This was ridiculous.

Nagisa had made it all the way back to the farmhouse. Her sense of direction had not failed her. She let the rain wash all the mud off of her, and then sat under the porch for a while. It had now been no less than eighteen hours of dark. Nothing had changed at all. Eventually, she got up and went back in, making her way up the stairs and back to her bed, laying down and going back to sleep. She wondered if this darkness would ever end.

The darkness ended seven hours later, two hours after the rain finally stopped. The world outside the house became light as day in the course of two minutes, as it did every morning. Erman woke up to find Nagisa still fast asleep. She was an odd girl, for sure, if she was still asleep while it was light out. He got himself dressed and, turning back to look at her, found himself getting a bit worried that she was sleeping too long. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, shaking her a little. To his surprise, she slowly opened her eyes and looked up at him. He let out a sigh of relief.

The two of them went downstairs, and Erman headed outside. Nagisa stayed at the doorway, peering out into the morning. It was light now, and the ground looked dry. She couldn't even see any footprints from the night before. She shook her head and retreated back into the house. Erman wasn't sure why she was acting this way, but he wanted to find out, so he followed her back in.

Inside, in the house's main room, he had set up several things that he thought might help them communicate. There was a sand pad in the corner, a small table with a raised edge and a thin layer of sand in it. They would use it for writing words and messages that could be easily erased, to save on paper for that ongoing operation. There was also a canvas, large sheets of paper affixed to a wooden frame, and some graphite sticks to draw with. He hoped that he could find her words for things by drawing the thing, and that way he could learn her words for things he couldn't physically show her.

There were other things set up, and more that he hadn't had the time to set up just yet, but those were the two she'd made use of. She wrote that word, 'baka', in the sand, and then proceeded to start drawing on the canvas. It was certainly curious to watch, as she was sketching something in the bottom corner. When she finished and took a step back, he could see that she'd drawn some kind of house. It wasn't any house he knew in particular, but it was a house. A very crudely drawn house. She then leaned in and made a line across the bottom of the paper that went behind the house. Along that line, away from the house, she made several short lines sticking straight up, with little specks all over their tops. It looked like the crops around a farm.

He pointed to those lines. "Crops? Grain?"

She ignored him, instead drawing a vehicle next to the house. This one looked more specific, clearly supposed to look like the truck that had visited them the previous day, belonging to the old man Derek. There were flaws with her memory of it, but it was clear enough that he could tell. Once that was done, she placed the graphite at the top of the paper, on its side, and dragged its entire length down to the line. She left a little border of smudgy white around everything she'd already drawn, in order to make it all visible, but now almost the entire paper was blackish gray with graphite.

It was the night sky.

Nagisa set about removing tiny little dots of graphite all over the blackness of the sky, so that white speckled the black. He had no idea what those were supposed to be. She suddenly pulled the sheet of paper off the frame and set up the next one. This time, she started by drawing a circle. She drew strange designs and shapes on it. He couldn't see that the shapes had any discernible pattern to them. It was just lines that barely stayed straight for the slightest distance, and there were no curves that made any sense either. Near as he could tell, it was chaotic and random, but she put so much thought and detail into it that there had to be a purpose. It was like she was remembering it.

She shaded in a large portion of the circle lightly, then went to work on the rest of the sheet, adding smaller circles here and there, then a number of tiny spots all over. She then shaded in everything that wasn't inside the circles until it was dark and almost black. She finally stepped back and pointed to the various circles, addressing them with names that he had no basis for understanding. These were things to her, things with names that she knew and understood well, but he had no idea what they were supposed to be. It was either some primitive creation of ancient minds that had to come up with answers for questions they didn't understand, or it was a representation of something beyond his own ability to comprehend. Either he was way beyond her, or she was way beyond him.

Erman pointed to the drawing. "I don't know... what this is. I don't know how to tell you that, but if you can show me how to understand this, I would really appreciate it. You just... work with this. I'll get us something to eat."

It was nearly an hour before he was done preparing the food, which he brought out to Nagisa on a tray and set down on the table beside her. She looked at it briefly, then handed him one of the papers she'd finished with. Setting down his own food, he looked over the paper. There was a depiction of another house, with the truck next to it again, so he understood the size. Next to the house was a tower. She'd set it up so that this tower was gigantic, bigger than anything he'd ever seen save for the capital building. The next paper had more towers, drawn side by side. There were dozens of them, clearly meant to be hundreds of feet tall. He couldn't imagine why she'd decided to draw so many of them all so close together.

Paper after paper made him question more and more about where she had come from. The next one depicted the towers again, only this time they were smaller. It showed them farther away, in the distance, all clustered together in a vast open countryside. If these were meant to be the same buildings, then this scenery was beyond anything he knew to be possible. It stretched on seemingly for miles, hundreds of miles even. The next paper showed the countryside turning to desert on one side, with the tiny city barely visible, huge jagged rock formations in the distance, and the countryside falling to cliffs in the other direction. At the bottom of the cliffs was water. She drew the water on another paper, and endless sea of water, along miles of coastline. It was unbelievable.

Then she handed him a paper that showed the coastline from above. There was seemingly no end to the water or the land. No edge. He couldn't imagine how to contain such a biosphere. She picked up the second picture she had drawn, tracing her fingers along the random pattern lines inside the strange circles, then pointing to the picture of the water meeting the land. Could it be that he was looking at another kind of world, something beyond the walls he knew? It was time, he decided, to find out what she thought was normal.

Erman grabbed Nagisa's hand before she could start drawing another picture and pulled her out the front door. "I know you can't understand me, but there's something I want to check." He figured whoever owned the farmland across the road wouldn't mind if they were just there to look around, so he led her across the road and through the field of crops. He realized he was following a trail of broken crops that hadn't been there the day before. There was no way to know who could have been responsible, so he put it out of his mind. After a short while of walking in a straight line through the field, he found the other edge. It was the nearest point he could find the land met the border.

Nagisa stopped when she saw the border. She held Erman back, her eyes scanning the oddity of nature before her. Seemingly in the center of the field, the world stopped. At the very edge, there was a steel frame wall. The frame was only exposed for the first meter above ground, after which it was covered by a thick shell that acted like a massive screen, displaying the blue sky above them. The screen wall went up into a massive dome that covered the entire district. The sky was fake.

Nagisa reached out and brushed her fingers against the screen wall. "The world is hollow... and I have touched the sky."

The man that accompanied her looked at her, clearly wondering what she had said. Nagisa knew he couldn't understand her words, and now she saw that he really didn't understand her entire concept of the universe. It was just as she had suspected, from the moment she saw his reaction to her drawings. They were foreign to him. The very idea of a world with an open sky was foreign to him. Wherever they were, in some sort of biosphere, closed off from the rest of the universe, he didn't know you could go outside. She had to learn to communicate with him. She had to find out why they were closed off from the rest of the universe.

Then maybe she could find out where the others were.

"I can't beat this thing on my own..."

A roiling mass of blood red teeth and eyes crawled along an endless gray surface. It swiped a long tentacle, tipped by sharp fangs, aiming to scar the surface and break it open. There was little effect, so it moved on to the next area. There would be a weak spot eventually, and it would find it. It was not short on time. Several of its eyes looked behind it at the shadowy figure following several hundred kilometers behind.

"Vanish, speck."

"Never. Wherever my friends are, I must protect them from your vile evil."

"Very well. Whenever you have fully healed, you may challenge me again. The result will be no different. How long before you've healed up again? Another ten thousand years? Perhaps I shall find my way in before then. What will you do?"

Helmet cracked, tail torn, armored bent and marred, cape shredded and sword broken, Oktavia von Seckendorff clenched and shook her fists at the Blood Mad God of The Void. "I will defeat you. I will destroy you. There is no other choice!"

"Then perhaps I shall end your miserable existence before you heal. You are not such entertainment to me to be worth keeping around." Uvhash swiped his clawed tentacles at the next spot. A tiny spot on the surface broke open, and air started pouring out into the darkness of space. "Finally."

Oktavia lifted her shattered sword and charged the massive beast. "You'll have to kill me first!"