Nowhere To Go But Up

Ghosts of the Past

They found themselves in the eye of a veritable cyclone-albeit not a very large one. The surroundings were a boundless void, with the exception of the fragments of... something whirling around them. Marx said what everyone was thinking. "Whoa..."

Daroach made it abundantly clear that he couldn't make heads or tails of what was happening. "Any idea what this means, little guy?"

Elfilin shivered slightly. "This guy's messed up..."

"Alright everyone, if we want to get anywhere in here, we'll have to do something about that." Taranza gathered everyone's attention. "If this is what's going on in his mind, it should stop spinning if we can get him to calm down, right?"

"Well, yeah. I don't know how we'd go about that, though." Elfilin scanned the surroundings. "Hey, that thing doesn't look like it's moving. What is it?" The five of them approached the item on the dark abyss that passes for a floor.

"I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure this is a box. Looks like it's for some kind of puzzle." Daroach picked up the box and shook it a bit. A rattling sound came from inside.

Elfilin tore open the flap on the top of the box. "Wow, that's a really clean tear! Perks of being in a dream, I guess."

As Daroach dumped out the contents of the box, Kirby picked up a few of them and tried fitting them together. "Looks like we're trying to make some kind of building. It's not just a picture."

Everyone chipped in to help solve the puzzle. Marx couldn't really help because he didn't exactly have hands, but everyone else was at least able to put in a piece or two. "Is this... the facility?" Daroach asked no one in particular.

When the puzzle finally took shape, the fragments in the cyclone began spinning higher and higher, closer and closer together, until they formed into a building identical to the one they had just built in the puzzle. It slowly lowered itself in front of the five of them. Carefree as ever, Marx hopped through the front door.

The rest of them followed. Elfilin zipped around the inside, eyes darting towards everything he could see. "Wow, these people are blurry!"

Taranza regarded the faded walls of the room they were in. "I've never seen anything like this before... What is this?"

"I can't see anything that we can really interact with. We should check out more of this place." At Daroach's signal, they split into two groups. Elfilin, Daroach, and Taranza went one way, while Kirby and Marx went the other. Kirby and Marx quickly realized they were at a dead end, so they hurried to go after the other three. Right as they caught up, Taranza noticed something.

"Hey, look at this door. Everything else in here is greyscale, but this door is brown." He twisted the handle. "It opens..." The room that lay on the other side was a bedroom. It looked to be for someone young. "Going off of common sense, there should be something we can do in here. But I can't see anything."

"Maybe it's not an object. We might just need to do something with ourselves." Elfilin floated the idea.

"Or maybe..." Daroach pulled the empty puzzle box out of his cape. He set it on the floor. Suddenly, a scene began to take shape in the middle of the room.

A monochromatic, very young-looking Magolor materialized on the floor. He was holding pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with an almost-finished puzzle in front of him. He fit one of the pieces where it belonged, and you could almost see his eyes sparkling with excitement. Once he fit the other one into place, he got up and dashed to the door. "Look! Look! I made the whole picture! It looks like those tree things you've been telling me about!"

Someone else came into the room. He looked like the blurry people from earlier, except he wasn't blurry. "That's awesome! You solved it very fast. How about this? For the rest of the day, I'll let you do whatever you want. ...Within reason, that is."