[Issue] The Abyssal Shelf

[Samantha McManus]

"Robin, can you hear me? It's Sam. Can you get to your dad?"

[Narrator]

The thought reaches with... unintentional results.

Over on the stoop where Roofing-Material-Robin is lieing the tarred up shingles stir and from them emerges an arm, followed by a shoulder and then the rest of Robin. She looks ashen, like most color has been drained out of her and she goes into a hacking cough that results in a thick glob of tar.

"Oh that tastes so bad, you guys..." she says, regaining a little color, even if that color is mostly green.

And then she proceeds to have some kind of full-body seizure that results in a third arm growing out of the side of her chest, though it doesn't look anything like one that should belong to her, it's pale with reddish-freckles and reaches up to grab her face, turning her hair green where the pale fingers touch her roots. And with her two normal arms flailing she falls over backwards into the ankle-deep water.

It seems the message isn't getting through so much as it is being interpreted - very loosely - by the Spark she's reaching through.

[Samantha McManus]

Oh for the love of...

"You. Find. Will."

[Narrator]

The next change is subtle. Just a couple of almost imperceptible changes ripple through Robin that smooth out her hair, fix a couple scrapes and bruises and restore her pinkish color to her cheeks and hair.

The follow-up is a lot more noticeable because she turns into a green beagle and lets out a confused bark.

Communication seems... awkward at best. Concepts are getting through but not the actual message. On the upside, she does feel a subtle connection in the Spark, memories of a young Robin running around an apartment as a dog, sniffing at everything, trying to find what household object Will is hiding as. And when she does, so does the Spark light up with a faint connection that let's Sam follow along to Will's Spark, where she is immediately inundated with countless different scenes. Some of that is to be expected, with the Mirror Will has split himself into different pieces and those fragments are all reflected in the Spark, but that wouldn't account for the sheer scale. It's like looking into a mirror reflected in a mirror, endlessly stretching across the void it's Will. And Will. And Will. All Sparks connect to other worlds, some more proliferated than others, but Will's is everywhere.

They'd seen a fragment of his used to power Conduit's home but thought nothing of it at the time. An artifact of accidental and violent dimension travel. But that piece and the one that landed in their Antarctica are far from the only ones. Will's trajectory across dimensions scattered pieces in countless worlds and she can see glimpses of them all in the Spark.

[Samantha McManus]

At first Sam has some hope as she rides the wave to Will's spark, but she's quickly overwhelmed trying to get her bearings in it. She tries to center herself to make sense of it.

[Narrator]

The more time she spends just focusing and trying to ground herself the more the abstractions and shapes take more concrete forms, like a bit of Astral metaphorical translation is taking hold. She can still sense the mind-bending shapes and energy-flows beneath it but she's slowly getting used to reading them a bit better. It's not unlike viewing thoughts as mindscapes though here it is exclusively colored by her own interpretation.

Will's Spark becomes a chain of little grey, featureless figures holding hands like a garland. Next to it Robin's is a large Crucible full of molten liquid reaching for the edge with pseudopods and continuously sloshing back down. Nearby a large boulder is rolling back and forth made up of nothing but arms that are folded in to create the roughly round shape, every once in a while unfolding a couple to brace itself or adjust it's trajectory.

[Samantha McManus]

As she starts to make sense of this, Sam tries to focus her mind on the part of the chain that has the most ties to Robin.

[Narrator]

And that's when one of the clay-people grows a mouth and begins swaying and chanting, making little waves with their arms that induce the next one in the chain to begin swaying as well.

"Sith co nem nem co doman."

Soon the entire chain is chanting and has encircled Sam. (How did that happen? Did they move when she wasn't looking? She's been looking right at them the whole time.)

"Doman fo ním nert hi cach."

The other figures in the chain open a mouth in their featureless heads as well though they're only silently mouthing the words.

"An forlann lan do mil, mid co saith Sam hi ngam."

There's a tug at something deep inside, past her mind and at something older. Someone older. This is not for her, just something that resonates with someone or something through her Spark, a shaking branch that rustles all it's leaves. But feel it she can, echoing through the chain of Wills from one in particular, kneeling in the water and a growing haze of red staining it. A frowning Ashlie has her hands folded in front of her face, both index-fingers extended across her mouth.

[Narrator]

And then what little ground she's standing on above this vision in the chanting circle disappears and she's falling. Sliding down a tunnel of fragments of memories and impressions from countless Wills in countless worlds. Unlike with the other Sparks, this one seems to not be split among different versions so much as it's in tune with all of them equally. Like it is among the various Legions from the mirror. Like they were all originally one. There's little dwelling on the realization as she hits a smooth, hard surface showing the view of a dorm-room but she slides off of it, gravity only really existing in the abstract sense that Sam is being pulled in a particular direction and in this case it's a sharp-turn/sideways/sliding off the inside of the Mirror and towards the reverberations of the chant.

And then her eyes snap open.