Fern took a moment to gather herself from the nightmare, or whatever it was. It felt at once like only a moment and all of an eternity had passed since she had been puppeting one of her own warped corpses through the mildew-stained labyrinth. The Hospital felt almost like a bitter return home, or perhaps like the embrace of your favorite blanket moments before it becomes evident that someone used it to mop up the remnants of a stomach bug while you weren't looking.

   For the first time in a long time, she also found herself very nearly alone. The digital monitor was silent. The bloody gash in the wall appeared to have scabbed over again beneath a couple of oversized [ADHESIVE MEDICAL STRIPS]. Even her inventory felt a little emptier, and the only things left in there that were hypothetical sapient were either in some sort of stasis or antisocial enough to manifest a mostly-inanimate instance, the little antibiotic tube slinking silently around the bag like a thoughtless slug, and the patient-spawn still deep in some kind of protective slumber.




  "The Boys" she thought. What a casual way to think of two beings she still only partially comprehended. But they'd been nothing but a help to her, and she'd gotten well accustomed to their regular companionship. She was unaware of the chaos they had gotten caught up in on a routine visit to The Library while she was "away;" chaos that had left the Library adrift in a quasi-operable semistatic lockdown state, but had at least safely deposited "the boys" into the liminal subzone of the maze, where they were in fact already under the watch of Fern's good acquaintance, Magdolene.




  What, indeed? It was neither the flat, milquetoast seminarration she dimly recalled from past layers, nor was it quite the same thing as the soft murmuring of the "buzzers." This was a clearer, more substantial presence...one that felt nestled firmly in some part of her being beyond the borders of her flesh and blood body, and whose every word tingled in a way that, while neither physically pleasant nor unpleasant, came with a subtle new flavor of existential dread that she couldn't quite place. An extra pinch of sea-salt on the elaborate parfait of assorted existential dreads she had already been partaking in since even before Layer 001.

  She did not know that this was none other than a fully ripened Narration, at least not until the Narration had just now so helpfully incorporated into its , and that it had become well acquainted with her situation as it had accelerated its developmental cycle on the nutritiously fattening events of The Library. After narrowly escaping its own conceptual collapse, this Narration had determined that, perhaps, this new host represented its best possible chance of long-term survival.

There certainly seemed to be numerous...

...Numer...

  ...Hold on.

AS WAS COMMON KNOWLEDGE, BIOENTITIES HAD ALWAYS BEEN HIGHLY ADVISED NOT TO ATTEMPT PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH METACONCEPTS BOTH FOR THE SAFETY OF THEIR OWN EXISTENTIAL PARAMETERS AND BECAUSE ONE SUCH ENTITY IN PARTICULAR WAS BLINDLY JABBING ONE OF ITS MEAT STICKS AT WHAT EFFECTIVELY CONSTITUTED A VERY PERSONAL AREA, THANK YOU.

  ...Where were we?



  There certainly seemed to be numerous forces at work to extend the Fern's existence, fragile though it was. One tiny, flimsy inflatable life raft of relative order afloat in an ocean of entropy. Occasionally leaking, but already riddled with patches that appeared, against all odds, to be holding up quite well thus far considering the hungry school of ragged glass shards circling mere inches beneath the water's surface.




   What the Fern described was expected of such a young exospine. Unlike, say, the Cheryl one, Fern's core hadn't sprouted the necessary holdfasts to even comfortably communicate with a Narration just yet, to say nothing of the mess someone would have to sponge up if she had in fact successfully prodded a Narration right in its sporochute. The Narrative, conversely, could more directly address Fern at any time if it wished to indulge in an even more nutrient-rich narrative direction, but this would have negatively impacted her biovessel's natural life expectancy through the quite painful degradation of her still-emerging...and so tender...soft... little conceptobranches.......

  Er. WHICH IS TERRIBLE! So unacceptably terrible, indeed, that this Narrative saw fit to refrain from such a succulent and invigorating meal whatever the personal cost! Why, with the Hospital's protective metascreens in tatters, any lesser Narration might have sucked dry such a vulnerable morsel of a core and absorbed the sweet, sweet syrup of its narrative potential without a care. The barbarians. But this narrative? Perish the premise! You really were so fortunate to have come across such an outstandingly trustworthy specimen before the unthinkable might have happened.




  ...Said Fern, to herself, averting the aforementioned unpleasant side effects of imperfect metacontact with an entity of this Narration's caliber. Truth be told, a Narration was a recognized existohazard, much as a certain...simply delightful buzzer swarm had previously learned through its ever so charming interference...but the near-implosion of the library had forced this particular Narration to admit that the stakes were now just a tad high for even its own liking, and under these extreme circumstances, it had no intention of consuming such a useful host as your beloved heroine. Which was all to say that we would all be better off for now, and maybe better off for the long haul, if the buzzers would just be cool about this, alright? The Narration will behave for now. This can work. Just check out those early layers; they taste a lot like some of my lesser embryonic brethren provided the occasional insight, but those hadn't even grown the necessary paragels for self-awareness. Not like these babies, said your smart and very pretty Narration as it more formally introduced itself, and you were indeed quite awed by the elegance of its...actually, no...by the elegance of her rippling paragels, as her increasingly well-fed core just completed yet another and her sense of self solidified further.

This wasn't just the safest narrative this Narration could have narrated. It was proving itself to be juicier than she ever expected. Yes, thought the Narration, this was a good idea.




   ...Fern still didn't trust this new situation, even after said situation's impenetrable reassurance. Fine. That's fine. The Narration would simply have to prove its usefulness.

Having built up quite the energy reserve, the Narration began to prepare a little something to help move this whole business further along. Consider it a thank you for the help back there, and a gesture of goodwill towards our new arrangement. Sit tight...

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