Phase Q/Banananananana

You swim deeper, deeper, deeper. Light and dark lose their meaning. The pressure mounts. Your mind begins fading into your body. Textures brush up against you.

As you travel further, you lose your sense of direction. Usually you can tell, through some kind of innate feeling, where you are in the intermundial medium. Yet, now you have little or no sense of where you are. Up? Down? Relative to what? Which quadrant?

You even begin to lose track of your body. Did you leave it behind? Are you now just a free-floating mind, another detachy?

Hopefully not.

Bit by bit, you begin to rematerialize. You sense you intuition, your judgment, your logic, returning. Yet you still lack a sense of where you are.

Ah, now your body rejoins you. Never been that long of a disconnect before.

With your preposterous body now attached, you take in the world sensorily.

Rivers seem to flow along the roof of some kind of enclosed vol.

Stars seem to fly throughout the vol, close to the surfaces.

The surfaces themselves are made out of some kind of highly reflective material.

You feel the air, and it has a high density of metal in it.

A kind of grinding sound rumbles around the vol, apparently following a circular pattern.

The whole place has a chemical signature, unusual in this mostly post-chemical age.

Motions all around you act blindingly. A species of small, purple, sock-like thing bops about.

The socky things seem to be working, although by your standards it looks more like a game.

Each one performs a specialized function, so they must have at least a level five civ.

They look kind of cute, with their fluorescent green stripes. The illumination highlights cadmium.

You float around the world a bit. The socky things don’t seem to mind your presence.

As you make your way about the plant, you can see that they are refining a metal. From the air ore.

A small section, an arcvol around a darker area, has a group of little baby socky things, and their supervisors.

The little baby socky things are extra cute. They bop around in tiny little steps. Sometimes they trip.

The supervisor socky things have a warmer aura. They follow the baby socky things on an auto pattern.

As the metal condensates out of the air, you notice the metal-depleted air changing. It loses its color, becoming transparent. And it seems to attract plumes of plasmic energy from the floating stars.

A burst of stellar wind brushes up against your armor, but doesn’t penetrate. Another more direct hit comes, and pushes you back, ejecting you from the vol.

As you trip over yourself, you fall out into empty space. There doesn’t seem to be any grav field in this world.

All around you, floating in empty space, you see vast clouds of the socky things, all emitting bright purple light. They seem to be bopping to the same auto pattern.

Is it some kind of dance? A ceremony? Part of the factory production?

Uh oh. Your energy status bar is running down to zero.

• Wait.
• Dance around the fire.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.