Awakening IX

I climb out of the beating heart, risen from the depths. That was a long climb - it feels like it took days! I look around. The room is just as I left it - the trapdoor atop the heart was closed, and all the other doors in the room are just as closed as they were when I descended. I climb down the moist, pulsing heart (and I never want to say that again!) and look at the two metal doors - presumably locked, as they were when I climbed down. I want to see what's inside them before I continue, so I can better choose an escape route once I've freed Rebecca. I dither for a moment, and then decide to open the one I saw that small creature (?) scurry through. I'm not too worried about defending myself - I still have the Device in the lockbox, after all.

I turn the giant's key in the lock, and try to open the door - it won't budge. I look at the door - it's wedged shut! Someone's put a little wood wedge just below the door - perhaps the creature that fled from my approach, just in case I managed to open the lock. I crouch down and poke it out - and just then, I hear footsteps. I quickly turn and look.

Rounding the corner - it's me! Just as I was when I entered this room before - covered in dust, holding only a roll of duct tape... I don't know what will happen if he sees me, but I don't want to risk it right now. I open the door and, before he gets a good glimpse of me (I hope!), dash inside, closing it behind me.

Breathing deeply, I realize what must have happened. The cavern beneath (?) the heart was a 'bubble outside reality', the giant said. Somehow - when I was in it, or entering it, or leaving it just now - I must have traveled back in time, to just before I entered the heart. Remembering what I saw in the room, I realize that there were slight discrepancies - I'd wedged the trapdoor open, and I doubt that the wooden wedge was in the door the last time I was in there. I'd examined the room pretty well, I'd probably have noticed that. I'm... in a time loop? It sounds improbable, but when a living heart as tall as I am is just a door away, I'm inclined to believe it.

So - what now? I guess I'll just wait until he - until I enter the trapdoor. Gotta keep causality intact - otherwise, I have no idea of what will happen. I hear a crash from outside, made tinny by the metal door - that must be me smashing the lock on the trapdoor. I wait a moment more, and then cautiously open the door and step back into the heart room.

I look back at myself, posed breaking a broom over my knee to use for keeping the trapdoor open.

Well, there goes that.

I decide to break the impasse - I am, after all, the older and wiser of the two of us. I walk towards myself - I'll call him Roshan from now on, to keep things simple. Simpler, anyway. I greet Roshan politely: "Hello, me. Sorry to surprise you like that - I expected you to be down the trapdoor by the time I stepped out."

Roshan still looks pretty startled by my appearance. "Who... who are you? Are you... me?" I - okay, he - stares at me. I respond, "Yes. I'm you, an hour and a half later. I just came out of there," pointing to the heart.

Roshan looks a little less shocked now, and more confused. "Did you come to warn me not to go in there? Was it a mistake?"

I consider. "No, not really. I actually came out pretty well from the experience. Learned a lot about my past and this place, got some very useful items... running into you really was an accident."

"Well... what do I do now?", inquires poor bewildered Roshan.

"I... don't know." I consider. "Going down there got me a great deal, but I'm not certain that it would do the same for you. The place down there is strange - it's entirely possible that it's left the way I last saw it, not the way it was when I entered it, and in that case you'd risk severe injury just getting down there, and likely have to make a deal with a daemon to get out." I consider further. "Investigating might prove my fears wrong, or it might prove them right... but either way, there's a pretty large chance that you'd be somewhere entirely different when you came out, and I don't think I - you - have much of a chance at escaping without the items I got there."

Roshan looks down. He looks up. He thinks. Then he closes the trapdoor and climbs down the moist, pulsing heart (dang it!), and stands at my side. "Where do we go now?", he asks. "Can you open the other doors back in that corridor?"

"I can, but not yet. First I want to see what's past these metal doors - they seem like the most likely escape route." As it turns out, they're just more corridors - bland, featureless, each turning in the same direction about twenty feet past the door. Roshan's getting a little nervous, though - worried about being caught? Oh, right! He doesn't have the Device! - so I close both doors, and we enter the corridor to the Cells of Forgetting. As we walk, I ask him for the lockbox, and open it for him. "What is this?", he asks. I explain, and politely ask him not to trigger it while I'm around.

We walk down the Cells of Forgetting. I know I should explain to Roshan what's going on - how he was trapped here, where I'm going, what I know of this place - but I am distracted. I wonder. What is the robed figures' plot? What do they hope to accomplish? I still haven't decided whether I'm willing to settle for simple escape or not - and now I'm accompanied by myself! I need more time.

...what first?