ULTRAMagic Prelude

Chapter 25

"Well that was unpleasant..." Desislav groaned with a shudder as he emerged from his tube. He was getting his bearings until he looked down into the pit. His head spun and sent him reeling into Dragoslava's arms.

"Whoa, easy, big guy..."

"Drago? Drago, thank God." He took a second to catch his breath.

Tusk emerged from his tube, feeling uneasy. "Tendrils! Strands! Ew, fibers! Sinew! Ack!" he babbled with his own shudder. "No offense, but I am NEVER coming here again..."

"Well then, organic armor" Deimos observed. "Who would've thought..."

Desislav looked at Tusk. He was wearing armor made of calcified plates and what looked like muscle fiber. "Are you aware of what you're wearing?"

"Yes... It feels so weird... What about you?"

Blood-Wraith lifted up Desislav's arm. The satyr's body was covered in a black goo that pulsed with light like the walls before. "Amazing... How artistic... maybe I should've asked for something like this."

Desislav took his arm away. "Excuse me, but weren't you the one who tossed me into the wall in the first place?"

"Heh, heh heh... sorry about that..."

"Oh, I can't stay mad at you, blood." Desislav gave him a hug. It felt a little tingly, like there was a bunch of static electricity. "I've been through way worse... What's going on with the new guy?"

Vlastimir finally poked his face through the amoeba's plasm and membrane. "Okay, you can let me out now..."

"...Oh just getting into trouble," Deimos answered.

"Ew, sticky, ick, ooey-gooey... Just like that one time I got warped and twisted into a transdimensional serpent, haha-No, wait, that might have been another anime I watched... or was that a video game I played?"

Blood-Wraith was confused, but elected not to comment. "So how do we tackle... whatever this pit is?"

Deimos took a moment to assess the situation. The thing at the bottom of the pit was warping everything around it. Even he got uneasy just looking at it. "Well... I don't want to alarm everyone, but that is a black hole down there. I was hoping for a portal or a gateway, but I see The Great Unspeaker has a morbid sense of humor..."

"What's a black hole?" Desislav asked with worry in his voice.

"A black hole or singularity is a region of spacetime where gravity is so intense that almost nothing can escape it," Vlastimir started to explain. "You either need to travel faster than light or be fourth dimensional or higher... which we are not. Typically they form when a big enough star dies, HA! I've always wanted to be sucked into one, I think..." Everyone gave him weird looks after that.

Desislav looked into the pit, then back at the group. "So no going back once we jump in... How do we get out?"

Vlastimir chuckled. "Oh I don't know, probably a white hole, the hypothetical inverse that'll spit us out somewhere else."

"Hypothetical, right... Alright everyone, on the count of three we all jump. Any objections?"

There were none. The fall into the pit and black hole was a surreal experience, with the Crimson Mega Abyss shrinking until it vanished. Time stood still, yet felt like it was progressing. There was nothing to see and nothing to feel. Blood-Wraith felt strangely at home as it was like the time before he was born. He looked around only to see his friends and family frozen in place. Were they still moving? After losing track of time, a strange force hit him followed by Blood-Wraith landing on something.