Miles' Log, Stardate: I wish I could see the stars.

Today's weather: Subterranean abyss. I drilled up into an underground lake a few hours ago, which I guess could count as rain. Almost drowned, got bitten by a fish. Still better than the last time it rained, at least. And way better than the lava pocket. Lava is surprisingly survivable here by the way. I wonder if it's a combination of the Leidenfrost effect and reverse entropy. Maintaining a layer of evaporating skin in between lava and the rest of you?

Well, don't really want to experiment with melting my arm off again. Did manage to scoop up some lava in a bucket though. Don't ask me how that works - well, you can't anyway since this is a recording - I also managed to melt a bucket by dropping one into the same lava pool, but it's not even close to the weirdest way to break physics I've found so far, which includes the closest I've come to a usable plan on "stabilising" this world.

Yes, this world. Saving mine is, um, a work in progress.

Anyway, long story short, in mad world physics there's no confusion whether the glass is half empty or half full, it's either emptying, or it's filling. Liquid either disappears entirely when it gets too shallow, or it spontaneously appears when it gets deep enough.

Suffice to say that thanks to a creative application of glass blowing, five buckets, and a willingness to drink stuff that's been on the floor, I no longer have a supply issue with healing drinks, water, honey - which imbibing in sufficiently large quantities seems to work even better than the red stuff - that flammable gel that all those slimes are made out of, or lava.

I'm not drinking the lava. Obviously. But not bad, right? Trying to find more liquids as we speak. If I could manage to not eat the next glass heart I find I'd pour whatever was in that out, but I've, uh, not been doing great on that front. Maybe the rain?

Wait. Yorick. I sent it to hide in a tree. Would the rain affect it? Could it drip into the portal?

Ugh. Great, there goes my good mood.

… Well, no big loss. I'm pretty sure that it's a memetically induced emotion anyway so it'll be back in a minute. Cosmo calls this place the "Hallow", and to all intents and purposes it seems to be a less horrible form of corruption, released when the guide died. Still dangerous, but… nicer? The stones are shiny and white, with naturally occurring crystalline growths on the walls rather than naturally occurring screaming tentacles. Even the monsters here are more like something you'd see on some retro music album than a horror movie, all luminous pink and radiant glowy bits instead of eyeballs and gross floaty chunks.

Still trying to kill me of course, although not with much success. The bag Cosmo, uh, "accidentally got caught on" when I dropped it into Hell contained… Well, mostly useless junk, broken machine parts, and assorted glowy bits, actually, but it also contained a supply of processed metal of the same kind as my hammer. I just so happen to have recently graverobbed an anvil and duplicated enough lava to boil an ocean so now I'm the proud owner of a suit of Enchanted Battle Armour, patent pending, making me look like a real fantasy hero.

Hm. I wonder if Amy would be impressed?

… Nah, she'd probably call me a dork or something.

Well, anyway, thanks to my, uh, "compact" physique I even had enough left to make a length of razor wire with the rest. While I admit that doesn't sound quite as flashy as crafting my very own Excalibur, since the power cores for my beam cannon never recovered, and there's not exactly any wood down here to restock my bowgun, the need to murder things at a distance takes priority over the need for a highly redundant close combat option, however flashy. By plumbing the deepest depths of my creativity this has allowed me to forge the… uh… bit of wire with a hammer stuck on the end. The… wire hammer. The Whammer. Yeah.

The Whammer's a bit flashier than it sounds actually, since every time I swing it the whole thing sets on fire, wire included, and what with the whole thing being made out of magic god metal, this makes the stabby string bit surprisingly good at cutting stuff, including uppity glow monsters that think they're better than me. And since centrifugal force sort of still works on madworld physics, the hammer ends up hitting harder too. Cosmo's a bit less than impressed, of course, but she's at least learned to stand behind me while I'm fighting now.

Incidentally, I've already broached the idea of simply carrying her for expediency, only to be informed in no uncertain terms that any such attempt would be punctuated - puncturated? - with a hawthorn bush. Oh well.

Still, my obscenely unhelpful and slow travelling companion aside, being able to actually dig through the stone down here, and being equipped with the mighty Whammer, has made traversal comparatively simple compared to my last fateful subterranean excursion. Here's hoping very simple, because I'm hoping to get out of here before I turn into a nightlight. My fur's already starting to look a bit like Amy's, and not really hoping for the whole twinsies look, if you know what I mean.

It's not super easy to think things through in an artificially induced haze of quasireligious contented bliss, but I have been trying to wrap my head around the various corruptions and the common traits between them in an attempt to know my proverbial enemy. Or was it literal enemy?

Anyway, first is my good friend the purple corruption. It's related to Iog-Sotôt, which is a real pain to say three times fast, and it would seem to play a big role in breaking into reality from whatever horrible place these, for want of a better term, "gods" live. This would be borne out by purple being the "first" corruption to show up, back in Cosmo's world, and it's best described as being a state of endless decay, an endless degradation of the world and… and the self.

Second, which I've never encountered, but Cosmo's very familiar with and Sonic's clearly fallen into, is the red corruption. This one belongs to Shupnikkurat, Cosmo's cosmic boss. Apparently this stuff is defined by life, though I've not managed to get much more than that out of Cosmo. The red corruption's a big collective organism, everything playing their role for the greater good. Can't say I'm upset I've not experienced it personally, but it seems like it might be the logical extreme of "nature".

Third is an odd one, in that it was tied to the moon, rather than something on the world itself, and whatever force that was was clearly strong enough to taint everything, at least that the moon could see. Candyfloss is a weird colour for a moon anyway, could the moon itself already be tainted? Good thing it was only temporary, being turned to liquid was unpleasant.

Ooo! Maybe if it happens next time I could try catching myself in a bucket? I… should probably check with a bloodman first though. Sounds like a good way to get an evil twin.

Fourth, fittingly, would be the taint of the dead. Cosmo described this quite clearly in her story, though I wasn't in the catacombs long enough to notice myself, and it seems to permeate every part of the world to some extent, with the zombies, skeletons, mummies… I'm going to go out on a limb and tie it to Mister Skin, or Ahtu I think he was called. A passive grazing of the dead? I'm not even sure if they have a will of their own or if their bodies are just recycled tools, but this one is everywhere and always.

Hell I'm not sure about in the slightest. It is where the guide was burned, apparently, but is it its own corruptive force? A symptom? Or is it something that just naturally occurred on this world? On all worlds? The prospect of literal demons lurking in the depths of the Earth is… actually I'm not even sure if it is creepy at this point, my standards for normal as so far gone by now I'm just happy they're minding their own business down there.

Finally, at least that I know of, is the Hallow. The etymology is pretty obvious, sacred ground, but I can't help but wonder. Madworld is defined by a lack of causality, of disorder constantly becoming order, and I'm assuming each of the manifestations, except maybe Hell, is a byproduct of each particular feeding process… preference?

Decay might be seen as the act of entropy in action, breaking down what is to something else, but a state of absolute decay is one of perfect uniformity, all things eventually becoming nothing. Life opposes that, hence the natural conflict between the two, but life is similarly order in a chaotic universe, same for the reversal of death.

So what of the hallow? This shiny underworld with beautiful fractals and perfectly refined lifeforms might seem…. Desirable? But I can't help but wonder, doesn't that just mean the thing behind it is just the greatest chaos eater of all? And that it must be released by the guide and the chosen… Are the chosen being led to feed their world to this ultragod?

There is one thing that gives me hope. Hopefully real hope, not this happy feel good uplifting hope that bleeds from the rocks around me. These existences are not free. They have moved to follow me, and they've broken in wherever the boundaries between worlds got thin, but they appear to have done so more or less sequentially. Perhaps they are just reflections here, where they show up on the world, but that they are bound to the world in some actual concrete sense seems obvious. If it is the loss of this world as the corruption overtakes it that permits them to move to mine, and it is chasing my chaos tainted self that leads them to new hunting grounds...

Huh. Wait a minute. If I'm here...

I think I need to check something real quick.