Into the Brundlesphere
Descended upon on August 3, 2008.
With a loud squish, not unlike the sound of a trash bag full of meat falling from a second-floor window, my flabby corpse was vomited forth from the tunnel, into the Brundlesphere. I hurtled forward, beginning what was to be the first of many terrifying, yowling descents toward the cold, spiky ground below.
I hit the ground.
I shattered into a thousand pieces.
Time had resumed: Now it ran backwards just long enough for my Pnårpy self to unshatter itself and rise back into the air. Of its own volition, the spiky ground smoothed into infinite flatness. The laws of physics were temporarily adjusted: With my velocity slowed to zero and my acceleration nulled, time ran forward again; I fell with a gentle plop onto the flat, glassy floor of the Brundlesphere.
I stood up on shaky legs. I looked around, my eyes started and my damnable heart tried to crawl up my throat and out my mouth again. I punched myself in the chest. It learned its lesson… for now.
I murped softly. “Murrrrp…”
Not since Cuthbert Burbage had burned down his own theater in a petty and ultimately futile insurance scam, had I seen something so paternostically unintelligible. The Brundlesphere lay before me, extending to infinity on all sides. Flat, nearly featureless ground expanded in every direction, including directions not previously thought possible according to the rules of Euclidean geometry. The ground was flat, infinitely smooth, cracked here and there, a purple-hued mirror image of the sky.
The sky. Never before had I seen something so dismal, so empty and hollow—a canopy of gray, leaden clouds, high overhead, extended out towards infinity and every other direction. Tommygoffs and squamous gnomes flittered overhead, brundling along on courses known only to them and the killer clown in the corner. Sooty warts grew from my nose, came to life, and trundled off on their own, disappearing into the purple and gray nothingness meeting at the horizon in front of me out there somewhere beyond that which I could see because I like this sentence and don’t want it to ever end.
Damn: It ended.
The gnomes danced: The golden, golden gnomes.
The golden, golden gnomes.