page_0: "You land on something that immediately ceases to be alive.

\"Are you the new girl?\" asks a voice.

\"No, but I had the good fortune to meet her in passing\" you respond graciously, referring to the thing that broke your fall.

There follows an interrogation as to whether you are a real woman or just a man wearing a judge's wig and gown. Declining to philosophize, you explain you are en route to the courthouse to pass ruling on a case of principal importance.

\"I am Miss Thunk,\" says the voice, \"and this is my dressing room. I do not know the quart-house of which you speak, but you are welcome to stay and judge our pageant.\"

You recall the Miss City pageant, in which the most beautiful girl in the City is thrown down a sinkhole in sacrifice to the Ocular Superiors. That is held topside, where you are not; however, it turns out you have landed in the sacrificial pit, where the most drop-dead taffable of these victims survive the drop (it merely selects for skull thickness) and subsist by hibernating in centerfold poses. They desire only one thing, which is to throw a \"Miss Sinkhole\" pageant, but need a judge who can read their busty braille dots and evaluate their beauty."

page_1: "\"Am I pretty?\", squawks Miss Thunk, bringing it to a point. The query is echoed by a hundred walls or mouths.

The gavel in your front pocket is shifting, and you move to rearrange it before it falls out and lands on your foot. Prudently tight-lipped as always, you insist you are not that kind of judge, whereupon the voices accuse you of being a Hammerite. So much for being in the closet. At the base of your sinkhole is a pit used by the Miss City contestants to make things disappear. You are one of those things.

The braille dots once again align in your favor, and you are plunged into a morass of radioactive beauty slime. You have landed in the lost sinkhole Mundivert, once home to the ancient Visionaries, who had the biggest eyeballs in history but still got blindsided by batrachomyomachia. You can't remember when you last saw a sign from the Ocular Superiors, but a course once set must not be doubted, especially when you don't know who is watching. Your jurisprudence is rewarded. Another vision upgrade, this time allowing you to see shadows, reveals your next instruction: it says \"Build a helicopter\".

You don't know what that is, but the Ocular Superiors explain it all. Compared to their usual \"go this way, you blind galoot\", these directions merely take longer to follow. The Visionaries' tablets employ a multi-dimensional brailligraphic script that feels"

page_2: "suspiciously like random dots. You are told not to meddle with them, and to instead pick up opaquely complex gizmos from their ant-infested tunnels. Channeling the Superiors' distinctly asympathetic magic, you transmute this ur-matter into a helicopter all too quickly. Programming the autopilot per instructions, you emerge from hell and fly to the courthouse.

You know it's the courthouse because of the EAX profile (\"type 3 - bathroom\") and a sign from the Ocular Superiors (\"The way forward is clear, unlike your corneas. You're welcome.\"). You set off for your assigned courtroom, reviewing the case in your mind and taking a few practice swings with your gavel. You are halfway through a prayer of thanks to the Builder (for building Ocular Superiors) when one of your feet fails to register on what ought to be marble floor, and you are once again treading air. This time, vestibular anarchy reigns a full six seconds before it is brutally abrogated by the sinkhole-tilled rubble of some lurking foundation. Thus initiates your eternal fall into the Great Sinkhole Beyond, where being prudently tight-lipped is no longer a matter of choice.

Overlooking your last worldly achievement is the final message of an Ocular Superior (also dead, having fallen down the same sinkhole as you). It reads:

\"Seriously, don't mention it. No, really. Stop. You're too kind.\""

page_3: ".











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