With her medical analysis complete, and all her other duties still demanding her attention, Tanya left Canard in Wildwing’s supervision, gathered her thoughts, and set out with the intention of returning to her lab. Winterwing was her moody shadow, reverting back to his previous silence. 

“Tanya! Hold up,” Duke called.

Tanya stopped in the corridor, and Winterwing came to a halt beside her, the awkward third in the conversation. She looked back at Duke, exhausted, and waited for him to catch up to them.

“Gotta question for you,” Duke lowered his voice, as if he was concerned with being overheard. “What exactly does it take to leave dimensional limbo?”

“Leave?” she asked.

“Yeah, like what are the circumstances that you spring out of there?”

She wracked her brain. “I mean, my knowledge stops at the theoretical, I can tell you what the math says, that’s it.”

“Okay, run me the numbers.”

“You’re not supposed to be able to. That’s why it was the perfect prison. The barriers between spaces are not supposed to be per-per-passable. At all. Not safely.”

“Aight, aight,” Duke nodded. “Then how do you suppose Canard did, today?”

Tanya had no answer. Canard did not escape from limbo. He could not have. The technology simply did not exist, not on Puckworld. And, even if he had managed it somehow, she could not think of any logical way that he would have been able to pinpoint his entry into a physical universe exactly where he needed to to be discovered by them.

The only one who had managed anything like that was Dragaunus, and presumably the Artificers before him.

Duke was right to be suspicious. She had been reluctant to say so in front of Canard. Or  Wildwing, who had finally perked up for the first time in weeks. She did not want to be the voice of caution, that reminded their leader that he could not just be happy that his friend had returned.

“No, you’re right,” Tanya said. “It didn’t happen by chance. It couldn’t have. Someone placed him there, to be found.”

“The list of someones is very short.”

“Unfortunately,” she agreed, “but, I don’t really get it. I don’t get….” She looked nervously to Winterwing, “All these things seem like they should be connected, but I don’t see how.”

Duke took notice of Winterwing now too, “What about you?”

“What about me?” Winterwing echoed. “I was down here the whole time.”

“Sure. But you seem pretty disinterested in your childhood friend appearin’.”

Winterwing blinked, before stating with deadly enunciation, “I’m not Wildwing.”

“Except you are.”

“Whatever. I don’t know that guy,” Winterwing said, then, forestalling further argument, “or anyone resembling that guy.”

Tanya considered this. It was an interesting revelation, but not relevant in any way she could imagine.

“So, what do we do?” Duke asked.

“Wait and see, I guess,” Tanya said.

“I gotta admit, I’m not a huge fan of that plan.”

“No, I doubt anyone here is, but-”

Her sentence was cut off by the hallway being plunged first into darkness, and then the red glow of the emergency lighting flicking on. 

They were now part of a lost, wandering section of the Pond.

Tanya had been in a few of the building shifts, and had decided to start coming prepared, knowing inevitably it would come around to her again. She had modified the omnitool, which had required giving up some of its more esoteric functions, to free up space for observing distortions in spacetime. Drake One could not see into the lost sections, and something inside them kept any recorded data that she tried to extract from the usual surveillance equipment worthless. Perhaps she could glean something useful as she stood right in the middle of it and observed in real time.

She was interrupted before she could start.

“Does anyone else hear that?” Winterwing asked.

There was a strange sound, a rhythm of fizzle and a pop that came from down the hallway, but was gradually growing closer. The three of them stood, frozen in place, as they listened to it grow louder, with the cadence of footsteps, until the cause became clear. The emergency lighting was overloading, growing far too bright, and then bursting as it exceeded its capacity. The overloard came toward them in a tidy line, one light after another, drawing closer and closer, plunging the lost section behind it into absolute darkness. It blew out the lights over their heads, and continued on.

“I’ve got a flashlight,” Tanya said, and though she had no way to know that it would not overload as well, it was better than nothing. She deployed and activated it, and cast it around at the floor. She confirmed that, indeed, both drakes were still with her.

She cast it down the hallway where the noise had begun, and the beam came to rest on what appeared to be a bulge in the floor, which seemed to be pressing into the compartment from below. First a couple of centimeters in height, it grew larger and taller as they watched. The steel finally gave way to stress and tore as it pressed upward, a screeching wound in the dark.

There could only be something underneath pressing inward. She did not know what could have possibly been strong enough to do so. She still did not know where the shifting rooms went, and what else existed in there with them while they were gone.

Tanya deployed the omnitool’s high powered laser. It was not truly a weapon, and could only sustain a short burst while on the tool’s limited power supply, but it would do for defense. Duke followed suit and activated his saber. 

Winterwing chimed in, “I don’t suppose anyone has any extra weap-”

“No,” they lied simultaneously.

The floor plating ripped apart. After weeks of assuming the phenomenon of disappearance was a saurian invention, she was surprised to find that what greeted them was not bipedal. It was not a recognizable thing at all. What emerged more resembled black, dirty, viscous crude oil. It moved as if it were a fluid, and as her light shone on it, it refracted a rainbow sheen of color across the scum of skin. It pushed through the hole, seeming to struggle, forcing the wound wider.

As it emerged, the shape of the thing changed, and rather than a fat blob, it became a thinner, dripping cable. It kept growing, took up all the vertical space in the otherwise immense compartment. An end resolved into something resembling a head, like that of a carnivorous beast, with a muzzle full of teeth and far, far too many red eyes, most of which fixed upon the three ducks before it, though a few drifted and darted to examine the dark. It opened that maw and made a scream unlike anything she had ever heard before, removing all doubt that it was not friendly.

Tanya’s laser punched straight through that open mouth, and exploded clean through the back of its head, scarring the ceiling plating behind it. The form of the creature collapsed and twitched, losing its cohesion and spreading in a black puddle across the floor as if it were a popped soap bubble.

“Nice shot”, Duke mumbled, awkwardly holding his saber.

“That’s why you get an annual eye exam,” she said.

“Noted.”

“What is that thing?” Winterwing questioned.

“It doesn’t match the structure of anything found on Earth,” Tanya observed. She left unsaid that wherever they were at the moment was also likely not on Earth.

The puddle moved, twitching. It swelled into a tight bubble of black malignant mass again, and then pushed out a head, then improvised limbs, and came to resemble the dripping form of the angry animal of tar. It had too many claws for its paws, and eyes that smeared down the side of its neck, all of them now perfectly focused on the three of them. It opened its maw again and as before, perhaps a little more angry, and screamed at them again.

“This is out of my field of expertise,” Tanya said.

“Mine too,” Duke agreed. He grasped her wrist his free hand, “Run. Run.”

Winterwing did not have to be told twice. He dutifully sprinted after them, down into the black corridor, with only the light of Tanya’s bouncing flashlight to lead the way. She did not recall this section of the Pond being this long, and was certain that at any moment they were simply going to smash into a wall. They never did. There was a red dot of light ahead that resolved as they ran, and she thought for a moment that it was a second set of glistening angry eyes, but as they came closer, it appeared instead to be a dim junction, where the emergency lighting had not yet burned out.

Behind them, the creature screamed and gave chase. She did occasionally catch a glimpse of it over a shoulder, though she should have known better. All turning to look would do was slow her down. As the thing ran behind them, it crashed against the confines of the hall, apparently so distracted by its anger that it did not care how much of itself it left behind in the tears it gouged in the walls. Its screaming was punctuated with their footfalls. Her lungs were beginning to burn. Winterwing, who had not been training with the team, was already beginning to lag behind.

They came upon the junction that split in either direction at a right angle. Duke broke for the right, on impulse, and she followed him. Winterwing stumbled around the turn, nearly falling on the slick floor. The creature leaped after them, unable to cease its forward momentum, and instead of making the turn, slammed into the far wall, puncturing it and trapping itself. It thrashed wildly, trying to pull its deformed body from the paneling.

It gave up on trying to pull out, and instead pressed forward, sliding its slick hide fully into the steel and wiring, and was gone.

For a moment, the three of them stood there–-well, two of them stood there while Wintering doubled over, breathing hard—and waited for the creature to reemerge and give chase. She flashed her light around wildly, trying to pinpoint any new spots of bulging damage from which it might return.  They listened for its screaming reverberating in the walls. For all their waiting, the only noise they heard was their own ragged breathing.

The lights turned on. The real lights. They were reattached to main power. The section was no longer lost.

With the laser still at the ready, Tanya carefully approached the huge hole where the creature had vanished. With its size and speed, she had expected it to have left a puncture several feet deep, at the least, and that it would now be loose somewhere in the superstructure. The damage merely stopped at the surface level. The plating was destroyed and would need to be replaced. The wiring and ductwork just inches behind, that supported ventilation and the generator lattice, remained untouched. There was no where for the creature to have disappeared to at its size, and yet, it was gone. It had made a superficial hole that it could not have possibly fit into, and was gone.

Duke stood at the junction, looking at the disaster in the corridor they had sprinted through with a quiet, appreciative whistle. Winterwing was now fully collapsed to the floor, declaring that he was going to vomit.

“This isn’t where we were,” Duke observed.

Tanya looked at their surroundings, “I think we’re under the gym? We dropped two floors.” Which should have been impossible, as they had run in a straight line the entire time.

Her communicator was beeping, Wildwing pinging them now that they were back in reality. She did not know what to say. She sent an acknowledging ping, but wasn’t quite ready to give an answer yet. That would be enough to let them know they were alive, while she assessed. She looked to her omnitool, and then to the hole in the wall that stopped a few more inches in, that had apparently accommodated and then dissipated a creature five times larger than any of them. She gave the broken paneling a small kick. “Why doesn’t anything make sense?”

 “What’s the problem?” Duke asked.

“It just disappeared!” Tanya said, exasperated, gesturing at the wall.

“Yes?”

“Things aren’t supposed to be able to do that,” Tanya said. “Mass has to go somewhere! To just appear like that and disappear somewhere else should take a massive amount of energy, just like the sections disappearing and reappearing should. It has to. That’s what everything is literally built on! It’s distorting readings and breaking recordings but I can’t measure it! I should be able to measure it! I should be able to identify it! I spent seven years of my life quantifying every single interaction of particle, so where are they? Where is the energy? Where’s the field?”

“Maybe it’s somethin’ you can’t measure,” Duke shrugged.

“That’s impossible!”

“Whaddya mean impossible?”

“Energy that isn't measurable doesn’t exist, it can never exist in a working framework of physics.”

“….So, what if it does?”

“There has to be action and reaction! Anything else is nonsense! Something to nothing isn’t reality! That’s fantasy! Magic!”

Duke nodded at this and said, with careful diplomacy, “Tanya, you’ve seen magic. You’ve seen a whole universe built on magic. You fought a wizard that turned into a dragon, twice.”

Tanya made an exasperated noise, pointing accusingly at the hole, “How the heck do I safeguard a fusion generator against nonsense?”

“Dunno, but I think the first order of business is not gettin’ eaten.”

Winterwing appeared to have caught his breath at last. He had stood up again, quietly listening in to their argument, while surveying the ruined hall they had run through. He looked at the eviscerated panels and wiring that the creature had pried loose in its chase. They could not even see the full extent of the damage, beyond the glimpse of the working light in the junction. Further beyond, the lights that had blown appeared to remain functionless, turning that corridor into a maw of broken steel teeth. 

“Is it always like this?” Winterwing asked, interrupting their exchange.