for getting on that boat weeks ago, I hate every one of my teachers because nothing I’ve been taught is worth anything in here, I hate my parents and Dr. Moore and the ship’s captain and every damn tile of that damn city and above all I hate fate if it exists, for she is a very cruel mistress indeed if she decided to let me rot away in this dampened tomb. I would scream in rage, if it were not for the fact that to do so would surely hasten my demise.

But it is useless to wallow in self pity and in anger, in the end of the day, and I have tasks I must undertake if I wish to survive – it is pointless, but I will not allow myself to go away without a fight. Among those, perhaps the most important right now is to find myself a new knife. The old one is worthless now, with the blade being bent and twisted. It spirals almost as much as I do. While I do have pieces of metal and wood I salvaged, I don’t have the know-how or the tools necessary to fashion them into something that can actually cut.

There’s only one real solution, and that is to use the good old caveman solution. There’s stone everywhere in here, tiling the walls, floors and ceilings, I only need to carve it off – and even if my previous knife can’t slice, it’s still pointy enough to be used as a pick. Should I have learned my lesson about not stabbing at the fabric of this place after I cut apart my own shoulder ? Maybe, but I do really need a new knife – in a feeble hope to protect myself, but also so that I can forage for my food.

And so I went to work, striking again and again at the wall with my warped metal blade. I’d chosen to try this in the tunnels, where I could see the wall wasn’t as thick as it was in the larger room, and in fact it only took me a few hours – by my own count, that is, which isn’t very precise – to be able to pull out a pentagonal tile the diameter of my forearm. But by taking out that tile, I revealed something quite unexpected.

Beneath this stone, there was a gross fleshy mass, like a slab of ground beef that had been left to the open air for far too long, covered by humid mold. It pulsed in a regular manner, like what might have been a heartbeat if there were anything like a heart in there. Seeing this, I dropped the tile I was holding in shock, and it shattered on the ground in about a dozen shards. My knife was still embedded in that flesh, and I tried to remove it ; but when I pulled it out, an inky liquid, the color of tar, oozed out of the newly formed hole.

I stood there for some time, staring at the slimy substance as if formed a small puddle near my feet, before I left. I needed some time to process – and writing down what happened is helping with that – and to reconsider, which is still something I need to do.

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It seems there always is one more curveball this place can throw at me, every time I foolishly believe I’ve figured something out about how it works. One step backward for each two steps forward, as they say… Although it feels much more like two steps backward for each step forward.

I just feel like it wouldn’t have been as bad it if was something overtly reality bending like whatever is wrong with the angles in here. It pains me to admit the laws of physics are mere delusions, about as real as medieval superstitions and beliefs, but once I accept that anything goes and there’s no use getting all worked up about it. A living, bleeding thing living in the walls is much, much worse, because it feels much more real.

I have so many questions, and I’m not sure I really want the answer to any of them. Is this meat, for lack of a better word, in every wall in here ? Is it part of this place, like a really fucked up hermit crab ? Is it just a parasite that has taken residence inside the walls ? Is it connected to the tentacles, are they the same thing as this ? Those certainly don’t bleed when I cut them up. Wait, fuck, if it’s in the walls, it’s probably in the floor as well – those two concepts are the same sometimes, anyway. Am I standing on weird moist flesh right now ?

Ultimately, even if I could get an answer, I expect it’d be both a lot more horrifying and confusing than anything I could guess beforehand. That seems to be a theme in this place.

I’ve been crying for a while now. I don’t really feel sad, though. With everything that has happened in the past few days – the ship sinking and the trauma of it, discovering this place, and suchlike – I feel like I’ve used up all the emotions I had in me, and I’m left empty, all the life sucked out of me. I’m just resigned now.

I went back to the place where I uncovered the being. No need to let the stone pieces I dropped go to waste, after all. I remember learning how to fashion a primitive blade by hitting two rocks against each other a long time ago while camping, but the memory is hazy ; still, I’ve got more than enough to be able to practice. It’s just going to be long, and repetitive, and very much boring. Guess that’s what my day’s going to be. I’m lucky I cut up some tentacles earlier, that way I don’t have to worry about food for sometime. Having to walk back and forth to get clean water is quite tedious, though.

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Day five.

There is water everywhere. I don’t know how or why it happened, but I feel even more like the victim of some grand cosmic joke than I did before. I wanted to have water closer to me ? Well, there certainly is now ! Worst part is, I probably can’t drink it – not unless I want to get sick. There must be all kind of grime and dust floating around in there.

I should probably clarify. I woke up this morning in the reoccurring fog, planning to continue my attempts to make a new stone knife ; I didn’t notice it at first, because the fog was blocking my sight, but when I knelt down to grab for the rocks I was trying to carve, I found that the ground was covered by perhaps a full centimeter of water. This struck me as odd, as for the few days I’ve been here, the room I sleep in – the one with all the statues – has been very dry compared to the others. That’s why I sleep there, in fact. It’s a lot more comfortable than waking up all damp every morning.

I spent some time puzzled about this but still trying to blindly grab for my stuff, and I had gathered two shards of rock and a tentacle before I realized the water was rising. Whereas a few minutes before only the tip of my finger could sink below the surface before reaching the ground, now it can engulf the whole of it. This is, obviously, bad. I don’t know where’s the water coming from, I have no way to find out before it reaches above my head considering the surrounding fog and the size of the room, and I have not learned to breathe underwater since last time I almost drowned. My best bet, right now, is to climb up one of the statues and hope the water stops before rising before I do.

Chapter Text

I should probably clarify. I woke up this morning in the reoccurring fog, planning to continue my attempts to make a new stone knife ; I didn’t notice it at first, because the fog was blocking my sight, but when I knelt down to grab for the rocks I was trying to carve, I found that the ground was covered by perhaps a full centimeter of water. This struck me as odd, as for the few days I’ve been here, the room I sleep in – the one with all the statues – has been very dry compared to the others. That’s why I sleep there, in fact. It’s a lot more comfortable than waking up all damp every morning.

I spent some time puzzled about this but still trying to blindly grab for my stuff, and I had gathered two shards of rock and a tentacle before I realized the water was rising. Whereas a few minutes before only the tip of my finger could sink below the surface before reaching the ground, now it can engulf the whole of it. This is, obviously, bad. I don’t know where’s the water coming from, I have no way to find out before it reaches above my head considering the surrounding fog and the size of the room, and I have not learned to breathe underwater since last time I almost drowned. My best bet, right now, is to climb up one of the statues and hope the water stops before rising before I do.

My plan, unfortunately, crumbled as soon as I subjected it to critical examination. While it would be much easier to try and scale the giant statues than the smooth, stone walls, that doesn’t mean I’d be able to do it. I have no mountaineering experience, and I have no ropes or picks to anchor myself to the wall even if I did. Trying to climb this might actually be more dangerous than trying to stay afloat indefinitely.

If we’re assuming the law of gravity is factual, that is.

I’ve already seen that this isn’t true everywhere in this place, that in some places the floor and ceiling become walls. While I have not observed this phenomenon in this specific room yet, it is large enough that it might happen in some part of it. So what I ended up doing was walking throughout this place, one hand against the wall at all times to try and feel any change in the direction from which gravity is coming, trying to ignore the water steadily rising.

It took me what I think was forty-five minutes to find the right spot, although because of my time blindness, that could be anything from fifteen minutes to two hours. It felt like a very long time, anyway, enough for the water to reach above my knees. I almost passed right by it without noticing, were it not for the way water rippled at this place, like three different waterfalls flowing in different directions jammed together so as to occupy the same space as one. It looks extremely weird, but what doesn’t in this place ?

I tentatively took a step vertically, trying to ease the transition between the two different gravitational fields, and immediately failed at that task. I tumbled forward and ended up with half my body lying on the wall while the other was still subjected to “normal” gravity, which meant my legs were pulled in a perpendicular direction to my upper body, which was dangling towards the water. After a few minutes of panic, I managed to get a hold of myself and to get inside the narrow pathway that allowed me to walk on the wall.

I took a few moments to ground myself, no pun intended, before continuing up. I slowly crawled up, or I suppose, forward, to avoid accidentally exiting the altered gravity zone ; I’m not very keen on falling a dozen meters before hitting the ground, or worse yet, half my body falling a dozen meters before hitting the ground. Eventually I reached the upper wall. I don’t think there’s a lot I can do if the water ends up following me all the way up here, so now I’m just sitting here, waiting for it to stop rising.

Chapter Text

It is hard not to spiral over the ways gravity fucks up when you’re sitting parallel to what normally is the floor. It is even harder not to obsess over the water when, every agonizing second that goes by, it is a few centimeters closer to drowning me. And the more time passes, the faster water floods in, too. The grimy, dirty brine is already a quarter of the way up the room, and, because of the way gravity works here, some of it has already reached me. I’m sitting in a puddle about a centimeter deep and a meter wide ; at the edges the water drips off like a tiny waterfall, with a constant, repetitive sound. Tip. Tip. Tip.

There is a breeze. Fresh air. I didn’t know I missed it, but there it is, and I cannot put into words how much of a relief it is. Ever since I first awoke down here, the air has been moist and heavy, almost suffocating, but it has been long enough for me to get used to it. You often do not notice what you lack until you get it, after all. But now ? There is wind. Actual wind. Refreshingly cold, flowing throughout the room gently, from…

...From a cavity in the wall, above one of the statues nearby. Small enough of a hole that I didn’t see it before I was looking for it. It must lead to the surface, somehow. An exit. Dear god, an exit. And it’s been there the whole time.

There is an issue, however. The statue below the hole is one of the largest, a bit more than forty meters tall, larger than some apartment complexes I’ve lived in. It protrudes from the wall like an oversized, horrendous gargoyle, but that means if I can manage to get on it, I’ll be able to reach the hole. That being said, the point of the statue closest to me – the tip of a wing-like limb – is at least two meters away from the narrow pathway in which I can cling to the wall. Which means I will have to jump.

I do not want to jump. The odds that I will simply fall down to my death are overwhelming. But the choice is simple ; either I take the risk and almost certainly die, or I wait here as water swallows me until I definitely die. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to figure this one out, but it helps.

I will spare you the tantalizing agony and indecision that preceded the jump, for in the end I did jump. I closed my eyes as normal gravity reasserted itself upon me, a feeling as unpleasant as ever, and for a single terrifying instant I thought this would be the end. My life flashed before my eyes as I felt myself fall… Up until I hit the statue, and the impact knocked the breath out of my lungs. I hugged the slippery stone tightly, to prevent myself from slipping down and falling again. It took me what felt like hours, but I eventually managed to pull myself up, climb the rest of the statue, and reach the very top of it.

The breeze is much more noticeable now. It is salty and briny, not like the thick and heavy air from within the tunnels, but like the unmistakable air found near the sea. The crevice from which it comes from is large enough for me to fit inside, but barely ; someone a head taller than I may not be able to go through it comfortably. I was still high off the residual adrenaline from the jump and the resulting fear, so I entered the crevice and started advancing through it.