Phase Q/And Just Because

Then the people come to the civil areas, and gather together. And in a group voice, they get together and proclaim a new day. It shall be a day of festivities. Hurray!

Anyway, they party through the night. It's a ball, a blast. Even the drunks got invited, and party a bit, and have some fun.

The next day, everyone is hung over. In a fine mist of champagne, all shrouded in white fine particles of cloud matter, the walls float away. The backdrop features upward-flowing waterfalls. The revelers keep on doing the things that make them turn around and spin upside down. And day after day, night by night, they arrive closer to who they want to become. The foresty backdrop emits a low resonant hum of dew. The temperature fluctuates rapidly between extremely high desert-like heat, and extremely low polar-like cold. In between the extremes, the oscillating climate quickly swings through the middle comfortable point. And then, the precipitation begins to fall.

One time, at the party, everything turns around and around and around. And after a while, the partiers realize that it's due to magnetic effects. The rest of what's happening is almost like yesterday.

“Did you ever notice that every day is today?” asks a drunk reveler.

“Well, yes. That’s sort of how things go.”

“OK, then.”

And then the steams let up, the pressure evaporates, dissolves. And then the sound waves burst through fifty levels of space. And then the light bright yellow costumes come.

“I accept this glorious gift freely,” says another drunk reveler.

Meanwhile, the crew of Zonnyxes ride out on a wave of breaking chaos.

Each second that transpires, a meaningful fraction of the orderly progression of systematic configuration of existence flips, like an Othello board, into topsy-turvy drivel.

The hounds of noise sweep through millions of lightyears. Wherever they pass, quantum disruptors break apart the logic of the world.

In their wake, a vast sea of burbling, bubbling turmoil.

You rematerialize underwater, in the cavernous body of a whale corpse.

That’s funny.

Feeling your way around in the dark, you float over, through the rib cage, into the tail. Oops, wrong way. You turn around and swim out of the mouth.

In the open water, you feel the rays of light penetrating the surface, igniting the liquid in a sea of colors.

However, the surface seems to extend all around you, like a sphere. In every direction that you look, light drops in from what feels like above. What is this place?

You look more carefully at the incoming light, and see that it diffracts sharply. It looks like you’re in a bubble of water, flying through space.

Pulling out your voltager, you image the light flying by outside, mapping it. By inference, you figure out that you’re in the stellar range of Alpha Tornuquirae. A fiery hot planet orbits, covered in volcanoes, with rivers of lava flowing through its canals. Natural lasers and fusion reactors pop up spontaneously. Life thrives on heat.

Home.

• Orbit.
• Explode!

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.