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Chapter VII: The Second Odyssey

Amanda was genuinely surprised that she wasn't dead. She was floating in some kind of medium, like fire and water, but lacking many properties of both. Everything was a tan-gray, perfectly imitating the screen of the device she had last seen.

"What the... What is this?" She frantically looked around her, trying to find Victor, or someplace he could have gone. As some strange fog cleared, she saw two landmasses. Torn by indecision, wondering where Victor had gone, she went to the one presently behind her.

Upon approach, she saw that the land was composed of parabola hills, with a dense grove of factor trees crowding the area below a particularly high parabola. On the shore, she saw what looked like a one. And it was moving.

"What the hell is--"

"What the...? Another one?"

"Who-- you can talk?"

"Why is that so surprising?"

"Wait, another one? There's been someone like me before?"

"Yeah. A vector or something. But neither of you look like vectors."

"Victor! Where'd he go?"

"Up to Uni. On the hill. But he's dead."

"WHAT!?"

"He fell off the other side, trying to use the zipline to the Second Empire."

"Where... where's his body?"

"Wha? Oh, we haven't retrieved it. But just look at the height of that thing!" It pointed to the parabola, referencing its theoretically unsurvivable height. "There's no point in looking for him."

"There is unless you can get me home right now," she said, dragging herself out of the water, and walking off. Unlike Victor, she didn't enlist the help of the One watchman.

"Yeesh," she said, looking at the tower that was Uni. She didn't want to climb it, so she did what Victor never had the intelligence to think of: go around it. But the effort proved to be futile. Victor hadn't needed to think of it after all.

"What? Oh, this is a load of crap," Amanda said, gazing into the abyss on the side of Uni's hill. It appeared to stretch forever from left to right, completely preventing her from taking the easy way out.

"Ugh," she said, taking another look at the daunting formation. "Well, that means that Victor was able to pull it off. Which means anyone can." She walked up to it, and put one hand in front of the other.

At the top, she collapsed in exhaustion. She desperately wanted something to drink, and wondered how Victor had gotten by. What did numbers drink, anyway? Or eat? Rebecca would have simply ignored the issue, and demanded an iced tea from these numbers, but Amanda knew that energy was needed to sustain life. It was just a matter of getting it.

"Hey!" she called to a passing One. "Where can somebody get a bite to eat around here?"

"I don't know about you," they responded. "You look pretty weird. But I just go to the Adder's. How did you not know about that?"

"Adder's?" she asked. "What... oh. You add to yourself when you get hungry."

"Um, duh! Where've you been your whole life."

She thought about how to answer that. "Not here," she decided to say.

"But every Integer Hill has one! I don't understand how you lived without knowing this stuff!"

"I'm not asking you to. Bye." She forgot to ask about the location of Adder's, but she was too embarrassed to go back and ask, so she wandered around a bit. Uni was a small place; how far could it be? Sure enough, she soon found a building (which seemed to turn to face her, like they all did) with a sign above the door, saying "Adder's." She walked in, greeted by a room that, somehow, had volume, and took a seat on a barstool in front of a counter.