Gale stumbled forth from the underground jungle, pulling a giant stinger free from her web-woven armor. As the poison slowly evaporated from her body (doing all the damage it could before disappearing), she looked up to see a quiet, stony corridor in front of her.
It was dark, and yet… she could’ve sworn she glimpsed stars in her peripheral vision. She checked her watch. Midday. Then her depth meter. Her vision was blurry, but that was definitely a four-digit number. Maybe the hornet stings were finally getting to her? Or something in those jungle spores? There was no way she could be viewing the night sky right now.
She decided to investigate. The starlight felt good, though its presence should’ve been more offputting to Gale. She frowned at that, but then, her eyes went wide upon seeing the glittering, pink pool spread out before her.
As strange as the jungle’s honey pools were, they at least had an explanation. Gale had never seen anything like this, though. It was serene. Otherworldly. Beautiful. Perhaps this was the “Hallow” she’d heard rumors about? She drew near to the pool’s edge, but stopped there. It’d be foolish to get any closer, she was more than reasonable enough to know that…
So she dipped the tip of her pickaxe into the drink instead. The liquid clung to it, and Gale’s eyes went wide once again as she watched her tool split apart into perfectly shaped ingots and shadow scales, which clattered to the ground. There wasn’t enough to completely destroy it, but about half of the pick’s head had been reduced to its separate ingredients.
Hurrying to scoop up the materials so she could rebuild her pickaxe, Gale was completely caught off guard by a bony arm slamming into her back. Not even her obsidian shield charm could keep her on her feet as the complete and utter surprise of the moment sent her falling into the shimmering pool… but not before she twisted around to get a good look at her skeletal assailant. Where it should have been, though, she saw nothing at all… save for the translucent hand of an otherwise invisible foe. Could this be another effect of the—
She broke the surface of the pool, and the pink tore away to open up a sea of stars around her. The ceiling of the cave above her shrunk away, and she was alone, suspended, floating.
Or was she descending, with agonizing slowness? Moving was almost impossible. Her eyes could look around, but Gale’s limbs were unresponsive. Not… unfeeling, exactly… It was like trying to force herself to move in a dream, which was, unfortunately, something Gale happened to be terrible at.
She felt her gear, her armor, trying to come apart. But she focused the power she used to weave those cursed bones and cobwebs together in the first place, her ability to Craft, and it held together. Of course, putting her attention there instead of on herself made it easy for the shimmer to seep into her own skin… but she’d likely just end up invisible, like the skeleton.
Finally, her back felt the bottom of the pool against it. She couldn’t see it, but maybe now she had something to push against… except, something was wrong. Her back felt the cool stone through her armor. And then her whole spine felt it. And her legs, and her chest, and her stomach, and finally her entire head and outstretched arms. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation of cold, damp stone pressing against the entirety of her volume, like, all three dimensions of it, was unmistakable. And the way the feeling had spread across her body… Gale realized she’d just sunk through solid stone.
It was also here that she noticed the lack of both the need of and the ability to draw breath. Her lungs, in whatever kind of lucid stasis Gale was experiencing, were full of stone. The input from her eyes suggested frightening openness, that she was floating in the great expanse of space. But the tactile input from her entire body screamed claustrophobia at the same time.
How long had it been? Seconds? Minutes? Surely not hours. She passed through a patch of dirt. It tickled, all over. Felt the softness of moss as she just barely missed an open cave and continued to sink. She could make out shapes, if she wanted to, not by constellating the stars, but rather in the inky void. Dark openings in the openness, like rooms, other rooms where other humans, some of them even other Gales, were fighting and exploring and crafting, and some of them were sinking too, just like her, and she made eye contact with one of them for a split second, and wanted to wave, to say “you too, huh,” but even though she couldn’t, the shared moment between them was enough to communicate all that and more.
Or not. Maybe she was just seeing nonexistent shapes. Maybe she was losing her fucking mind, trapped forever in this—
She slowly surfaced from the ceiling of some unknown cave, life returning to a body that finally took up its own space, and did not have to share it with solid stone, and oh gods how do you breathe again? So she lay there, coughing and sputtering in the dark, her spit giving a dull glow as her biology came awake…
… and finally began reacting to the shimmer it was soaked with.