[b]Lucien![/b] A-ha! Here it is! A cunning, spidery mechanism has attached itself to the ceiling up in the stairs, its many girder-iron limbs tense, its vespine stinger tipped with a huge, crimson-crusted pie. You play a game of bobbie weavers with it, and when it finally loses its cool and stabs the pie at you, you're able to smoothly remove it. And that's when things start to go a little wrong: firstly, it opens its mouth and starts to let out an awful noise of pipe organs, causing clatterly cacophony upstairs from whoever set the trap, presumably the Grail Questant; secondly, the pie is hot. Very hot. Scorchingly hot. It is hellfire and condemnation, ghost peppers and crushed mace, and the steam off it is getting in your [i]eyes[/i]. Take Damage! That being said, if you managed to get this somewhere sensitive on that horrible thing, it only stands to reason that the infernal fires of this pie, this wrathful punishment of the wicked and the merely shady, might overcome the watery nature of the beast. It's ridiculous, preposterous, and illogical, which means that by the rules of the Heart it's sure to work perfectly. And as for the surroundings: really, that's a terrible idea. The decay's going hard here; if you start tipping things over and breaking things, you'll accelerate its descent into the Flood. This is, for what it's worth, a place where you can all catch your breath, probably. A place where you don't have to worry about losing memories or beautiful shoes. Start shoving statues over and you'll bring the whole place down! *** [b]Jackdaw![/b] You are at peace. You are shapeless, formless; you are water moving on water. You are remembered forever in the currents and the bed. Existence is painful; memory is painful; the Flood takes all these things from you as an act of love. In the depths there are no colors; in the deep places, there are no sufferings. There are no worries, there are no fears. There-- hurk. There is a burning inside you, and a hammering on you. Your throat constricts as you vomit up: salt water, and barnacles, and a rusted jumping-jack, and sodden paper, and your throat burns with the expulsion. There are tears in your eyes as it all comes up, more and more, too much to fit inside of you, and with it all come memories flooding in, painful and sharp and angled, and not all of them yours. And then Ailee, in your face, smug as ever. Do you feel saved, Jackdaw? Or do you feel bereft? *** [b]Coleman![/b] [i]Amalgamation.[/i] It is one of the great mysteries of the Heart. When one is transfixed by the eye of one of the great and terrible powers of the Heart, they change; their flesh becomes a canvas, and they become both more and less than what they were. Its study is one of the sciences you were never terribly good at, but it strikes you, as you fight, in some detached signal-box in your head, that this monster is the result of amalgamation. If you were able to study it, examine it and compare it to the shape of a train and some other subject, you might be able to discover secrets... Secrets that might be the difference between failure and success when you reach the end of the line; when you reach Nexus; when you act as midwife.