"Are you sure you want to do this?"

It had taken half a year just to get their request to the General. He was apparently a very busy man, and more so now that they wanted to talk to him apparently. But they had gotten the chance, and they had asked. And through the course of another half year or so, they had finally received permission to go. So here they were, approaching the place where Nagisa was reportedly found. A long corridor near the core.

They'd made their way here through what seemed like miles of tunnel road on a bus, and then countless miles more on a railcar, and then even more on several different elevators. Each step of the way, they were taken even further down through stranger and grander machines. And it all led to this corridor. Told to wear radiation suits long before they approached the corridor, they were now inside the large and bulky costumes that would protect them from the core's dangerous energies.

All this, just to reach this corridor. But where did the corridor lead to?

Nagisa looked back to their guide, who was attached to them by a steel cable that continued past him back the way they had come, disappearing around corners and into the distance. She shook her head. "I don't understand."

The man just shrugged. "It is very dangerous to go much further. These suits will only protect us for another twenty steps or so, and even now we should not linger much longer."

Nagisa glanced back down the corridor. "I was found here? In this hall?"

He nodded, though she wasn't watching. "About thirty or so steps down, yes. Just floating there."

She looked back at him again, incredulous. "Floating?"

"Yes." He sighed. "Gravity starts to... fade. The closer to the core you get."

Erman personally didn't know what to make of this all. He knew there were operations down near the core region, but he'd of course never been there himself, nor did he know what they did down here. It was not his area at all, whatever it was. He nervously glanced between the two others. "How much time do we have left before we have to go?"

"I would say a minute." The way he said it sounded very arbitrary. "And even then, you will probably feel pretty sick for the next couple of days. You will recover, though."

Erman turned back to Nagisa. "Well? What do you think?"

Nagisa wasn't paying much attention. Her gaze was on the other end of the corridor. Where did it lead? She wanted to go look, but she doubted they would let her. "It's so close... How was I not found sooner?"

"Ah... yes." He waved it off like there was a simple explanation. "It was the first time we ever came down here."

"What?" She turned around, her surprise plain on her face. "You haven't been down here before? How is that possible?"

He just shrugged again. "It is not like we built the place."

That was a bit much for her to handle, though it did answer a few questions. They didn't build this place? As in, the whole world around them? So they had no idea what was outside simply because their civilization came from inside to begin with? "Well... then who did?"

He laughed. "That is one of the mysteries of life, is it not? Where the world came from. Yeah... I suppose the answers could be further in, closer to the core, but we estimate that only around five percent of the world has been properly explored, and that includes all the populated areas. And it excludes the areas closer to the core that are too radioactive for us to survive in. Those areas are believed to be about two to three times the size of the areas we can currently explore."

So the radiation from the core was that immense? That most of this world was shrouded from their knowledge by the radiation that permeates it? With all that, was it possible that the others were somewhere down nearer the core? Lost, floating in endless corridors or some gaping caverns? For all she knew, given the information they'd told her, there could be a whole other civilization, or two, or more, hidden in the depths, adapted to the radiation and the lack of gravity, who had found her friends. This scene could be playing out at this very moment for Madoka, Kyoko, Sayaka, and Mami individually. Though she supposed one of them would still be in their monstrous Witch form. But then where were they? Weren't they supposed to be keeping watch over the others while they slept? How could they let Nagisa be so separated from the rest like this?

"We need to head back now."

Their guide started walking, pulling them along behind him. Nagisa could have easily pulled back, overpowering him, but she knew better. There was nothing here for her, at least right now. She didn't know what she needed to be looking for or how to find it. So she let him pull her back. She was quiet all the way back, up through the elevators, back along the railcar and on the buses, all the way to the farm. It was starting to get late, and she was about ready to sleep. She needed to think. She needed to stop thinking. She needed something, and she didn't know what. This was a mystery, growing more and more frustrating for her. Exactly something that Mami should have been handling, not her.

Nagisa wandered into the house and up the stairs, falling down on her bed. She wasn't tired. She didn't get tired. Not anymore. But she was exhausted. Emotionally, mentally, she was running out of steam and needed desperately to recharge. This was not something she was suited to deal with. Mami could solve mysteries, it was her thing. Sayaka knew militaries, Kyoko understood architecture, and Madoka was brilliant with astrophysics. Nagisa knew languages, cheese, and surfing. Surfing wouldn't help her here, as there was no body of water large enough to make use of it, and she couldn't see how it would apply anyway. It'd be nice if she could solve all her problems by surfing, but that stopped being reality the moment she turned eighteen. Incidentally, that's also when cheese stopped solving all her problems too.

As for language, it seemed she had reached the end of her uses for that skill as well. She could communicate well with Erman, and passably with most of the rest of the people in this strange bubble world. It was big enough that everyone she met was sure she must have just been from a locale they'd never been to before. So that wasn't an issue for her, but after that there was nothing that language helped with. What was there left for her to do?

Erman sat down on the edge of his bed across the room. "Are you okay?"

She didn't move. She didn't respond at all for a while before, finally, an answer creaked out of her throat. "I don't think so."

He nodded. That much was pretty obvious. "When we were down there, you were hoping to find more. What were you looking for, Nagisa?"

Did she even know? What was she looking for? Did she just expect to take a long journey into the core of the artificial world where gravity stopped working and radiation was deadly and what? Find Mami just looking for her too? Find Kyoko or Sayaka sitting around waiting? Find anything? Anything at all? She shook her head. "I'm lost. I don't know where I am. I don't know how to get back where I came from."

"I see." He didn't, really. But there was nothing more that he could do for her here. "I guess... just let me know if you need anything."

Well...

"What happened, Inspector?"

The General watched the investigators scurry around, trying to find anything that could help them make sense of the scene. It was pretty clear, on the surface, what had happened. But of course the obvious answer forced them all to try and explain away everything as best they could, because what it looked like was absurd. Impossible. Mortifying.

The body lay curled up in its bed where the person had died during the night, collapsed in on themselves like a water pouch drained of all liquid. When one of the investigators had touched its finger, the appendage crumbled to dust. The dust had of course fallen down through the hole in the floor. That was a big part of the scene. A hole in the floor that went down into the blackness below, somewhere where there was no light. To anyone with a wide open mind it was pretty obvious what had happened. Something had burrowed its way into the room and drained the man of all liquids. But that presented the problem of just being ludicrous.

The lead investigator at the scene let out a pained sigh and stepped around the hole, pointing at the corpse with care not to actually touch it. "There are some clear puncture wounds where we think... whatever it was, it attached itself there. We would not be able to tell any more than that without a thorough autopsy, which is rather impossible considering the mildest contact causes the body to disintegrate. There is nothing we can do to prevent that, unfortunately, and the only way around it is to transform this room in order to perform the best autopsy we can produce without physical contact. Considering the ...hole... I do not think that would be safe to attempt."

"I agree with you there." The General shook his head and stepped back out of the room. "Should we assume that the threat comes from something in the core area?"

The investigator nodded. "I would not simply assume that, but there seems to be no other possibility. Do we have a contingent?"

The General was quiet for a moment, weighing his options. He knew there was really only one, but it didn't sit right with him. Regardless, he had to. "We do. Destroy the scene. Make certain everyone aware of the situation is sworn to absolute secrecy, under pain of death. No one is to talk about this. Ever."

Nagisa sat up in bed. It was still dark. She was used to waking up in the dark by now, but this time was different. She didn't feel alone. She didn't feel confused. She still didn't understand anything that had happened to her, but tonight she felt like there was just a little bit of purpose to her being here. She went to get up and do her usual midnight snacking, which had become a habit, but found that she couldn't get out of bed without moving Erman's arm from around her waist. At least this problem was easily fixed. She knew from some late night experiments that Erman, and everyone else in this place, slept so long as it was night, and would not be awakened. So she simply through his arm aside and got up, finding a shirt to put on as she wandered down the stairs.

The power was out all night, so she didn't dare open the cold box. She knew it was a fridge, but their word for it was just 'cold box', and it had brought her to question why anyone called it something else in the first place. That aside, she was familiar with where, in the pitch black house, she could find the dry goods. Specifically, some cheese-flavored crackers, which she found impossible to describe how happy they made her.

Sitting back on the couch with her munchables, she was just settling in when she felt everything begin to rumble. She couldn't see too well in the darkness, but she could hear dozens of things fall from the shelves and break or clatter on the ground, pieces and whole dishes rolling around or rattling in their place, and the very frame of the house shaking. She wisely covered her box, the next moment feeling some dust fall from the ceiling and land on her hand. And then it stopped.

Standing up slowly, Nagisa looked around at the darkness. She had been here for close to two years, and she hadn't once felt even a tremor. And now this.