descending down to ... where? What? Is the elevator *shifting* a little, with their pitter pattering feet and lurching movement and...
Wilder sees it first, near the edge as he is, and befitting enough of the name perhaps a wild one at heart. Beyond the acid pitted and corroded metal confines of the elevator shell that has become some sort of sickhouse or outre bean storage system, undulating tendrils of enormous flesh-shaped trunks swirl in an unseen wind. Wilder leans. Wilder looks. Wilder learns.
They're below the elevator too.
They're holding it up.
This?
This isn't an elevator, subjects. It' some sort of fleshwood treetop house.
>WAKE UP PHASE>THAT MEANS YOU LOT!>We're still doing mostly LIGHT ACTIONS and QUICK BITS, get your bearings a little, shake off the tupor, check your pockets, apply for >>6083674 test protocols now that they've been slightly updated. . . >>6083026Perhaps you've been losing the microevolutionary arms race because this forest of fleshwood or woodflesh has provided a myriad of genealogical sampling opportunities for cunning counter-measures to your art. You try to reach out and warp them - influence them - perhaps even direct the sprawling circulatory twig-trunks that wind, faintly pulsating, beneath the elevator and it BURNS, stinging, a hundred new microbiomes reacting with hostility to your intrusion.
In pathogenic ages unnumbered, a million million million and more life-cycles of microbes ago, perhaps, these things were almost related to you. Spun out and touched by a panicked fuelled command down a rapidly descending elevator shaft.
But no more.
No soveriegn you, sir Bob, of this forest or the things that live here.
It seems by passing such endless time absent from your throne, the whole edifice of monarchy has been thrown out.
You should not expect this environment to react to you with servility, despite you being perhaps, in some distant sense, its progenitor.
... how long has it been anyway?
