Hunter floated, motionless, for what seemed to be a very long time. He looked around without moving his head, or his eyes very much. Spread out around him were strands of shimmering blue, and he floated amidst them without touching any. Kelp I think, Hunter managed to get his thoughts moving slowly, how pretty. In the ocean, twice in one week.

  Occasionally, he would blink, everything would go black for an indeterminate amount of time, and then he would see the ocean again. Must be near the bottom, everything’s so quiet and dim, except for the kelp or whatever. His surroundings were a uniform gray, dark and flat like waking up in the middle of the night, except for the blue ribbons around him, the black ones off in the middle distance, and some dull, burnt orange ones past that.

  After a few seconds, or hours, he didn’t know because he kept losing track of his train of thought every time he blinked, he realized he wasn’t exactly floating, he was suspended from one of the strands of kelp, and he felt the oddest sensation when he concentrated on it.

  Once, the trader that brought medicines to the redoubt had changed suppliers, or there was a mistake, or something Hunter wasn’t exactly sure about. He was so, what’s the word, contrite? But I thought it was fine. All of the drugs he brought, that particular trip, didn’t come in pills or liquids, but tablets you had to drop into water and then drink the whole glass. Hunter thought they were great, watching the blue or yellow fizz dance up, a tiny show before he’d have to take his medicine.

  Effervescent, is that what they called it? How the tablets looked, slowly bubbling as they dissolved into nothingness, that was the feeling coming out of Hunter’s back when he thought about it. It wasn’t alarming, by itself, but he did wonder what exactly was fizzing out of him and into what he was starting to suspect certainly wasn’t the bottom of the ocean.

  He blinked, forgot mostly about the possibility that he was dissolving, and floated for a while longer until one of those pretty blue strands started dancing erratically, then slapped him in the face. It only lasted briefly, but it gave him the sudden and disturbing knowledge that he only had a few minutes left to effervesce, before he’d be a lightly tinted glass of medicine ready to drink down.

  That’s not very long, he thought, and while he wasn’t entirely sure, Hunter guessed that he was able to focus better than before the slap. He looked around and found he wasn’t between a few, sparse ribbons, those were just the ones that were lit up. He was cradled, he was cocooned, he was attached to hundreds, thousands of them, but they were all dull, lifeless, transparent.

  There were too many to understand what exactly they were for, but somehow Hunter recognized the strands that were full of shimmering light. That one, he tried to point but couldn’t, wants to tell me the emergency’s over. Oh right, the emergency. Those are, huh, telling me I got better at things. That’s nice. Oh, and that one just wants to be friends.

  The strand of kelp that had slapped at him tensed again and then latched firmly onto Hunter’s head, and all he saw for a good long while afterwards was blue.

  Once the flood of notifications had stopped, only two strands were left shining fully, but Hunter could start to see the slightest increases in the luminescence of the others. He made the mistake of blinking, and when he was aware again, they had appreciably lit even more.

  He noticed somehow, between one moment and the next, that a vast number of the black strands he had been trying to keep a wary eye on simply vanished. He guessed, Maybe they just went clear, too. Or they’re gone, who knows how the flip this place works.

  Hunter checked to see if he had a timer, found there were at least four more hours of the slow, confusing nothingness left to endure, and would have sighed if he could. Four more hours until he could get moving, until he could move at all, four more hours until he could see anything more than a sparsely populated expanse of gray, until he could see what’s next.

  In the meantime, he remembered he had his small Infra file of notes, Uncle Ernie’s voice floating up to remind him, Keep it on paper. Things update, things change, and you won’t know why you planned on four when it clearly says five in the Infrapage. It would have to do, though, since apparently he didn’t bring his notebook with him, wherever he was.

  He tried to keep his thoughts simple:

  After that list, which Hunter tentatively named in his head, Things I should have already thought about but I got dodge/death-punch-happy, he let himself drift. Meditation, the skill, wasn’t working, but as a concept he figured there was nothing wrong with it, and so he centered himself, in a slow, visualizing manner that he hadn’t had to put himself through in a while.

  It was, Hunter reflected, even with the ominously peaceful surroundings, a long four hours to go.

  Spoiler: Spoiler

  something like

  this. And then I realized, no, that's stupid, by no means should I do that. The formatting alone, wow.