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Isabelle sat alone in the dark. Dark, it seemed, was a universal enough concept to apply even here. It was nice to have something familiar at least, this far below human dreamspace. Isabelle shifted the strange extrapolation of her body, resting the back of her head against the hypersphere that loomed in the four-dimensional space behind her. The dark made it hard to make out more than smudges of the 4D landscape around her, spires of barren rock glinting impossible colors as they rose into the liquid air. Propeller worms swam through the air, twisting their bodies in ways that would have been impossible in three-dimensional space to propel themselves. Her mind hurt taking it all in. The flat plane of her field of view had been stretched out into a volume she perceived inside and out, her 4D surrounding projected down to a mess of 3D forms shoved directly into a brain that wasn’t designed to handle more than processing surfaces. The dark helped. She didn’t need to see every individual grain and speck in the massive volume of her view, just blurs and smudges that her mind could handle. Not that it made four-dimensional space any less confusing. As a dream-diver, she’d always known they were only scratching the surface of dreamspace. Now, as The Dreamwalker, she had the keys to all of it. Further down, spaces were five-, six-, or even seven-dimensional, all the way up to infinity, but even four was too much. There was a reason human minds never touched any more than the surface of dreamspace, dreaming only of the spaces that resembled physical reality. She picked up the 4D analogue of a book and flipped through its cubic pages. At the bottom of one, in indecipherable alien script, but still quite recognizable handwriting, was a blue signature inked in three-dimensional glyphs with far too much flourish. Blanche, Isabelle knew it said, without needing to know the symbols it was written in. With mild amusement she traced her strange, flexible finger across the signature, and felt a mild feeling of a charge building and breaking as nothing happened. Blanche was an avatar, but she was an avatar of Curiosity, while Isabelle was an avatar of access. Access was her aspect. Nothing could stop her from moving anywhere in dreamspace, and nothing could move her anywhere if she did not move herself. Tracing the path of the signature in her mind, she formed a key leading to the same place. Of course, it looked nothing like a key. In four-dimensional space, the closest analogue of a key was a metal sheet covered in spikes of varying heights. She slid it into an imaginary keyhole in the air and turned it through itself. Suddenly in a bright space without the shroud of darkness, her mind burned with millions of details filling her viewspace until a familiar presence added a blur to the entire space.
Oh, hello dear. I didn’t expect you here. I’m afraid this parlor was meant for receiving four-dimensional guests. Perhaps my three-dimensional tea room would be more comfortable?
The four-dimensional Blanche gestured (somehow) in the direction of a version of the Cyngus Archive on the surface of dreamspace with a familiar three dimensions, bordering the physical Archive that existed in The Backrooms. In the opposite direction Isabelle could see an entire chain of dreamspace Archives of increasing dimensionality, each with a higher-dimensional Blanche gesturing in sync like some hyperdimensional tendril reaching out of the infinite depths of conceptual space. She felt the sensation of opening a dry mouth even though she did not have one. “I…” After so long being unable to speak to anyone, Isabelle was unused to speaking. Why were conversations so hard?! Hello, yes, she needed to say hello.
No need to worry, I know what you mean even if you can’t find the words.
Isabelle still found the fact that Blanche could read her mind unsettling. She definitely didn’t want anyone accessing her mind. Almost unconsciously, she felt herself reaching in response for a key she didn’t even know she had. Locking something was as easy as accessing it, she just had to turn the key in the other direction, and so she did, locking Blanche out of the space within her mind.
Oh, it appears I startled you. I understand your alarm. Many people are uncomfortable with being read. You simply seemed to be having a little trouble expressing yourself so I responded to what you meant.
“I can express myself just fine,” Isabelle hastily lied. Blanche’s multi-eyed, four-dimensional face somehow conveyed the impression of being unconvinced.
I see, may I ask why you’re visiting me on a conceptual plane not suited to you?
Isabelle was eager to change the subject. “I was exploring. Being The Dreamwalker prevents me from talking to, well, anyone-” Isabelle cut herself off before hastily backpedalling, tripping over her own tongue to apologize, “anyone but you I mean, and The Keymaster, and the other A-class entities. It’s not that I mind talking to you, it’s just that I’d like to be able to talk to someone human. Someone who-” Isabelle waved her noodly limbs in front of her, as if trying to catch the word she was looking for, “-understands.” Isabelle winced internally at the offense she imagined Blanche must have taken.
And that led you to explore four-dimensional space in search of… company?
Blanche gave no sign of irritation, which either meant she was hiding it out of politeness, or she wasn’t human enough to feel any in the first place. Isabelle wasn’t sure which was worse. “Well isolation is the cost of being The Dreamwalker, but the ability to explore dreamspace is the upside, so I figured I might as well try to explore all of it if being able to do so is the one good thing this title offers. Of course, everything below human dreamspace is so… alien. It hurts my brain to even go down this deep, but that makes it all the more intriguing. Seeing things I’m not supposed to comprehend.”
Ah, the desire to seek knowledge that is beyond your comprehension. If you can believe it, I have done the same, myself.
Blanche stirred her tea in two different directions at once and laughed lightly. Isabelle found it difficult to believe that there was anything beyond Blanche’s comprehension, and said so. “You’re the pillar of knowledge. How could you… not comprehend something?”
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies to me too, I am afraid. ‘In any system of logic, there must exist statements that are true but unprovable.’ Of course, I am not bound by the constraints of the universe nor Turing computability, so I can increase my own Turing Degree to think in higher systems of logic unreachable by human minds, but those systems in turn introduce new statements that can only be proven in still higher systems. If I were to chase those unknowns, I would be ascending to higher and higher levels of hypercomputation forever. I find that almost everything I would wish to think about, and certainly everyone I would wish to think about, is in the zeroth Turing Degree, and I wish never to lose sight of them.
“That’s… nice.” Isabelle found it hard to look Blanche in the eyes and looked down at the cup of four-dimensional tea that had somehow found its way into her hand. “But I don’t have anyone to lose sight of. There’s no reason for me not to see how deep into dreamspace I can go.”
You can’t run from loneliness, Isabelle.
Her hand clenched around the cup, shaking it and sending spherical ripples across its three-dimensional surface. If she didn’t know she’d locked Blanche out of her mind she’d have thought the phrase was ripped straight out of her mouth from every time she’d stared into the mirror and repeated it to herself each morning when she was throwing her life into dream diving. She knew she couldn’t run from loneliness. She knew she would always try anyway. And she knew she could never change. Isabelle put the cup down suddenly, and stood to leave, already thinking of a key to manifest to take her deeper into unexplored dreamspace. “The four-dimensional tea was nice… but I think I’ll be going now. Thanks.” Blanche rotated the sideways directions of her head slightly in the four-dimensional equivalent of a tilt of concern. After a moment she spoke slowly, treading carefully across her words.
Perhaps… you could do me a small favor when you leave.
Already halfway out of her seat and feeling somewhat guilty for leaving so abruptly when Blanche had been so polite, Isabelle paused awkwardly between sitting and standing to stumble out a response. As powerful as Blanche was, Isabelle could see why she couldn’t really leave her archive. The image of that infinitely-long tendril of higher-dimensional Blanches stretching from the infinite depths breaking out of its safe corridor of higher-dimensional archives and tearing across conceptual space briefly haunted her mind. Perhaps it was best Blanche stayed within her homely library. “I- I could run a small errand if you need me to.” Blanche stirred her tea with a notably pleased manner before continuing.
I know you like to leave trails of keys to show people around dreamspace. There’s actually someone I would like you to show around dreamspace, although you won’t have to leave a trail of keys to do it. Your physical counterpart, The Keymaster, should be able to share a dreamspace with you like I can so you can show him the non-physical side of liminal space yourself.
The trap closed. Isabelle wanted nothing more than to retreat into isolation and the distraction of esoteric spaces rather than have another, even more awkward conversation with an entity who was far, far less conversational than Blanche, or perhaps even her, but she could not politely say no after already agreeing to run an errand. She forced a smile. “Sure, I could… talk. To him.”
Thank you my dear. I hope you have a nice trip.
Unable to decide between saying goodbye, returning the thanks, or some third option she hadn’t thought of yet, the words died in Isabelle’s mouth and she simply summoned a four-dimensional key silently, twisting the spiked sheet into a mirror of itself so its spikes were facing down and jumping across dreamspace. She could have sworn she heard the start of a giggle as the archive vanished from her view.
The Keymaster was pacing an infrequented part of The Hub where most doors lead to deadly or unknown levels no one asked for keys to, somewhat tired of dispensing keys to The Snackrooms and hoping to avoid further company. Further company it seemed, found him regardless as a spot in his vision resolved itself into something like a half-remembered, melted-together image of a Keymaster with wrong proportions and no clear division between cloak and body. Isabelle. The ghostly apparition made no move to speak and simply stared at him, leaving him to ask the question, “Why… are you here?”
On the other end of the jump, Isabelle found herself suddenly and violently returned to her familiar three dimensions as the endless tunnel of The Hub came into view, or rather the perception of it that existed within The Keymaster’s mind. After spending enough time in four dimensions, returning to three somehow felt claustrophobic, like being flattened between panes of glass. Before she could think of what to say, The Keymaster spoke first. Isabelle froze momentarily before straightening up and trying to imitate the dramatic air she expected an Avatar of Access should speak with. “I have come… to lead you deep into the unexplored depths of dreamspace.”
Another adventure. The Keymaster had just about had enough of those. His silence met hers as he found himself tempted to refuse outright. But, he did not know why she was here. For all he knew (and it probably was), there was something important at stake, and it would be a poor decision to refuse. He spoke at last, “…And why should I embark on this journey?”
Isabelle faltered, almost folding in on herself as she went from a dramatic pose to an embarrassed slouch. “I- I don’t actually know. Blanche just asked me to show you dreamspace.” The Keymaster paused again, for almost the exact same amount of time. Isabelle wondered if he practiced his pauses with a stopwatch.
The Keymaster, after a moment of serious temptation to jump somewhere else, relented. If it was something Blanche asked of him, even indirectly, he would see it through. “I will not question the wisdom of Blanche, and I do find the prospect of visiting non-physical spaces inaccessible to me intriguing, although I wish she had seen fit to provide more detailed information as to why.”
Isabelle gave an exasperated shrug, feeling much in the same boat. “She does what she does.” Isabelle manifested a key that would lead him to the Pastel Neighborhood, a well-known dreamspace frequented by dream divers. As she extended her too-long arm to hand it to him, she caught sight of the key she had created and realized with embarrassment she had made it in the same shape as the outline of a four-dimensional key. The rotation to flip the spiked sheet into its mirror image only worked in four dimensions, so there was no way The Keymaster could turn the key she was giving him. “Um.” Isabelle retracted the key, drawing her flexible arm back in too smooth of a motion for a limb with bones. “Can you copy the destination into a new key?”
The Keymaster considered. “It is not a key that leads to a place within my domain…” His voice trailed off in uncertainty and a degree of curiosity. Deciding to test it, he flicked his fingers like a magician revealing a palmed quarter, manifesting a key in his hand bearing the same signature, surprising even himself. Perhaps some of this would be interesting. “It appears,” he muttered, “I can.”
“Then follow me.” Relieved to have made it past the initial awkwardness, Isabelle wasted no time jumping to the first dreamspace. Not needing to physically turn the impossible key herself, Isabelle willed it to activate, blinking from The Keymaster’s mental surroundings to the Pastel Neighborhood, disappearing suddenly from The Keymaster’s view.
Still looking down at the strange new key in his hand, The Keymaster wondered, “If just my mind follows you, then does my body-” he noticed she was gone. “Follow me” had apparently meant immediately. With no answer to his question, or even a proper explanation of why he was going in the first place, The Keymaster was left to take the precaution of physically jumping to a safe location in Level HELP before turning the key that sent his mind careening across dreamspace. With a jolt he would have felt if his body were there to feel it, The Keymaster arrived in his first glimpse of a space in the other avatar’s realm. A very blue sky greeted him, completely cloudless with its sun positioned directly overhead in perpetual noon. Endless houses of the exact same design lined the streets stretching off to the horizon in all directions, painted a variety of pastel colors but otherwise identical. Warm sunlight, rare for a dream, cast the entire scene in a haze of summer tranquillity. It was all very liminal, very… ordinary. “I can name a number of levels in The Backrooms like this. What about this space necessitated showing me?”
Although still uncertain herself as to why she’d been sent to show The Keymaster these spaces, Isabelle would not let anyone miss the point of how incredible dreamspace was, speaking hastily before she’d even formed a complete thought. “Similar, perhaps,” Isabelle trailed off for a moment, trying to think of how to articulate it, “but not like this.” The words came to her quicker as she remembered everything about dreamspace that had fascinated her as a dream diver. She spread her arms out to gesture at the space around her, “This sense of hollow tranquility you’re feeling, it isn’t yours. You’re not feeling it in response to what you perceive around you, you’re perceiving the emotion directly. It’s part of the space itself.” Feeling it easier to demonstrate than explain in words, she manifested another key, turning it before The Keymaster could respond.
The Keymaster was abruptly left standing by himself in the too-perfect, featureless neighborhood. A neighborhood that was apparently shoving an unnatural feeling of tranquility directly into his mind. A mannequin waved at him. Social skills were not exactly his forte, but teleporting to another space mid-conversation was generally not something he did. Left with little else than to copy the key she’d made and follow her, The Keymaster jumped to the next space. The Pastel Neighborhood vanished, replaced with the frigid, windswept night of the Cold Abyss. Yellow halogen lights fought bravely to cast tiny flickers of orange luminescence into the darkened snowfall that descended upon the infinite blacktop. The Keymaster felt the frigid air blowing through him, and glanced around to spot Isabelle standing, sheltered from the wind in the windshade of an isolated parking structure rising from the expanse. He wasted no time following his runaway guide into the shadow of the building. “You could have warned me that you were going to teleport to another level,” he grumbled irritably when he reached her. “Especially when you jump mid-conversation.”
Not knowing the exact words to respond with, Isabelle simply shrugged. “I thought it would be best explained by showing you.” Feeling the cold, she pulled her cloak tighter around herself, and used the moment pivoted onto the subject, “This isn’t cold, it’s the feeling of being cold. Or the memory of it.” Ignoring the awkwardness of interpersonal interaction and returning to a subject well familiar to her, theories and ideas from her old posts poured out of her. “This isn’t a physical space, so there’s nothing actually here and no air to be cold. Dreamspaces are just, well, dreams, and dreams are made of perceptions. Directly of perceptions. Perceptions of things around you, but also internal perceptions. How you see things, how you feel, how you think, even who you are is subject to the perceptions of the dream. Your mind is as much the dream as it is you.”
“Interesting.” The Keymaster had little more to say. Perhaps he should be unsettled, but his mind as he could remember it had never been “his” anyways. Experiencing foreign perceptions layered over his own was trivial in comparison. Relaxing, even. Perhaps this was what Blanche had sent him here for. He could take some time to see the world through someone else’s eyes. And as for Isabelle… he hadn’t thought much of her, as they’d only had a few formal interactions, but after seeing how she showed off the dreamspaces he could see now why she’d been chosen as the guardian of this space. She clearly loved it. It was strange that he was only really meeting her now though. Shouldn’t he have met her at that Christmas Party Blanche invited everyone to? She’d even tricked him into it. Antisocial as he was, how had Isabelle slipped through the cracks?
Silence fell on the two of them as The Keymaster did not speak further. Isabelle felt like it was her turn to talk again, and she hastened for something to say, speaking a little too quickly so her words almost blended together, “I can show you more examples.” She manifested a key to the Fractured World, and only stopped herself a moment before turning it, remembering to turn around and explain to The Keymaster, “I’m going to be showing you a lot of spaces, so whenever I make a key, just copy it and follow me.”
The Keymaster nodded and manifested a key of his own. He was beginning to find these spaces somewhat interesting, enough to tolerate being the passenger instead of the guide at least. The two of them turned their keys together and their surroundings blurred and disappeared, with a thin cliffside path warping into view in their place. They stood on a winding, flat section carved into the side of an enormous stone slope, curving upwards and downwards into the distance. Rather than the roughness of natural stone, everything was perfectly smooth and followed neat, geometric curves, like architecture rather than nature. Looking out across the space it became apparent why, as similar curving slopes that dwarfed mountains rose like, or rather as, pillars in an enormous cathedral-like structure that enclosed them. Nowhere was there a right angle or a flat surface, save for paths cut into the rock, with floor, walls, and ceiling alike following complex flowing curves like a vaulted roof in the enormous space. It was almost like standing inside of a fractal. Here and there, isolated wooden doors hung askew, leading into small abandoned dwellings where everything within had been seemingly turned to stone, but that was not what was most wrong with the space. It was the colors. Vibrant hues shifted and danced in his vision, crawling in rainbows across every surface and strobing through the spectrum. Stone he knew was featureless and gray also appeared as every color there was to see, and he took note of the discrepancy. He felt like something terribly wrong had happened here and he should leave, but that thought wasn’t his, and he could feel his own perception alongside it, intrigued rather than afraid. Despite being so alien, the place carried a strange sense of familiarity, and he wondered if he was experiencing a native’s perception of the space, the ruins as seen by someone whose former life lay among them. Isabelle strolled past him without any apparent care to the space’s inherent sense of loss and foreboding as if she was showing him around her own home. What must it take to come to regard a space like this as home?
Isabelle failed to notice The Keymaster’s contemplation and barreled right ahead into her explanation, “We’re getting closer to the edge of human dreamspace. Dream divers can still reach this place, but it's noticeably more abstract than dreamspaces closer to Baseline. Gravity warps with the space, it messes with your vision, there are long tunnels you cross too quickly where either length or your perception of time is altered, foreign emotional associations tied to objects, shifted color associations, and perhaps most interestingly, a few entirely novel colors.” Isabelle listed off her observations of the space’s anomalies without missing a beat. She didn’t have a mouth to smile with, but had she, she would have been grinning with manic enthusiasm as she pointed to a patch of blue seeping across the stone surface. “See the edges? They blend into red here, but not by passing through purple. They really pass outside of human color space through a fourth primary, and we can actually see it!”
The Keymaster turned his head and squinted. Right where Isabelle was pointing, there was in fact a stretch of color he’d never seen before. It wasn’t any mixture of red, blue, and green, but something else entirely. His sister was the artist, not him, so he found the new color difficult to describe. It was warm like red, but it didn’t stand out in the same way and seemed to fit more with green and brown than red and yellow. He barely had a moment to examine the first new color he’d seen in… ever, before movement caught his eye. A wanderer was making their way across the space. His job- no, Isabelle’s job, in this realm, was to guide wanderers to where they needed to go. He straightened up. “A lost soul, it seems, has crossed into this realm.” He waved in the direction of the man making his way across the winding cliffside path. “I believe he could use a key.” Isabelle’s excited demeanor faltered, and she seemed to shrink back down to how she’d been before. The Keymaster did not know what to make of her reaction, but did feel a twinge of concern.
All of Isabelle’s words dried up as she looked at the man slowly coming towards them. The thousands of things competing in her mind to be shared first slipped away and wasn’t sure if she could think of even one of them if she tried. The Keymaster didn’t know. Of course he didn’t, why would he? She’d never told him. She hadn’t even told Blanche, but that didn’t exactly matter with Blanche. The man drew closer, and looking right at them, stared through them at the path ahead as he continued without seeing them. There was one rule of dreamspace no dream diver could ever break, and that was that you could never meet anyone else in dreamspace. Avatars like herself and The Keymaster could interact with each other, but only because they were Avatars. No human could ever see or hear her in dreamspace, and dreamspace was a place she now could never leave. She was always alone. It was pointless, but because The Keymaster had asked her to, she summoned a key and dropped it to the ground. The man noticed it land, and looking at it warily, backed away and made his way around it in a wide circle. She was still regarded as a hazard.
The man steered clear of them, coming close to the steep edge of the path to avoid coming near. Wanderers had reacted in fear to him before, some even in hate as he knew all too well, but even so the man’s behavior struck The Keymaster as strange. He hadn’t run away, or even acknowledged them, he was just avoiding them. “You,” The Keymaster called out, “where are you going?” The man gave no sign of hearing them as he continued walking. Refusing to be ignored, The Keymaster noclipped in front of him, appearing to block his path. The man simply walked right through his chest as though he was not even there, and he was left looking through the space where the man had been, at Isabelle who stood staring at the ground. A tiny bit of terrible comprehension began to worm its way across his mind. At last he spoke slowly, “How long have you been alone?”
Isabelle did not even acknowledge him. She didn’t want to talk about it. “There are deeper dreamspaces even more abstract than this one,” she monotoned robotically, the enthusiasm gone from her voice, “Come.” This had been a mistake. She’d known from the beginning. The conversation had just gone from her special interests to deeply personal and she didn’t- she couldn’t talk about it. Without even thinking about it, a familiar key manifested in her hand. The key to the four-dimensional space she explored to occupy her mind with too much sensory input and incomprehensible geometry when she didn’t want to think about what she was thinking about or feel what she was feeling. What little social interaction she had had become too hard to deal with again and she was running from loneliness, again, like she always did. She turned the key and blinked into the mind-numbing complexity of a space beyond her human mind.
The Keymaster blinked as Isabelle abruptly vanished rather than responding. That behavior seemed… strange. He was definitely missing something. And something was definitely wrong. With little else to do but follow Isabelle, he materialized a copy of the key she’d summoned and jumped to the same space, only to be assaulted by geometry. His field of view was suddenly expanded into a solid block of volumetric vision and he felt himself losing his balance and falling in a direction that hadn’t existed a moment ago. He landed on the four-dimensional ground and rolled over, flipping his limbs around in their new degrees of freedom as he tried to right himself. As his fingers clawed at the hypersurface and the strange shapes morphed in his vision, the insane unreality almost began to feel… familiar. Natural. He straightened up suddenly and stood effortlessly. When he’d been Brian he could only comprehend three dimensions, but as Clavis he found it second nature. Isabelle was staring at him.
“It took me months…” she began, her voice trailing off with equal parts disbelief and envy. Of course The Keymaster wouldn't struggle with four dimensions, he was an avatar proper, practically a god, while she was just Isabelle Liligrass, the coma patient with a tiny fragment of Kei' bound to her dream-self. It was the same as talking with Blanche. Who was she kidding, sharing what she’d discovered with these entities that already knew it all, or just understood it naturally? How could she expect them to appreciate her work and achievements exploring four-dimensional space when it was like breathing to them? And however little they appreciated her accomplishments, they certainly understood her feelings even less. They weren’t even human, and that was the only reason they could even see her. She knew she needed to talk to them, but she just couldn’t. And there The Keymaster was, looking at her with what appeared to be concern. No. She would ignore it, just get the tour over with and not have to face him again. Isabelle spoke briskly, all personal interest evaporated, “Because these spaces are made of perceptions rather than existing physically, they can be perceptions of things that could not exist in any physical form, like impossible colors or extra dimensions.” She waved her hand absentmindedly, ”The space of everything that can be imagined is much larger than the space of everything that can exist, which is why dreamspace is so much larger and more complex than The Backrooms.” Manifesting another key, she flatly stated, “Come,” and turned it.
Isabelle vanished once again from his sight, without waiting for him. A propeller worm swam idly by. His Keymaster nature immediately informed the worm’s swimming motion worked by rotating its finned body segments in opposite directions, which it could do without twisting up because π1(SO(3))=ℤ2, and absurd mathematical fact that would have made no sense to him as Brian Smith. He couldn’t say he didn’t find her erratic behavior somewhat irritating, but… perhaps he understood a little of what Isabelle felt. He often chose isolation, and although he wouldn’t say he was suffering from it, he did at least have the other members of The Pantheon who were like him. He spoke to them rarely, but they were at least there. And of course there was Solaris and the children, when he could see them. If he had to guess, Isabelle only existed as The Dreamwalker because Kei' had been so determined to access everything, that he’d even created an avatar of himself in a place as abstract and isolated as dreamspace where no other pillar had bothered. She was most likely a pantheon of one. Blanche hadn’t asked Isabelle to show him dreamspace for his sake, it had been for hers. It wasn’t a job he would have picked himself for, he was probably the last person he would have picked for a job involving people skills. Perhaps it was because she saw some similarity between them, or because as The Keymaster he could generate the keys to this place on his own, although he didn’t know why that would be important. Still, Blanche must have known what she was doing. He manifested a copy of Isabelle’s key and blinked after her.
Isabelle waited in the four-dimensional labyrinth in a long moment of silence before The Keymaster appeared beside her. She couldn’t say why he’d taken so long, but with him here she could finally wrap up the tour and cheer herself up exploring some interesting corner of dreamspace. She gestured to the walls, “Here you’ll observe a common impossible color in the deeper layers of dreamspace, which looks and feels liminal. As you get deeper into dreamspace you’ll see less of the familiar angry red, calming blue, or cheerful yellow, and more of these impossible colors that feel liminal, eerie, or hollow.” Without waiting for a response or even looking back at The Keymaster, she blinked ahead to another space. She had to close her eyes rather than face the unphysical impossibility of the geometry beneath her feet. Speaking without looking, she narrated, “The object we’re standing on is called an 11-cell. Although it is technically a four-dimensional polytope, it is completely geometrically impossible and cannot exist in any space of any dimensionality.” She shrugged, ”Nevertheless we are walking on it.” Without waiting for a response, she immediately jumped to another space, and soon after that another, almost losing track as she mechanically pointed out impossible things that can only exist as concepts in dreamspace. After a time that she knew wasn’t very long but felt like ages, she staggering to a halt in a five-dimensional space she couldn’t even open her eyes in without seizing, heaving a breath and hoping she had finally shown The Keymaster enough of dreamspace to fulfil her obligation to Blanche. “I think,” she resisted the urge to vomit as her five-dimensional sense of balance churned her mind, “you have seen enough of dreamspace. You can leave. Now.” Fumbling to manifest a five-dimensional key, she turned it, the solid block of spikes flipping through itself to let her into a space she’d been wondering about ever since her encounter with Blanche. If she could lock her own mind, that meant she could unlock it. And go there.
Isabelle appeared in a very familiar room. Her old flat. It was dark, with the only light pouring out from a single lamp in the main room around the corner, and through the crack of the half-open bathroom door where her notes on dreamspace hung pinned up like the work of some conspiracy theorist. Not enough light made it through the door to her tiny bedroom to see much other than the edge of her bed. She wondered if she was still in it, dreaming. She knew she’d been moved to a hospital a long time ago, but in the dreamspace of her mind, she might still be here. She turned away from the room, only for the motion to feel more human than expected. Looking down at herself, Isabelle saw arms, her arms, human-sized with human skin and bending normally at the elbows. After so long she was back in her own body, at least while she was here. She looked at the endless scrawlings on dreamspace posted on the bathroom wall. Somehow it did not feel reassuring. She turned away, looking out the window instead, to see rather than night an endless shifting fractal of her mind perceiving itself perceiving itself perceiving itself- she looked away, and not entirely out of overexposure. Knowing everything she hated about herself was one thing, but seeing it was another. A voice from behind startled her.
“You don’t seem at home here.”
Isabelle whirled around to find the keymaster standing behind her, a similar five-dimensional block key sitting in his hand. “You-” Isabelle felt invaded. “I told you to leave. You shouldn’t be here inside my mind!”
“I didn’t know this was where you were jumping,” The Keymaster looked at the key in his hand, useless now in a space two dimensions lower than the one it was made in, “but leaving you didn’t seem like the right thing to do.”
Isabelle threw together the few words she could think of, “Well you’re wrong, so get out!”
Seemingly ignoring her, The Keymaster looked out the window, “What was it you didn’t want to see?” he pondered.
“That- that,” Isabelle found herself running out of words to throw at him. She looked down, silent for a while, and The Keymaster waited patiently. She couldn’t very well avoid him, and being perfectly honest with herself, she knew this was what Blanche really wanted. What she really needed. She took a breath. “That it’s my fault.” Silence. “That it’s my fault that I’m alone. It’s always been my fault. I avoided people even as a human, not because I wanted to be alone, but because I found it easier to distract myself from loneliness than fix it by actually talking to people.” She glanced up, and The Keymaster didn’t look judgemental yet. She made more words come out of her mouth. “And I ran away into dreamspace, because it was wonderful and fascinating and so, so distracting. I didn’t have to think about being alone there. And when I had the chance to see all of dreamspace and run away into it forever, I took it. I actually took it.” She shook her head. “It’s my fault that I can’t interact with anyone. It’s what I wanted.” She grinned bitterly. ”I turned my metaphorical curse literal. And then I panicked and tried to shed it by passing it off onto someone else, anyone else, and drove them all away. The dream divers all avoid me now because none of them want to be trapped like I am. I did that too.”
“I can speak to you, as can Blanche and the rest of The Pantheon.” The Keymaster spoke in a level tone, “You are not alone.”
Isabelle found herself almost angry, swept up in prosecuting herself so no glimmer of hope would be accepted, “But I’m pushing you all away too! I can’t change.” Her shoulders slumped. ”I’ve always known running away from loneliness was my problem, it was never hard to figure out. But every time I try to change and actually talk to people, I always find it too hard and go back to what I was doing before. It’s what I’m doing now. I’ll just push you all away and isolate myself completely.”
The Keymaster dragged over a chair and sat in it. “Then I’ll just keep visiting you to talk to you.”
Isabelle scoffed weakly, “I’ll just lock you out.”
The Keymaster looked at her with perfect seriousness, “You can’t lock me out, I’m The Keymaster.”
Isabelle gave him a blank look, and then in spite of herself, she snorted. “I’m sorry, was that a dad joke?”
The Keymaster’s expression turned grim, and he spoke with sudden sternness, “You must not tell anyone about my children.”
Confused, Isabelle found herself taken aback. “I… can’t. Remember?”
The Keymaster seemed to shrink a little in his chair. “Oh. Right”
Awkwardness. At least it wasn’t just her awkwardness this time. The question welled up within her, and she found herself asking, “You have children?”
The Keymaster regained his lost height as he straightened up in his chair, and perhaps swelled out a little further than before. “Two, daughters. Ceres and Nebula. Ceres is a real handful, and Nebula is so put together. I don’t know where she gets it from. Certainly not from me.”
Isabelle smiled weakly. “Sounds… fun.” Her smile faltered. “I wish I still had family like that. I moved away from my folks and stopped calling them, and now I guess I’ve really moved away from them.”
The Keymaster seemed to consider something. “We’re all your family.”
Isabele looked up.
“The Pantheon,” he began, “the pillars and avatars of The Backrooms. We’re all, somewhat dysfunctional family to one another. After the uprising, we really only had each other. As another avatar, I think you can consider yourself a part of that family.”
“I…” Isabelle wasn’t sure what to say, or what she felt either.
The Keymaster continued, “I think I can take Ceres and Nebula to meet you next time I’m with them. I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”
Isabelle understood what she felt now. Happy, yes, but above that, overwhelmed. She retreated, “I’d just cut you off.”
“You don’t get a choice in that,” The Keymaster held up the key to her mind, “I can make keys to wherever you are, and so can my daughters. As an adopted Pantheon member you’re an aunt now, and you’ve got aunt duties that you’re not getting out of. We’ll just keep coming to see you, whether you feel like it or not.”
Isabelle looked at her knees. She knew he was right. She felt nauseous, but she knew he was right. “Good.” The words came out slowly, “Don’t let me isolate myself.”
The Keymaster shrugged. “We are avatars of access. I don’t think there’s any isolation we can’t bridge.”