The situation snowballed. There was still the positively incomprehensible reality of all that surrounded him, the floating castles and incorrectly colored bits of the habitat, still the very strange feeling of living though he knew he was dead, and atop it all was the sudden realization that there was a whole damned troupe of them. The detective couldn't feel as inclined towards the little kumbayah session as all the others seemed, but their introductions were too important to miss. He listened half-heartedly, slinking a bit away from the crowd instead of toward it. William crouched to pluck a grade of grass from the ground beneath.

Their stories were wildly varying, with no apparent common thread.

And the grass felt different. Smooth and cool, as it should, but also more pliant somehow. Almost as if William could push it between thumb and finger and form it, shape it into something else entirely. And the dirt beneath, it was warmer than he might have imagined, heated by an alien sun and pressing against his palm like a summer day. William ran his fingers back through his hair haphazardly as he stood again, turning in an entire circle to take in their surroundings. Perhaps there was a building or something of the sort on this plane, something they could access. William had learned a long time ago that everything belonged to someone, and trying to parse together the pieces of this puzzle was a welcome distraction from the feeling of lead in his stomach, the realization that a silly, prolonged tryst with an unlikely lover had cost him everything. His career, his ambitions, his life. But, worst of all, his son. Now his kid would just be another statistic, growing up in a hard city with only one parent. Shit, how many kids did he see every day who might have turned out entirely differently if they'd just had a father around? 

A cluster of flowers, a more vibrant purple than he had ever seen, crowned the top of a very small hill just behind him. William, having lost track of the introductions when the language seemed to shift to French, turned to pursue the vegetation. With more earnest efforts at motion put forth, he realized immediately that the gravitational pull of this strange place was not the same as that of earth. It reminded him a bit of fifth grade, when his entire class had gone on a field trip to a glorified planetarium. Apart from the larger than life projection of a manned mission to mars, intended to stir all of their childish curiosities and make scientists out of them, there had been simulators to ride. William had been the only one to turn green on the multi-axis trainer, but he'd kicked all of their asses on the five degrees of freedom simulator, and the manned maneuvering unit as well. He had left convinced that he should be an astronaut, and that the buoyant bounce he had felt in the 1/6th gravity chair, meant to simulate walking on the moon, was certainly his fate. He would be the first man to go to Mars.

That, of course, was a big ass dream for a poor kid in a broken home. He had forgotten about that, buried it beneath layers of responsibility and adulthood. William remembered it now, though, as each step made him feel like he might just spring away from the ground entirely. Except that he didn't, and gravity seemed as tenacious here as it had ever been on earth - just with more give. At any rate, he reached his destination with less effort than would have been required on the human plane, and the flowers were so beautiful it almost felt like sacrilege to touch them. As he watched instead, William saw drops of clear dew push up from the centers of the flower, run down the petals and stem, and pool at the base of the plant. Eventually the few drops became many, and they traced a hollowed out path through the warm soil to join the quiet flow of water back down towards the group he had left behind. It was so gradual that William hadn't noticed it, but now he wondered how he had missed the slightly metallic flow. It was beautiful, just like everything else in this place. 

It was easier still to traverse the hill on the downward slope, and following after the trail of shimmering, jeweled water led him right to the center of the gathering. One Ophelia was apparently trying to interpret for the English-challenged, and William thought to simply go around them. A niggling thought in the back of his mind warned him about casting off possible allies before he had even made sense of where he was, however, and so he paused in his pursuit to glance over his shoulder and speak to the lot of them.

"Ah, I'm William. I was in a car accident, and I suppose I drowned."

How ironic that his fixed fascination in this new place so far was water, then.

"And I'm going to go check out the river," he added as an afterthought, before his eyes dropped back to his feet, to that strange grass and the sparkling water atop it.