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Sounds like GS, but you don't have the tools to push him. More particulars. "So you say I'm your quote-endquote 'niece' because—"
"Unofficially," Henry says mildly. "I make no claim to blood relation, not that I believe anybody would be fooled— but that is the way I saw you. I, eh, don't have any children." For a moment he breaks your gaze. "But your father and I did take you out on day trips, and things. Got you out of that moldering house. Don't you remember?"
You say nothing.
"It has been a long time," Henry says, and his perpetual smile sags at the corners.
For some reason your fury's overboiled, is steaming away in gasps, leaving you with a wet face and an empty pot. This is unacceptable, leaving you exposed to all manner of cultish manipulations, and you need to change the subject immediately. "Where are we?"
"You going to do all the talking, Henry?" Whatsherface says. Henry waves her ahead distantly. "Sheesh. It's a labyrinth. It's a— a— you know, back in ye olden days, some folks in red took 'The Spiral Road' pretty literally. Get it? Built these things all over the place underground. Under cities and towns, usually. Most of them are collapsed by now, or they're under a mile of silt from the Flood, but this one got dug out all convenient-like for us. Practically got a straight shot on it from HQ."
HQ? But your inchoate question is shot down by Henry, who casts an unmistakable warning look at Whatsherface. You shift. "And you're here why? Just... hanging out? Sacrificing any— any, um—"
"Guard duty," says Whatsherface.
"Yes. No sacrificing, unless you mean our sleep," Henry says. Whatsherface snickers. "The long and the short of it is, I received a premonition that the central chamber would be under threat. We're ensuring this doesn't come to pass."
This is dubiously benign. "Under threat why?"
"Premonitions don't often come with particulars, but one easy guess is that somebody's after this." He points his foot at the black circle, which you won't be fooled into looking at again. "I can guess your follow-up question."
You don't let him have your follow-up question.
"This is a plug for a hole in the world, which is meant... do you want to answer this one, McCann?"
McCann ("the other one") has either been meditating or falling asleep, because here he startles. "Uh. Yeah. World doesn't go down forever, right? It's not just infinite rock and stuff, it— you know, it cuts off. If you dug for years and years, with a really fucking good shovel, you could come out the other end of it. And there you'd see a really fucking <span class="mu-i">big</span> snake, because—"
"That's plenty," Henry says. "This stone covers a tiny hole through the remainder of the entirety of the world, speaking vertically, and it's plugged because unpleasant things leak out when it isn't. With the plug, however, it's a useful focus-point for commingling and similar things. So you can see how we'd rather it not be destroyed."
(3/4)
