Author's Note: Well, I realize that there was a rather long hiatus between the last chapter and this one. Eh. :P Running low on time is a curse. Hope you'll enjoy! Reviews plz! :D

AESEARIA

Consciousness hit her like a hammer. Sunlight, which she had not seen for quite a while, shined down on her. Her mind still groggy, she propped herself into a sitting position –

- and found cubes around her.

Cubes in grotesque mimicry of grass and trees surrounded her, square patterns etched upon them. Even the sun was a square.

The first thought that hit her was that no star could even possibly assume a cube shape. The second thought was that something had gone terribly wrong and she had been teleported to the wrong planet. The third thought was that no planet like this could even exist at all.

She gave a psionic burst and reached into her own mind. Upon a quick examination she concluded that she was not in a dream. By now panic had built up in her quite nicely, and –

- Moooooooo

Aesearia turned and saw a parody of an animal made of cubes and prisms. Its disturbing eyes beheld her in a blank stare, and its head slowly cocked sideways.

Hoping for something, Aesearia reached into the animal's mind, in anticipation of perhaps some sort of sentience –

Nothing.

But there was more. Behind the blank façade she saw more – expectations, of sorts – codes.

She was completely perplexed. Was this a robot? She reached out and felt the thing, but it was nothing extraordinary, just tough skin.

"Fascinating," she breathed, her mind quickly working. Nature simply doesn't manifest itself in discrete edges; it doesn't like to. There's always imperfections, rounded corners, and the such. The only way these cubes could be here is either one, someone with too much free time finally went crazy and manually made everything cubes, or two (and more likely), these little cubes were the fundamental building blocks of this world.

Which implies she'd been teleported to not a different planet, but a different universe entirely.

Of course, she'd heard the theory of multiverses and done the mathematics involved; but supposedly, the sheer amount of energy involved was beyond even Protoss technology.

Deciding that the nature of her dilemma couldn't just quite yet be determined, she reached out with her mind to, perhaps, try to detect some type of conscience –

Nothing.

This was like silence to Protoss. Normally, the hubbub of psionic activity is registered as a constant and filed to the back of the mind and ignored – like the humming of computers or singing of birds for humans. It is not until true silence hits you on the side of the head that you begin to appreciate this background noise, of sorts.

Disgust began to build within her. There was something simply unnatural about sensing… nothing. Disgruntled, she raised herself up and began to walk. After all, night was fast approaching.

Her plan was to walk in a straight line and hope that she might run into someone. There was the possibility that some entity was blocking the psionic signals (she refused to believe sentience did not exist here), after all.

It was shortly after the sun set that she met her first creature.

The thing was vaguely humanoid, its skin a gross shade of green, its eyes black and dead. It moved lethargically, almost comically so. The only thing that warned Aesearia was its hostile intent.

When its moaning sounds startled her, Aesearia first searched its mind in some hope of a semblance of a mind. Unfortunately, there was nothing but a constant urge to kill. She ended it with two quick swipes.

But then the truly odd happened.

The creature dissolved cube by cube into smoke (which was, surprise, also cubes), leaving floating pieces of glowing orbs and reddish things behind. Fascinated, she put herself on the ground to better examine the orbs, observing with awe at how the balls gravitated towards her when her hand got close. The first conclusion she came to: this force of attraction was inversely proportional to distance raised to the second power or higher. Of course, if she could establish a stable orbit of these orbs, she could possibly determine the potential function that governed their –

"Don't move a muscle."