Several questions come to mind as you regain consciousness. Who are you? Where are you? <span class="mu-i">Why</span> are you?

All of them important questions. You will need to spend a good long while contemplating that last one, and its answer will no doubt follow you for the rest of your days once you figure it out. You push it to the back of your mind for now. The first two need answers as soon as possible, but you keep drawing blanks. You can't think of a face to answer the first, let alone a name and the history associated with it. As for the second, the only answer that comes to mind is <span class="mu-i">someplace dark and cramped</span>.

Feeling returns to your body shortly after thought returns to your mind. Your limbs feel weak, like you just spent days upon days asleep, and a thousand needles push a your skin as your nerves slowly switch back on. Sight does not return to your eyes, or maybe it does. You're in a dark and cramped space, after all, without enough light to see in the first place. Curled up like a fetus and suspended in a sea of soft marshmallows, with a pillow on your nose blasting warm, moist air into your weak lungs.

Once your arms and legs feel like moving, you stretch them out. The marshmallows crinkle and crackle as you move, and your fists and feet bump up gently against walls of hard wood. Groping in the dark with uncertain hands, you find a latch above your head. With a click, it comes unlocked, and with a push you can crack the ceiling open.

The dim light that floods in nearly blinds you.

Thrashing in the light sends the marshmallows scattering about the floor, but eventually you manage to pull yourself free from the box in which you had been packed like a life-sized doll. You rip the pillow from your nose and the tubes from your mouth and throat. Two more tubes have to be removed from embarrassing places that you'd rather not mention, and leave you feeling oddly empty once they're gone. Some people would pay good money to be in the situation from which you just escaped. A fact that leaves only further questions niggling around in the back of your brain.

Why would anyone want to be tied up in a wooden crate? What is money, and why would it be "good"? How do you know that to be true, when you can't even name yourself, picture your own face, or understand where you are right now?

These questions all need answering eventually. The answer to the first question comes when your eyes finally get used to the light. Your box rests on a stone paved path at the foot of a house in the shape of a teapot. The chimney rises up like a spout, and an unlit lantern hangs off the "handle" from which a tangle of vines falls towards the ground. Empty plots of garden space surround the walkway, which winds down to a little stream and fishing pier.

A small forest surrounds the hill upon which the teapot-house sits, and paintings of mountains surround the forest on all sides. Great murals that stretch so high that the sky itself is false, a painted artifice above.