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You're Gil again. You are in a room with several silent animal-headed Friends, plus Teddy. Your brain is telling you you're a Friend, so you know Headspace got to you. Shit. You know you better escape ASAP, but escaping involves a lot of stressful unknowns, so you instead: banter with Teddy, turn your head into beetles (to match your fellow Friends), and install some mini-siphons. You finish just in time: Casey Fucking Kemper, plus his tagalong Everard Kurz, barge in. Casey is looking for a Friendly tour guide, and he likes the cut of your beetley jib. You're hired. You suppress your impulse to mess with the two of them, and instead lead them faithfully to the "Thinking Machine"-- actually a bunch of people wired up to typewriters, typing away in mindless sync. It's very weird. While you investigate, you spot the guy in the diving suit, who warns you that Headspace is going to explode. You engage in some confused handsign conversation before following the guy below the Thinking Machine: he'll take off the helmet and explain in detail.
Elsewhere, you're Charlotte. You are in a drug-induced hallucination, reliving the moments just before your drowning. Only... Teddy is there?? Teddy snaps you out of it, and you finds yourself in a mirrored room, alone except for... still Teddy, in the form of the beetles you swiped on the way down the pipe. You begrudgingly accept his offer of help, then use the mantis shrimp to shatter the mirrors, revealing a back room filled with employees... and one Manager. Cornered, you unleash the red stuff, killing, incapacitating, or scaring off everybody except for the Manager, who is unfazed. He offers to take you to "EDU." The red stuff, which has fully overtaken you, shoves itself into his mind instead.
Like the Manager from before, this Manager is a black void inside. This time, though, the red stuff traces his string all the way to a bizarre structure: a giant Law-filled sphere. The red stuff follows the Manager's string inside the sphere, and successfully traces it to its origin: a place with a desk and a potted plant and a shiny yellow-eyed creature. There's little time to learn more before the red stuff is tugged back inside the sphere: it has been located by two... IT professionals?... who seem to think it's an invasive "worm." They trap it in place.
Back in 'reality,' you have escaped the depths of the mind closet: you and Virginia are now holed up in the facsimile of your old house. You attempt to chat with Virginia, but Virginia's blithe acceptance of her fate causes complex emotions to rise in you. Newly emboldened, you wrest control back from the red stuff, absorb the sphere's Law, and go SUN MODE.
Underneath the Thinking Machine, you're Gil. The guy in the diving suit removes his helmet, revealing... Ellery's ex-girlfriend Anthea Aves?!?!
