noticing. i couldn’t focus this hard on following a white line if you had a gun to my head.

also kind of wondering what, uh, actually happened. and if they’ve got my body somewhere. and if i’m still in it, technically. and how they hooked me up to your brain. and...

Who knows what they've come up with.

Maybe you've been Displaced In A New Dimension and you're all actually right here glued to me like a four-dimensional conjoined twin. — and neither of us can feel that for reasons this ridiculous theory doesn't explain.

Pfft.

maybe they stuck half my brain in your head. maybe ghosts are real.

Well, what're you haunting me for then?

They're getting close to the end of the maze.

ghost staples?

Ooh, door.

—staples?

The impression of a shrug.

how else are you gonna attach a ghost to somebody? glue? uh, rope, i guess?

Chains made from broken promises and forged in the fires of regret.

He pulls on the unlocked (hooray!) door's handle.

The door opens and reveals — a bigger and weirder room. It's divided in half by a moat, there's a genuine wooden drawbridge on the other side, the far wall is covered in a coarse rope net, and that's just what's immediately visible.

you know i stop listening at "chains", right–

Oh. Wow.

...room.

—can't say I did know that, actually.

He steps in, cautiously.

The wall around the door is covered like the far one. There's a steel I-beam hung from the ceiling with more rope, perpendicular to the moat. The moat has actual water in it, but not at a level high enough to just swim across.

...although, is it “stop listening” or “start listening way more closely”...?

He pays close attention as Jonathan looks around.

i guess we’re supposed to cross.

(Sigh.)

He walks around the room. There is no obvious means of lowering the drawbridge — it's just standing up on hinges on the other side. The I-beam could perhaps be used to cross if one is enough of a gymnast to jump off the wall onto hanging from it by one's hands.

ooh, fun.

He sizes up the jump you would have to make. Lot of potential for this to go wrong, given where the end of the beam is...

do you think we can make that?

Sorry, too busy cringing at the hypotheticals.

...huh. That reaction definitely wasn’t from him. He pauses in the middle of a lovingly rendered ankle twist.

okay we may have to do something like that but, uh—

you’d prefer to not do the painful injuries thing, huh.

He seems to find this incredibly unsettling.

I apologize for being a boring normal person at you.

He steps cautiously closer to the moat to inspect it.

it’s weird to get actual confirmation that most people don’t just start fucking themselves up as soon as they regenerate.

If we get out of this intact I'll probably go revisit my list of extreme sports.

The moat could be taken for a weirdly designed swimming pool, except for the water being too low and not having any of the usual plumbing and facilities — oh wait, there are steps set into the near wall so it's possible to climb back out. (Not one on the far side, of course.) There's also a niche or possibly corridor entirely underwater at the left end of the moat.

...hey, can you open your eyes underwater?

Yeah. And here I was hoping to be dry eventually…

He removes unsuitable clothes and climbs down cautiously. The water looks and smells innocuous (though also unchlorinated).

From below the surface, the niche can be seen to be an underwater tunnel; it unhelpfully makes a left turn shortly past that end of the moat.

Without missing a beat-

can we fit in there?

Probably, but.

Surface, breathe, dive, swim into tunnel — looks like it's a completely underwater maze. Feelings of air-supply-related nope. Return to surface.