Fractality: Episode 1

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Fractality: Episode 1
Source: collected/045-fractality-episode-1.mp3
SHA-256: c498b54c95dedb2978e58ecfeda783feefabc008f81758ce5fb607ad19a89e65
Model: scribe_v2 | Transcribed: 2026-10-10T18:18:31.870868+00:00
Machine transcript — uncorrected. Speaker labels are local to this recording and do not identify people.

[00:00:01.320] Speaker 1: Fractality, Chapter One, Splitter. Outside Ravencliff Hospital, Layer Zero. Faize looked up at the looming abandoned hospital and knew it would be the perfect playground. He'd seen it in the distance from the back of a truck a few weeks ago doing mun work. He'd spent the day with a dozen muns clearing a field that had been covered in debris so

[00:00:36.200] Speaker 1: some idiot could try and grow something there. Good luck with that. It was basically a perfect waste of a day, at least until he'd seen this place peeking out over the trees like a concrete corpse. He'd thought about sneaking away from the muns and the overseer to get a look, but that was stupid. Didn't matter because now he was here. He pulled at the chain link fence in front of him, brand new. He pressed his face to the links and looked at the courtyard before the building. Trash blew around in the overgrown garden area.

[00:01:11.460] Speaker 1: The concrete walkway was cracked, letting plants as big as saplings grow through. He started climbing the fence. "Stop!" The girl behind him walked up to the fence and after fishing a tool out of her pocket, started snipping away at the fence instead. "Splitters, always thinking with your feet" "You mean thinking on our feet" "No, I don't" Faize hopped off the fence, landing lightly on the ground, and watched Ambrosia work. Faize took the opportunity to

[00:01:46.360] Speaker 1: swipe a protein bar that was peeking out of her pack. "Mm, that's good. You can stop. I want it to look like no one came through." Amber looked at the tiny door she'd cut in the chain link fence skeptically, perhaps measuring it against herself in her mind. "You're eating now?" "Yeah. Why? It's always a good time to eat." Faize shoved the rest of the protein bar into his mouth, then got down on all fours to push through the little door she'd made. When he was through, he stood up and started walking. "Wait! That

[00:02:21.120] Speaker 1: sign says mines." He paused and briefly stopped chewing, looking down at his feet. Then he kept walking until he reached the front doors, or where the front doors used to be anyway. "Guess there's no mines." Mines were expensive. Plus, he realized after the fact that the overgrown grass hadn't been disturbed at all. If the fence was new and someone was laying mines, it would be muns, and muns were lazy. Lazy work leaves

[00:02:55.800] Speaker 1: clues. Ambrosia pushed through the little chain link flap with effort. When her pack caught the second time, Faize walked over to help pull her through. She already looked tired. "You came back?" In reply, Faize tried to swipe another protein bar. She snipped at him with the wire cutters, and he backed off. [laughs] Faize motioned for her to follow. Despite his apparent carelessness, he was actually careful to follow the same path back through the grass just in case there actually were mines.

[00:03:30.760] Speaker 1: "Ready to get rich?" Amber rolled her eyes, but she was smiling too. Of course she was. This was her playground too. Amber and Faize walked around the abandoned hospital for a few minutes, scoping out the place for security, signs of other splitters. To Faize, everything about the place said it was untouched. "You ready?" He could hear the nerves in her voice. He looked around, spinning slowly. The hospital

[00:04:05.380] Speaker 1: atrium had grimy concrete walls that climbed to a high ceiling where glass plates once formed a dome. Now only a rusting metal skeleton hung here, threatening to fall at any moment. Sitting furniture lay in dusty ruins about the room. "Yeah, this is the place." Choosing the place for the first rift was more art than science. It had downstream effects on the shape of the fractality he would enter. "Give me a sec to set up." Amber sat down cross-legged on the floor and started pulling

[00:04:40.220] Speaker 1: out gear from her pack. Her nervousness seemed to melt away as she silently set up the equipment. She fixed two crystals to their tripod stands and attached various wires to them. Then she attached more equipment that Faize couldn't identify. Everything ran back to her laptop in an indecipherable tangle of cables. "Approximating the seed now. It'll be more accurate if you'd rather stay the night here first, though" Faize was looking at a dark stain that ran down the wall in front of him. It looked like rust.

[00:05:16.000] Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely rust. "No, thanks. Good is good enough" "If you say so." She tapped away at the keys of her laptop, then looked up at him expectantly. "[clears throat] It's time" She nodded. [exhales] Now it was his turn to be nervous. You could free run anywhere, but you only came to a place like this for one reason: shard runs, the

[00:05:50.760] Speaker 1: Mack Daddy, real splitter work. He closed his eyes and reached out in front of him, feeling around in the air, feeling for the place that felt right When he found it, he pulled. There was a tension there, not quite physical. He kept pulling until he felt reality itself tear. Some splitters treated that moment with reverence, the moment when entire universes were created in a simple motion. All Faize could think about was shards, shards and money, because money was power,

[00:06:25.740] Speaker 1: and if you had enough, you could disappear. He could disappear, stop doing mund work, be a real splitter. When he opened his eyes, he saw the rift in the fractality beyond. It was a shimmering line in the air, just wide enough for him to squeeze through. He could just make out the world through the rift. It was like looking through shallow water at just another room in the hospital. "Looks stable." Ambrosia smiled innocently and shrugged. "If you say so." Faize took another

[00:07:00.680] Speaker 1: deep breath, then slipped through before he could lose his nerve. He felt the shift as a cool wave that ran through his body. There was a brief moment when everything sounded muffled, but then he was through. The shift disoriented him for a moment, and he quickly fell to a crouch, letting the nausea subside. He shook off the dizziness and stood. He was standing in a patient room, but a patient room that had never seen patients. It had never seen anyone. If he believed what the collective priests said, it hadn't even existed until he'd created it just now.

[00:07:37.160] Speaker 1: He fished the wired earpiece out of his pocket and turned his body cam on. [electronic beeping] "Got all your fingers?" He adjusted his earpiece. "Seems like. I've got eight fingers, right?" "Good enough." "On each hand, I mean." "Let me see." Faize moved his hands in front of the body cam pinned to his chest. "Connection's loose. Can you fix it?" He pulled the other end of the camera's wire out of his pants pocket. The little white crystal that was supposed to be attached to the other end was loose. He tightened

[00:08:12.120] Speaker 1: the nut around the connection and put it back in his pocket. "How's that?" He put just his middle finger in front of the body cam. "Oh, no, it's worse than we thought. There's only one left." "Only one I need." "So you gonna get to work, or are you just gonna wait around until the slicers get you?" "Yeah, yeah, let me get my bearings." Faize closed his eyes again. He always located better with his eyes closed. There were two tugs on reality here, like weights sagging

[00:08:46.940] Speaker 1: into a soft mattress. He could feel roughly where they were in relation to him. One small, softball-sized, definitely worth something. One big. Not big, big, but pretty big. Bowling ball-sized. Payday-sized. Not never-work-again payday, but maybe big enough to take a few years off. Time enough to build a crew. "There's two shards here. One small, one pretty big. Big one's in deep, though. I'm gonna check out the little one first, 'cause it's on the

[00:09:21.920] Speaker 1: way." He started in what felt like the right direction. "Okay, be smart. I don't get paid if you don't come back." "I hear you." Faize looked back at the rift, knowing it would still be there, but finding an ounce of relief in seeing it again, as if it might disappear if he were away for too long. It wouldn't. It would be stable as long as he was inside the Fractality to stabilize it. With the thrill of a fresh run in his heart, he took one last look at the easy way out.

[00:09:57.180] Speaker 1: Then he turned away and started running. Faize vaulted over a rusty file cabinet, belatedly hoping his hands wouldn't sink through the flimsy metal. It didn't, and he kept running. He jogged through a series of offices connected by closet-sized hallways. The furniture was dilapidated, as the furniture in the source building had been. Pictures of people that didn't

[00:10:32.220] Speaker 1: exist hung on the walls. There were dozens of them. Portraits of people with still-gleaming brass nameplates beneath them. He slowed only slightly to read some of the names. Frantilda Mossmer, a wrinkly woman with a too-long neck that peered over thin glasses at him. Another plate beneath the name read, "Employee of the Year." Great job, Frantilda. The next picture was a man with pale skin and very sunken eyes. Faize looked away after only a moment. Something about the

[00:11:07.020] Speaker 1: gaze of its beady eyes made his skin crawl. The nameplate read, "Birkus Yarfned, Tool Man". Faize smiled to himself. Tough luck, Birkus. There's always next year. He picked up the pace to make up for his sightseeing. It was hard not to want to stop, even on a shard run. No one else had ever seen this place, and if he did his job right today, no one would ever see it again. Eh, not great news for Birkus, actually. His hopes of

[00:11:42.040] Speaker 1: ever making Employee of the Year would be dashed. After a long string of offices, he came to his first real obstacle, a set of concrete stairs that rose to the ceiling, leaving only a tiny gap into a room above. Faize climbed up the stairs and shoved his head through the gap. There was a hallway beyond, but the gap was too narrow to squeeze through. Well, no one said it would be easy. You see this?

[00:12:08.988] Speaker 2: Already working on another route. I've been watching. Seed looks good. If you're going for that first shard, I think I've got a decent map there. The second one, though...

[00:12:19.608] Speaker 1: One thing at a time. He wanted that second shard, though. There was no way he was pulling the plug at the first shard. Given more data and more time, Ambrosia's algorithms would draw some more accurate maps.

[00:12:34.108] Speaker 2: Right. Okay. If you go back about 40 yards, you'll see a door. It leads to a bathroom, which leads to another bathroom.

[00:12:44.228] Speaker 1: Hmm. Which leads to another bathroom?

[00:12:47.688] Speaker 2: You got it. Get moving.

[00:12:49.968] Speaker 1: But he was already moving. He was always moving. Never quite frantic, but never quite comfortable either. He moved with urgency. Whether he realized it or not, a silent clock was always ticking down inside a fractality. The slicers couldn't open their own fractalities, but they would gladly enter his. When he stepped through that rift, he rang the dinner bell. If he stayed too long, they would find him before he pulled the shard. That encounter only ended one way: another dead splitter.

[00:13:34.008] Speaker 1: Chapter Two: Momentum. Raven Cliff Hospital Fractality, Layer 1. Phase slid under a support pillar that grew from one wall to another, almost horizontal. He vaulted a rusty hospital bed frame. He heard it clatter to pieces behind him as he passed. The hallway ahead of him stretched far into the distance. There was enough scattered furniture to make it difficult to see how far, but it went far enough to give him vertigo. It went straight for a mile, maybe more. He'd been running down it for a good 10 minutes

[00:14:08.908] Speaker 1: already. The fractality was starting to diverge from its source. Good. That meant things were about to get interesting. Seeing no immediate obstacles, he slowed to a walk and closed his eyes to sense. He felt a strong tug on his soul nearby. I'm close.

[00:14:28.528] Speaker 2: Okay. I'll keep comms quiet just in case.

[00:14:31.848] Speaker 1: Just in case there was something else nearby. The comm shards in his pocket were quiet, but they weren't silent. They had potentials of their own. Since they didn't belong to this fractality, they would be much quieter than the native shards he was hunting. Still, using the shards to communicate made him louder. He considered turning his body cam off to go quiet, at least as quiet as he could anyway, but decided against it. The nearby shard would mask him a little bit. Phase stepped into the adjacent room,

[00:15:07.208] Speaker 1: happy to be out of that endless hallway. There was definitely something here. It was an ambient tinkling sound, like wind chimes blowing in a faint breeze. Jackpot. Phase walked past a row of desks with chairs so small that they surely would have collapsed if anyone sat in them. In the room beyond, he saw a soft white light pulsing rhythmically. The sound of chimes grew louder. He stepped into the room. Hanging in the center of the room, frozen in midair, was the shard, a bright white crystal about the size of his pinky,

[00:15:42.228] Speaker 1: like its own little rift in space. You seeing this? Looks like a comm shard, maybe.

[00:15:50.128] Speaker 2: Yeah. You gonna pull it? Easy money.

[00:15:54.148] Speaker 1: Ambrosia was right. It was easy money. He knew a splitter could make careers pulling shards like this and never do a day of mun work. It was the reliable path to freedom, the path that most splitters took. Grab the first shard you could find, then get out. But you'd never be a legend that way. You'd always be just a step above the muns. There was no real freedom there. A gilded cage was still a cage. Fuse had tried to become a legend that way, too. He pushed the thought away. Besides,

[00:16:29.168] Speaker 1: his sister was a legend. She'd accomplished that much. And who was he? Nah, I'm gonna push for the second one. I made good time getting here.

[00:16:40.208] Speaker 2: Phase...

[00:16:43.368] Speaker 1: I'll be careful. First sign of trouble, I'll double back here or head straight back to the rift.

[00:16:50.868] Speaker 2: You promise?

[00:16:52.428] Speaker 1: Promise.

[00:16:54.308] Speaker 2: Fine. Where is this other shard?

[00:16:57.528] Speaker 1: Phase closed his eyes and with deliberate effort ignored the pull of the smaller shard near him. He could feel the bigger one farther out. He opened his eyes and pointed at a wall. About half a mile that way, maybe a little more.

[00:17:13.228] Speaker 2: Hmm. Give me a sec to find a path. [keyboard clicking] Seed's gonna start diverging that far out. I'm gonna try Script Kid's algo instead. He talked it up for these low-layer distant shards.

[00:17:24.248] Speaker 1: She said something else, but he wasn't listening anymore. Something else about this room nagged at him. Phase scanned the room until he found it, a mark on the doorframe, the only other exit from this room. He stepped closer to examine. It wasn't obvious. If he'd been running, he probably would have missed it. A gash in the steel doorframe, almost a half-inch deep. He stepped into the hallway beyond the door. There were faint scratches along the wall trailing up to the ceiling. They led away from him, exactly in the direction he was going.

[00:17:59.528] Speaker 2: I've got a route. I'll get you close, but the last part will be on you. You still wanna do this?

[00:18:06.848] Speaker 1: Phase was silent... He felt pulled back, a desire to honor his promise to Ambrosia and just take this easy shard. He felt pulled forward by the promise of a real treasure. The second pull was stronger for now. Yeah, I'm in. The Fractality diverged from Ravencliff Hospital with each passing step.

[00:18:41.780] Speaker 1: Twice Phase had found dead ends that Amber hadn't seen coming. He was moving mostly on instinct now, receiving only occasional suggestions from his earpiece. Although he would never tell her, he liked it better this way. There was something right about moving through the world this way. This must be how the free-running splitters felt. His thoughts melted away. There were only obstacles and his body. He jumped onto a desk, swung from a light fixture, then landed on the other side of the room, rolled to keep his momentum, then he was up and running again. The wind licked at his face and he

[00:19:16.700] Speaker 1: couldn't keep a smile from forming there. The first chasm he'd seen shot through the hallway ahead of him. It was only a few feet wide and he leapt it without slowing. In the moment he had to look down, he saw that the chasm opened up into a tiny room with no doors. The light was dim down there. He felt a tight moment of panic, imagining what it would be like to slip and fall down there. Trapped in a concrete room with no way out, waiting for something to find him. Phase shook the dark vision and narrowly avoided slamming his head

[00:19:51.700] Speaker 1: into a set of stairs that spiraled down from the ceiling. The hallway ahead rose in a shallow incline, bending up and out of view a hundred yards away. The potential was strong enough now to guide him without even trying to sense it. So Is there some reason you're in there alone today? Phase felt a pang of irritation at being pulled out of his trance of movement. Why, you wanted to split the pot three ways? No, but I figured you'd at least

[00:20:26.160] Speaker 1: ask. Wait. You told her? You told Spineless about this? He started walking again. I just mentioned it to her. I didn't know it was a secret. It's not. He still sounded defensive. Whiny. He hated that. Why couldn't he control himself? He sounded like a little kid. It's just She doesn't do shard runs anymore. She might. For you.

[00:21:00.920] Speaker 1: Phase fought the urge to snap at Ambrosia. Hey, I'm gonna go quiet. Getting close to the shard. We're almost there. Talk soon. Then he completely disconnected the comm shard. He left the body cam on, though. The light inside this area of the Fractality was unreliable. They'd come to Ravencliff during the day so that most of the rooms would be illuminated by daylight. Those illuminated rooms would get copied more often than the relatively rare dark rooms. But now that he was getting farther and farther from the epicenter where his rift was, the Fractality was spiraling

[00:21:35.780] Speaker 1: into surrealism. It was nowhere near as crazy as some of the stories he'd heard from veteran splitters. Places without air, without light. Escher-like mazes that started to treat basic laws of physics as mere suggestions. Phase remembered the claw marks he'd seen earlier. He slowed and listened to the world around him, looking for anything out of place. The world was still and quiet. The air stagnant. Sounds would carry a long way in this silence. Suddenly,

[00:22:11.640] Speaker 1: he felt very alone in here. Caution would be more important than speed now. He looked into every doorway, peeked around every corner before stepping past. His heart pounded. This was stupid. He should have taken the first shard. Something moved in the shadows of a darkened room to his left. He froze. Phase peered through the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust. All he saw was darkness. All he heard was silence. He kept moving.

[00:22:47.380] Speaker 1: Stupid, stupid, stupid. The pull of the shard was so strong it could have been in any of these rooms. Something crashed to the floor of a room nearby. He started running. It was just debris. Just debris. This place was getting unstable. Things fell apart here. And yet, he kept running. Nowhere in particular, just closer. He hoped. He hoped. Phase tried to convince himself that there was nothing wrong. That at any moment now he'd see the shard. He would pull it immediately. His way out. He Something

[00:23:22.440] Speaker 1: slammed into his shins. Pain shot up his legs and he skidded across the floor, scraping and bruising his side. Stunned from the fall, he looked back at the cinder block he somehow missed. He rolled onto his back and looked down the hallway ahead of him. He realized then the fall had saved his life. The first thing he noticed was that a red glow illuminated an otherwise dark room three doors down. The sound of chimes echoed into the hallway, calling him closer. The second thing he noticed was claw marks. So many

[00:23:57.280] Speaker 1: claw marks on the doorframe. There was a sound nearby. Not in the red room, but behind him, in one of the other dark rooms. Another sound, like the clicking of a pencil against stone, came from a room on the other side. He craned his head around, trying to determine the source of the sounds, heart beating faster. "Time to go, Phase." He gritted his teeth, jumped up, and ran for the red room. If he could just get inside, if he could just pull the shard... At the last moment, he spun away from the illuminated room,

[00:24:32.236] Speaker 1: changing direction to keep running down the hallway instead. As he turned, he saw inside the shard room. He saw the walls moving. The walls hadn't been moving, he realized, his brain finally catching up. The things covering the walls were moving. That meant... "Amber!" No response. He climbed over a small tower of file cabinets, falling awkwardly down the other side and bruising his legs even more. The connection, the connection. Phase plugged the comm shard back in.

[00:25:05.536] Speaker 2: You idiot. Where are you going?

[00:25:09.096] Speaker 1: I don't know. There was a reverberating cry from somewhere behind him. The shriek set his nerves on end. It made his limbs want to freeze up. It made him want to crawl into a corner and hide.

[00:25:23.776] Speaker 2: Phase, where are you going?

[00:25:26.156] Speaker 1: He couldn't die here. No, no, no. They couldn't get him. He-

[00:25:29.796] Speaker 2: Phase.

[00:25:32.196] Speaker 1: A memory drifted into Phase's mind. Another Fractality run, long ago. "You'll see things in here, Teddy, things you aren't ready to see." His sister, Fuse, walked, holding her hand on his shoulder. Phase hated his real name. "You're supposed to call me Phase." Fuse just laughed. "You're not Phase, not yet." She stopped walking and motioned for him to sit down next to her. She tucked the hair dangling in her

[00:26:07.156] Speaker 1: face back behind one ear and handed him a water bottle. He hadn't even realized he was thirsty until he took a drink. "One day you're gonna open your own rifts, Teddy, and I won't be here to help you." Phase didn't know what to say to that. Where was she going? Fuse looked out at the trees of a forest that wasn't real. He still couldn't believe he was here, actually inside a Fractality. "Do you know what makes the Splitters strong? Why we're not all dead or locked up?" He thought for a moment, not wanting to be

[00:26:41.996] Speaker 1: wrong. "Shards." She smiled, but then shook her head. She fixed an unexpectedly serious stare to him, her green eyes piercing him. He stopped drinking. "No, not shards." "Freedom?" She seemed to consider this, but shook her head again. Phase felt a pang of frustration. "Sometimes, but that's more likely to get you into trouble than out of it. Slicers are fast, faster than you,

[00:27:17.576] Speaker 1: but they're dumb. Tesserati are smart, smarter than you, but they take orders, move as a group." Phase didn't speak, afraid to get it wrong again. "What makes us strong?" "Momentum. Act fast, but think. Anyone can go fast. You have to keep moving, but always make the smarter move. Be bold. Keep them on their toes. But don't be stupid either." When Phase didn't respond, she lifted two fists into the air

[00:27:52.356] Speaker 1: apart. "Mind and body." She brought the two fists together. "Momentum." Phase rounded the corner at full speed, knowing he could be brained by anything sticking out, but also knowing he was dead if he slowed down. Something big slammed into a pile of file cabinets he passed. He was in a cafeteria now, or something like one anyway. He closed his eyes and felt for the rift, felt for his way out. He couldn't feel it, and he had to fight the rising panic. He had to be smart, had to keep

[00:28:27.256] Speaker 1: moving. He felt himself tiring, but the scratching on the walls kept him going. Momentum. "Find me a route to the rift." He heard something clatter in his earpiece as if Ambrosia had been shaken awake.

[00:28:45.256] Speaker 2: I'll try.

[00:28:47.336] Speaker 1: "Just give me the rough direction, shortest path." He had an idea. An extended chase wouldn't favor him. Splitters might look graceful compared to the average person, but the Slicers, the Slicers lived in Fractalities.

[00:29:03.676] Speaker 2: Okay. Take a left out of this room, then the next right. You should see a long hallway.

[00:29:08.896] Speaker 1: He took a left out of the cafeteria and glanced to the right. Something large and flat rounded that corner on a hundred chitinous legs. The segmented body shimmered like asphalt on a hot day. Crap, crap. He took the next right and almost ran straight into a wall. Dead end. "Amber!"

[00:29:29.416] Speaker 2: It's going, it's going. Stupid script kid.

[00:29:34.216] Speaker 1: He heard the sound of a hundred clicking legs on concrete walls. "Amber!" Phase pressed his back to the dead end, eyes wide. They'd tear him apart, cut him up, take as many pieces as they could until he passed out, until he died and the Fractality fell apart, sending the monsters back to wherever they came from. The very first Slicer came around the corner, then shivered and fell off the wall with a thud. It unfurled its segmented body and its front half rose into the air, almost as tall as him. Dozens of

[00:30:08.616] Speaker 1: razor-sharp limbs unfolded. "No, no, no, no, no, no."

[00:30:12.856] Speaker 2: Take the next right.

[00:30:14.480] Speaker 1: His legs moved without his mind. He ducked as he slipped past the creature. The slicer swiped it where his head had been moments before. The next right brought him down a hallway with few obstacles. He sprinted down it. It's this way, right? Roughly, but you're so far. Don't worry about that. When I disconnect my body cam, I want you to pour as much power as you can into the signal, okay? Okay. Phase ripped the cable off his body cam and chucked the rest of the device, shard and all, as far down the hallway as

[00:30:49.400] Speaker 1: he could. Then he ducked into a dark room and waited. He heard scuttling sounds and moved down the hallway past him. He ignored them, closing his eyes and sensing. He still couldn't feel the rift he'd enter through, but he guessed the slicers could. Fuse had called them dumb, but they were only dumb in a can't-do-math or a can't-tie-shoelaces kind of way. They had sharp senses and an instinct for finding prey. He focused, trying to ignore

[00:31:24.400] Speaker 1: the stronger pull of the bigger shard nearby. There, he felt the first shard. Phase? I'm fine. Calm silence. Trust me. It must have been terrifying for her now that he'd gone dark. She wouldn't know for sure he was dead until the rift closed in the real world. But it could take a long time for someone to die. Too long. He moved on instinct from there. A few times he stopped and ducked into a closet

[00:31:59.460] Speaker 1: or an open door, not knowing why he'd done so until he heard the scuttling sound of slicers in the distance. At first he'd been tempted to go back for the second, bigger shard. Once the creatures realized he wasn't going for the rift, they might go back to the red one, thinking he would seek out the largest potential. Or whatever passed for thinking in their alien minds anyway. Instead, he moved quickly but quietly on instinct back to the first shard. When he heard the tinkling chime, he finally released some of the gut-wrenching tension

[00:32:34.340] Speaker 1: he'd been holding. Phase jogged up to the brilliant white crystal and without hesitation yanked it out of the air where it hung suspended by invisible threads. He felt those threads pull, then snap, and with it all of reality unraveled. Somewhere far away he heard the frustrated yowls of the creatures who had hunted him. When he opened his eyes again, he was on his hands and knees, breathing deeply. Someone grabbed him and pulled him into a squatting position. He grinned at Ambrosia and held out the shard.

[00:33:09.460] Speaker 1: His first shard. See? No problem. She snatched it out of his hands, scowling. You idiot! She pushed him and he fell backward onto his butt. He rolled all the way back and laid down, looking at the ceiling of the dilapidated hospital. It was a sight he wouldn't miss anytime soon.