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You are back in your body, and therefore you get the full somatic blast of heat and fear and panic as your ankle is grabbed— you mean <span class="mu-i">grabbed,</span> as in a literal hand has punched out from the dirt under you, and wrapped its square fingernails around your boot, and is pulling you forcibly under— like a nightmare! Exactly like a nightmare, and Earl's grin dies at your pale and strangled expression. He begins a whimper. You're too shocked almost to react, and the navel-string(?) has drawn taut once more, and between the hand and it your whole body's gone in seconds.
You don't plow through dirt, not exactly; it's like it collapses in on itself, or you collapse in on yourself, and either way there's void where dirt should be, and you sail through that and in one more second are tugged— your legs dangle— are tugged, and drop into somebody's arms, and are lowered deftly to your feet.
You swallow down your lodged scream. The Man in Red, short and black-eyed and coppery, brushes his dirtied left hand off on his slacks. Little fangs protrude from either side of his smile. "Easy does it."
You take a deep breath, ignore him, and scan the room. It is perfectly circular and perfectly shining-white— expensive marble, is your assessment, with no dark veins, and only two thin seams for a hidden door. This holds true for all the walls (er, wall) and most of the ceiling, excepting some spidery cracks and a big missing chunk just above you. The floor is also white, but in the dead center of it there's another inset circle, six feet across, made from matte black stone. The black circle is engraved with a complex labyrinthy-spiraly pattern, set again in white, and it hurts your eyes a smidge to look at it.
So you look elsewhere. The room is illuminated with real heavy-duty glorbs, the white-bright kind, also expensive to buy or to make, here trapped in special reflective lanterns. You have before coveted both those glorbs and those lanterns, but have declined to purchase them on account of your minimalism. On the floor between the lanterns, casting long warped shadows on the curved wall, are two individuals in red. One of them you dimly recognize from... from... the Nothing? It's one of the regulars from the Better Than Nothing, though you'd be damned before you remembered the name. Limp long hair, recessed eye-sockets. Uhh. Whatsherface. The other one, slim and angled, you don't recognize at all. They don't make furtive cultish faces at you when you look, but rather smile politely.
(2/3)
