Elfangor finally came to Loren's door, after having a bit of trouble with the stairs. They were not ideally suited to a creature with hooves, and he had slipped a few times on their polished surfaces before he had found what he assumed was the purpose of the raised wooden pole beside the staircase.

He had gripped the pole as tightly as his weaker hands allowed, and now he stood in front of the door that was the only thing between him and Loren. Mimicking her actions from before, he reached out and turned the small metallic ball on the right side of the door. Pushing it open, he looked around the room that Loren had created for herself.

The room was empty, that was what Elfangor noticed first. Loren was not in it, and he was more than a little worried about her. But he was also curious as to what she had brought here from her memories of her home. The first thing that he noticed was the large rectangular shape that was almost directly in front of him.

More rectangles, humans seemed to be inordinately fond of the shape. It looked like it was covered in the same kind of fabric that the humans made their artificial skin out of, in fact. There were also two more upraised, rectangular platforms, though they were nowhere near as large as the main one.

A jumble of the bound paper sheaves that humans referred to as either books or magazines – although what distinguished one from the other Elfangor wasn't sure – lay on one of the platforms. Elfangor walked over and opened one. He couldn't read what was written there of course, but the writing stopped in the middle of the left sheet of paper.

Elfangor supposed that Loren had yet to finish reading this volume, so she could not recreate the text from a memory she did not possess. There was also a small, flat, still image of Loren with her mother and a male human that Elfangor supposed was her father.

Elfangor removed it from its resting-place, studying it in hope of gaining some insight into Loren's life. But the frozen, smiling faces offered him nothing. He put it back down, and decided to leave.

Elfangor knew that he would have to contend with the stairs again to get back outside, so he steeled himself to deal with them. As he headed out of the door, he cast a last look back at Loren's room. It was slightly disordered, but it seemed like a comfortable place for a human to be.

Gripping the rail at the side of the stairs, this time with both hands, Elfangor fought down the sudden uneasiness he felt going down at such a steep angle. As he looked down, he also fought the sudden mental image of himself falling down the slippery stairs. How do humans do this? He wondered. They have only two legs.

As last he made it to the base of the stairs, all without losing his footing even once. Retracing the path Loren had taken through her home, he left the human dwelling and was soon back outside, but Loren was still nowhere to be seen. He heard something then, the sound of a distant impact, but of what Elfangor did not know.

He followed it though, since it was as good a direction as any to go. He kept an eye out in all directions, as Andalites are wont to do, since Loren could have been looking for him as well. He heard the noise again, louder this time since he had gotten closer, and found Loren standing in a field that was mostly bare dirt.

It was however, bordered with some rather tasty-looking grass, something like the grass growing in front of Loren's house. Behind Loren stood a tall wire cage with no front door. She had a stick, about as long as her arm, gripped in both hands. The stick was strangely shaped, since the base was narrow enough so that Loren could wrap both of her hands around it and the tip was roughly twice that size.

She stood with her feet apart, the stick held diagonally in front of her. Her entire demeanor was that of someone waiting for something, and then it happened. Or rather, she made it happen; Loren tossed a small, white sphere into the air just in front of her.

Why she did this, Elfangor didn't know, but it seemed to have some point to it. Gripping the stick with both hands again, since she had used her left hand to throw the sphere, she swung it into the path of the falling object again and again until at last she managed to connect. There was a loud impact sound, exactly the same one that had led him here, in fact.

Loren either did not notice his approach, or she was just choosing to ignore him right now. Given her state of mind when she had left, though, Elfangor kind of suspected it was the latter. She repeated the process – taking a sphere from the circular, open-topped container at her feet. Throwing it into the air, and swinging the stick until she connected with the sphere and sent it flying through the air with a loud CRACK! – until she had exhausted the supply in the container.

Loren!

She let her left hand drop to her side, leaning on the stick now gripped solely with her right. Staring out at the white spheres scattered in the grassy part of the field. When she spoke, she seemed to be distancing herself from her emotions, judging by the flat tone of her voice.

"I really should go gather up all the balls, coach goes ape if we lose our equipment."

Elfangor did not know what Loren meant by "go ape", but he decided to forgo that question in favor of something he was more interested in.

What were you doing?

"Playing softball."

Elfangor did not understand what this new word meant, but Loren quickly elaborated.

"You see that high spot over there?" Loren asked, pointing with the stick to a spot roughly in the center of the expanse of dirt. "That's the pitchers mound. The pitcher throws the ball and the batter, that's me, tries to knock the stitches off of her."

Off of the pitcher?

"The ball," Loren said distractedly, bending her legs so far that she was almost touching the ground.

Elfangor had seen her do this once before, on the old Model 14 that he and Arbron had used to rescue her and Chapman from the Skrit Na. She had been checking a wound on Chapman's head, and Elfangor and Arbron had both been impressed that she hadn't fallen over while doing it. But now, as she began to gather up the scattered balls, Elfangor saw something in her manner that made him realize why she had run out on him.

You are upset.

"Gee, what was your first clue?" she asked shortly.

Well, when you -

"It's just an expression," Loren said, cutting him off.

Elfangor did not know how to respond to that, and so they were both silent for the next few minutes. The only sound was that of the balls being dropped back into the container that Loren had slung over the lower part of her left arm. She had dropped her stick just before starting to pick up the balls, and now it lay half in and half out of the grassy part of the field.

"Why did this happen?" she asked suddenly.

What?

"All of this. My mother acting like a weird clone of herself, but knowing things that she shouldn't know. My neighborhood with no people in it, the sky and ground in all those patches. Why did all this happen?"

Oh, Elfangor said, searching for a way to explain something he didn't understand very well himself. I think you were right when you surmised that this place was created by our thoughts. We all wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere that was familiar to us. And we each made contact with the Time Matrix, all of us with our own separate and contradictory desires. The Time Matrix could not transport you to your world, while at the same time transporting myself and the Visser to our own worlds. So it created this place from our thoughts and memories.

"So, what you're saying is this entire place wouldn't have existed if we hadn't been fighting over where to go?"

Succinctly put, yes. And the process was complicated by the fact that none of us were thinking all that clearly. We were suffocating from lack of oxygen, as well as slowly freezing to death. The Time Matrix did all it could with the information it had been given.

Loren nodded, but she still seemed to be troubled by something.

"I thought the Time Matrix was a time machine," she said at last, looking at him uncertainly.

Some people have theorized that there is not only one universe, but many. Perhaps, when we were all fighting for control, each wanting the Time Matrix to arrive at a different destination, instead of traveling through the spacetime of our own universe like I suspect the Matrix was designed to do, we forced it to create a separate universe. Everything here was created from our own flawed and incomplete memories. Your mother, and anyone like her that we might encounter, would all have been pulled from any memories of them that you had.

Loren looked at a spot on the ground, just between her feet. Trying to wrap her mind around all of what she had just heard was giving her a headache.