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Mr. Hoojgruggwidd very slowly raised his heavy feeling eyelids to open his sore, weary eyes. He was not too surprised to see very little effect of this action. Pitch darkness was of course something with which he was very familiar in what, he had to admit, had effectively become his new home: the boundless and seemingly inescapable wilderness. Something felt different though. A different sort of pitch darkness, as odd as that sounded. He did not think he could exactly see what was different yet but some of his senses were picking up cues that told him there was empty space close to him, with some sort of boundaries to that space a short distance away. Could they be walls? The idea felt very comforting to him after all his endless wandering around the plains. When you could not escape them, even open spaces became maddeningly confining. The usual itchy long grasses were conspicuous by their absence on his lower legs and the ground felt harder and more even and level than the surfaces to which his raw, blistered feet were accustomed.

He strained his vision to try to see these supposed walls. Any surfaces were the same pitch black as everything else, but as he cast his eyes around he began to convince himself that he could just about make out soft sort of edges, a very slightly pale golden color, a pale, golden black. They did not look how he would have expected a room's edges to look. They were more like bands of very dim, soft light. They formed the shape of a cube, a cubic room. That was all he could see. Where had the plains gone? Was this freedom? If it was, then he certainly did not feel very happy about it. Was it safe? Was anyone here? He shouted "Hello" and his own voice sounded hoarse and echoed in a way that just did not sound quite right for an empty room that size.

He sighed. Bizarre environments did not seem to shock him these days. They seemed to be almost the norm for him now. The new normal. His hunger, fatigue and dehydration could not have helped but something in him somehow just knew that all these unexpected phenomena were to be, well, expected, in this place. But he could not remember why. There was so much he could not remember. He had so much time to think but thinking never seemed to get him much closer to figuring out what the hell was going on, so he had started to develop a sort of stoic, resigned acceptance of the inherent weirdness of his new life. And the discomfort of it. There was not much fear of the unknown, or in his case of even the seemingly impossible, anymore. He knew on the plains he could likely die at any moment and he had so little control over it that the fear and even his curiosity had massively faded, leaving his cynicism, impatience and a little arrogance. He could not even reminisce about his past before the plains because his memory of those times was an almost impenetrable fog.

His eyes were still on the bottom edge of the wall in front of him. He could have sworn that the soft, pale golden line had pulsated. As this room, if it even was a room, seemed to be empty, Mr. Hoojgruggwidd decided to walk forwards towards the wall in front of him. With each step he took, the golden room edges seemed to pulsate more vigorously and they enlarged. He wondered if they could harm him. That would be typical, he reflected. He took another step forward and the golden lines were now very clearly visible. At the corners they had expanded rapidly in curves, rounding off the corners like rising orange flames licking at the walls. The walls themselves and floor and ceiling were all still as black as the darkest night sky which made Mr. Hoojgruggwidd wonder whether he could actually just be suspended in outer space. A space without stars at this point perhaps. He took one more step forward and his leg wobbled a little as he put it down. The golden lines shimmered as if they copied his leg's movement. He cautiouslessly pulled his right sleeve down over his hand, which seemed to hurt, and reached his arm out and swung it down at the front wall so that the tip of his cuff brushed against it. A green, blurry, multi-sided shape spun extremely rapidly on the wall around his cuff and instantly expanded out from view, at which point the golden wall edges rotated clockwise in a circle in front of him, changing shape as they did so, such that he was no longer inside a cube. It had many more sides--ten or twelve, perhaps a dodecahedron. So was there a wall or not? The way his shirt sleeve had hit it, it did seem like there was something there but he could not say for sure that it was solid.

He abandoned his cautious approach, quickly thrust his hand back out of his sleeve and raised it up to tap his fingers against the wall. He felt a sort of fuzzy coldness, like ice but immensely softer, not in the way that ice cream is softer but in the way that a gas, or a gust of wind, is softer than a block of ice to the touch. It was more solid than air though, and firmer than a liquid. Perhaps some very exotic sort of fabric. He had no idea. Anyway, it was not anything like a hard brick wall, and there was not a door, so he decided there was nothing for it but to try to push through it. He gritted his teeth and strode forwards, into the soft coldness. He jolted as he felt the strange cold make contact with his face and arms and, continuing through the so-called wall, clenched his teeth tighter as he felt it glide in a chilling band over his whole body. As he had passed the golden wall edges, he noticed they faded into a lush green color and actually seemed to turn into serrated plants like brambles or creepers. It was so dark he could not be sure if they really were plants, but hopefully it would not matter.

Beyond his previously golden cube or golden dodecahedron, there was now a corridor lined with the serrated creepers. In fact, he reflected, rather than being lined with them, it seemed to him it was probably actually composed of them. They were not arranged in the way he would expect plants to grow. Instead they formed an intricate lattice, like a thick green spider's web or perhaps the veins of a leaf skeleton. There was a noise.

"Hellooo!" called a loud, female voice.

"Hello. Who's there?" replied Mr. Hoojgruggwidd uncertainly.

There was silence, so after a moment's hesitation, he just resumed walking along the serrated green corridor.

"It was you! You did it! You!" the voice scolded.

"Huh?" reacted Mr. Hoojgruggwidd.

"You! You! You! Why did you drink the green mud? Why must you stay here? You've ruined it all! It was you!"

"I can assure you, whoever you are, I wasn't sticking around deliberately." he said firmly. Once again there was silence, but the serrated boundaries of the corridor were moving a lot now, in sort of spiky waves, and some of them scratched past Mr. Hoojgruggwidd's shoulders and caught on his sleeves. Although it hurt, he ignored them and kept walking onward.

The web of green that defined the sort of corridor widened out in front of him, but he could still feel the plants scratching his sore skin. He looked up and could see pale, grayish shapes a short distance in front of him. It could be someone's skin visible in the shadowy gloom. Yes, it must be the person that had been calling out to him. Why the hell was she so annoyed with him? How did she even know him?

"Who are you?" he demanded.

A pale hand reached out of the darkness and pointed an index finger with a long, white nail on it, which jabbed at his chest.

"It was you! It was you! You're a disaster, a blight on this land! You!" With each word, her nail spiked harder into his sore flesh. He felt a little faint.

"Y-y-you! I-it w-wa-as y-o-ou!" her words seemed to somehow double and triple up upon themselves like echoes at full volume and at the same time Mr. Hoojgruggwidd shivered as he saw the pointing fingers had multiplied and they continued to do so, a bit like how images seem to spread out when rotating a kaleidoscope, until there must have been about twenty hands all pointing at him, twenty voices all berating him, twenty very sharp nails jabbing in and out. The pain seemed to radiate out from those points until it felt like all of his skin was absolutely burning. He cried out in pain and fell to the ground. Everything was dark again, then there was a very loud rushing noise in his ears, getting louder, like a tremendous roar of air, cold, then the hot soreness of his skin, then cold again, rushing faster and faster, the green web of creepers flew by in elongated streams, the golden lines from earlier flew past as well like fuzzy laser beams, and then they diffused and reformed into sort of crispy, sharp little rainbows that were so bright and intense that his eyes hurt like they had never hurt before, and then the noise and light and motion became so impossibly intense that he could not even form any kind of impression of it; it just utterly and completely overwhelmed every one of his senses.

He woke up, panting and confused. The searing pain was there. All over his skin. It was real. He looked up at the peachy gray clouds. The sun had set, a few minutes ago he imagined, but he was burnt. Sunburn! He had fallen asleep in the sun and he was still on the plains. So that was a dream. What a dream! He felt more tired now than before he fell asleep. He felt sick too and had a headache. He shivered. He needed more sleep and he desperately needed a drink but he could not immediately think where he could find either. He was sure he did not want to try sleeping here again. He remembered the tadpole men. Were they part of the dream? No, they had been real, unless it was delerium. Anyway, he really needed that drink. He cursed at his own thoughtlessness at losing his way when he followed the voice of those weird tadpole men. It would probably take him hours to find one of his little patches of mud to drink now. Still, it would not be the first time. He spent most of his days just walking around these endless plains. Oh, the pain of that sunburn. He wondered if any of his wet drinking mud could soothe it, and he set off in search of it.